Planeswalking Rangers
Metafictionality has been a bit of a hot topic in the circles we run in. These discussions are not ones we can usually participate in. We have a hard time viewing Fallout as a work of fiction, instead preferring to see its existence as a video game here as some sort of accident. The lives we led had similar qualia to the life that we find ourselves leading now. There’s a few exceptions to this.
Cincinnati acted a lot like a stereotypical Western RPG protagonist. Human beings were not meant to carry that many giant guns, survive that many near-death experiences, take that many drugs without side effects, and be able to convince just about anybody of anything. That’s classic protagonist behavior. Tycho’s Ian had the same issues with friendly fire that canon and fanon Ian do, which stems from a bit of sloppy coding in Fallout 1. Both these things have explanations in our universe that don’t rely on fictionality. Ian had awful vision and no glasses, Cincinnati had ADHD and something magical backing her up. These explanations make sense to us, but they’re clearly based on things about the way our lives are depicted in media here.
There’s one thing that we feel like we experience kind of differently. Before Fallout was created, there was a video game called Wasteland. In Wasteland, the player manages a party of characters who belong to a post-apocalyptic group in the Southwestern United States called the Desert Rangers. They aren’t anything like the Desert Rangers we are. Completely separate concept that happens to have the same name and operate in the same broad geographic area. We don’t see ourselves as the same people as the Wasteland Rangers in any way.
Fallout 1 disagrees with us on that. The developers of Fallout 1 didn’t set out to create an entirely new setting originally. They wanted to develop a sequel to Wasteland, but copyright issues with EA made that impossible. To continue their project, and maybe to spite EA, they took the groundwork Wasteland laid and created Fallout 1. They’re similar in many ways, both early CRPGs set in a post-nuclear Southwestern United States with the overarching goal of stopping a villain from replacing the population of Earth with more “genetically pure” folks. In many more ways they are different. Fallout 1 has different gameplay, a much more developed story, less emphasis on creating a party, and a completely independent setting.
When creating Fallout 1, Interplay came up with its own timeline, map, and people to inhabit the world. There aren’t any plot-important factions ripped from the Wasteland-verse and plopped down into Fallout. There’s a few easter eggs in the game, not very obtrusive ones. Just there as a nod to the game that gave the Fallout-verse its life. Our existence is one of those easter eggs.
When the player talks to in-game Tycho, he makes a reference to a character from Wasteland, a man in Las Vegas he says his father fought. He tells the player he comes from somewhere east of Fallout 1’s Southern California setting. The exact location he’s from and the exact motives of his group aren’t ever elaborated on. The game wants to leave space for a player who has experienced Wasteland to fill in the gaps and realize these are definitely Those Desert Rangers.
That Wasteland character isn’t a part of Fallout lore in any other way, and it’d make no sense for him to be. Later Fallout games give Las Vegas its own history that doesn’t leave an inch of room for Wasteland’s lore to creep in. This really makes it feel like the Desert Rangers of Fallout 1 walked in on another world one day. Their history isn’t anchored to the setting they find themselves in, it’s anchored to another world entirely.
We didn’t walk into Fallout from anywhere else. The nature of our canon divergence and exomemories ground us quite firmly in the Fallout-verse. We can recount our history with dates and locations attached from before the Great War up until after the end of Fallout: New Vegas, and nothing in that history gives any sign that we are tied to Wasteland. That easter egg didn’t have any impact on our life in our home universe, but it does change how we view ourselves now.
Jumping realities, existing as a foreigner in whichever one we land in. Both in the body of work we are depicted in and in this reality, that seems to be a part of our heritage. Seeing the journey we took to get here alluded to in Fallout 1 made us feel confident that even if the existence of Fallout is one big cosmic accident from our perspective, our existence isn’t. We were made to travel. Does it really matter if the way we’re travelling is by walking the highways or by walking the boundaries between fiction and not-fiction? I don’t think so. We’re doing exactly what we were meant to do here.