25 Years Ago, Fallout Perfected Post-Apocalyptic RPGs
Role-playing games have traditionally been set in fantasy worlds, full of undiscovered country, mysterious monsters, and hidden treasure. But a quarter-century ago, a brave team took a step into the future and created a post-apocalyptic adventure that would forever reshape the genre. Fallout, originally released on Oct. 10, 1997, has become one of the most prestigious series in role-playing history—let’s explore how it got that way.
Newport Beach teenager Brian Fargo was captivated by computers after his parents bought him an Apple II in 1977. It wasn’t long before he was developing his own games. After graduation, he founded Interplay to create role-playing games for a variety of publishers, including the critically acclaimed series The Bard's Tale. It wasn’t long before the company branched out into publication themselves.
In 1988, Interplay released Wasteland. Inspired by the popular Mad Max franchise, the game set players in a world generations after global thermonuclear war, exploring a radiation-ravaged American Southwest and discovering an artificial intelligence threatening to eliminate humanity's scattered dregs.
It was an immediate critical and commercial success, a breath of fresh air into the moribund landscape. The team put a sequel together, the less successful Fountain of Dreams. But after a third title in the series was abandoned, programmer Tim Cain started to spearhead something new in-house.
In the olden days, many computer RPGs were based on the rulesets of existing tabletop systems. In the 1990s, one of the hottest pen-and-paper franchises was Steve Jackson’s GURPS—short for “Generic Universal Role-Playing System.” GURPS was a sort of catch-all product that encompassed sci-fi, fantasy, Wild West, and
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