1. The Tough Tandi Choices
Early in the original Fallout, you’re given a quest to find Tandi, the daughter of the leader of the Shady Sands. She’s a sweet young woman, who’s earnestly helped you before (and who goes on to found the New California Republic). She’s been kidnapped by raiders, who have a heavily fortified camp, with a dozen defenders, all ready to go after your measly Vault Dweller. Show up with a high enough Luck stat, though, and the opposition just melts away, believing you to be the ghost of their old leader.
Or you can sneak in, pick some locks, and bust Tandi out. Or you can talk your way through the raiders, and buy her freedom. Or you can try to do it guns blazing, realize that Fallout isn’t about that, and come back when you’re more powerful. The options don’t end at regaining Tandi either – sure you can take her back to her dad, but if she follows you in a meeting with a local villain, and he offers money to take her into slavery...well, in the world of Fallout, that’s an option too.
In 1998, almost no video role-playing games offered these kinds of options on a consistent basis. Fallout didn’t just offer them every now and then: every single quest had multiple methods for resolution. For many players, rescuing Tandi was when that gameplay variety sunk in.
2. The SMG Salsa
While you’re in Shady Sands, you may want to take a moment to meet Ian. Along with Tandi and her dad, he’s about the only interesting person there. Ian, in fact, will join you, as your first companion in the Wasteland, for enough money. And if you ask Ian, he’ll tell you he’s a fan of submachine guns.
Don’t give an SMG to Ian.
If you do give a semi-automatic weapon to Ian, he’ll likely help you learn something cool about Fallout. That cool thing is that mass damage or critical hits can make characters die in hilariously/awfully gruesome fashion. In fact, the most likely result is that Ian sprays a ton of bullets in whatever direction he so chooses, and those bullets are as or more likely to shred you in your pathetic leather jacket as they are an enemy. Watch your Vault Dweller’s entire side just split off, flying through the air, as Ian cackles wildly, unable to control his burst-fire urges.
The entire Fallout series has a strange relationship with hyperviolence (see entry #4). Good ol’ Ian is most players’ introduction to that, in the worst (best?) possible way.
3. Meet The Master
Fallout - Meeting the Master in Fallout
As you progress through Fallout, you slowly pick up information about the Super Mutant menace and their leader, known only as “The Master.” While the Super Mutants are certainly a threat, The Master ends up looking like a more sympathetic figure – he was a good man who fell into the wrong experimental vat, mutated, and lost his grasp on reality.
But the depths of his mutation and loss of reason only become apparent when you step into his church and meet him. He is body horror incarnate, an unholy hybrid of organic matter and computers, spread across a full building. It’s hard not to treat him as a monster and fight, but if you can talk to him as a human, and have the information to convince him his plan is doomed...he’ll listen to you. Or you can sneak around his building, never meet him, and detonate a nuclear bomb. That’s Fallout.
4. The Kiss
Fallout 2 - Full Fallout 2 Intro
Aesthetically, Fallout has always been built on the tension between insipid and hilarious faux-Cold War nostalgia and the brutal necessities of life in a post-apocalyptic world. Across all of its games, this was never better than the intro to Fallout 2. Here’s Louis Armstrong’s 1951 version of “A Kiss to Build a Dream On”,  combined with pure Vault Boy kitch about the joys of stepping outside the Vault.
And then there’s a man in massive power armor, bigger and badder than everything else we’ve seen before. The Vault dwellers wave hesitantly at him. He opens fire with a minigun.
This is Fallout. This is the combination of horrific violence and cute pragmatism.
5. Geckos Chirping
Every Fallout has had potentially violent death animations. Ian blasts half your torso out with a submachine gun. A super mutant melts under attack from a plasma rifle, flesh first, then skeleton. In later Fallouts, the brutal skull explosion from a critical hit to the brain.
But the most shocking violence in Fallout may be one of the least graphic. In the early sections of Fallout 2, the main animal enemy you run into is the gecko. It stands, it walks, and it kills. But when you shoot it...it winces. And squeaks. And when you kill it just keels over. Over and over and over, as you’re encouraged to kill gecko after gecko after Golden Gecko. It is an example of how occasional bursts of subtlety can be as or more effective than over-the-top cartoonishness.
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6. Going Shopping
Early in Fallout 3, your character is given a quest to go to a local bombed-out Super Duper Mart, pick up some medicine, and head back to town. Simple enough. But the grocery store is huge, and filled with raiders. At your early levels, you can probably handle a couple at a time, and that’s enough to get into the back of the store to get your medicine. But once you get in the back a new set of raiders appear, making you all lost in the supermarket, with no easy way out.
What happens is perhaps the best argument for Bethesda’s style of Fallout systems around. With your weak set of early skills, you have to traverse the massive Super Duper Mart with your skin intact. Combat? Stealth? Science? Some, all, or none of these things can be used, as all of the game’s systems collide in fascinating ways in the aisles of the market. Whatever moment was the point that got you out of the grocery – that was likely one of the craziest and most resonant in the entirety of Fallout 3.
7. Boom
Fallout 3 - Nuking Megaton
Every Fallout – almost every RPG – has an intro town. Here’s where you learn what your role is, how to level up, how to interact with people, how to understand your role in the game world. Fallout 3 is no exception: it has Megaton, with multiple quests from friendly townspeople that help you learn how the Wasteland works and you within it.
Once you’ve gotten that, though, Megaton is much less useful. In fact, it’s so much less useful that you’re given the opportunity to take a quest to engage fully with its name: to take the nuclear bomb at the heart of Megaton and activate it.
There goes the happy, confident tutorial town. There goes every single person who helped you start your life in the Wasteland. For a new generation of Fallout players, this was the the moment when it became incredibly clear that this was not an RPG that let you mess around. Fallout played for keeps.
8. Happy Hotel
The first Fallout helped invent the “moral choice” ideal of role-playing games, which they stuck with ever since. Try to be a good person, and you’ll get largely good result. Be a jerk, and the world is jerkier. It’s simple, effective, and largely unsurprising once you’re used to it.
Enter Tenpenny Tower in Fallout 3. It’s got a relatively straightforward problem: this luxury hotel has rich humans oppressing the ghouls who want in. You can join either side, sure, but as every RPG player knows, there’s an ideal compromise solution: convince the ghouls to be less violent, convince the humans to be less bigoted, and there you go! Instant RPG success, both sides happy!
Then you go back and the ghouls have slaughtered all of the human residents. Okay, the humans deserved this. But did you? After all your hard work get the ideal RPG quest solution, is the game crazy to make that solution actually worse than not having done anything at all? It’s a shocking, and intelligent subversion of expectations – one that games like The Witcher and Dragon Age 2 would go on to do themselves.
9. The Think Tank
Fallout: New Vegas is a very good game on its own, but it, more than most any other recent role-playing game, is tremendously improved by its expansions. Each of the four examines a different aspect of Fallout: Honest Hearts is about post-apocalyptic community-building; Dead Money is survival horror; and Lonesome Road examines the mythology of the wandering hero. But the weirdest and funniest is Old World Blues, the DLC that dives gleefully into the silly 1950s sci-fi B-movie inspiration.
And boy does it land its first impression: your Courier awakens in a science lab, explores a bit, and meets The Think Tank, an orb with a brain inside, filled with different personalities, all filling some kind of “mad scientist” archetype, and best of all, all responding to you and your presence as if you’re incapable of understanding – always comic gold. Then you try to convince them of your intelligence by waving your hands and fingers at them, they start ranting about your “erect hand-penises,” and Old World Blues is off like a rocket.
10. The End of the Quest
Fallout: New Vegas's Horrifying Intro
“Do as many quests as you can” is a core tenet of the modern role-playing game – in fact, Fallout helped popularize this model. Fallout: New Vegas has the densest collection of quests in the whole series, combining the large open world of Fallout 3 with the narrative strengths of the first two Fallout games. The quests themselves could also be more complex than normal RPGs, particularly when you arrive in New Vegas itself, and are recruited by multiple factions.
In most RPGs, the goal here would be to do as many quests with as many factions as possible, get the experience and loot, and then maybe make a final decision at the end. But not in New Vegas, which warns you that the different factions are all spying on you, and, as soon as you hit a point of no return helping one faction – which occurs much earlier than you might expect – suddenly the other all turn on you, and there’s a cascading series of “Quest Failed” notifications.
For many players this seemed like a bug – understandable given New Vegas’ unstable launch. It’s certainly shocking and frustrating given conventional RPG tropes. But it’s also the best example of New Vegas’ approach to narrative complexity, the main thing that set it apart from Fallout 3. You can’t do everything for everyone, be all things to all people.