But that's the thing about good fiction, you want to know more and explore it. Tolkien created Middle Earth that has gotten people to ask questions about it. Same with the Star Trek and Star Wars Universes. When you create a good fiction world, people want to know more.

Of course all we are doing is speculating. Unless someone involved in the game comes on and posts, nothing we say is canon. All we can do is take the clues given us and expand on them. But I think it is obvious that the Fallout world is a fascinating place and the fans want to know all about it. I do agree that we do need to do it tongue-in-cheek since that is a big part of the Fallout world.

The lore behind immersive games like Fallout and others along with literary realms such as Middle Earth,Star Trek and Star Wars is part of what draws people to those things, because it forces the imagination to work. But by forcing the imagination to work it spawns these types of questions which in turn spawns more imagination and so on.

Personally I think the divergences occured shortly after the end of WW2 and the FO world found Fission to be a reliable source of energy (think about it we see portable fission batteries in FO3) it's even mentioned as being the power source used in power armors and there are other types of weapons that use energy cells that could be fission or fusion powered (2 different types of energy btw)

I think the path and innovations of energy creation and manipulation is where the timelines diverged.

It's mentioned the the Enclave ISN'T the government of the USA or wasn't prewar and is never actually said that i know of (havent' finished FO3 yet and ain't played FO1 or FO2 in forever) that the Enclave is the Gov'T of the USA. The enclave is a shadow gov't meaning they pulled strings but never actually "ran" things.

In closeing and sorry for the longwindedness of the post. While it may be a game, a established and believable and questionable lore base is what makes the Fallout series so successful, and it also opens the do to the community to give ideas and help in mods that are community and game designer made (what ya think a DLC is.. it's a dev made mod).

The Enclave was composed of some government officials, corporation CEOs and high-ranking military officers. Basically an industrial-military complex.

ie, the people who really ran the country, not the dog-and-pony show put on to convince the people their votes and opinions mattered. <_<

Yes, pretty much.

Or, alternatively, a social crisis happens sometime early in the 2000's. Like, say, 2020 or 2030. Out of finding ways to stabilize the country, governmental think-tanks get to work, and decide to copy the 1950's *form* as a way to cover up a financial/social mess. They take over parts of the corporate world, Coke-> Nuke, etc, and try to reinvent themselves. In the process, they limit some free-thinking elements to the society (for the greater good, of course), get rid of the internet, but keep simple terminals around due to the population's addiction to computers.

By this time, however, robotics, Pip-boys, etc are all possible; but, due to regulation, most computing resources are limited to the simple terminal system. If you are smart or rich, however, you get access to the pipboy/robotic systems.

Fusion/nuclear powered systems are common, due to low amounts of oil.

Radiation acting differently? Are you sure the FEV first showed up in 2077? Perhaps prototypes (or the original "natural" version) has been around longer... hootnams may not be exactly like you and me by, say, 2060. In other words, it might not be the radiation that is different, it might be the people. Especially if they were messing around with some basic genetic engineering.

Canada would have objected, or at least, pointed out that we of the ol' good US of A didn't exactly fit the mold of what we used to be. Nagged us a bit, probably. And, they'd have all those nice natural resources... TERRORISTS! We need to help our brothers and sisters to the north see how enlightened the New Society is!!!

Nice try, Myrdinn, but I don't know if you can put the genie back in the bottle.

You know this is impossible because if you just removed computers in the current era the people would storm down and annihalt the goverment because of it.

The difference in technology and in the actual effects of radiations is simply explained by the fact that the fundamental underlying principles of physics are different. This is cutely referred to as "Science!, not science."

The 1950's was a time soon after the first realization of the devastating power of nuclear weapons. The Cold War was in full swing and the fear of a nuclear holocaust was as great as it has ever been.

The younger you are, the less likely it is that the 1950's theme will strike a cord. It play's nicely on the memories of some. Personally, I like it.

Remember that it's a game. Your allowed to suspend disbelief.

anyone knows what did happen the warschau pact it was being sealed in our reality after the second world war by nations 'liberated' by the russians, as russian answer on the european union... A intresting view on a shadow government you can find in the scifi thriller the x-files did run from '92 - '02 ...

I was born in 1970, and grew up during the last two decades of the Cold War. Believe me, I remember what it was like... especially the feeling of helplessness and uncertainty during the 80s, when it was clear that there weren't going to be any winners, and it was just a matter of hoping we found a way out of the whole mess before someone pushed the Button or there was some accident that set it all off.

In the 50s, there was still that belief and hope that nuclear war wouldn't be the end of civilization, the species, and/or the world. By the 80s, we'd lost that, and all that was left was dread of something we had no power to prevent.


I'm aware of that, and I do every time I start the game, or watch TV, or whatever. On a meta level, in terms of theme and tone and all that, I understand why the designers of (original) Fallout decided to make it that way. But looking at it as a plausible alternate timeline and trying to figure out how we got from 1950 to 2077 requires suspending not only what we know about the hard sciences, but also the "soft" (social) sciences too.

They'd consider our timeline implausible too.

"So, they have these magical 'transistors', whole computers on a little 'chip' and a world-wide computer network - but they still haven't figured out robots or atomic power? And you say women do men's work, even when there isn't a war on? Wait... WHO did you say is President?"

That form of government is called an Military Oligargarchy..

Where as the Brotherhood of Steel have a form of Military Theocracy.

Ignore retarded post.

Judging by the music in Fallout, I guess they never experienced the great musical revolution of the 60's and 70's

I have one word for ya: Fiction

Everything in the Fallout universe is a 'what-if' scenario branching down the path of an alternate reality. If you try to bridge logic into something that doesn't need explaining you'll miss the immersive experience and just ruin it.

Oh and it's not just 'Bethesda Humor', since Interplay / Black Isle is responsible for many of the initial the themes / environments / moods in the game. I'm not trying to take anything away with that statement either, since Bethesda has done an OUTSTANDING job on Fallout3. And that's coming from a fan of Wasteland, Fallout, Fallout2 and FOT-BOS. I just just mention that because I want to point out the rich history behind this game, since many players are new to it.

Not really understanding something can help immersion.

I haven't read anything past the starting post here *yet* but before I do I decided to repost some thoughts I had on this in another thread here (they were addressed to someone who was very new to all this):

The world isn't entirely logical but if you find out more and think about it more and get a little creative there are some ways it can make more sense to you than it does currently.

Remember, style is different from technology level, we're to believe that in the Fallout universe certain technologies advanced faster than in our timeline, and others advanced slower. While our world developed highly advanced communications, computers, display screens, entertainment devices, etc, by 2008, by 2077 in the Fallout universe certain things like computer processor power was lagging behind, as well as display terminals etc.

Now, obviously in practical terms the reason for this is that they (both the devs of the earlier Fallouts and Bethesda) want to mix 50's tech with what people in the 50's envisioned as future tech, but let's consider some justifications as long as we're thinking here.

Okay, in this timeline they've been locked into an extremely long cold war with China, and perhaps one with Russia before that. It seems reasonable to believe their world has been locked in a perpetual state of war since the 50's, so more than 100 years of war. Most of it cold war, but still war.

We're told that resources like oil and such become extremely scarce...

we know that they have robots, military and domestic ones.

Perhaps it is viewed as frivolous in a time of war to be using any of the advanced processors which are needed for military robots in computers, now you could argue well they wouldn't use them in domestic robots either, and that's a good point, but maybe it's just a matter of cultural focus... they are focusing on robots, we focused on computers. You might say, well that's kind of the same thing, you can't really achieve advanced robots without getting damn good with computers first, and why in the world would there be such a discrepancy between the power of their computers and the power of their robots? Well, here I kind of have to start straining a bit but here's some more ideas...

Maybe their computers, which appear to be on par with like Commodore 64's (certainly not 486's as you said) are far more powerful than they appear to be, maybe it's just the operating system and interface which are primitive, maybe this is again because of what the culture is focused on. Maybe in the Fallout world it was seen as unpatriotic to spend resources and time on developing pretty operating systems and advanced graphic computer games like we did... it's a time of war and maybe that has gobbled up all the talent that could've been doing that sort of thing too *shrug*

Maybe in the Fallout universe they went through many of the transitions culturally and technologically that we did, but by 2077 they are so worn down by all this war and how brutal and gruesome things have been that they all have been longing for a much simpler time, in their minds the last time things were simple was more than 100 years before, before all this war really began. So they make a conscious cultural effort to return to the aesthetics of that time. Remember, just because you see an old fashioned looking refrigerator doesn't mean it actually is one, it could just be a stylistically similar one which is in fact much more advanced, powered by a nuclear reactor like the cars are as well. The cars are a great example, they LOOK like old fashioned 50's cars but they absolutely aren't. It's a stylistic choice.

The Fallout world longs to go back to that time of innocence, so they willingly bury their heads in the sand and return to an old look to everything.

That doesn't explain every single thing maybe but it can go a long way to making it make more sense to you, I hope.

Another point I forgot to make, I was getting there but I got sidetracked. We're told in the first game's intro watch here that oil has become extremely scarce right? okay so what is oiled used in? plastics! think about how much plastics are used in our modern world for every sort of container, etc... they are a huge part of the aesthetics of all our modern technology too, from computers to every consumer good.

Well, remember how in WW2 people were patriotically turning in all their copper and steel and different things like that for the war machine to use? maybe in the Fallout universe, all those old things that would've indicated that they might've gone through some of the same aesthetics and technological trends that we have done, were wiped out because all the plastics were gathered up back when they were still needing oil, maybe they found a way to convert plastic consumer goods back into oil for use as fuel... or had some other need for it in the war.

So maybe the government even sold the public a sort of excuse for this, with the whole "let's return to a simpler time, the 50's from last century, make our new technology look that way, dress that way, even talk and act that way" *shrug* it's possible, and they had an extra motivation for doing this to give another reason to have everyone turn in their plastic goods.

I don't know, but these are some possibilities if you really want to make it work logically.

And then of course the other possibility which is probably more canonical is that their culture just simply never progressed from that 50's thing, they were locked in a 100+ years war so there was a slowing down of cultural change, maybe even a resistance to it, when you're fearing for your life in a time of atomic war as a possibility maybe you want things to stay the same as much as possible? lots of ways to make it more logical.

Well when society has not changed the cultural side effects would not either.

Another thought, maybe the government views advanced computer technology as very dangerous to just let any old citizen have (anymore?) maybe there was a lockdown on what the public was allowed to have, out of a combination of the government jealously, greedily keeping hold of the most impressive advances technologically, allowing a company like RobCo to only release certain things to the public... who knows. It might be very interesting indeed to see what the Fallout world was like in 2008, I'm guessing the 50's style wasn't around then, and maybe computers were a lot different *shrug* but who knows.

That's how it looked in 50s sci-fi. They had computers primitive by today's standards, but had robots with advanced AI.

Maybe the government controlled all media outlets and geared life, pop culture, and society in general to go back to the 50s way of life. Easier to control the people?