Why Bethesda Needs Fallout…

Fallout fan Mr. Teatime has written an article called “Why Bethesda Needs Fallout Like Vault 13 Needs a Waterchip”, in which he offers some reasons why Bethsoft needs to get Fallout 3 “right.”

Fallout and its fans have become one and the same, and you can’t sever one from the other. As life imitating art, they both, together, represent a chaotic and dangerous order (OK, as dangerous and chaotic as nerdy, mostly male twenty-somethings sat in front of computer screens can be), a break from the mainstream and something you can’t quite fully grasp without it shifting and slipping away. Developers may try to awkwardly solder the Fallout name onto something without fan support, but the end product will be weak and snap under pressure, leaving your investors gently weeping and wondering why the free thongs didn’t work.1

Fallout has become more than two games that did things a bit differently; it has been taken over by a fanbase that refused to let the original concept die despite repeated subsequent attempts to mutate it. It’s a fanbase that has charged itself with the series’ defence. Similar fan communities exist for other games, but nowhere to this extent: witness, for example, Deus Ex: Invisible War’s low sales, surely a result of the fanbase’s reaction, despite overwhelmingly positive reviews from the mainstream press.

The lessons are there to be learnt: if you’re working on a cult franchise, make sure you get it right. Cult is more than the sum of its parts, and the older the cult is, the more powerful its influence and the more it’s entrenched in the product.