Brutality and despair: what the first two Fallout games got right

You find the water chip. You walk it back across the desert. You destroy the Master and the army he was building out of people. Then you return to Vault 13, and the Overseer thanks you, and tells you that you cannot come back in. You have been outside too long. If the others see you they will want to leave too. He turns and walks up the tunnel and the door shuts, and that is the reward.

Tim Cain, who led the project, has said he pitched a different ending: you come home, everyone throws you a party, there is cake and balloons. Leonard Boyarsky argued for the exile instead and won. Cain has said since that the other idea was the better one, though at the time he was not sure anybody would accept it.

That single decision is the whole game in miniature, and it is the reason we are writing this page instead of a page about something else.

The clearest example is a small one. Junktown has two men in charge of it: Killian Darkwater, a shopkeeper who hangs people, and Gizmo, a casino owner who wants him dead. You pick one. According to the Fallout Bible, the designers' own notes on the series, the original ending slides had it the way round nobody expects. Back the lawman and Junktown stays a small shanty town, because traders steer clear of his frontier justice, with a gallows standing in the background of the picture. Back the gangster and the casino money comes in and the town grows.

That got reversed before release. The reason on record is that the mixed message was unsatisfying, because the outcome did not match what the player had done. The complaint was fair and the fix was wrong. The first version was telling the truth about how towns get rich, and the shipped version tells the player what they want to hear. It is the only place in the game where the nerve went, and you can feel the difference.

There is a city on the map called Necropolis, which used to be Bakersfield. Underneath it is Vault 12, advertised before the war as one of the best prepared shelters anywhere, with the best water purification system. Its door was not able to close. On 23 October 2077, when the people of Bakersfield heard that every other vault had sealed, they forced their way into theirs, and the door did exactly what it was built to do, which was nothing. The radiation came in with them. The ones who did not die became ghouls, and their descendants live in the sewers under the ruin of their own town.

The later games explained this as a deliberate experiment. The first one does not need to. It just puts the ruin in front of you and lets you walk down into it, and when you get there the people living in the dark ask you for water, which is the same thing you came looking for. The catastrophe is inside the piece of infrastructure built to prevent it. Nothing in the game says that out loud.

There were children in the towns, and you could kill them. The game did not stop you and it did not look away. Kill three and it writes Childkiller onto your character sheet, permanently. Companions leave. Towns treat you differently. Bounty hunters come looking. You cannot undo it, apologise for it, or grind it off.

That is not the same as a game rewarding cruelty. It is a game that declines to protect you from yourself and then keeps the record. The European release solved the problem by deleting every child from the game, and the digital versions sold today are built on that release, so the children are gone from the copy most people now buy. Only the original American disc is uncut. The censored one is the common one, which is worth knowing before anyone tells you how brave the game was.

You have 150 days to find the water chip, plus another hundred if you arrange a water caravan for the vault. Crossing the map costs days. Resting costs days. The scariest interface in the game is the world map, because the counter moves while you watch it.

There was a second clock too: 500 days to destroy the Master's army, cut to 400 if you had used the caravan. Patch 1.1 pushed it out to thirteen in-game years, which in practice removed it. Players asked for that and got it, and the game became slightly less honest as a result. The water chip deadline stayed, and it is the one that does the work. A deadline is the cheapest source of dread in game design and almost nobody uses it any more, because it makes people uncomfortable, which is the point.

The sequel, shipped in 1998 by the division that had just taken the name Black Isle Studios, is a messier game and a nastier one. Vault City is clean, orderly, well lit and well run, with functioning medicine and a eugenics programme, and it runs on slaves. The people outside its walls are stock. You can earn citizenship there, which is the part that sticks.

The Den is the other end of the same economy: pickpocketing children, addicts in doorways, slavers hiring. The drug that is doing it is called jet, and you can meet the chemist who invented it. Myron is a teenager, he is proud of it, he will explain the chemistry to you at length, and you can take him along.

The worst thing in either game is in Vault 13. The Enclave emptied it, shipped the residents to an oil rig, and released a pack of intelligent deathclaws into the empty vault to kill any witnesses. The deathclaws did not do it. Cut off from their handlers, they stayed. Gruthar, the pack leader, built a functioning community down there and worked out how to use the mainframe's voice recognition to feed his family. His son Goris wears a robe over himself so he can pass. Then the Enclave comes back and kills every one of them, and you find the bodies laid out where you left the living.

And the Enclave's reasoning is the thing to pay attention to, because it is only one step past Vault City's. Everyone who survived the war on the surface has been mutated by it. Mutants are not people. Therefore the plan is to kill all of them, which is to say everybody. It is a position, argued in dialogue, by people in clean uniforms.

People came apart. They burst, melted into puddles, folded in half, left scorch marks. There was a character trait called Bloody Mess whose only function was to make every death the worst version available. It was funny for about ten minutes and then it was not.

What made it land was everything it was printed next to: a cartoon mascot giving a thumbs up, an interface styled after a 1950s instructional film, the Ink Spots singing Maybe over an opening that pulls the camera back from a television set playing a wartime broadcast to the rubble the set is standing in, and Mark Morgan's score, which is barely music at all and closer to a dark ambient record of drone and industrial noise.

The joke is not the gore and it is not the cheerfulness. It is that the same civilisation produced both, and one of them is still playing.

The thing we actually remember is not an ending or a design decision. It is a shop.

Early in Fallout 2 there is a small town with a trader in it, and the trader has a house, and the house has his stock in it. You can rob him the ordinary way. You can also sneak up, open his inventory the way a pickpocket does, and put a live grenade in it. He comes apart. Blood goes up the walls. You take everything he owned off the floor and walk out, and the town carries on without a shop.

Nobody replaces him. There is no new trader next week, no respawn, no quiet reset. That line of business is simply closed for the rest of the game, in a game where ammunition is scarce and a shop is a lifeline, and the only person who decided that was you.

Then, many hours and many maps later, you come back, half expecting the game to have cleaned itself up, because games do. It had not. He was still on the floor of his own house, in pieces, and the blood was still where it landed.

That is a 1998 game choosing to hold on to a mess rather than free the memory it was sitting in. What stayed with us was the principle: the game wrote down what we did, in the place we did it, and left it there for us to walk back into.

None of this is about a setting. Anyone can do rust and dust, and most people do. What we are actually trying to inherit is a set of decisions that a studio today would have to be talked into.

RAD Tactics is a squad tactics game for Windows, real time with pause, set after a collapse, with zombies and with factions fighting over what is left. It is in development, and we are not going to describe anything in it that is not finished.

What we will say is which way we intend to fall when the choice comes up, because it always comes up, usually late, usually when somebody sensible points out that players would prefer the cake and balloons. Fallout had that argument in 1997 and went the other way, and that is the reason anyone still talks about it.