Fallout 1 & 2 are WEIRDER Than You Remember 

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Not mentioning that the aliens in Fallout 1 have a photo of Elvis with them is criminal

One of my favorite random encounter in fallout 2 is when you find the portal that takes you to vault 13 before the events of fallout 1 and you cause the water chip to break, before coming back to the “present” time.

I assumed the giant dino footprint was just a reference to Godzilla 1998, when the main character stands inside a giant, three-toed footprint.

Seymour was Rick Moranis's character. The plant was Audrey 2

Haha. Fallout 1&2 were not serious at all. They had all sorts of humor.

Some people dont understand the humor of FO1 and FO2. Old games were not super serious. Bethesda humor is more in your face and its usually not required to know the reference , while the old games were either wacky or if you didnt know the reference you wouldn’t understand that it was a joke. I like most fallout games but prefer the wacky, also subtle jokes/reference/easter eggs from FO1, FO2 and FNV.

Playing through 2 right now. If this came out today, people would say "wow was this dialogue written by vivzypop?"

In fallout 2 you could obtain a fallout 2 manual that would max all your stats to 200 or something... if that's not tongue-in-cheek, I don't know what is.

13:25 if i remember correctly, tim cain himself did not like the idea of humanizing deathclaws, he wanted them to be the scariest thing youll ever witness so to say. These decisions were made by people who havent worked on fo before. Which is sad, because tims grip on the games slipped entirely throughout fo2s developement, until he left completely.

Real bummer you didn’t mention what you find if you loot the bodies of the aliens besides the alien blaster: a framed painting of the King of Rock n Roll, Elvis Presley 😂

Seymour is the protagonist of Little Shop. The plant is Audrey.

I don't think that Bethesda has made the games any less serious, but I do think they've made them less dark. I think there was some darkness and grit present in the original two games that Bethesda kind of eased up on in Fallout 3 and even more so in Fallout 4. I think New Vegas tried to inject some more of that back into the game, but not at the same level as the original two.

13:17 Black Isle made Fallout 2, not Troika. I don't think Troika was even around yet in 97.

Didn't people complain that 2 was too silly at the time?

Love the video, just a quick note that in Little shop of horrors, Seymour was the human, Audrey II was the plant. Other than that, great!

Honestly Bethesda toned down the silliness of Fallout in a lot of ways. They also pushed it into areas where it doesn't belong.

The humor was to keep things interesting and to bring a little joy to the bleak world. Just look at the old radiation mechanics that shit was horrifying and relatively realistic. Then you have the dark shit like rape slavery child killing etc… the old games where more serious then the modern versions not because of humor but because of story and mechanics.

Fallout 1 and 2 were my first PC games and i still love them to this day. Always thought the footprint was a godzilla reference

Fallout 1 had some easter-eggs, but not really whacky things in the main game content. Overall it had a pretty serious tone. The games afterwards (including Fallout 2) added more and more whacky, pop culture elements.

I just feel like we'll never see anything as creepy as The Master in the TV Show for example.

Fallout 1 and 2 absolutely had wild things in them. But for me, it’s not that modern fallout is too wacky. It’s how modern fallout handles the darker, more serious moments and themes that fallout 1 and 2 handled perfectly. The older games weren’t more or less silly. They were simply better balanced and knew when to take themselves seriously, and when to joke.

The silly weird things are what make it more fun. Picture being in a post apocalyptic he'll full of people that lost their minds.

Having humor in a game doesn't make it any less serious, it's just a bit of humor, but now Fallout is a comedy with some serious moments. and very very poorly written, I'm not saying that the old ones are perfect, of course not, but I prefer that to what we have now.

The plant in Little Shop is named Audrey 2. Seymour was Rick Morranis's character.

The plant in little shop of horrors wasn't called Seymour it was called Audrey 2. Seymour is the protagonist

In F1 and F2 you can hold down left control and click credits on the main menu. It'll show a ton of inside jokes from the dev team i remember being hilarious.

Im going to say it... the humor and levity comes from the radio. If you listen to the ambient soundtracks theres way more dread... at least in new vegas and most of 3. Fallout 4s ambience feels like an adventure game in a medieval fantasy forest.

1&2 were masterpieces Like many things, it's hard to boil down something to just the factors that made it work. The thing that DEFINITELY changed is passion. The people who made Fallout 1&2 WANTED to make those games. Sadly a lot of content is just a paycheck to some people and we will never grasp what made those older titles legendary.

dont forget the toll keeper for a rope bridge that gives out riddles which is a reference to Monty python and the holy grail

There’s a lot of funny humors in the original too. Like for example there’s this guy who randomly backflips and he says “I hope nobody sees that”

Yes but also not as much as you say here. You're right that there has always been some goofy stuff in Fallout, but the examples that come from special random encounters shouldn't be used since I'm pretty sure that stuff is non canonical.

The plants name is Audrey. The Shop owner is Seymour. Hence "FEED ME, SEYMOUR!!!"

I dont remember any criticism of the new games about them being too whacky. the gripe people have of the new games are simply about the writting system "KISS" keep it simple stupid.

oh my god they killed Kenny

Imo the early games where computer-nerd comic-book-geek silly, and the newer ones are pop culture marvel fan silly. Different vibe I guess? Enjoyed all the games!! Good video, you covered a lot :)

In Fallout 2 there is mission that allows you to plant explosives below an outhouse; the resulting explosion cover the entire village in dookie.

Fallout 2 may be most glorious shitposting in history of video games.

The plant was Audrey. Seymour was Rick Morranis' character

couldn't you go back in time in the second to break the water chip from the first?

You missed the point. Post-Nuclear wasn't "fun" in F1&F2, it was the world of people struggle to survive. In F3 we're restoring water facility in the world, that doesn't seem like it needs water(no mentioning of it), if F4 we're looking for our son in world, that...fine. It's okay and there's no real struggle. The people of F4 world are...content with their lives. And F76 we see girl in power armor smiling and shooting around. Because it's fun.

Fallout 1 humor is mostly hidden or easter eggs, not very in your face. Fallout 2, on the other hand... But the issue with modern Fallout is that the overall tone is less dark than classic Fallout, so the goofy elements feel more present.

I think Fallout 2 especially was goofy, maybe the goofiest. But I think Bethesda going the 1st/3rd person route has the comedic effect amplified.

I feel like the original games were meant to be dark, but not serious. It was an amazing blend. New fallout isnt bad imo, it definitely takes the cake when it comes to general feel. However I wish they retained more of the RPG aspects. I prefer the older atmosphere though. It had the perfect grit and humor for the genre.

Many things considered silly in Fallout 1/2 were not available to a player with low luck, so most of the extra silliness was optional and as luck did not play a major role on the gameplay, people tended to skip above-average luck a lot. Talking animals, especially under scientific oversight aren't that special even in the real world, parrots can repeat human language while chimps and even better gorillas can learn hand language as used by deaf people and actually use it in a sensible manner, though their vocabulary is limited to a few years old children thus is hardly inconceivable that much larger animals with large brains would not be able to do the same. What is on the other hand questionable is why would such large animals even develop in a world with very limited resources even for much more resourceful humans, note that food and oxygen supplies were on entirely different levels in the Jurassic era where large animals and insects existed in reality that was hardly possible in post-nuclear exchange world... Bethesda Fallout silliness is on an entirely different level because in their games breaking of reality is done on so many levels for the sake of coolness, like giving you power armor at the beginning but at the same time making fusion cores last less than gasoline-powered lawnmower to balance it out, not to mention or addition of laser rifle with a hand-cranked dynamo power source as if you ever could power megawatt class energy weapon with hand cranking. Thus the main issue with Bethesda games is why and how often immersion of a believable world is broken for the developer's convenience sake that sways away from how game mechanics and tech worked in the first two Fallout games without improving the game very much, not like giving you power armor later but make its power source last longer than first iPhone in battery stress test app would make the game worse but it was done entirely for the sake of grabbing gamers attention into the game early on and any kind of realistic feel was thrown away just to achieve that goal. Because Bethesda sold a lot more copies than the first two Fallouts under Black Isle ever could hope in the 90ties, Bethesda has very little motivation to change their approach to Fallout tech&gameplay design despite it breaking immersion to the point of making Oblivion looking more realistic than new Fallouts with Mr. Handies butler robots levitating with fire blasting jet engine indoors...

fo1 and 2 are filled with so much wacky stuff that, when asked on what is canon, the writers for it outright said "we added so much stuff we kinda went overboard, we genuinely don't remember what is and isn't canon anymore". Objectively. the only REAL way to play fonv like an authentic fallout title, would be with wacky wasteland, because if someone actually picked fo1 and 2 up today and played them, there is absolutely no way to deny that they're filled with weird, silly nonsense. Mony python references all over the place. a red shirt next to a crashed alien ship. a dead whale in the middle of a desert with hints of 'something large', dinosaur footprints out of nowhere. harold and bob are expressly comedic. You have an arm wrestling match with a supermutant to decide if you're going to get fucked or fuck him, and depending how good you do, a sex doll gets named after you(which is not at all treated as non-canon, as it happens in a main hub, and also breaks pre-established lore that says supermutants both male and female lose all genitalia, which is fundamentally one of the ways in fo1 you can convince the master to stop his plans). If you take this series seriously, you're just going to come away wondering what fucked up kinks the devs must have been into with just how many 'horny' moments are in the first two games. Honestly. i first hated fo4, because i played fo3 and nv first, but then went to try fo1 and 2 to see if the fo3 hatemob was justified, and all i gained was an appreciation for 4. Canonicity was broken WELL before bethesda got their hands on the series to such an extent that at this point each game should be considered it's own game, separate from what came before, even if it references events from previous iterations. Edit: if i were to compare fallout, i'd have to compare it to Yakuza in this regard. Yet for some reason while the silliness contrasting the seriousness has become the selling point of yakuza, with fallout, people get a hate boner every time they see something that isn't 40k grimdark happening in fallout.

I always laugh when people try to say that wild wasteland is silly compared to the earlier games/ isn't the cannon way to play...yet its MOSTLY references TO those earlier games

I thought the humor in Fallout 2 was because of time constraints.

I grew up with the classic Fallout games and I very specifically remember Fallout 2 getting a good amount of crap, from fans of the original, for being goofy and stupid. FO2 was definitely the better game mechanically but you can really feel the lack of Tim Cain throughout FO2.

This happens with all long running franchises. Like how the GTA community says the PS2 trilogy had realistic art design even though they clearly have cartoonish comic book designs.

I think the contrast of the dark and ridiculous is what makes fallout so great

This is a realization about these sorts of games: a lot of people don't acknowledge clown world. Take VtM for example, for years since some news program (yeah, of course it came from a news broadcast) that, through what they said and footage of the LARPers, the Masquerade was a serious dark game. However, many years later I've discovered that it was more like Buffy the Vampire Slayer: it had tension and can be serious, but then comes the episode where the cult tried to summon a demon from a tome had a disclaimer next to its picture that reads "comes in actual size."

Theres a difference between having comedic relief and being a comedy show. The new falloud 4 and up are cartoony and silly themed. The old ones are themed seriously with lots of comedic relief. The comedy also cane in the form of the rediculousness of things that would happen jinda like real life. The soldier thar loves war gets killed kinda way

Jesus THANK YOU!! I hate people focusing on just the lore aspects of 1&2 when there's LOADS of comedy

I think what people mean is the artstyle. Everything, especially vault-tek looks more like a toy for children 8 to 12 rather than just part of the background world. As if the company was ran by an out of control marketing department. I mean things that give people pause and subconsciously bother them might not be what they end up mentioning when they complain - a subconscious feeling of game not LOOKING as serious gives them the idea to complain about not serious things in the game. I think what fo1-2 had going for it is the gritty and very realistic and adult looking background and characters, and that gave it the funny juxtaposition with the over the top violence and wacky things which were sprinkled all over. Bethesda's artstyle is that vault tek is disney and vaults and gadgets n weapons are a theme park.

I’m playing fallout 1 right now to see what all the hype about it is. People say that the culture of the classics is different and all this and that about how Bethesda’s fallout isn’t real fallout but honestly bro they all feel like fallout. It all feels like one world and the only thing that change is the mechanics and choices but the tone doesn’t seem to be that different. Other people will disagree, which is fine. But at the end of the day I feel like people just want to rage bait and or have something to complain about. I think that Bethesda and Classic fallout needs that respeck on their name💯

Well, back then there were quite a few people who criticised the wackyness of Fallout 2, talking animals and deathclaws were particularly hated. Even today, there are still old-school nerds for whom the decline of the Fallout series began with the second instalment and for whom only the first instalment is truly 100% canon.

The cyclops thing in the show actually fit very well. It didn't hurt that the character was also Chris Parnell playing a bumbling villian, he's good at that.

The bridge keeper. The Holy Hand gernade. The vorpol rat instead of the killer rabbit. Knight of the round table going clippity clop (coconuts).

As a fan who like New Vegas the most, I love the wackiness! Maybe it’s because I started playing New Vegas and FO3 for the first time ever at the same time basically back in 2011. And I took wild wasteland in NV and in FO3 I made sure to do all the weird things. So since my first experiences with it Fallout has always been wacky and had funny odd moments. It’s definitely a serious series with a commentary on real life and politics but it also has many things to not be taken seriously! The balance between the serious and weird is what makes it work to me

Anyone saying that the first two Fallouts where more serious is just objectively wrong. Remember the Bridgekeeper? The crashed Star Trek shuttle? King Arthurs freaking Knights? And that's just three from the top of the dome.

6 minutes in and you didn't make the parallel between a rare and small special encounter joking about area 51 aliens and a fricking DLC literally taking place aboard an alien mothership, canonizing them and their potential involvement in the great war. That's the difference between Fallout 1, which should be the point of reference (not Fallout 2) and Bethesda's Fallout. Also, Fallout 2's 4th wall breaking is mostly locked until you finish the game.

My issue with bethesda games is ... essentially use of magic in "rare" items

Full disclosure: I'm relatively new to Fallout, having only started playing the series for myself around late last year. I've seen playthroughs of FO3 and NV, but it was a while ago. So I'm speaking with limited knowledge. In my playthrough of FO1, maybe my RNG was bad, but out of the multiple hours of travelling map square-by-square that I put in, I personally came across only *one* 'wacky' incident, of a cow saying something like "moo, moo, I say". The rest of the game was tense, atmospheric and grim; a world wherein I felt like any speech-check failure or backchat could result in an instant shootout. To put it as clearly as I can, mostly all of the 'wacky' humour in FO1 feels like intentionally 4th-wall breaking humour that the player knows couldn't possibly exist in-world; the kind explainable by dehydration, starvation, radiation poisoning or heatstroke causing hallucinations or mirages. It's random and scarce, and the only 'canonical' humour is in the dark humour provided in the commentary of the inhabitants. It was the type of 'survivalist' or 'make-do' humour, typically found in world war diaries. If I were to sum up what Fallout was, I'd say that it's a post-nuclear world, whereby only a couple of generations ago, the whole of civilisation as we know it was completely turned to ash. Whereby you as the vault dweller have to make sense out of being thrown, blindly, into a degenerated and fragmented society. Trialling through a wasteland that has been reduced to a survivalist, tribalist and paranoid mindset, amidst a desperate struggle between emerging and ever-conflicting philosophies. All of it being set in a war-torn, baron, desolate and resourceless world of mutation and radiation, riddled with moral ambiguity, death & disease. Between the growing 1950s aesthetic (FO1 felt only inspired by, not closely reflective of the 1950s aesthetic), saturated colours, and more frequent and zany in-world humour that tries to make the audience outright laugh, I just haven't felt the prior paragraph being upheld so well in post-NV Fallouts. And this feels especially apparent in the Amazon series. Again, I'm only a noob to the series really, but this is the impression I get when contrasting the original game to the Fallout of which we have today.

Regarding the giant footprint and the possible connection to Bambi meets Godzilla; I first saw that short in 1995 when Doctor Demento was touring wirh Weird Al and showed funny shorts as part of the pre-show, so it's definitely plausible timeline-wise (Fallout came out in 1997)

This video needed to be made. Classic Fallout & NV fans ragging on Bethesda Fallouts for their wackiness conveniently forget these things and also probably worship the fever dream that is Old World Blues

Fallout 2 has so much silly stuff that even the devs said they exaggerated

I’ve never heard this argument of 1&2 being more serious than the Bethesda games..

A couple of things: 1. Anybody who says fallout one and two were entirely serious has never played fallout one and two or at least never paid attention to them. 2. The killer plant in little shop of horrors was actually called Audrey II by Seymour, because he named it after the woman that he loved. 3. I think the mole rats were also a reference to the Rat King, Shredder, and Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 4. I always thought that the aliens had escaped from area 51, went to Vegas, got hammered and crashed their UFO again. They have a photo of Elvis with them, which suggests that maybe they had seen a Vegas show with an Elvis impersonator at some point.

New Vegas the game made by the guys who worked on the OG ones then made a new studio after the parent company closed them?

Fallout was always a humor game but at the same time with dark atmosphere.

The plant in little shop was audrey 2 not Seymour, and it was an alien that beamed to earth during a total eclipse. Seymour was a shop sweep in a flower store who found it

Nv was supposed to have a giant fire gecko named kojira to be a reference to the godzilla footprint

Ghosts! Actual ghosts in F2!

The plant from Little Shop of Horrors is named Audrey 2, Seymour was the Rick Moranis' character....

i'm always thought the footprint is a reference to the tarrasque from DnD, as they used the imagery for the deathclaw...

while i still think the game has an overall more foreboding and ominous tone, there is definitely humor to be found. one of the weirdest random encounters i've had so far while playing Fallout 1 is a group of wild Brahmin that kept saying "Moo I say" over and over. the combat log said something along the lines "you feel as though something is wrong here and want to leave immediately." off-putting but also hilarious

There's a lot of things that Bethesda's Fallout can be criticized for... but not the wackiness. As you've shown here, and those who have been long, long time fans would know, Fallout has always been a balance of seriousness and wackiness. Its supposed to be serious and melancholy, and then all of a sudden you encounter something that makes you laugh or scratch your head, just to break up the monotony and mood.

Streteched aliens are Bethesda's retcon

I always thought Bethesda’s fallout was more serious than the originals. I think the Wild Wasteland trait is supposed to be a callback to that era of classic Fallout. In my personal opinion, Fallout 4 has got to be the most serious of the fallouts due to its story and their companions backstories like Nick, Preston, Deacon, Cait, Maccready, etc. I say all that even though my absolute favorite is New Vegas and Fallout 3. I think New Vegas turned me into an armchair philosopher lol

really? people think a game where you can have a party consisting of a robot dog, a 9 foot green mutant, a tribal with his grandpa's bone in his nose that "enables" him to talk to spirits, a horndog Ghoul, a sentient Deathclaw, and a robobrain named Skynet is "serious"?

The Bridge Keeper encounter was the best silly encounter.

It’s funny that the super mutant in the title is the general from fallout 1

fallout has always had humor. but even the humor fit the game/story/mechanic, and still added to the immersion. bethesda made fallout a campy fun time for the whole family, including collecting bottle cap plushies and nuka cola power armor. i wont even get started on the abortion of fallout set in the themepark... and the less said of 76 the better.

I think people just don't know what they liked about the og Fallouts. They had the look. They had the atmosphere. The games aren't taken overly seriously, but the early series is primarily horror. It's impossible to not see Bethesda in modern fallout precisely because Bethesda does not do horror well post Oblivion and that's giving them far more credit for horror than they deserve. They do spooky amazingly, but true horror doesn't really stick. The first scene with Cooper and his Daughter in the TV show gives me massive hope because suddenly, Fallout was horror again. There are aspects of Fallout 1 and 2 players miss that are fully justifiable reasons for not liking modern Fallout as much. I also miss these aspects even if I believe Bethesda gets fallout and that Bethesda Fallout games are good. First. The music. The absolute desolation of the soundtrack is haunting in the extreme. Try not imagining the music in your mind when you try to go to sleep after getting killed in the wasteland. Then there are instances, like the death screens that build that existential horror. The Master is a cosmic threat, not necessarily the tangible "unequivocally bad guy who it is an objective good to shoot." Deathclaws will kill you and your entire party in a big way. The threat of being caught in your travels by Deathclaws or Super Mutants as you cross the map is genuinely nail biting. Those difficulty spikes matter too. You're supposed to feel like just some other already dead asshole who doesn't even know it yet even as the so-called "Chosen One." Bethesda tends to Great Man Theory everything in that you're always Jesus coming home. Also, this is a game series based on A Boy and His Dog. Imagine thinking Fallout takes, took, or will take itself seriously given that knowledge.

Good stuff! Appreciate the nostalgia. Good teaching for newer generations.

You definitely make some good points - - I think oftentimes we hear things repeated on the internet and forums particularly and certain things become common belief, although they may be a bit more of a stretch than some people realize. Well done - subbed.

I assume none of you played 76…

Most of the silliness in F1 and F2 comes from "special encounters" which are... basically easter-eggs that show up, very sporadically, when you travel on the map and aren't considered canon in any way. If you play a low luck build, it's very possible to never see a single one. The overall feel and narrative of those games IS grim, depressing, and played fairly straight for the most part. Are there jokes and references? Yup. But the world itself is NOT funny. Fallout 3 and 4 straight up feel like a parody of those games to be honest. Yes, I'm leaving out New Vegas on purpose.

I learned the terms "gimp" and "fluffer" from playing Fallout 2, so i guess you know how my playthrough went

Only thing grim and dark playing Fallout 1 is the death animations and the anxiety of Ian filling me with 10mm SMG rounds 😂 Everything written and how characters act seem so mudane and silly. Like the BOS introduction. Sure fits the idea the series was more Post "Post-Apoc" if anything.

Aye I really enjoy your videos and you inspired me to play fallout 4 again

Some people never played with wild wasteland and it shows

seymour was rick moranis... the plant was called Audrey (or Audrey II)

"Talking cave rat thought it to me. " Norbark newman

*Wonders around Hub *Accidentally finds Thevies Guild *Makes british boss enraged over how i found his group and starts cursing at me Anyway, i tend to love every games humor, no matter how good or awful it is. If a bunch of knights ask for directions out of nowhere, im like wtf and chuckle along, or finding a mutants with duck names is hilarious. Even the shitfest in Modoc is somehow funny. In my opinion, its not good or bad, its just different type of humor/seriousness.

harold and bob, anyone? ghoul with a sentient tree growing out of his head.

There was that cafe.

5:50 There are skeletons from the day the Earth stood still, 210 years in the elements. Get outta here!

My favourite moment is massacre of vault 13 this was so silly blood everywhere people run for their life while screaming. Slavers in Den were cute too little goofballs treat people like an object