The original Fallout’s lead developer Tim Cain has dropped another in his long-running series of videos discussing the earliest games in the series, and with this one, he’s definitively answered one of the big questions about how everything kicked off. Well, kinda.
Cain’s latest video is called “Non-expository Fallout lore” and opens with some necessary caveats about what, exactly, he’s covering. This is lore from the very first Fallout (not Fallout 2) that the design team “knew was true… but nothing in the game directly stated it.” Cain says these were ideas that were supported by narrative and environment design but never stated directly in the game.
As Cain puts it: “Nobody should be walking around the Wasteland going, ‘Hey did you know they dropped nukes eighty years ago?’ Yes! Everybody knows that!”
To be explicit, this is not canon. “This is stuff that was true in the first game but there’s no design document,” says Cain. “Bethesda is canon. You don’t have to like it, but water’s wet.”
The first biggie? This has been known about for a while, but it’s the first time Cain’s addressed it at such length: the nuclear war was triggered by China. But it had a good reason, inasmuch as you can ever have a good reason for starting a global nuclear war.
“China nuked first,” says Cain. “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.
