The Fallout universe is the 1950s!

nkchan16 said:
I often felt like I was in a 50's movie while playing NV.
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The aesthetics, the whizz-bang tech, and the music on the radio may be distinctly vintage, but there's no way the sex, violence and moral ambiguity in New Vegas would have been allowed in a 1950's movie due to the Hays Code. The Fallout series has always looked at the post-WWII dreams of the future with a distinctly counter-cultural eye.
 
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Check out the assault bots in SAD though, the one with the rockets and machine gun. He has a single red eye, very much like HAL.

Sentry Bot
https://fallout.gamepedia.com/Sentry_bot_(Fallout_2)

Laser Rifle
https://ltcom.wordpress.com/2016/08/31/a-fallout-4-modding-story/

Blade Runner inspired .223 pistol.
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/.223_pistol

The mohawk head statues on buildings.

There is no way in hell that one can argue that it is diesel punk OR 50s Americana, atleast solely. That right there is straight cyberpunk.
 
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President_Peaches said:
And that's why the Institute and its replicants don't belong anywhere near the Fallout universe.
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Not entirely so; (and not to totally disagree)... It's not exactly dieselpunk—not the way 'Karl Ruprecht Kroenen' the cyborg is in the Hellboy films, but perfectly human androids were a TV concept in the 50s, same as Robby the Robot.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734656/

Alicia.jpg
 
Robby The Robot is a robot. A cyborg is supposed to be a fusion between organic and synthetic. An android is a human like robot.
 
Gizmojunk said:
perfectly human androids were a TV concept in the 50s
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Damn, I was agreeing with Peaches on this but you have a point.

It just pisses me off because ZAX was this huge fucking room-sized turbine looking thing, which perfectly explained why other smaller robots in Fallout (Robobrains aside) were retarded while it had achieved sentience. I guess you could argue since Institute technology is new and Mr. Handies are old, synths could have better processing power. Fallout 4 fucked this up anyway though by making Codsworth self aware.
 
Fallout's design was a mash-up of lots of different things, there were influences from sci-fi of the 50's to Dune, Blade Runner, Mad Max of the 80's and so on. In fact, both the original game and the sequel has the feeling that they were right out of the 80's in many ways.

TerminallyChill said:
Don't tell me that Fallout has never had anything to do with the 50s or retro-futurism though, because that's just blatantly untrue.
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The games had nothing to do with the 50's, some design choices of certain things had.
 
nkchan16 said:
The games had nothing to do with the 50's, some design choices of certain things had.
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This really isn't the case; unless you mean in the strict technical sense that the game is set in 2161, and not 1956. In which case... of course.

What is obvious, is that very little of their current world (the one the player experiences) is mired in the 50's. Almost everything 50's~ish, is pre-war salvage. Fallout 1 & 2 do show burgeoning cultures that seem unconcerned about the style of their past. As many of the NPCs in Fallout have uncharacteristic body piercings, and Fallout 2—has Hakunin; and Sulik for that matter. Culturally they appear to diverge, but I believe that they would always retain a 50's design aesthetic; not that they would do this to consciously emulate the 50's, but that that's the only way that it would occur to them to build things.

Tim Cain has described in verbose detail, that their idea was a future where everything was as the 1950's might have expected it to be. It was definitely on their mind. They also ran Mad Max on endless loop in their art department.
 
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nkchan16 said:
Fallout's design was a mash-up of lots of different things, there were influences from sci-fi of the 50's to Dune, Blade Runner, Mad Max of the 80's and so on. In fact, both the original game and the sequel has the feeling that they were right out of the 80's in many ways.

The games had nothing to do with the 50's, some design choices of certain things had.
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The utopian retro-futuristic vision of the future is really thematically important though, as well as being a big part of the look and feel of the series. Its just not like how Bethesda has bastardised the series into being, there's a huge amount of different sci-fi influences.

I would still argue that the replicants don't belong though, throughout the series, the tech has been clunky, bulky and retro, not the refinement of a self-aware human-like robot. Its a pip-boy, not an iPIP.
 
Hey @Gizmojunk...great post, but why am I quoted as saying "The games had nothing to do with the 50's, some design choices of certain things had." exactly?

I realize it's probably a mistake, I'd just rather not be on the record saying the exact opposite of what I believe, you know?

Anyway, I think everyone here can agree on a few things:

1. Pre-war culture has always referenced a 1940s and 50s aesthetic since the very first Fallout game

2. The Fallout universe does not take place after a war that occurred during the 1950s but rather the 2077 that people in the 1950s would have imagined

3. Post-war culture in Fallout is both allowed and expected to branch out into other styles

What exactly are we arguing about again?
 
TerminallyChill said:
1. Pre-war culture has always referenced a 1940s and 50s aesthetic since the very first Fallout game

2. The Fallout universe does not take place after a war that occurred during the 1950s but rather the 2077 that people in the 1950s would have imagined
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1. Nope. That's the illusion you get if you played Beth's Fallouts first perhaps.
2. Only partially.

The design is only partially influenced by the "sci-fi" of the 50's, not the 50's itself. Yet, there's a huge amount of stuff just from Mad Max (characters, guns, armor etc.), ruins and buildings are quite literally gothic mixed with cyberpunk etc. and none of it was in the sci-fi of the 50's.

What I mean by all that is the first two Fallout games did not have a "50's feel" to them, while Bethesda made Fallouts, including FNV, did. That 50's feel is especially apparent in FO4.
 
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The pre-war world is not exactly as they imagined the future to be in the 50's. Utopian sci-fi of the time usually imagined that technology would bring world peace and prosperity (with any questions of social inequality quietly ignored). Pretty much the exact opposite of the Fallout world.
 
President_Peaches said:
The pre-war world is not exactly as they imagined the future to be in the 50's. Utopian sci-fi of the time usually imagined that technology would bring world peace and prosperity (with any questions of social inequality quietly ignored). Pretty much the exact opposite of the Fallout world.
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Yeah, I see what you're getting at. I could be totally wrong, but I always thought it was implied things were utopian before the resources started running out on Earth.

nkchan16 said:
Explain which part? Most of it is pretty generic.
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The cartoon rocket ship, the vintage advertisements, the 50s style car, the 40s song, the retro TV... I mean if you really pay attention to the part where it zooms out and shows the city, everything looks remarkably similar to Fallout 3. Which is why to this day I still don't understand why people choose to criticize the game for its art direction when there are so many things Bethesda actually got wrong.

nkchan16 said:
Don't know if he actually said that, but that's clearly not the case.
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Listen, I have no problem disagreeing on things, but once you start implying that I'm making shit up, I'm going to lose my patience and drop the conversation. I posted a video called 'Fallout Classic Revisted' earlier in this thread where at around 10:09 Tim Cain says these exact words:

"We wanted to see Forbidden Planet style ray guns, if we did ray guns at all, um, and we, we often went back to this movie as a visual touchstone."
 
TerminallyChill said:
The cartoon rocket ship, the vintage advertisements, the 50s style car, the 40s song, the retro TV...
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Some of those things (not the song though) are the retro-futuristic design choices we've been talking about but when you take them literally and think "oh, the prewar world looked like the 50's" then what do you make of those soldiers with power armor?

TerminallyChill said:
I mean if you really pay attention to the part where it zooms out and shows the city, everything looks remarkably similar to Fallout 3.
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And what's that supposed to mean?! It's just a city in ruins.

TerminallyChill said:
"We wanted to see Forbidden Planet style ray guns, if we did ray guns at all, um, and we, we often went back to this movie as a visual touchstone."
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Cain simply talks about the style of ray guns, not the overall style of the game. Mind you, Forbidden Planet is a sci-fi that doesn't take place in the 50's.
 
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nkchan16 said:
Some of those things (not the song though) are the retro-futuristic design choices we've been talking about but when you take them literally and think "oh, the prewar world looked like the 50's" then what do you make of those soldiers with power armor?
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I never said once said the pre-war world looked like the 50s, I said it looked like the future people in the 50s had imagined. I'm not exactly sure why you think soldiers in power armor and a 50s futurist world are mutually exclusive things, either. You also admit that the song does not support your position, yet for some reason you continue to make a case for it.

nkchan16 said:
And what's that supposed to mean?! It's just a city in ruins.
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I was using that to refer to the animated part of the introduction with the song, the TV, and slow zoom in order to differentiate it from the narrated slides. My fault, I should have been clearer.

nkchan16 said:
Cain simply talks about the style of ray guns, not the overall style of the game. Mind you, Forbidden Planet is a sci-fi that doesn't take place in the 50's.
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If you take that quote out of context, yes. Again, my fault. I seem to have underestimated your desire to be pedantic in this discussion. If you actually watched the video, you'd hear him talk about how Forbidden Planet was especially liked by art director Leonard Boyarsky and that they frequently used the movie to explain what Fallout was about to new people joining the team. But I guess that was expecting too much from you.

In summary, you should probably get a job as a lawyer. You've exhausted me to the point where I now feel like a broken record in this thread. Over a video game. I'll let you have the last word so you can feel like you won, but don't expect me to argue with you anymore. Believe what you want to believe, and I will do the same.
 
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