Retro-Futurism in Fallout: Crafting a Narrative Through Setting 

Ive heard a lot of people say it's the date that the transistor was invented that was the divergence, being invented much later in the fallout timeline! Though the 'first' divergence is the Zetans abduction of the samurai toshiro kago in mothership Zeta. He was abducted between the 1560's to the 1610's!

At this point I don't even think it's a Divergent so much as a parallel timeline. Sunset Sarsaparilla was established in 1918 and I'm sure there's more instances where little things like that happened in the past I think it's just a parallel universe.

The "point of divergence" is an old fan theory we need to move away from and just call Fallout an alternate universe that has similar history to ours. There is just simply too much going too far back to definitively claim one year/event as the point of divergence

I don't think this is canonical in any way, but I've always considered Fallout to be a universe dreamed up by a fictional 1950's sci-fi writer. Much like B-movies of the time or something like The Outer Limits, you end up with future technologies that have a base in current technology of the time, and the extrapolation is often fun, but wrong. All of the things that don't make sense in the universe don't matter if you look at it from this angle. In the writer's time radio was still relevant, TV was still black and white, bombs yields were lower, computers were magic to most people. The list goes on.

​@thomasbrooks3572 First divergence would actually be the lost city Cabot found.

It's mostly because vacuum tubes were still preferred over transistors, meaning all electronic technology needed to be able to fit multiple, bulky glass cylinders in order to function. If you've ever seen a computer from the 40's or 50's, you'd know what I'm talking about

We all miss him man.

I've been unable to rewatch his videos since. Miss him too.😢

Who?

​@@jayl5032a fallout gaming legend

He was a youtuber who did fallout challenge runs, but he died recently ​@@jayl5032

It comes full circle, because Fallout has referenced Bradbury numerous times.

I always think of reading and watching the animated form of "There Will Come Soft Rains".

Not quite the same, but with the post-apocalyptic feel in the early 1900s, you can read Stephen Vincent Benét's "By the Waters of Babylon" from 1937. Written from a spiritual/religious people exploring the post-apocalyptic cityscape

Boring game with nothing to do past lvl 55

It’s such a fun game!!! Got it back when the game first released and still playing!

Better than most AI. Usually, it's like trying to read Cyrillic masquerading as English

Not really, New Vegas was a lot more colorful lol

I mean the bright colors are a part of the retrofuturism of the 50's like have you seen how brightly colored homes in the 50's were made?

Youre nuts

@@Manfromthenorth0551 i prefer the style fnv and f3 it’s a nuclear wasteland not vice city

Well why not?

@@hermos3602 76 is garbage imo

Why?

@@JoeVington I didn't know what retro-futerism meant

@@UnionCowboy Oh ok

To be fair - they haven’t actually explained what retrofuturism is. It’s when we create fiction by imagining how people in the past (retro) imagined or wrote science-fiction about the future (futurism). They’re generally referred to as “X-punk”s, with the X changing on the era we’re looking back to. Fallout is Atompunk as it’s imagined as 1940s/50s sci-fi. Steampunk is imagining Victorian / late 1800s sci-fi, Dieselpunk is imagining sci-fi from the era between those two, and Clockpunk is imagining sci-fi from the post-medieval but pre-steam era. There’s science fiction and predictions in media going back for centuries so we actually have a good idea. Essentially it’s about forgetting what we know about how technology and science did actually progress, and imagine how people would have thought that the future would be.

@@chrisrulton1131 That... is perfect.