The “Fallout” lore isn’t too complex, but there IS a lot of it, with the game world having an entire, alternate history that begins centuries before you step out of your first vault.
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00:00Welcome to WatchMojo, and today, we're doing a deep dive into the Fallout timeline.
00:13The Fallout lore isn't too complex, but there is a lot of it, with the game world
00:18having an entire alternate history that begins centuries before you step out of your first
00:23vault.
00:24Much of Fallout's history is the history of our own world, with a few differences deep
00:29in the past, things like the influence of the fictional Cabot family on Boston way back
00:33in the 18th century.
00:35But things get notably different around the Second World War, when Fallout pursues alternate
00:40forms of technology to us in the real world.
00:43Specifically, they invest hugely in nuclear physics, mastering nuclear fission and eventually
00:49nuclear fusion, to create vast amounts of power.
00:53Energy is revolutionized, but other forms of technology, like television and radio,
00:58remain stuck in the 1950s, never moving on, except that they're nuclear powered now.
01:04People enjoyed luxuries once thought the realm of science fiction, domestic robots, fusion
01:11powered cars.
01:13Fallout is so concerned with technology, and exploring the impact its futuristic tech has
01:18on the world, that all of its biggest private companies work in science and technology,
01:23many of them becoming defense contractors for the US government.
01:27These are companies like Vault-Tec, Robco, and Repcon.
01:31Vault-Tec is, of course, hugely important, because it's the company behind the vaults
01:36that save humanity, at least on paper.
01:39Robco Industries, meanwhile, was run by Mr. House before the war, and is responsible for
01:44practically all of the robots we encounter, as well as inventing the Stealth Boys.
01:49Finally, Repcon largely built rockets, but was crucially contracted by the US government
01:55to create new fuel sources, including nuclear fission, which makes the world go round.
02:07The world was also reliant on fossil fuels by this point, a finite resource, but nuclear
02:12power was a finite resource too, because it depended on uranium.
02:17This eventually led the world's two largest superpowers, the United States and China,
02:22into conflict through the Resource Wars, beginning in 2052.
02:27Our only real look into what the world was like at this time is through the liberation
02:31of Anchorage Simulation, which shows American soldiers freeing Alaska from Chinese occupation.
02:38Alaska had been under occupation since 2066, when the Sino-American War broke out, but
02:43in early 2077, it was brought back into the US.
02:47China's power led to extreme paranoia within the US about the impact of Communism, which
02:53again mirrors real life in the 1950s, when America was gripped by the Second Red Scare
02:58and thought Communism was hiding around every corner.
03:02But in Fallout, these fears weren't unfounded.
03:06Not only were spies genuinely working to undermine America, as we see in Fallout 3's Point
03:11Lookout DLC, but China had armed submarines stationed around the coast.
03:22This of course culminated in the Great War, which lasted for all of two hours on October
03:2723rd, 2077.
03:30America and China together, in the last hours of the Sino-American War, destroyed the world.
03:35Some people survived, either by descending into vaults or by finding refuge in other
03:40places.
03:41We can see this play out at the beginning of Fallout 4, as the sole survivor descends
03:45below the Commonwealth to be cryogenically frozen.
03:49In Fallout 3, we see that a community managed to survive by hiding in the Lamplight Caverns,
03:55creating Little Lamplight.
03:56On the other side of the country, Vegas was left largely unscathed because of Mr. House
04:01protecting it with his superior technology.
04:04But it would take a long time for the world to even begin to recover.
04:18With the exception of Fallout 4's opening, the earliest we've ever gone in the Fallout
04:23timeline is 2102, which is when Fallout 76 begins.
04:28You start in Vault 76, a vault designed to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of
04:33Independence back in 1776, when it opens 25 years after the war.
04:39Luckily, Vault 76 was one of Vault-Tec's control vaults, meaning it didn't have any
04:44sinister experiments running in the background.
04:47Even better, Appalachia is definitely a more pleasant place than other Fallout settings,
04:53though it's been ravaged by Scorch Beasts, which are enormous mutated bats.
04:58Because it's an MMO, the plot of Fallout 76 is always growing, with expansions released
05:04following the Zeta Aliens and returning to Pittsburgh.
05:07But you spend the early hours and initial quests in the game trying to rid Appalachia
05:12of the Scorch Beasts and the infected humans they leave behind, known as the Scorched.
05:17It ends when you drop a nuclear bomb, but Appalachia bounces back from this quickly
05:22enough.
05:23Crucially, this is one of the earliest iterations of the Brotherhood of Steel we see, even though
05:29they were actually established in 2076, right before the Great War.
05:34But Fallout 76 is still set far away from the main continuity of games, since the story
05:39really begins in the year 2161 in California.
05:50This is where Fallout, a post-nuclear role-playing game, starts, almost 90 years after the war
05:56that destroyed the world.
05:58You're playing as the Vault Dweller, who's been chosen to leave Vault 13, another safe
06:03control vault, because the vault needs extra water chips to operate their water purifier,
06:09otherwise it's not going to survive.
06:11You leave the vault and soon encounter Shady Sands, a small town that's beaten the odds
06:16and already learned how to grow fresh crops in the wasteland.
06:20But it hasn't all been plain sailing.
06:23Shady Sands was founded by Dwellers from Vault 15, a vault that was a social experiment gone
06:29awry when the Dwellers, chosen because they held beliefs across the political spectrum,
06:34came into conflict.
06:35A group left and stole the vault's GECK when they did.
06:39That's a Garden of Eden creation kit, the crucial piece of pre-war technology that terraforms
06:44the wasteland to make it habitable.
06:46In Shady Sands, you're witnessing the birth of the New California Republic, which will
06:51be officially founded in 2189, 27 years after the first game begins.
06:57More on them later.
06:58Back in the 2160s, the wasteland is under threat.
07:02A group calling itself The Unity is growing, a cult with the aim of turning every human
07:08being into a super mutant, a giant green monster.
07:12Its leader is the Master, a mutant himself who wanted to use the Forced Evolutionary
07:17Virus, or FEV, to transform mankind.
07:22Like the GECK, the FEV is a key part of Fallout lore that will return time and time again.
07:28The quest for the Water Chips eventually leads the Vault Dweller into conflict with the Master.
07:34To pull off this final dramatic confrontation effectively, you'll have needed to explore
07:38the wasteland to get several key pieces of information, so that you can prove to the
07:42Master that the super mutants are sterile.
07:45This means that his all-mutant society is doomed, because it will be impossible for
07:50them to reproduce.
07:52When the Master realizes this, he sets his base, the Cathedral, to explode, scattering
07:58the Unity, known to others as the Master's Army far and wide.
08:02Wonderful, amazing.
08:05I'm so proud of what you've accomplished, what you've endured.
08:10Between Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, we've actually got two spinoff games.
08:14These are the confusingly named Fallout Tactics Brotherhood of Steel, released in 2001, and
08:20Fallout Brotherhood of Steel, released in 2004.
08:23The former follows a Brotherhood campaign in the Midwest in 2197, as soldiers journey
08:29southwest to find the semi-mythical Vault Zero to claim its technology.
08:34They, again, come into conflict with mutants and a villain called the Calculator, a grotesque
08:39supercomputer powered by an amalgamation of real human brains, not too dissimilar to the
08:45Master himself.
08:46It's not clear which ending is the canon ending, but it almost certainly ends with the Brotherhood
08:52getting its hands on even more powerful world-ending technology, for better or worse.
08:58Humanity once again starts to prosper.
09:01The 2004 game, on the other hand, is set 19 years on, in 2208, following an initiate recently
09:08brought into the Brotherhood.
09:10Interestingly, 2208 is the same year that the original Vault Dweller leaves their town
09:15Arroyo for good.
09:17Unfortunately, this game was critically panned and doesn't offer too much new, though it
09:22is the only Fallout game set in Texas, taking place in the city of Carbon.
09:27You're fighting yet another army of mutants who are, in-game, modeling themselves on the
09:33Master.
09:39Fallout 2 sees another big time skip.
09:42It begins in the year 2241, and you're a new player character, nicknamed the Chosen One,
09:48living in Arroyo, grandchild of the Vault Dweller.
09:51At the end of the first game, the Vault Dweller returned to Vault 13 to bring back the Water
09:56Chips.
09:57He was exiled by the Overseer.
09:59By 2167, Arroyo had been built in Northern California.
10:04But the town is hit by a severe drought, and there's only one thing that can help, another
10:09Gek.
10:10The Chosen One leaves to find it, but the Enclave soon emerge as a new threat.
10:15You find out that before the war, the US government made a lot of contingencies, with many top
10:20government officials escaping nuclear annihilation and forming the Enclave, which has been biting
10:26its time for over 150 years.
10:29Its main base is Control Station Enclave, an offshore oil rig, but it also has a major
10:35presence in Navarro, a military base on the West Coast.
10:39The Enclave plan is, again, preoccupied with the Forced Evolutionary Virus.
10:44They want to modify it so that it's lethal and airborne, capable of infecting and killing
10:50everybody in the wasteland.
10:52When this is done, they'll move in and rebuild America to their own specifications.
10:57Obviously, you can't let this happen, because it turns out that while the Chosen One is
11:02successful at retrieving another Gek, the entire population of Arroyo has been kidnapped
11:07by the Enclave to serve as test subjects for the modified FEV.
11:11The Enclave is ultimately destroyed when the oil rig's nuclear reactor is detonated by
11:16the Chosen One, who uses the Gek to turn Arroyo into a powerful force in the West.
11:21Crucially, by this point in time, the NCR has been founded officially, and is building
11:27shady sands into one of the most advanced cities in the entire wasteland.
11:32Proving, once again, that genocide is a viable solution to any problem.
11:37But it's time to skip another few decades, ending up in the year 2277, and in a brand
11:43new location, the Capital Wasteland, the ruins of Washington, D.C.
11:48A lot of people join the franchise with Fallout 3, with this game serving as their introduction
11:53to the world of Fallout.
11:55It starts officially in 2258, though, when the main character, this time dubbed the Lone
12:00Wanderer, is born.
12:02Your father James, aka Liam Neeson, decides to break out of Vault 101, another Vault-Tec
12:09experiment where the populace was ordered to never open the vault doors.
12:13The Lone Wanderer decides to follow him and is violently expelled from the vault, where
12:17you begin the long journey of tracking James down.
12:20Eventually, the Lone Wanderer discovers that they were born outside the vault, and that
12:25the Observer remarkably let them and their father in, after their mother dies in childbirth
12:30right at the beginning.
12:32Their parents were working on something called Project Purity, a high-tech installation built
12:36around the Jefferson Memorial designed to deliver clean water to the wasteland.
12:41But it needs a geck to get up and running properly, and that's where James has gone.
12:46The Lone Wanderer tracks him down to Vault 112, where he's been trapped in a simulation
12:51called Tranquility Lane.
12:52The simulation is being controlled by sadistic scientist Stannilus Braun, who incidentally,
12:58is also the creator of the geck, but unfortunately, Vault 112 doesn't have one.
13:04The Wanderer breaks James out by either going along with Braun, or breaking his control
13:08of the simulation and freeing the residents.
13:11James rallies the former Project Purity scientists, now all working in Rivet City.
13:26They return to the Jefferson Memorial to get it up and running, but are thwarted by the
13:30Enclave, many of whom have survived the events of Fallout 2.
13:35To stop the Enclave's leader, Colonel Autumn, from activating the Purifier, James seals
13:39himself inside and gives his life, dying from the equipment's massive radiation output.
13:45The Wanderer and the other scientists fight off the Enclave and flee through the sewers,
13:53eventually finding sanctuary in the ruins of the Pentagon, now renamed the Citadel and
13:59occupied by the Brotherhood of Steel.
14:01This faction of the Brotherhood has, by now, gone against the group's original mission
14:05statement of hoarding technology for technology's sake.
14:09They want to help the people of the Wasteland to rebuild.
14:13This has led to the formation of the Brotherhood Outcasts, who roam the Wasteland in red power
14:18armor and dismiss outsiders.
14:20More on them later.
14:24With the Brotherhood's help, the lone Wanderer determines that Vault 87 still contains its
14:29geck, the only one in the Capital Wasteland.
14:33You've got two options for how to get in, through the front door, which requires a lot
14:38of anti-rad medicine and equipment, or through the back tunnels, which require you to get
14:44in good with the people who live in the caves.
14:46The catch is that these people are children, and in their town of Little Lamplight, they
14:51hate adults and won't want to help, unless you do a quest or pass a speech check.
15:02Whatever the case, the Wanderer gets into Vault 87 and acquires the geck, only to be
15:07snatched by the Enclave at the last second.
15:10They awaken in the Enclave's high-tech base, Raven Rock, and make their way to the President
15:15of the United States, John Henry Eden, at his invitation.
15:19This is where they find out Enclave's grand plan, which is, yet again, to release the
15:24modified FEV and reclaim the Wasteland.
15:27Eden is easily talked into blowing up Raven Rock, and the Wanderer makes their escape.
15:32The final assault begins, with the Brotherhood activating its enormous pre-war robot, Liberty
15:38Prime, and taking back Project Purity.
15:49At the end of the game, the lone Wanderer has two choices.
15:53Activate Project Purity themselves, dying in the process, or send Sarah Lyons, one of
15:58the Brotherhood, to do it instead, in which case, she dies.
16:02The game was later patched to give you the third option to send Fox, the super mutant
16:06companion to do it, since Fox is immune to radiation.
16:10But they don't actually die, because the Broken Steel DLC sees them awakening back
16:15in the Citadel.
16:16From there, you're tasked with wiping out all the remains of the Enclave.
16:20Along the way, you'll also get abducted by aliens and have to fight your way off their
16:24ship, you'll help the Brotherhood outcasts to gain access to a pre-war stash of dangerous
16:29weapons, you'll journey on a riverboat to Maryland and have part of your brain removed,
16:34and you'll return to Pittsburgh, seen much earlier in its history in Fallout 76, to free
16:39its slaves and cure its plague.
16:48Finally we're moving on from the surprising density of Fallout 3 to 2010's Fallout New
16:53Vegas, where we return to the West to see the expanding NCR, which is now one of the
16:58most powerful forces in the Wasteland, come up against a new faction, Caesar's Legion.
17:04The Legion model themselves on ancient Rome, and have brought peace and security with them
17:09from Arizona, albeit peace and security enforced strictly by slavery and crucifixions.
17:15The two groups are fighting for control of the Hoover Dam, and subsequently, Vegas.
17:19We're also going to catch back up with Mr. House, owner of Robco, who still controls
17:24Vegas from the shadows.
17:26Since the war, Vegas has regained its pre-war reputation for hedonism, with large casinos
17:32now run by the three families.
17:34They were originally Wasteland tribes that Mr. House saw potential in, giving them control
17:39of the Tops, the Ultra-Lux, and Gamora, while he kept control of the Lucky 38.
17:45The game opens with you, Courier 6, being shot in the head and buried in a shallow grave
17:51in Goodsprings in 2281.
17:54You wake up with no memory of your previous life, and decide to hunt down the man who
17:58shot you, tracking him all the way to Vegas.
18:01The Courier discovers that this was Benny, the leader of the Chairman who run the Tops.
18:07He killed the Courier to retrieve the coveted Platinum Chip, which they were trusted to
18:11deliver to the Lucky 38.
18:20It turns out that the Platinum Chip is a computer chip, carrying upgrades to the Scuritron robots
18:26that patrol the Strip and keep its citizens, and Mr. House, protected from the NCR and
18:32the Legion.
18:33There are four ways the Courier can proceed.
18:36They can side with the NCR, the first and largest faction they encounter, and work to
18:41reclaim the Hoover Dam and the city for California.
18:44They can work with the Legion and do the opposite, undermining the NCR from within and dispatching
18:51Mr. House.
18:52They can take Mr. House's side and let him have absolute control with his upgraded army.
18:57Or finally, they can take Benny's plan for themselves and become his legacy, creating
19:02a truly independent Vegas.
19:05We don't know which of the four endings is canon, despite widespread debate, and we won't
19:09know until the series revisits the Mojave.
19:22But we're traveling all the way back to the East Coast for Fallout 4.
19:26After being sealed in cryostasis for decades, the sole survivor is briefly awakened, only
19:31to see a hardened mercenary kidnap their newborn son and kill their spouse, before they're
19:37sealed away again.
19:38They finally wake for good in 2287, six years after New Vegas, and leave Vault 111 to track
19:45down their son, Sean.
19:47This search takes them to Diamond City almost immediately, a large settlement built in the
19:51ruins of Fenway Park in Boston.
19:54They learn about an alleged conspiracy by members of a shadowy group that may or may
19:58not exist called the Institute, to kidnap and replace the citizens of the Commonwealth
20:03with synths.
20:04By tracking down the mercenary who kidnapped their son, and getting the help of one of
20:08the factions, the sole survivor discovers that not only is the Institute and its plan
20:13real, but that its leader is their son Sean, who's far older than initially thought.
20:18We then head into Act 2 of the game, where the sole survivor helps all four factions
20:23until reaching various points of no return.
20:42If they decide that Sean is right, there's another plan to get rid of the current human
20:46population with pure, non-irradiated people, albeit not by releasing a dangerous virus.
20:52They side with the Institute and destroy the other factions, taking the Commonwealth
20:56for good.
20:57Alternatively, they can side with the Brotherhood of Steel.
21:00This is another iteration of the East Coast Brotherhood, but now they've only got one
21:06mission, purge the world of synths, mutants, and anything else that isn't completely
21:11human.
21:12Third, you can team up with the Railroad.
21:14They want to destroy the Institute and the Brotherhood because they threaten the synths
21:18and their freedom, but they don't care half as much about humankind.
21:22Finally, you've got the Minutemen, who just want to protect the people of the Commonwealth.
21:28Only the Minutemen and the Railroad can coexist.
21:31The other factions all demand you destroy two of the others, leaving the Minutemen alone
21:36in most cases.
21:37Whether Fallout 4 has a canon ending or not, we also don't know, and likely won't until
21:42the next game in the series.
21:54And that was the Fallout timeline explained.