I have seen all kinds of excuses for this phenomena...The U.S.'s switch to fusion based automobiles creates the type of future those in the 1950s envisioned, yada yada yada. It's great for fiction and don't get me wrong I love the Fallout universe and it's quirky pop-culture references and how it reflects the cold-war atmosphere of the 50s everyone enjoys, but in real life there is NO WAY IN HELL by the year 2077 we would still be in a world that hasn't gotten out of the 50s in regards to society.

So events like the 60s civil rights movements and peace movements never occurred; they would occur sometime. People tend to forget that the 20's were full of radically liberal people and a society that started going crazy constructing new ideals and whatnot, and the Fallout's divergence of the timeline occurs after WWII. Given this, social revolutions would be popping up everywhere if not in the 60s, then in the 70s or 80s, or 90s and so on. I mean human beings in the 20th century do not just magically change so that they reflect the same xenophobic, communist-hatin' bigots for more than a century.

We've reached a stage in humanity where new fads and new ideals are popping up every decade, so how on Earth would the same fads, the same music, and remarkably primitive technology be around 120 years after the 50's? Ok, so I can see technology-wise how things diverged. Internet was not created and instead the basic type of Arpanet (?) (sorry I svck at this technical stuff don't know if I'm describing it right) stuck around. Fusion technology exploded (no pun intended) and new types of weapons evolved as it was a (cold) warrior based world where technological advances were focused on military advances.

Still, regarding society, how does one still remain stuck in the past after more than a century? Although energy weapons and robots would not be around in the game it would have made much more sense for the developers to simply have the nuclear holocaust occur in the 60s if they wanted a 50s type society by the 22nd and 23rd centuries.

end rant, like I said this has probably been discussed countless times before...

My own rationale is that the whole idea that society had stayed generally stagnant for 120 years is silly. But that by no means at all is what actually occured in the Fallout universe. Keep in mind that society is cyclical. What we see of the Pre-War society 2077 is simply one that has come full circle - a retro-retro-50's of sorts. This means that the 60's occured, and the 70's, 80's, 90's and so on. (With some changes, of course - but that's mostly to account for the differing technology and to explain the aesthetic choice of having vacuum tubes, black and white TV, and Power Armor.)

Apart from the technological changes, there's no reason that society didn't progress in a generally parallel manner to ours. Keep in mind that 2077 is still well in our future. I'd imagine that a society that has suddenly realized all of these technological dreams (and the future schock that would come with that) might find themselves nostalgiac for a more "wholesome" society. As an artist myself, I don't think it would be terribly far-fetched that if I was living in that society I might well base much of my work on that Atomic Age vision of the future that they had in the 50's. Plus, there are fairly obvious correlations between 2077 in Fallout's Universe and our own 50's society. Xenophobia, the beginnings of the Cold War, fear of imminent destruction, etc. That "safe and wholesome" image in the 50's was largely to cover up the underlying tensions of the age.

Plus, since cycles come around roughly every 20 years. The retro-60's fad of the 80's and early 90's - the retro-50's style underlying the 70's (Happy Days and American Graffitti, for instance.) And so on. The math actually works for 2077 being a retro-retro-retro-(ad nauseum) 50's throwback.

In short - society wasn't stagnant through all of the intervening years between 1950 and 2077. Only that by that time society had come around to remarkably the same place. And that the styles and mentality of the time were a throwback to that earlier, "simpler" age.

That's my rationale, at least.

The Fallout setting is not an alternate timeline that logically examines what would happen in some change was made to the history, it shows a future world as envisioned in the past. It's not about "what would happen if America developed in a different way technologically and stayed in the 1950s culturally?". It's about "What would happen if the World of Tomorrow as envisioned in the 1950s was nuked?". The society in 1950s sci-fi and other visions of the future *was* much more 1950s-like than what the future actually turned out to be.

Fallout is set in an alternate timeline that diverged from ours in the 1950s. In the 21st century, it looked like the future as imagined in the 1950s pulp science fiction. E.g. instead of transistors you have huge vacuum tube-based computers with artificial intelligence and monochromatic terminals, robotic servants, a pseudo-utopian society based on 1950s values, black and white TV, music from the 1950s considered all-time classics, and most modern musical genres never appearing, etc,. Weapon development was also different from ours and thus plasma and laser weaponry was introduced, 10mm became the most common ammo type, etc. The modern high-tech weapons were never created - instead, weapons based on how people in the 1950s thought 21st century weaponry would look like are used.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Divergence

I don't trust wikis... and you should neither

I actually wrote much of this wiki. And this wiki link isn't there to prove a point, just for additional reading.

There's a reason why I describe Fallout's prewar aesthetics as "Retro-50's Futurism"; I've never believed that the 50's simply didn't end ... I think the aesthetics simply came back into vogue. Possibly as part of a Nationalist movement in response to the growing threats worldwide - honestly, in the weeks after 9/11, we saw a similar trend, albeit a short-lived one, as suddenly people who a week before probably couldn't have cared about X nation versus Y nation, were all over the "America is #1!" attitude. Suddenly, the decorative thing to buy and display - on cars, houses, backpacks, clothes, your own skin, wherever - was Old Glory. Everything was "red-white-and-true-blue".

That ultra-nationalism, on a much more sustained basis would almost require a strong element of nostalgia, looking back towards when the U.S. was (in it's own eyes, at least) the power on the globe - and when "better dead, than red" was part and parcel of the (public) ideal. Which, it just so happens, was ... the 1950's.

That's my take on it, anyway.

The folks living in the fifties had a very different view of the future than what has actually come to pass. We thought we would have robots to do our daily chores and make our life easier. We had this idyllic view of the future in all ways but one. The one thing that worried us was that Russia would bomb us and we might have to live in a shelter for a few months and that the world would be devastated.

Fallout is based (I believe very successfully) upon those view of the future along with our greatest fear of the time coming true. Nuclear cars, robots, happy marriage with 2.5 children, a time when smoking was glamorous, time travel, clean energy in abundance...all a part of what the time considered the perfect world of the future. But...the threat of "the bomb" was drilled into us until it was a fear we carried every moment. That threat created a more hedonistic attitude which eventually led us in a different direction than anyone had ever thought.

Looking back it was quite funny how gullible we were and how very wrong we were. It was genius for someone to take those misconceptions of the future and put it into a world having been everything we thought it would be both idealistically and with our worst fears coming true. The humor that came out of that vision is for me over the top and I imagine even better for those of us who remember the fifties. It's like looking back and being able to laugh at our own ignorance.

To sum it us...it's an alternate timeline of what us gullible 50's era people thought it could or would be.

I agree, I don't think the Fallout world remained "stuck" in the 50's, but in order to fit the retro-50's future style they eventually reverted to the "good old days". We actually don't know a lot of details about the divergence and what caused it, if I were to venture a guess culture did continue to progress until at least the late 70's (hence the 70sish computer terminals in Fallout 3), but due to the never ending Cold War (which could have been caused by a variety of things) American society reverted back to the 1950's when McCarthyism was dominant so that the American propaganda machine would have an easier time keeping the populace loyal. Technology definitely did progress as Fallout 2 had a few more modern weapons, and of course there's laser and plasma weapons.

The divergence probably didn't really happen until sometime in the 70's or even 80's. The details are pretty sketchy, though.

Anyway yeah - what Ausir said. Fallout isn't a sociological reconstruction of what would logically happen in a divergent timeline. It's basically - "What would happen if we blew up the 50's version of Utopia?" All the details were added backwards to support that end result, not constructed forward from the premise.

I've played very little of the Fallout series so far, though I've read a good deal of the wiki, so I'm not 100% sure how the original Fallout mythos projected the alternate timeline to play out. I think it's far-fetched to say that the Fallout timeline stayed so heavily in line with what a logarithmic sociological path of the time would be like, especially in terms of the racial views of that period, such as segregation, racial science, colonialism etc. Besides, many aspects of the asthetics you see in the Fallout series didn't follow the 50's vision of the future so perfectly either. Look at the robots and the power armor in Fallout- while they have a certain clunky retro-futuristic charm to them, they have many design aspects that were very alien to retro-futurism aesthetics of the 50's.

However, although I've only been playing Fallout Tactics so far, what's the deal with so many common modern weaponry popping up in that game? Uzis and the like look exactly the same as they do in our world, and I'm also wondering just why so much of the weaponry encountered in that game is from the late 20th century.

On another note, what was architecture supposed to generally be like in the pre-WWIII period of Fallout?

the 50's, when things were made to last. cast iron, lead paint and all that stuff. the plastic crap made after then didn't last the 200+ years imo.

This.

End of discussion

The original Fallouts never had a strong artistic stand-point, the story and writing adhered to 1950's retro-futurism, though.

Fallout Tactics is semi-canon. It was developed by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Forte, and contradicted some canon, like including many post-WWII weaponry, for example.

Those could all just be apart of some odd parallel developments though- unless those are universally considered non-canon aspects?

And are these all of the inconsistencies?
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_Tactics#Inconsistencies

Fallout Tactics is officially semi-canon. Van Buren nor Fallout 3 put any emphasis on modern-day weaponry/armour. My main confusion was in that Tactics claimed the BoS to originate from a Vault, which they didn't.

I haven't studied that article in any great detail, but Ausir has worked on it in the past, and if only for his contributions, I would guarantee its accuracy.

But there was no parallel development that reflected the post-divergent real-world in Fallout.

Fallout 2 had some modern weapons as well if I'm not mistaken, in fact didn't the original Fallout have one or two?

Fallout 2 most certainly did, for which the developers held their hands up. But Tactics had no less than a plethora of inconsistent weaponry

Which weapons in Fallout 1 would you consider modern?

.44 Desert Eagle is the only one I can think of (for certain values of "modern").... And I think Chris threw his hands up in the bible IIRC saying they wanted to add it just because it was cool or something.

And althought he particular weapon is modern, the notion of large bore automatics really isn't. It didn't strike me as really being out of place. many weapons in FO2 did strike me as out of place...like the M60, for example.

I don't find it that unlikely. While it's doubtful things like uzis came into being, AK-47's, many of the simple pistols, along with basic shotguns and hunting rifles without a doubt developed in the Fallout timeline.

Plus, most of those were around BEFORE the divergence. However, is there an explanation in Tactics as to why so much technology that would be incredibly dated by late 21st century standards are so common in that game?

The developers of both FO2 and FOT admitted that including so much modern real-world weaponry was a mistake. And the lack of retrofuturism is one of the main reasons Tactics is not considered fully canon.

But did they mention specific weapons? Like I said, AK's, hunting rifles, shotguns etc. wouldn't be out of place. Though, what other elements of retro-futurism were lacking from FOT? And again, exactly what are such dated forms of weaponry doing all over in FOT?

The dated weaponry belongs. Anything before, during, and just after WWII belongs in the Fallout world. Anything post-WWII doesn't correspond with the http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Divergence#The_Divergence_of_the_Timelines. These dated weapons belong in Tactics like any other title, but anything post-divergence is an inconsistency. As for what is lacking from Tactics, I'm aware you're getting stuck into that title yourself right now, so have a look around

Oh, I don't think we really want to see the negative aspect of society in games that are supposed to be fun.

The robots, except for Prime, which seems right out of a 50's sifi mover, seem more like the kinds or robots we say on TV in the 60's. A little late, but not that for off the track.

One of the thinks I've been thinking about is the way the Wasteland appears in game. Given that nature is already reclaiming the Chernobyl zone after only 20 years, it's difficult to reconcile the desolation of teh Wasteland with a rational scientific point of view. However, I was talking to my mother about this (she was a chemist....strong scientific background) and she indicated that people thought the world would never recover from a nuclear war.

Interesting...

Why not? It's supposed to be a mature game, exploring the ethics of a post-apocalyptic society. I found exploring negative aspects of society quite fun myself.


Protectron in FO3 is based on Robby the Robot, from a 1956 movie. The Enclave eyebot is based on the Sputnik, also from the 1950s.

This is a picture of a robot from the 1950s:

http://img362.imageshack.us/img362/4051/1984ifihadarobotpaleofudq7.jpg

Looks quite like Mr. Handy, doesn't it?

I agree with the retro 50's thing. Hundred years since then and still the culture doesn't evolve. I think it's really stupid, and the weakest point of the whole series. Should of had the nuclear war happen in the 50's.