Fallout 4: 10 Biggest Questions Answered For New Players

10. Why Does Everything Look Like It's Stuck In the 50s?

The distinctly 50s stylisation of the Fallout universe is something that those of us familiar with it just take as a given. The shark-finned cars (defunct, unfortunately), the music, the mannerisms of the people, all seemingly stuck in that fascinating, repressed period before the 60s blew culture wide open. If you're a newcomer to the series, you'd be forgiven for assuming that the great nuclear war that shaped the Fallout world happened in the 50s, and that cultural evolution essentially got put on hold for the next couple of hundred years while people hid out in underground vaults. But the nuclear war (known as the Great War, presumably taking over the prestigious name from World War I based on its much higher body count) didn't happen until 2077. The future of Fallout 4 is based on what 50s science and sci-fi novels (particularly the Worlds of Tomorrow) speculated the future could have looked like, not based on what we today think of the same scenario. Crucially, the Fallout timeline diverged with the real-world timeline in the 50s, because in the Fallout universe the transistor was never invented, meaning that the miniaturisation of technology that led to our world of smartphones and microchips never happened. Instead, science focused on harnessing atomic fusion, which is why so much machinery in Fallout runs on nuclear power.