Fallout (video game)

Fallout
Developer(s)	Interplay Productions
Publisher(s)	Interplay Productions[a]
Producer(s)	Tim Cain
Designer(s)	Scott Campbell Christopher Taylor
Programmer(s)	Tim Cain Chris Jones
Artist(s)	Leonard Boyarsky Jason D. Anderson Gary Platner
Writer(s)	Mark O'Green
Composer(s)	Mark Morgan
Series	Fallout
Platform(s)	MS-DOS Windows Mac OS Mac OS X
Release	October 10, 1997 MS-DOS, Windows NA: October 10, 1997 EU: 1997 Mac OS NA: 1997 Mac OS X WW: 2002
Genre(s)	Role-playing
Mode(s)	Single-player

Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game is a 1997 role-playing video game developed and published by Interplay Productions, set in a mid-22nd century post-apocalyptic and retro-futuristic world, decades after a nuclear war between the United States and China. Fallout's protagonist, the Vault Dweller, inhabits an underground nuclear shelter. The player must scour the surrounding wasteland for a computer chip that can fix the Vault's failed water supply system. They interact with other survivors, some of whom give them missions, and engage in turn-based combat.

Tim Cain began working on Fallout in 1994. It began as a game engine based on the tabletop role-playing game GURPS, but after Steve Jackson Games objected to Fallout's violence, Cain and designer Christopher Taylor created a new character customization scheme, SPECIAL. Interplay initially gave the game little attention, but eventually spent $3 million and employed up to thirty people to develop it. Interplay considered Fallout the spiritual successor to its 1988 role-playing game Wasteland and drew artistic inspiration from 1950s literature and media emblematic of the Atomic Age as well as the films Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog. The quests were intentionally made morally ambiguous. After three and a half years of development, Fallout was released in North America in October 1997.

Fallout received acclaim for its open-ended gameplay, character system, plot, and setting. It won "Role-Playing Game of the Year" from GameSpot and Computer Games Magazine and was nominated by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences at the Spotlight Awards. Fallout was a commercial success, selling 600,000 copies worldwide. Often regarded as one of the greatest computer role-playing games, Fallout has been credited for renewing consumer interest in the role-playing video game genre. It spawned the widely successful Fallout series, the rights to which were purchased in 2007 by Bethesda Softworks.

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