Yes, I glanced at them. A lot of things were imagined/assumed back then. Much of which of course we look back on today as the exuberant pollyanna fantasies of a generation which just didn't know any better yet.
Yeah :laugh:, like http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/08/31/your-telephone-of-tomorrow/.
But of course that has no bearing on how this stuff is portrayed in NV, as it is a fantasy RPG game after all, which was never intended to mirror any truly sensible RL reality. I get that. Always did. But when some people try to argue that some of the highly improbable, unlikely, and ridiculously-designed cartoony stuff portrayed in NV is somehow 'plausible', heh... they'll never convince me of that, sorry. Especially when said objects are directly incompatible with all laws of physics, common sense, and human safety. I mean, come on... companies adding nuclear radioactive material into softdrinks, so they glow in the dark? Hehe, this stuff was intended as a ridiculous joke, not as something to be in_any_way taken seriously, or argued for 'plausibility'. But I still enjoy the game immensely, and just chuckle at that stuff. Opinion strictly my own, your mileage may vary.
I disagree. Fallout (provided you played any before FO3), did make sense in context, and was a lot more... eh... believable than FO3 (and to an extent NV).
A big concept to focus on is the "in context" part. Fiction (and games) can be totally serious and realistic
within the context. I read a lot of posts in forums that say things like 'Well of course anything can happen, dude... its a
game." ~ or something like... "C'mon... you expect realism when they have elves and fireball throwing wizards !?? LOL"...
But... That's exactly what many expect in many different IPs. Fiction can be realistic to its own context; and in that context, say in Tolkien's Middle earth, or Nirn.... goblins, trolls, and magic are real; they exist in their world, but cybernetic minigun wielding Smurfs do not, and they won't be pouring out of the Oblivion gates, Moria, or Vault 21.
In Fallout, their future
IS what their pop 50's ideal predicted ~it just did not predict the war. In their universe, radiation
can mutate a person into a ghoul.
There is truth in the tongue in cheek humor not being 100% literal; but it has an odd misconception [IMO] that flew right over the heads of later developers. If you look at Fallout 1 ~the original, you see that much is deadly serious and horrific, but there is some fiendish humor in that game, and the strangest of the strange always takes place when the PC is out in the wastes ~not in the towns... around others.
This exaggerates the terror of the total and complete unknown nuclear wasteland, and the sense (in this case figurative
and slightly literal ~in a tongue in cheek way, that :shrug: anything can happen out there ~because nobody knows what's there... Its the sci-fi version of "There be Dragons" written on a map.)
(It should also be noted that Fallout was not expected to have NPC companions ~they were hacked in later; this is why the UI has no method to trade with them, and you had to steal stuff from them, and they were made to ignore the theft). Fallout was never intended as a ridiculous joke; the guys spent three years designing it. I would agree that Fallout started to become one later on though (and as great a game as it was... it started in FO2, and went into full gear with FO3).
» Sun Sep 05, 2010 12:31 pm 
Of course they accidentally got some of their predictions right. Atomic cars and everybody living like the Jetsons by 1980? Not so much. 
