Something weird in the Fallout 1 manual : Fallout Series Discussion

» Tue Dec 29, 2009 7:26 am

Hi everybody! My first post on these forums and hopefully not my last (even considering that I don't currently have internet at home). I thought about posting this on the NMA forums, but they wouldn't accept my Gmail address. Maybe it's a good thing I didn't post there considering that I heard they are just a big bunch of Fallout 3 haters. Anyway....

I hope this wasn't already known, and I'll keep this quick. I am currently addicted to Fallout 3 probably like others. I would rank it among my top 5 list of greatest games I've ever played (somewhere among some Zelda titles I enjoyed) I wanted to see how the series got its start, so I got Fallout 1 on GoG.com really cheap. I haven't beaten the game yet but I will restart soon because I haven't been playing it regularly and consistently. I took a look at the PDF of the manual and noticed that there are some places where there is are paper graphics seemingly placed right over some text, as if somebody was covering it up. One day I happened to use the selection tool and highlighted those spots in the manual, and noticed that the highlighter was selecting something. I copied (Ctrl+C) the mysterious hidden text and pasted it in a text editor. The first section I found was pretty normal; it actually looked like something from the Vault Dwellers Survival Guide:

Flooding VTF-100 Flotation Homes & Seaweed
Meteor VTM-020B How to Dodge Falling Rocks*
*Document not available at this time, will be available the 3rd quarter of 2078.
While we hope that peace will prevail and the need for such from the ground up to provide the best chance for a good life following nuclear armageddon. It is the duty of every American citizen to learn and use the skills necessary for a comfortable Vault life. The best place to start is with a dek and if you try to read this than you.
The Vault series of survival shelters are designed from the ground up to provide the best chance for a good life following nuclear armageddon. It is the duty of every American citizen to learn and use the skills necessary for a comfortable Vault life. The best place to start is with a description of your new home.

The section in bold italics is what was covered up. That last part was a little bit weird, though. There are other sections that are covered up throughout the manual. They get pretty weird. I'll let you read them yourself. If you don't have a PDF of the manual, you can find one at http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/dload.php?action=file&file_id=33 (OK...maybe I shouldn't be linking to NMA after bashing them, but whatever). Looking forward to any comments you all may have. Also welcome are any tips on enjoying Fallout 1 and probably eventually, Fallout 2. Good day. Oh, and sorry for the wall of text!

» Tue Dec 29, 2009 9:41 am

No cross site trolling, please. What NMA do at NMA is their business.

I'll take a look at my manual, see what I can find. It seems pretty tame, nothing out of context, at least.

» Tue Dec 29, 2009 7:28 pm

No, those are supposed to be there. Maybe your computer's color setting are a bit off? They're not supposed to be hidden (at least not in the original manual I have.)

I haven't looked at any .pdf's of the manual, but the actual one has little graphics where it's supposed to look like someone's taped post-it notes or whatever over parts of the manual and hand-written their own thoughts, etc.

» Tue Dec 29, 2009 3:25 pm

To FalloutChris, sorry. I don't mean to be rude. I don't want it to seem like I am trolling. In fact, I go to that site pretty much every day I have access to the internet. It is their enthusiasm to this series that sealed the deal about playing the first one. Anyway, that just goes to show that I should think about what I type before I hit send.
To the nu_clear_day as well as anybody else, I really don't think this was meant to be seen by everybody. Those post-it-note sections are the ones I am talking about, and I can read the hand written parts of them. What I am talking about is actual text "below" the paper graphic. Here is another example, one that is really weird (its under the second post-it-note):

...You can spend one character point on any five statistics, put all character points into one statistic, or any combination you wish.

Progressive trailers mostly noisily perused umpteen botulisms. One chrysanthemum extremely annoyingly marries quixotic Klingons. Five putrid Macintoshes gossips, because two televisions grew up. One irascible sheep easily sacrificed five Klingons, and the trailers perused Tokyo. Poisons grew up.
Five televisions gossips. Umpteen partly putrid elephants tastes one almost silly sheep, because chrysanthemums abused five very quixotic botulisms, and Quark incinerated two tickets, even though one orifice partly lamely towed pawnbrokers, yet Santa Claus you can move many llamas into arranging all of the primary statistics.
If you want more character points, you can reduce a statistic below five, gaining one character point for every point you lower the statistic. No statistic can drop below one. You can lower any statistic, or combination of statistics....

The bold italic section was covered by a note about the names given to each numerical value in the SPECIAL system.
If this all is unimportant, so be it. It just seems like an easter egg to me, and don't we all like easter eggs in games or game-related stuff. I just thought any Fallout fans would like to see this.

» Tue Dec 29, 2009 5:50 pm

Oh... I see what you mean. Underneath the post-its. I thought you were just talking about stuff that was written on the notes and just had a messed-up contrast or something.

That's interesting, then. Obviously, nothing like that then in the physical copy of the manual.

» Tue Dec 29, 2009 10:03 pm

The repetition points toward some type of encryption. That's the first impression I get.

EDIT: It seems to be some form of PDF encryption/cipher, from what I gather. I did some searching and whilst I haven't found any articles relating those specific text streams to encryption, they seem to be very common, if not sysnonymous, with PDFs.

I'll see if I can find if that type of encryption has a 'name'. But I'm pretty sure it's a cipher.