There's a version of this game that exists between its admirers, one with too solid a body of discourse built up around it to be called imaginary. This Fallout is the centerpiece of a secular religion of CRPG design, attended by Deus Ex and Planescape Torment, though perhaps finally consigned to the status of Old Testament anticipation by Disco Elysium. Hbomberguy is this faith's high priest.

I'm fond of the Fallout of conversation, in which the skills are consistently useful, there are multiple, organic solutions to problems and the writing is thoughtful and nuanced. The kind of guy whose praise perpetuates belief in this game is often the least racist kind of PC gamer. I'm also fond, however, of the playable piece of software released in 1997 bearing the same name, and feel its merits should be articulated as well.

The structure of Fallout's world is less reminiscent of anything else called an RPG than it is of the evidence-gathering phase of a Phoenix Wright case. There's a manageable number of locations presented through a menu, and in each of them one pokes and prods around, with novel bits of optional content with little long-term bearing but which serve as their own reward, until something moves the world state forward. Fallout's chief innovation wasn't so much opening up the CRPG as subjecting it to the same rigorous structure as the adventure game. While there are filler enemies and random encounters, each of the game's major combats provides the player with the tools necessary to manage the next: Vault 15's SMG, for example, allows the player to deal with the Khans, whose armor makes the upcoming chain of large group firefights survivable.

That progression is driven by new gear and information rather than leveling keeps any of the game's areas from feeling extraneous. Nothing in Fallout ever overstays its welcome, which is enormously beneficial: ideas and characters which would be insufferable in a game a few hours longer are instead presented straightforwardly and immediately moved on from. It's this brevity, and the recognition that a thinly-sketched character is almost always preferable to an overwrought one, that Fallout inherits from tabletop, rather than anything like freedom of choice. It's perhaps the best example of pacing in a western CRPG.

Aside from a few points at which the player's given multiple, equidistant leads to follow up on at once, the progression is incredibly taut and, because its only gating mechanisms are information and ability, feels more essential and less arbitrary than equivalents in the genre. Most of the choices of approach are back-loaded into the last two areas of the game, where the character skills which have been largely useless for the previous two-thirds of the game now function as keys. That these areas can be so easily circumvented by simply wearing a disguise undercuts their significance, but ultimately a high Speech or Science or Big Guns is treated like an item in an adventure game. This is made possible by and supports Fallout's limited scale and general restraint: it's a game where a skill or a tool used two or three times is worth going out of one's way for.

It's probably the first Western RPG to have really good art direction, and I'd suggest resisting the urge to play the game at a modern resolution in order to really appreciate the spritework. The voice work is shockingly solid, and with the exception of some of the better New Vegas characters I don't think the series has ever quite matched the talking heads in this game for memorability. It is so sad to watch the cinematics in this first entry present what would become the series aesthetic as succinctly and stylishly as they do, and to know this would be milked dry in later years as these games got more and more saturated with 50s-dystopian broad satire.