The Escapist Issue #33 Now Available

The thirty-third issue of Escapist Magazine offers four new gaming-related articles, one of which discusses the tension during the Cold War and how titles like Fallout offer a perspective of what a post-apocalyptic world could have been like. An excerpt, as usual:

Fallout, Black Isle’s innovative post-apocalyptic RPG, finally forced me to face my darkest fears. In Fallout, the world has been reduced to rubble – yet you survive. You begin the game inside a community fallout shelter called a “Vault,” where you have lived for your entire life. The Vault Elder informs you that there is a problem. The water purifier is failing, and the elders have decided that someone has to go outside to find a new one. They’ve chosen you.

Not since the heady days of Glasnost and Infocom text adventures had a game begun with a more pitch-perfect set-up. The massive door of the Vault opens and you are unceremoniously thrust out of the only home you’ve ever known and into … well, The Day After. Only, in the game, it’s actually been decades after. And, as bad as we’ve been led to believe the world will get in the days following World War III, in the years following that, it’s become much, much worse.