Fallout (video game)

Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game is a 1997 role-playing video game developed and published by Interplay Productions. Often listed among the greatest video games of all time, Fallout has been credited for renewing consumer interest in the role-playing video game genre. It is the first game in the Fallout series, the rights to which were purchased in 2007 by Bethesda Softworks.

Fallout's protagonist, the Vault Dweller, inhabits an underground nuclear shelter in a mid-22nd century post-apocalyptic and retro-futuristic world, decades after a nuclear war between the United States and China. The player must scour the surrounding wasteland for a computer chip that can fix the Vault's failed water supply system. They interact with other survivors, some of whom give them missions, and engage in turn-based combat.

Tim Cain began working on Fallout in 1994. It began as a game engine based on the tabletop role-playing game GURPS, but after Steve Jackson Games objected to Fallout's violence, Cain and designer Christopher Taylor created a new character customization scheme, SPECIAL. Interplay initially gave the game little attention, but eventually spent $3 million and employed up to thirty people to develop it. Interplay considered Fallout the spiritual successor to its 1988 role-playing game Wasteland and drew artistic inspiration from 1950s literature and media emblematic of the Atomic Age as well as the films Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog. The quests were intentionally made morally ambiguous. After three and a half years of development, Fallout was released in North America in October 1997.

Fallout received acclaim for its open-ended gameplay, character system, plot, and setting. It won "Role-Playing Game of the Year" from GameSpot and Computer Games Magazine and was nominated by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences at the Spotlight Awards. Fallout was a commercial success, selling 600,000 copies worldwide.