Computer Graphics World

e year is 22077, and the US has been laid to waste for two centuries now following a global nuclear war with China. But what remains of Washington, DC is no ordinary postapocalyptic nightmare. Set in an al- ternative universe that split from our own after World War II, Bethesda Game Studios' Fallout 3 imagines what America might have looked like had the 1950s idyllic "world of tomorrow" actually come true. It then takes this advanced, retro-futuristic world, with its ro- bot butlers, nuclear-powered cars, and tape-driven com- puters, and drops an atomic bomb on it. Everything is reduced to a radioactive wasteland, albeit one that retains the aesthetics and design sensibilities of the '50s, and re- mains fi rmly entrenched in the stilted, cultural norms and proprieties of a Leave It to Beaver episode. e new Fallout game, released in late 2008, continues the series' story line. One of the more intriguing aspects of the property continues to be its retro look, created mainly with Autodesk's 3ds Max. And for this title, the setting adds an emotional element and more. According to executive producer Todd Howard, placing the story in the seat of American government for this release allowed the group to explore fascinating ideas about those in control and how the government would transform un- der these circumstances. Also, the imagery of the Washington Monument, the Capi- tol, and other iconic structures reduced to rubble would evoke an immediate visceral response about the power and magnitude of the enemy. Moreover, Washington's neoclassical architecture would commin- gle perfectly with 1950s design aesthetics, while DC's Metro subway tunnels would provide a scary, dungeon-like atmosphere and an elegant means of connectivity be- tween the levels. The Story e adventure begins in Vault 101, an underground fallout shelter that hasn't been opened in 200 years and whose inhabitants are largely oblivious to the outside world. Here, life begins, as your father, a doctor and scientist, is shown delivering you into the world. After- ward, you can shape the look of your character by choosing your DNA through a Gene Projector system. Cooler still, the fi nal ge- netic makeup that you choose will aff ect your father's DNA as well, so his appearance becomes remarkably similar to your own. Mom is absent, but Dad is around to shepherd you through 19 years of life in the vault, all of which unfold like milestone moments from childhood. On your 10th birthday, you're pre- sented with a Pip-Boy, a device worn over the arm that acts as a Geiger counter and radio. On that same day, a group of bullies crash the party. Your decision to intervene here (as well as other moral decisions you make throughout the game) aff ects your Karma, the game's sliding scale of ethical judgment. Rewarding amorality, or even immorality, is a gaming philosophy Bethesda has been perfecting not only in the Fallout series, but also in its Elder Scrolls: Morrowind and Oblivion. A game-changing moment occurs on your 19 th birthday, when your father mysteriously disappears. ough you've been warned never to leave the vault, you abandon safety and security to search for him. You join up with the Brotherhood of Steel and your ally, Dogmeat, to face a nightmare landscape overrun with freakish super mutants, feral ghouls, and military robots. Although the world outside the vault is clouded in a pallid, ashen haze, the terrain will seem strangely familiar to many. at's because the artists spent days wandering around and sur- veying the city, measuring the distances from point A to point B, and taking pictures of major landmarks. is enabled them to faithfully re-create the Washington Monument, the Pentagon, and the National Mall, for instance, and then destroy them as credibly as possible. While the virtual Washington compresses the scale of the city considerably, the general spatial relationships and fl avor of key landmarks have been retained. Fallout 3 is set in a retro-futuristic version of Washington, DC. The artists spent a good deal of time familiarizing themselves with the city so they could re-create it, then destroy it, so it looked believable. March 2009 7 Gaming ■ ■ ■ ■

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