The original CRPG Fallout game doesn’t explain everything about its post-apocalyptic world, but that doesn’t mean the team behind the iconic isometric game didn’t know what was going on. While the series is now spearheaded by Bethesda who have their own ideas on what the canon of the series is, original creator Tim Cain has revealed some never-before-released original lore.
In the developer’s ongoing YouTube series, Cain revealed a slew of “non-expository Fallout lore” that was not “written down” or kept in a “design document” by the original staff working on the game. Instead, Cain has kept it in his head, but admits that he’s “not canon, not anymore” and that “Bethesda is free to invent different reasons” for everything in the game.
“You’re not canon just because you played the game or like it a lot,” Cain said. “Bethesda’s canon. You don’t have to like that. You don’t have to like that water’s wet. I don’t like that white chocolate exists, but it does. So there we go.”
One of the biggest lore drops was the why China nuked first in the original Fallout universe. While no NPC knows why the nukes were dropped—””Nobody should be walking around the Wasteland going, ‘Hey did you know they dropped nukes eighty years ago?’” Cain explained—the team did have a reason why the world was destroyed.
“China nuked first,” Cain told viewers. “It’s pretty obvious from the game isn’t it? This is not canon, but let me explain what I mean and why we thought that. In the original game we had established that the US was doing bio-weapons research. We weren’t supposed to, we had signed a UN treaty saying we wouldn’t do that, and I think you can find that out in the game. China discovered that we were doing it, how did they discover that? Espionage. We went ‘oops our bad we’ll stop doing it’ but we just kept on doing it, just moved the research to another base. It’s the hidden base where you discover ZAX the supercomputer.
“So he knows some of this and there are logs that explain some of this but it’s never actually stated, that when China found out we were still doing it and had just moved… well, they’d already tried diplomacy and they’d tried espionage and none of that was working. So they just nuked us. We nuked back, other countries nuked, because all anyone saw was missiles flying. China technically started it by firing the first nuke, but you could argue that technically the US started it by doing illegal bio-weapons research then lying about it multiple times.”
Even in the final version of the game, it doesn’t really matter who dropped the nukes, you’re living in the world past that. Despite the games’ focus on the past and their retro art deco aesthetic, Fallout is about persevering and moving towards the future, no matter how hard that is.
Nevertheless, there have been hints in Bethesda’s Fallout games and the recent Fallout TV show that the bombs were dropped by China, although there has been some evidence pointing towards the US causing the nuclear winter as well. At this point, it doesn’t seem like it’ll ever be fully explained in an official capacity, but sometimes vagueness is more exciting than having a straight answer.
For more Fallout coverage, read about the upcoming Burning Springs expansion for Fallout 76 which brings Walton Goggins’s Ghoul into the game. Additionally, read about how the game will see improved gunplay in the future.
