Americanization of Fallout by Bethesda

I replayed 1 and 2 last winter and i noticed something.
In F1 the only time we see the american flag is in the intro tv propaganda showing Nate commiting warcrimes during the brutal occupation resulting from full scale unprovoked invasion of Canada by the USA.
In F2 the only time we see the american Flag is on the oil rig.
Borth of those depictions show the flag in a negative context, actually in both cases connected to warcrimes or even genocide.
Aside from the flag itself there are pretty much no mentions of the USA in the games themsleves and pre war times are dismissed as ancient history including even some of the brotherhood members just 80 years after the bombs in F1. People in general are focused on survivial in the present (especially in F1) and building a new future in F2.
From the lore we get a pretty grim picture of the USA as an agressive country torn by internal problems such as energy crisis, riots, plagues etc.
Lastly i want to mention the aesthethic and architecture of the pre war usa, the style seems to be monumental mix of gothic and art deco but also somewhat brutalist and opressive at the same time. The screaming head decorations, the massive skyscrappers even in small cities like Bakersfield etc. paint a picture quite alien compared to the the world we know despite using some familiar stylistic elements.

Compare this with Bethesda's take
Fallout 3 is set in Washington and the capital wasteland (capital of what? the old world is gone), including some american landmarks and even post war american museum and people larping pre war lives.
The architecture while retaining some of the original elements from original games (and integrating them rather poorly imho) seems to be closer to real 1950s including the plywood suburban american houses which were compleatly absent from the 1 and 2.
Fallout 4 is where the biggest change happens, the pre bomb USA is depcited as colorfull 1950s cartoony jettson land. There are still pre war flags hanging from Buildings in Boston as well as larper factions like the minutemen. As Emil said... Fallout is (now) about 1950s Americana, similarly the concept of old world blues was introduced and both of those shift the the tone towards 1950s nostalgia. Pre bomb world which was myserious and alien is now being overly explored and explained, pre war world is sanitized and turned into a epcot themepark lookalike with all the increasingly goofy evil shit blamed not on the USA itself but intentionally detached from it and blamed on few greedy moustache twirling corporate CEOs.

Edit
Fixed the typos

When I played Fallout 1 for the first time as a teenager, I remember not being aware that the game was taking place in the USA until I've seen the map town for Boneyard, which identified it as Los Angeles. I thought that was incredibly shocking and well done world-building. Modern Fallouts are too Disneyfied for a lack of a better word, they feel to me at least like theme parks. I prefer the darker classic Fallouts, as Jason D. Anderson called them, moribund worlds.

I think part of it is also that everything was a little less flag-waving in the 90s compared to the 00s?
The bush-era conservatism with 9/11 and Iraq turned the flag-waving up to 11.
And Bethesda's offices being placed near DC just made it more natural for them to set it in the capital just as the Interplay offices made it natural to set it on the west.
I think the rest probably followed from that more than anything?

hexer said:

When I played Fallout 1 for the first time as a teenager, I remember not being aware that the game was taking place in the USA until I've seen the map town for Boneyard, which identified it as Los Angeles. I thought that was incredibly shocking and well done world-building. Modern Fallouts are too Disneyfied for a lack of a better word, they feel to me at least like theme parks. I prefer the darker classic Fallouts, as Jason D. Anderson called them, moribund worlds.

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I think it also has something to do with the degree of destrucion cause by the war in the original games. The Hub for example was the only town (and actually a small one) in F1 that was not nuked directly but still llooks quite to quite devasted even just 80 years post war, also all of the towns have new names, none are knows under their old names which furher drives the point that we are not in usa but in a new world born after destruction of the old one. The landscape in the world map in Fallout 1 looks almost metled and is scarred with multiple enormous craters. The first 2 settlements we come upon are actually fully post war and built from ground up, i really like what Shady Sands conveys, it's an adobe farming village, the obelisk and the town map screen which looks egyptian or ancient sumerian pretty much tells you that the old world is gone and civilization was restarted.

PlanHex said:

I think part of it is also that everything was a little less flag-waving in the 90s compared to the 00s?
The bush-era conservatism with 9/11 and Iraq turned the flag-waving up to 11.
And Bethesda's offices being placed near DC just made it more natural for them to set it in the capital just as the Interplay offices made it natural to set it on the west.
I think the rest probably followed from that more than anything?

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This might indeed be the case in both examples.
It makes sense for Bethesda to set the game in the area they are more familiar with as well as setting their games on the oposite coast for more creative freedom (which they didn't even use since we got rehash of factions and plot elements from the old games anyway, shame they didn't chose to set it before F1 which would allow for more pre war elements to be present). It makes sense that USA was in patriotic fervor at the time which certainly had large impact on games too however we see this peaking with fallout 4 when the post 9/11 wars were exposed to be a sham but i think by the time of F4 it might be less of a patriotic angle but the reflection of american growing inreasingly dissapointed with the present and looking back to the idealized golden age.
As for the Interplay setting it in the west also made it closer to mad max in terms of the enviroment as well as westerns both of which really fit the game.

There were devs on FO3 who had not played the games; some had never heard of them.

I believe that Bethesda (management) intentionally changed the world setting to (further ) simplify it for the mass audience. Rather than being the 50's anticipated future, they made it a future obsessed with the past. Absolute 180° nonsense—almost certainly a pure marketing choice. Unconscionable pricks IMO.

Gizmojunk said:

There were devs on FO3 who had not played the games; some had never heard of them.

I believe that Bethesda (management) intentionally changed the world setting to (further ) simplify it for the mass audience. Rather than being the 50's anticipated future, they made it a future obsessed with the past. Absolute 180° nonsense—almost certainly a pure marketing choice. Unconscionable pricks IMO.

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True. Fallout wasn't so heavily based on 50s. that's only the bethesda's retarded invention and take.

Fallout was based on late 80s and 90s actually. There was another thread on this forum discussing this matter.
You just don't see 50s clothing/apparel in the first fallouts like you do in bethsoft's fallout.

even the name Frank Horrigan from fallout 2 is taken from an early 90s movie lmao. Something which the small minds from bethesda couldn't create. They would have relied on some either unknown or overused known celebrity/fictional name from the 50s if they would have created that character.

Bethsoft is basically stuck in the past. I really hate their take on the fallout universe sincerely. They should have relied on making it look like F. Tactics, would have been 5x better. Saying this because it's clearly they inspired from it with the blimps/zeppelin idea. They should have taken more ideas and sprites/models from it.

AbullSinCara said:

Bethsoft is basically stuck in the past. I really hate their take on the fallout universe sincerely. They should have relied on making it look like F. Tactics, would have been 5x better. Saying this because it's clearly they inspired from it with the blimps/zeppelin idea. They should have taken more ideas and sprites/models from it.

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Speaking of being stuck in the past.

AbullSinCara said:

Fallout was based on late 80s and 90s actually.

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Wasteland was, but according to the devs that made it, Fallout was the future as expected by the 1950's pop culture. It was the 'world of tomorrow', as opposed to Commando Cody serials for example.

The 50s idea was shown in Fallout 2 at first the desktops with computer that was commented tube computers, plus various super computer design. And New Reno mafia with (implied) Italian style (grease gun and Made Man). If it is 80s-90s the mafia would be more chaotic style. One can also argue the NCR's cattle drives and brahmin barons theme is influenced by cowboy movies of the 50s.

In fact 80-90s style is more like the Chinatown and wakizashi. That come from influence of Hongkong kung fu movies, and japanese ninja movies.

Fallout was influenced by the 80s-90s because that’s the time period the devs lived in. It wasn’t a conscious choice. They set out to make a Mad Max-styled post-apocalyptic RPG, then at some point in production, Leonard Boyarsky had the idea to “make it like the 50s”. Specifically, to style the pre-war world after science fiction of the 1950s. Though Boyarsky would later say that he really meant the 40s, he just didn’t realize that the era of science fiction he had in mind was more dominant in the 40s and was on its way out by the 50s.

This isn’t to defend the complete flanderization of Fallout under Bethesda, but let’s not forget that retro-futurism has always been a big part of the series’s aesthetic. And in 1997, 80s sci fi would certainly not be considered “retro”. Do we think of the Matrix as “retro” today? Maybe the slo-mo gunfights, but not so much the technology and culture.

Now that I think about it, it does feel like Fallout 1 (and of course 2 as it's based on the same assets) feels more like it's based on the science fiction self-image of American in the 50s, but after a nuclear war. It's like the "past" of Fallout 1/2 is based on what happy (and possibly naive sci-fi reading) idealists in the 50s thought the 60s and the "space age" was going to be like.

The "ideal of America" in that SCI-FI future 60s is a lot more idealistic and less fractured than in the real world (was it actually less fractured in the IRL 50s?), and more likely to show up as an "ironic thing we thought we had but never really did".

Also, if you weren't there in the 90s, it might not be immediately obvious, but there were quite a few games made where not every storyline was directly and immediately topical and political. Whereas, post 911 you'd be crazy if you didn't make sure some of your plots were a bit flag-wavy. I may be cynical but I'm not stupid.

Takeaway here is that the difference in the "50s and almost 60s if we hadn't blown it up" as perceived by the people and artifacts in Fallout 1/2 is a lot more sci-fi; this suggests the art designers of those games read?

Iprovidelittlepianos said:

Fallout was influenced by the 80s-90s because that’s the time period the devs lived in.

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True. But as a child of the 70s-80s who read a lot, I was influenced by back issues of F&SF and other books, mostly written in the 50s and 60s. You have to consider what was in the libraries in the 80s. It wasn't books from the 80s, libraries have never been well funded. :{

retro-futurism has always been a big part of the series’s aesthetic.

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"retro-futurism" that's the word I was looking for!

They said that it was not set in the 50's (everyone here knows it's set post 2077), but set in the future that they —thought— would happen.

Fallout of 2077 in major cities should be just behind (before) The Jetsons —not quite advanced enough for aerial highway systems, and houses on thousand foot towers, but more advanced than we are currently.

No one then would assume that their future was exactly the same as their present day—just with added gadgetry. Their idea of the future was seen in films like The Forbidden Planet. A future tractor for them looked like this: [not a diesel-punk John Deer]


So Fallout is set in the desert, not in a great metropolis; not many modern elements in a desert, as opposed to a major city. It's got the outskirts of Los Angeles, but the country has been destroyed by nuclear war.

FO:Tactics shows their city of Chicago, and while it's certainly a spin-off game that just uses the Fallout IP, they had a liaison in Black Isle who's task it was to proof their work for setting appropriateness.

This passed muster for Black Isle:


Their future cities shouldn't have been 50's style brick office buildings:


The former being the 50's anticipated future, the latter being a future styled on the 1950's.
Polar opposites.

Gizmojunk said:

The former being the 50's anticipated future, the latter being a future styled on the 1950's.
Polar opposites.

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You and i have said this many times in this forum, the fact that we still say it shows how hard Bethesda misconstrued the franchise and in turn made many new Fallout fans also get it wrong because they still think Fallout is the future with 1950s aethestic and not the future envisioned by the 1950s.

People can argue all they want that Bethesda "seemingly saved the franchise", the fact the above happened and still happens negates that entirely.

Norzan said:

Bethesda misconstrued the franchise

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I wish I could believe that. I was on the Bethsoft forums for years [30k posts, and not a moderator].
I do believe that those people were not stupid or naive, and deliberately chose to alter the setting into what they offered, for marketing purposes.
It's just simpler to say its the future, but its like the 1950's, rather than say it's the future as imagined by the 1950's—where that entails the physical laws of reality being bent to their misconceptions about atomic war.

I speculate that those whose decisions mattered...didn't like that rabbit hole, and preferred offering a simpler concept to the mass audience.

*This brings to mind the difficulty expressed by the Fallout 1 devs in imparting the setting concept to new hires, artists, writers, and such.

**I believe this is why there are talking plants and a chess playing scorpion (, and Brain from Animaniacs, leading a Logan's Run parody cult) in Fallout 2; a lack of understanding the setting.

I lean more on the argument that they genuinely didn't get the franchise and thought the setting was the future but with 1950s aethestic and thus did everything out of sheer ignorance and honestly stupidity.

But i can see why someone would think they did it out of a sense to simplify the franchise because it's much easier to just add aethestics from a past decade into a future version of a fictional setting than it is to make a fictional setting look like the future envisioned by a past decade. The former you can just copy and paste very lazily stuff from that decade and call it a day, with the latter you actually have to be creative because you really don't have anything to go off of (you have to try to predict what it will look like from something vague).

The above argument is further supported by the fact that they recycled so much from the first two games in Fallout 3, much easier to just borrow old shit for your new game.

Norzan said:

they recycled so much from the first two games in Fallout 3

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This is because Interplay sold them the pot of sauce without including the recipe for the sauce—which by that point they did not have. It's like a restaurant selling the last pot of stew from the fridge made by a chef that quit months before... They don't know what's in it, or how it's prepared.

Bethesda has no clue how to make more of the special sauce, so they just keep scraping the IP pot for leavings to spread on their own stuff in attempt to make it Fallout—ish. That's why they reused bottle caps (also known as Hubucks; Hub Bucks—because it was local to the Hub, the water merchants, and the surrounding region).

There is no reason to use bottle caps in a city —certainly not the capital city, and on the opposite coastline. They did it for new fans who had never heard of Fallout? Nope. They did it to make it reminiscent of the Fallout series; even though Fallout 2 (set elsewhere) didn't use them.

Fallout 3 has many problems in writings, and setting.

But bottlecaps is not one of those.

First, if you dont use caps, which kind of money would you use? Gold, Silver, Prewar Money? They would be the same as bottlecaps, aka a prewar artifacts which is rare and impossible to replicate. And once you set your heart on a money, lets' say wasteland dollar... who print it, who back it?

Fallout 3 setting has very few factions that is strong enough to print money and back it: Brotherhood of Steel and Enclave. But BOS dont do money, and Enclave disdain dealing with wastelanders, let alone so much to the point of printing money. So no one is going to issue an acceptable money in DC. At least, not until after Mobile Crawler Base get smashed.

This is a very easy to understand problem, I dont get why you would puzzle your pretty little heads about it

laclongquan said:

But bottlecaps is not one of those.

First, if you dont use caps, which kind of money would you use? Gold, Silver, Prewar Money? They would be the same as bottlecaps, aka a prewar artifacts which is rare and impossible to replicate. And once you set your heart on a money, lets' say wasteland dollar... who print it, who back it?

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Bull
It was local (and unique) to Southern California.

In DC (or any major city) they should have used something local and feasible; perhaps something locally significant. In a major city they would have banks, currency exchanges (Krugerrands), bus or arcade tokens; not sharp tin. Bottle caps were associated with the Hub water merchants.

Fallout 2 included mining scrips. The region of FO3 has a history of mining towns.

...lets' say wasteland dollar... who print it, who back it?

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My own preference:
People used to trade Sea shells and sand-dollars; so long as it's not plentiful, and generally accepted for trade, no backing needed. Who backs Bitcoin? [rhet.]

You dont seem to understand the logic of this matter.

The similarity of bottlecaps to gold/silver/prewarmoney/BusToken is that they are prewar artifacts. No one can replicate them easily and cheaply. Thus the reason bottlecaps being used in Cali, because no one can fake it. And if people choose to use prewar artifacts, might as well use bottlecap instead of bus token, simply because of no need to reinvent the wheel. We are not sitting here to admire your smart, your so-called smart, after all.

And to issue a new money, aka printing it, run it, exchange it, making it a real money instead of waste paper, who would do it? Which is what I said, there's only two factions strong enough to do it (and make others accept that new money of theirs), but they dont bother to do so.

The pile of prewar money in banks' vaults, safes etc across the lands... they are not money, but prewar artifacts.

Do you understand the difference between real money and prewar artifacts?