Fallout
Reading about Fallout lore.
In Fallout 2, the Chosen One may meet Torr, the “town simpleton of Klamath,” who would normally give them a quest to help protect his brahmin against “the evil bugmen.” If the player character has low Intelligence, however, he will appear to be highly intelligent as if being stupid has a culture and language of its own. Two flat-headed people can have a complete, thought-provoking, and fully articulated conversation between them.
The series is set in a fictionalized United States in an alternate history scenario that diverges from reality following World War II. In this alternative atompunk “golden age”, vacuum tubes and atomic physics serve as the foundations of scientific progress, while transistors are not as scientifically important in this world. As such, a bizarre socio-technological status quo emerges, in which advanced robots, nuclear-powered cars, directed-energy weapons, and other futuristic technologies are seen alongside 1950s-era computers and televisions. The United States divides itself into 13 commonwealths and the aesthetics and Cold War paranoia of the 1950s continue to dominate the American lifestyle well into the 21st century.”
Having foreseen this outcome decades earlier, the U.S. government began a nationwide project in 2054 to build fallout shelters known as “Vaults”. The Vaults were ostensibly designed by the Vault-Tec Corporation as public shelters, each able to support up to a thousand people. Around 400,000 Vaults would have been needed, but only 122 were commissioned and constructed. Each Vault is self-sufficient, so they could theoretically sustain their inhabitants indefinitely. However, the Vault project was not intended as a viable method of repopulating the United States in these deadly events. Instead, most Vaults were secret, unethical social experiments and were designed to determine the effects of different environmental and psychological conditions on their inhabitants. Experiments were widely varied and included: a Vault filled with clones of an individual; a Vault where its residents were frozen in suspended animation; a Vault where its residents were exposed to psychoactive drugs; a Vault where one resident, decided by popular vote, is sacrificed each year; a Vault with only one man and puppets; a Vault where its inhabitants were segregated into two hostile factions; two Vaults with disproportionate ratios of men and women; a Vault where the inhabitants were exposed to the mutagenic Forced Evolutionary Virus (F.E.V.); and a Vault where the door never fully closed, exposing the inhabitants to the dangerous nuclear fallout. 17 control Vaults were made to function as advertised in contrast with the Vault experiments but were usually shoddy and unreliable due to most of the funding going towards the experimental ones. Subsequently, many Vaults had their experiments derailed due to unexpected events, and several Vaults became occupied by raiders or mutants.
Fallout satirizes the 1950s’ and 1960s’ fantasies of the United States’ “post-nuclear-war-survival”, thus draws from 1950s pulp magazine science fiction and superhero comic books, all rooted in Atomic Age optimism of a nuclear-powered future, though gone terribly awry by the time the events of the game take place. The technology is retro-futuristic, with various Raygun Gothic machines such as laser weaponry and boxy Forbidden Planet-style robots. Computers use vacuum tubes instead of transistors (but still existed in a limited capacity), the architecture of ruined buildings feature Art Deco, Streamline Moderne, and Googie designs, direct-energy weapons resemble those used by Flash Gordon, and what few vehicles remain in the world are all 1950s-styled. Fallout’s other production designs, such as menu interfaces, are similarly designed to resemble advertisements and toys of the Atomic Age. Advertising in the game such as billboards and brochures has a distinct 1950s motif and feel.”
Jet injector Fallout 2 Jet was modeled after this it seems.