Bethesda and parent company Zenimax have quickly taken down a completely AI-generated video game based on the Fallout IP dubbed Fallout: New York.
Bethesda has been rather lax with fan usage of the Fallout IP, allowing entirely fan-made games and expansions, audio dramas, and even fan films to exist online. For example, Fallout London, a massive free fan game, has not only been allowed to exist, but is even hosted on official PC storefronts.
This leads us to Fallout: New York, an entirely AI-made browser game “built” with Claude Opus 5.5. Shared online by Twitter user Chris First, the AI browser game was touted as a fully-3D Fallout game set in New York with “quests, dialogue trees, VATS, a working pip-boy” and more.
First claimed that the project “took about five days” after they “directed Claude and a studio of AI agents” to “recreate Fallout, set in New York”. They claim the game isn’t “inspired by” but is instead “exactly like Fallout” as “New York never had its turn”. Hmm, I wonder why New York hasn’t had its turn…
The AI game featured pretty much everything you’d expect from a modern Fallout game, albeit incredibly scuffed-looking. While impressive from a perspective of, ‘huh, I guess AI can do this now’, the browser game did look more like a Roblox experiment than a real Fallout game.
As the game was entirely AI-generated at runtime, those who tried the AI-generated game noticed a litany of bugs, more so than your average Fallout experience. Within minutes, players discovered broken animations, player fists mutating into massive globules, hard-locking by levelling up, and more.
Additionally, as any fan of the Fallout series knows, setting a game in the concrete jungle wouldn’t really be a great idea for a game in the first place. While the AI-generated browser game allowed players to explore what looked like a slightly dirtier version of the city, New York in the Fallout universe was levelled by atomic blasts and simply does not exist anymore.
After receiving over 3.5 million views on Twitter—although, I’m pretty sure Twitter’s view count is still massively inflated—Zenimax and Bethesda quickly filed a DMCA takedown against Fallout: New York. In an email shared on Twitter, Zenimax stated that the domain the game used, Fallout,nyc, included “copyrighted material produced by Zenimax Media”.
“Please understand that in order to effectively maintain the integrity and value of Zenimax Media Inc’s intellectual property, it is their obligation as a trademark owner to monitor and enforce against the unauthorised and infringing use of its trademark in a way that ius likely to cause consumer confusion and/pr any other act that may weaken, dilute or otherwise adversely affect the goodwill and reputation of its brands,” the email continued.
First, upon sharing the DMCA takedown on their social media, told followers that “the suits got involved and the fun is over”. Additionally, they tagged Bethesda and said: “how about you make a Fallout game instead so I don’t have to?”
Despite First’s upset, the response to the lawsuit by fans of the series has been overwhelmingly positive. “Can’t believe the slop bros are making me side with big company copyright claims”, one fan said. “You’d have to be a complete dumbf**k if you didn’t expect this to happen,” said another.
Right now, the Fallout: New York website has been taken down, and it seems that First’s original plan to open-source the slop project has also been scrapped. As anyone even slightly knowledgable of copyright law would know, the fan project is obviously in direct violation, using the named IP, a copied gameplay style, the games’ lore, various iconic elements such as the Pip-Boy, and more.
Additionally, First’s comment that they specifically told the AI to make a game “not ‘inspired by’” but “exactly like Fallout” only further exacerbates the knowledge that they sought to directly violate copyright. While Bethesda is quite forgiving of fan projects, using technology built off their stolen work to create a game using their IP and hosted on its own website that some could mistake to be an official Fallout website… well, you get DMCA’d.
While First’s message to Bethesda is to “make a Fallout game instead”, that’s exactly what’s happening. Obsidian Entertainment has just started development on a human-made Fallout game, and remasters of Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas are in the works. Additionally, after Bethesda wraps up work on The Elder Scrolls 6, work on Fallout 5 will begin, and there’s more content coming to Fallout 76 as well made by talented developers with knowledge of game design.
