Member-only story
‘Fallout’ Doesn’t Work Anymore
Its core audience has moved on, and its new audience doesn’t understand it.
It’s 1995, two years before Interplay will release their seminal roleplaying game Fallout. I’m seven years old, still a solid 9–10 years from ever hearing the word ‘fallout’ in a video games context, and I’m standing in the control room of a nuclear reactor. Thirty other seven-year-olds are with me, impassively pushing switches more or less at random while our teacher, probably bored out of her mind, tries in vain to keep us focused on the tour. Workers stand around in yellow radiation suits, demonstrating how uranium slugs are loaded into the reactor (affixed to long rods, shoved in through narrow holes in the reactor’s loading face). Excited to have a day free from school, I’m not listening to the tour. I’m thinking mostly about what’s in my sack lunch, how many buttons I can press before somebody notices, and how difficult it is to manipulate fissile material through a glove box’s thick rubber gloves.
As you may have guessed, this was a decommissioned reactor — specifically, the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge National Lab in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The workers were plastic mannequins, the fissile material plastic blocks. You genuinely aren’t supposed to press the buttons, though: the reactor is a museum, shut down in 1963 and designated a National Historic Landmark two years later (1)…
