Reflections of War and the Apocalypse in Games—on Fallout and beyond

Fallout, 2024, TV series still (pictured with actor Kyle MacLachlan) © 2024 Amazon Content Services LLC

On screen, a youthful Kyle MacLachlan, a cinematic icon of the 1990s, stands amidst the discussions of a corporate ambition: to achieve absolute monopoly, and crush all rivals. His appearance embodies the most potent expression of conspiracy theories found in the science fiction television of the decade. As the protagonist recoils in shock, we, the audience, witness a lurking menace emerge in the last scene of the live-action adaptation of Fallout (2024). That moment culminates with the ominous words that have echoed through generations of gamers: “We have friction. We have conflict, and we have war. And war…war never changes.”

“And war…war never changes.” This sentence triggers a déjà vu for both the characters in the show and to the audience at home. Recognized as one of the most iconic prologues in gaming history, it has been repeated numerous times in different sequels and spin-offs of Fallout on various platforms. Since the dawn of the 21st century, players of this game have encountered this refrain, accompanied by grainy, black-and-white vintage footage, time and time again. Yet, for the first time ever, it resonates not through a video game console, but within the digital landscape of an internet drama series streaming directly into our homes.

In recent years, we have seen quite a number of TV series and film adaptations from renowned game franchises. This phenomenon points to a recurring pattern through the course of history: popular works originating in “mass” media, often initially dismissed or marginalized, inevitably return to the forefront of public consciousness due to their enduring appeal among the “masses.” Following in the footsteps of novels, films, and TV series, now video games have shed their old sub-cultural labels to assume the dominant status in mainstream entertainment. However, it must be noted that, given their vast scope of targeted customers and commercial values, they can no longer be dismissed as a marginal or niche genre in contemporary society, or “toys” for teenagers only. Rather, video games have occupied a considerable portion of adults’ everyday lives. However, with all these being said, the cultural status of video games still remains nebulous. How do video games resonate with and reflect upon issues related to zeitgeist, the defining spirit of our times? This question arises as a new subject for further investigation and comprehensive research.

In the case of the Fallout series, its “realistic” concern was originally connected to the Cold War, but its recent re-mediatization through TV adaptation added another layer of metaphorical complexity: the show’s themes of conflict, war, and apocalypse are the headlines screaming from our daily news feeds over the past few years. The Russia-Ukraine War has entered its second year with no end in sight; subsequently, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists adjusted its Doomsday Clock closer to the midnight: a world catastrophe shall arrive in mere “90 seconds”—the closest to a complete annihilation of mankind than it ever has been; earlier this year, NATO held its largest military exercise since the end of the Cold War. The Cold War, a word that seems to have faded into our memories, has crawled back from the historical wormhole and looms large once more. Again, the grim reality of wars is on the horizon.

War is far from a foreign concept for video gamers. In fact, the biggest concern and critique leveled against video games have always been their portrayal of violence, blood, and brutality of war, which infiltrates the bedrooms of teenagers worldwide. Through video games, players not only immerse themselves in “Cold War” narratives, but even partake in battlefields that transcend historical, temporal, and planetary boundaries, ranging from tribal conflicts to interstellar conquests. A conundrum persists among game researchers: why are video games so well configured to label “the others” and “enemies,” and derive entertainment from their defeat, conquest, or even death? This question extends beyond the media-technological features of video games, but also the cultural and economic decisions that feed into such media technology. At the same time, video games, throughout their history and still today, have been consistently digitizing, gamifying, and typifying the activities and experiences to which people have grown accustomed. There exists an overwhelming number of war-themed video games, precisely due to humanity’s enduring familiarity with warfare and war games, as well as the undeniable pleasure derived from them.

Screenshots of Fallout 4 by the user David J

The writer Jonathan Swift once poignantly encapsulated, “War: that mad game the world so loves to play.” Between wars and games, there exists a certain elusive entanglement. People in modern society tend to frame warfare and its reasons through the lens of strategic gains and losses; wars in ancient times, however, bore a striking resemblance to ritual and gamesmanship. If we broaden our definition of “war games” to include activities like hunting and dueling, then humans have been engaging in such “war games” since the very origin of play itself. Moreover, if we also consider traditional games like chess and Go as war games, then the act of playing games is essentially a form of normalizing and “sanitizing” conflicts and wars, transforming it into an intellectual exercise or a mode of social communication.

Does this also hold true for video games? Do they also draw inspiration from the theater of battlefields and wars, while trying to transmute the essence of warfare into something else? Simulation and calculation are two important factors in modern-time warfare. As early as the 18th and 19th centuries, Prussian officers invented intricate board games that incorporated variables and elements of chance, serving not only as tools for war preparation and training but also as a form of entertainment. These early prototypes directly influenced contemporary board and video games. Furthermore, the pursuit of modeling and calculation capabilities for military applications was one of the driving forces during the early development of electronic computers. Later, the advancement of military technologies during WWII and the Cold War laid solid groundwork for the hardware architecture that underpins video games today. For these reasons, the emergence of video games was hence in the wings from a technological perspective.

Early video game Tennis for Two (1958) set up at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1961

However, the invention and development of general-purpose computers largely differed from those of video games. The earliest video games—from OXO (the electronic game of noughts and crosses, 1952) to Tennis for Two (1958) and Spacewar! (1962)—were all created in scientific laboratories. Although these labs represented an important technological shift from military use to educational, research, and civilian applications, utilizing the most cutting-edge, high-cost machines to produce and play “games” definitely symbolized more than a “military-to-civil” transformation. This transitional process has long been a central issue in the study of history of science and technology (HST) and science and technology (S&T) policy analysis. So, the fact that video games were produced in scientific labs, not for academic research or commercial promotion but for entertainment, is noteworthy in its own right. Learning about its history will possibly help us understand the nature of video games, and offer us a glimpse of the social and cultural complexities during the Cold War era. Furthermore, it reveals a nuanced narrative, one where the depths of warfare fostered not only fear for loss and the desire for victory but also introspection and deviance coming from the inside. Then, were the earliest video games and the hackers who created them a product of, or perhaps an inheritor to, the anti-cultural movements of the time? This question, first posed in the 1970s, still awaits a definitive answer. Against the backdrop of the tumultuous global 1960s, the video games born out of war machines depicted communication, understanding, and joy. This juxtaposition brings to mind the iconic photograph The Ultimate Confrontation: The Flower and the Bayonet (Marc Riboud, 1967), a powerful image that defined the spirit of that era. 

National confrontation during the Cold War ignited a storm of imaginations around conflicts and wars. First, narratives of invasion took shape as paranoiac panic towards the Red Scare in fantasy works. Under the shadows of McCarthyism, the Soviet Union, cast as the ultimate enemy, was often projected as aliens, or utterly “otherness.” Looming threats of nuclear wars and nuclear deterrence soon diverted everyone’s attention towards the sky and space as the next battleground, a theme readily adopted by early video games where victory in space became synonymous with winning the war itself. From the pioneering Spacewar! to Space Invaders (1978), the signature work from the golden age of arcade cabinets, the central narratives of video games revolved around annihilating invaders and conquering the cosmos.

However, the very “coldness” of the Cold War already hinted at a certain reflection on and resistance to warfare. Humanity harbors an innate propensity to view war as a destructive event, one that civilization ought to extinguish. This sentiment underlies the concerns of educators and parents regarding war-themed video games—we inhabit a world that fundamentally rejects the normalization of armed conflict. People generally believed that wars could be controlled and actively guided by human hands to usher in peace and order—until the cataclysmic eruption of World Wars in the early 20th century. The intense trauma and anguish wrought by full-scale wars changed everything, while the invention and deployment of nuclear weapons further cemented humanity’s understanding of war’s devastating potential. In response, military institutions worldwide began shifting their objectives away from winning wars, and towards preventing their outbreak altogether.

Spacewar! (1962) running on the Computer History Museum’s PDP-1, 2007
Photo: Joi Ito

The Cold War itself alluded to a plea of avoiding the heat of battle. Its echo in cultural and entertainment realms, including video games, underscored the notion that portraying wars and their consequences was inherently an exercise in anti-war reflection. The 1950s saw the emergence of a series of post-apocalyptic works that continue to exert significant influence in the present day. Their narratives encompassed elements that preceded even the games themselves. One such example was the nostalgia for the Wild West in North American culture, which imbued the concept of the “frontier” with spiritual significance, dealt with societal moral concerns, explored social systems, and engaged in religious contemplation of the apocalypse and imaginings of a new world. Yet, these Cold War-era post-apocalyptic visions also incorporated unexpected elements: nuclear wars wreaking havoc across the globe at an unprecedented pace. Even if a few individuals were to survive such a cataclysm, they would have to face an even more heterogeneous and challenging world.

Subsequent technological developments and social movements further shaped these apocalyptic imaginings. Notably, the development of digital technology forged an increasingly interlaced connection between destructive military strategies and computational operations, as if the most dangerous war were nothing more than a harmless game. As early as 1983, when video games were just beginning to enter household living rooms, their formidable similarity to modern warfare was laid bare on screens (as exemplified by Wargames). Concurrently, social movements such as environmental activism significantly altered our conception of the reasons behind wars. The seemingly inevitable depletion of resources and collapse of ecosystems rendered war—a desperate means to solve problems at an incalculable long-term cost—a future from which no one could escape. This premise formed the very foundation of conflict in the Fallout series. Yet, public skepticism persisted, surging in the 1960s, enduring through the Cold War’s end, and continuing even as the United States emerged as the only superpower and as information technology fueled economic and social booms. Even during the last decade, when society basked in excessive optimism, science fiction television shows remained replete with gloomy visions of the near future, often casting politicians and conglomerates as the culpable troublemakers. These strains of political sarcasm and social criticism also permeated the understanding of war in the Fallout series. 

A reconstruction of a Prussian military wargame (Kriegsspiel) in 2016, based on a ruleset developed by Georg Heinrich Rudolf Johann von Reiswitz in 1824

Photo: Matthew Kirschenbaum

“And war…war never changes.” The commercial success of the Fallout series has made this sentence a proverb among its players, suggesting a universal understanding of war’s nature and meaning. However, this consensus is as widespread as it is fragile. The Fallout series exemplifies the volatility of our imaginations regarding war and apocalypse: the first and second Fallout games, released in the late 1990s, attributed the origins of nuclear war—and indeed all wars—to humanity’s struggle for space and resources. These iterations emphasized humanity’s role as the architect of its own demise, as well as the annihilative power of full-scale nuclear conflict. Such themes not only echo the Cold War era but also manifest contemporary environmental concerns in the new age. In contrast, the following third and fourth generations of the game shifted focus, linking wars to more abstract human propensities; the interchangeability between nuclear war and apocalypse was no longer self-evident. As we turn our attention back to the very recent live-action version of Fallout, we may notice that we now live in a world totally different from before. Perhaps it has become challenging for us to experience the piercing yet authentic desperation of facing an inescapable catastrophe.

In this new world, video games have ascended to a position of immense and all-pervasive cultural influence, a power that sculpts both our memories and imaginations. It then begs the questions: how did video games emerge from the war machines within the global context of the 1960s, and continue to integrate into the depiction of wars and imaginations of the apocalypse within mass culture? How did the anxiety about and revulsion against nuclear disaster from the Cold War era seep into these virtual battlefields? And how have these elements become part of the players’ historical memories, and passed down to the next generations and beyond through the re-mediatization of TV and movie adaptations? Now, more than ever, it is crucial to grapple with these questions.

Text by Lu Yahuai

Translation by Jiajing Sun

Lu Yahuai holds a master’s degree in Philosophy and a PhD in World History from Peking University. She has received academic training in the history of technology and late antiquity. Her current research focus is video games and history of memories during the Chinese Economic Reform.