Fallout - Why Fallout Is the Best Nuclear War Story Ever Told

Matthew Gault (Medium.com) writes about the Fallout series:

(...) Video games are huge business, sales of electronic entertainment have surpassed movies, books and television for several years now. But more than that, video games are art. The medium possesses the unique ability to transport a player to another world completely.

Like films and TV, it’s a visual medium where the creator’s vision is explicit. But like books, video games often create unique, beautiful worlds that trigger the user’s imagination while providing dozens of hours of entertainment.

Like all art, the best video games tell us something unique about the human condition in general and the culture that created them in particular.

That’s what Fallout does best — it’s a 20-year-old video game franchise that helped the MTV generation understand, mock and control its elders’ Cold War paranoia.

Fallout is set in a post-apocalyptic world as conceived by American 1950s Defense Department propagandists. It’s a world in which the grandchildren of the Cold War conjured the fear of the previous generation and dispelled that fear by turning it into a playground. (...)