Bioshock kind of did the same thing though.......

Yes. But exactly how many games are like Fallout/Bioshock? While certainly not unique, it's rare enough for a game to pass through recent memory before the next one pops up.

Its worth pointing out that the retro-futureistic look of Fallout 3 was set down by Fallout 1 and 2, which came long before Bioshock was even a dream in a dev's head.

It's also worth pointing out that bioshock isn't retrofuturistic in the same sense that fallout is. Bioshock is set in the 50's and 60s. So the "futuristic" part has less to do with the normal advance of technology and more to do with what happens when you take the smartest people from around the world and put them in one small area.

To put it simply: The "retro" aspect of bioshock is actually contemporary. The futuristic technology is the anachronism in this case.

In fallout, it's the culture that's remained the same. Technology advanced normally in some ways, and abnormally in others. But the culture is the aspect you would not expect.

You've totally missed the point. No new music has been produced and recorded for centuries, what else is a post-apocalyptic radio station going to play?

The Fallout world when the war happened was culturally stuck in the 50s and their computer technology had only just advanced to simple semiconductors and monochrome green screen monitors (the 70s.) The entire point of a post-apocalyptic game is that the world is a shadow of the place it once was.

That's not necessarily true. What he have is the end result - what the world looked like in 2077 before it blew up. Anything else is rationalization. The world could have remained in one place where culture stagnated for 120 years. That's one rationalization. Another is simply that by 2077 that was the music everyone was listening to, and 50's fashion and art deco was back in fashion again. That's just another rationalization, but I think it makes a bit more sense.

It's none of the above, actually. We can't really compare how the culture developed in our world with how it developed in the Fallout world based on some changes to some events or things being back in fashion etc. It's simply how people thought the future would look like, they didn't expect the vast social changes of the 1960s and beyond, and if you look at 1950s sci-fi, you'll see that even if the authors predicted social changes, they were simply different from the ones that actually happened.

That's even assuming there were any social changes in the 1960s in the world of Fallout. Of course, given the lack of racism in the game, it's possible there was, although that could simply be a post-war development.

Everyone seems to have missed this part, but I suppose the rest has been answered well enough already.

It's actually 2277, but obviously nobody has been around for 200 years to make new advertisemants. The loading screens show various things from around the game, and the advertisemants are merely one of them.

It's all academic, of course - I mean, we are discussing the undocumented and superfluous details of a videogame.

But, of course society went through the standard social changes and upheavals between 1950 and 2077 in Fallout's alternate universe. That's been a constant through the entire history of humanity. It all looks quite a bit the same to us, now - but in 1620 if you were a kid you still thought your parent's music was lame, and that the way people dressed a couple decades ago looked silly (assuming, of course, that you're not a peasant with no concept of the world outside his farm or that anything even existed before his time - which is still the case for people to this day, of course.) People in 1830 looked back on 1800 as "the good old days." In Ancient Egypt, the Pharoahs set the fashions and predominant social conventions - and each one would have their own spin on things.

Sure, Fallout's not a very scientific look into a world devestated by nuclear disaster. But I would find that the idea that people were watching Leave it to Beaver rer-runs and nothing else for 120 years to be harder to swallow than Supermutants, Radscorpions, or why it never rains in the Wasteland. Because it would simply go against one of the only constants in all of human history - that society goes through constant and cyclical evolutions and upheavals.

Appearently you don't pay attention to storyline. After WWII, America and the rest of the world stayed in the 50's theme, and technology progressed much faster. They still listened to 50's music and watched shows like 'I love Lucy'. And it's not 2077. That was when the bombs were dropped. It's 2277. Also, I don't see why it's so dissapointing. I kind of like the happy-go-lucky themes of the 50's. And you think things aren't futuristic, but yet you don't notice plasma rifles, laser rifles, tesla cannon, Vault technology, and many other things.

Well technically, some techs progressed faster while others didn't. For instance, we have tiltrotor aircraft long before they did, we have much more advanced (commonly available) computer tech than them, and we have assault rifles more advanced than an AK knockoff and a G3. Likewise, they have viable robotics, man-portable laser weapons, and the biggie: pervasive nuclear power (for better or worse... ).

OH MY GOD ITS UUUUU
but srsly reseach before purchase

I think trying to figure out the exact evolution of Fallout society pre-war is a slippery slope... though even Bethesda has done it with certain computer journals and refferences, which surprises me in a way.

The reality is the developers and the lore-enthusiasts started with "50's world of tomorrow future, then nuked" and work out from there... we don't work in from the past, seeing what lead there, observing what occured... we start with that simple idea and state of the world, then work out, seeing and surmising what might have happened.

You can imagine what might have happened from 1950 to 2077, and read hints from game journals and such, but for the most part you just have to make the basic leap that the world was like that in 2077, and then it got destroyed.

Amen brother!

Because generally that's all most people ever hear.

Rap just doesn't fit the setting, regardless of how good it is.

Indeed. "The Revolution will not be Televised" was not released until 1970.

I didn't say I wanted rap in Fallout, I was just saying that it isn't all bad.

Okay, first of all, everyone who is "correcting" everyone on the dates, im pretty sure we all know that when FO3 takes Place its 2277. FO3 takes place 200 years after the nuclear war. So everything you see is what life was like before the bombs dropped...Okay, now that i have ranted at the one or two people correcting the dates, on to the main topic.
When i played the game, i got the vibe that, instead of the U.S. staying in the fifties theme for an eternity, the fifties style simply made a relapse. I mean, look around. Styles are always relapsing. teenage kids are wearing their hair long again, and sporting tie-dye shirts. I think the style of the fifties simply returned to the united states before the Great war. To me, i just didn't think that a culture staying exactly the same for more than 120 years is possible, but the event of a relapse in culture is.

I also feel that the fifties music kinda sets the erie desolate waisteland feel to the game. Listening to, "I don't want to set the world on fire" while i walk through one of the destoryed metros with ferals jumping at the throat really got my adreniline pumping sometimes.

That's about how I think of it, as well.

To be sure, that's just a rationalization based on what evidence there is. The only solid "facts" are that in Fallout, you are exploring a devestated world that before it's fall ended up looking like the pulp sci-fi vision of the World of Tomorrow. Anything beyond that is sort of irrelevant when you really get down to it. But still, I prefer the rationalization that society went through it's typical cycles (which doesn't necessarily imply that it ran parellel to our own timesteam, of course,) rather than the other rationalization that society was stagnant for 120 years.

Which would have been the first time in human history that something like that had happened. I mean really, that would defy my suspension of disbelief more than Supermutants, even.

If you look at typical 1950s sci-fi, the society of the future usually is very similar to the one in the 1950s. Just like much of modern sci-fi shows future society that is much more similar to the present than it will likely end up being. It doesn't really need any rationalization beyond that.

You might think so, but you'd be wrong. It's official canon that in the 50's, the Fallout universe branches off. In the FO universe, the culture stayed the same as in the 50's, and technology advanced much differently.

Think about it, if it went like normal and the 50's were only "back in style" as of 2077, what's with all of the computer terminals and such? The culture stayed the same, and as such, what people out of technology stayed the same. People didn't care about computers or HDTVs or the like, so computers stayed the same. On the other hand, people in the 50's wanted robot butlers, and figured that in the future, they'd be all the rage. As such, they made robot butlers. Or at least, that's the better explanation than "who cares, it's just how people of the 50's would have seen the future."

I think you need to look at Ausir's copy/paste another time.

The official canon says nothing more than that by 2077 the world came out looking like the 50's view of the World of Tomorrow. In the Fallout 3 manual, it says that the timeline split around 1950. There's nothing "official" about culture stagnating for 120 years. That's a rationalization tacked on by people to explain the end result. There's nothing in the lore to describe how we arrived at the end result in 2077, other than that's what it ended up looking like. It can be logically assumed that technology progressed in a different way - that much is obvious. But the actual cultural progression of the world in those intervening years is completely open (and largely irrelevant.)

There's two ways of looking at this - and both are rationalizations that the existing lore neither supports or denies. (Like Ausir said - if you watch an black and white sci-fi movie - everyone's still pretty much dressed the same and kind of looks like 1950 with neat gadgets. You see the same thing in 60's sci-fi, and all through to the present.) One rationalization is that society stagnated for 120 years. I think I've already explained twice in this thread why that's more outlandish a concept than anything else that occurs in the game. If there was some cataclysmic event that stopped cultural growth for over a century - that's what the game should be focusing on, because surely that must have been a pretty interesting event to go against what has been a constant through all of recorded history.

The other rationalization is that society did indeed go through it's usual permutations. This doesn't mean that it had to have progressed in any way parallel to our own timeline. (For example, it doesn't mean that the hippie movement occured, or disco, etc...) It's nothing more than an assumption that culture went through it's usual cycles and that by 2077 it ended up looking like they always thought it would in 1950.

Again, both are rationalizations, and rather beyond the point. Neither is "official lore." I just happen to think one makes a whole lot more sense than the other. Fallout is a fictional world. The only important thing is the end result - the setting in which the game takes place. Which is in a destroyed World of Tomorrow. How it got there is largely irrelevant. It's kind of like discussing what the world of Star Wars looked like a few thousand years before the movies take place - the answer is simply "whatever was required to provide the end result." But if we were going to talk about that, I'd still maintain that literally the one thing you could be sure of was that Star Wars "pre-history" went through the typical cycles of cultural upheaval and revision that is a defining aspect of all cultures in the first place.

From the Fallout Wiki:

"This means hovering housecleaning robots and laser guns were the norm, and automobiles looked like Motorama concept vehicles from the 1950s: massive tail-finned and chromed behemoths but with nuclear fusion engines. At the same time, clothing styles and building interiors and furnishings apparently remained very much stuck in the 1950s. Posters and signage also largely harken to this decade. Radio remains the most common mass media, and food products are based on those popularized in the TV dinner era (boxed macaroni and cheese, canned meat, Salisbury steak TV dinners, etc.). "