About the Fallout 1
Fallout[b] is a 1997 role-playing video game developed and published by Interplay Productions. The game has a post-apocalyptic and chiefly retro-futuristic setting, taking place in the mid-22nd century decades after a global nuclear war. The protagonist of Fallout is an inhabitant of a Vault, part of a network of long-term nuclear shelters, who is forced to venture out into the wastes to find a replacement part to fix their Vault's failing water supply system and save their fellow Vault dwellers.
Tim Cain is the creator of Fallout, working on it as early as 1994. The game was treated as low-budget by Interplay and was outsourced to the role-playing game division of Interplay, though it would cost $3 million. Fallout was conceptualized as a game where the player could do whatever they wanted. It was initially intended to use Steve Jackson Games' system GURPS, but Interplay eventually developed their own system called "SPECIAL" for the game. Fallout is considered to be the spiritual successor to the 1988 role-playing video game Wasteland. The art style drew inspiration from works from the Atomic Age.
Fallout was critically acclaimed and a financial success. It was praised for its open-ended gameplay, combat, and character system. The game reached 600,000 sales worldwide and is considered one of the best video games of all time. It won "Role-Playing Game of the Year" from both GameSpot and Computer Games Magazine, along with being nominated for an equivalent award by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences and Spotlight Awards.
Main plot
In Vault 13, the Water Chip, a computer chip responsible for the water recycling and pumping machinery of the Vault, malfunctions. With 150 days left before the Vault's water reserves run dry, the Vault Overseer tasks the protagonist, the Vault Dweller, with finding a replacement. They are given the Pip-Boy 2000 that keeps track of map-making, objectives, and bookkeeping. Armed with the Pip-Boy 2000 and meager equipment, the Vault Dweller is sent off on the quest. The Vault Dweller travels to Vault 15, the closest known Vault that may be able to provide help, but finds it collapsed into ruins and abandoned; the survivors of Vault 15 founded a town named Shady Sands. The Vault Dweller then travels south to Junktown, a town involved in a conflict between local sheriff Killian Darkwater and criminal Gizmo. Further south the Vault Dweller finds The Hub, a bustling merchant city, where the Vault Dweller has the option to hire water caravans to aid Vault 13 and extend their estimated survival by 100 days. The Vault Dweller travels to Necropolis, a city of mutated humans called ghouls who are under occupation by large mutated humans, dubbed Super Mutants. Under the city, the Vault Dweller finds Vault 12 and recovers a water chip.
With the chip, the Vault is saved, but the Overseer is concerned about the Vault Dweller's reports of the Super Mutants. Believing the mutations are too widespread and extreme to be natural, and that they pose a threat to the Vault, the Overseer charges the Vault Dweller to find the source of the mutations and stop them. Information that is picked up throughout the wasteland reveals that humans are being captured and being turned into Super Mutants by getting exposed to the Forced Evolutionary Virus (F.E.V.). They are being led by someone named the Master who wants to turn every human into a Super Mutant to establish "unity" among Earth. The cult-like Children of the Cathedral operating around the Wasteland are a front created by the Super Mutants' Master, who is using the Children to preach his message to the wastelanders and get them to submit to him peacefully. The Vault Dweller has to kill the Master and destroy the vats containing the F.E.V. and can choose which one to do first. To kill the Master, they explore the Cathedral of the Children and finds a prototype Vault beneath it, from which the Master commands his Super Mutant army. The Vault Dweller infiltrates the Vault and can either convince the Master that his plan will fail, kill him directly, or set off an explosion that destroys the cathedral. To destroy the vats, the Vault Dweller travels to Mariposa Military Base, where the Super Mutant army is using the F.E.V. The Vault Dweller destroys the base, stopping the creation of more Super Mutants. After the Vault Dweller does both, a slideshow plays showing the impact the Vault Dweller had on the societies they had met. The Vault Dweller returns to the Vault and is greeted at the entrance by the Overseer. The Overseer is happy that the Vault's safety is secured, but fears the Vault Dweller's experiences have changed them, and that hero worship of them in the Vault may encourage others to leave. For the greater good of the Vault and to preserve its isolation, the Vault Dweller is exiled into the wasteland.