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The Fallout intro are opening cinematics in Fallout.

Background[]

The first video provides an overview of the themes and important aspects of the game, including Vault-Tec, nuclear war, and the respite of the Vaults. The viewer is introduced to the conflict overseas and subsequent current violence underway. Advertisements give insight into the aesthetic of the time, introducing products and the general retro-futuristic style. The video cuts out, setting the tone for the subsequent narration.

Overview[]

The intro begins with "Maybe" by The Ink Spots and a screen of a Radiation King television set showing a Vault-Tec ad for Vault 13, featuring the Vault Boy watering plants and waving at the camera as the Vault blast door closes, followed by the "Vault of the Future" picture.

Then a Galaxy News Network (GNN) program starts, stating that "Our dedicated boys keep the peace in newly annexed Canada" and showing two American soldiers in power armor executing a Canadian insurgent and waving at the camera. A power-armored soldier is then shown in front of the American flag with 13 stars and a war bond ad. Next, ads for Corvega and Mister Handy appear before the TV shuts down and the music echoes into the latent ambiance of the destroyed world. This occurs as the camera pulls out from close up of the television screen and slowly reveals the ruins the television set stands on and the open view of Necropolis from the half-collapsed structure.

Narration[]

After the cinematic intro, a series of still photographs with narration by Ron Perlman follows.

War. War never changes.

The Romans waged war to gather slaves and wealth.
Spain built an empire from its lust for gold and territory.
Hitler shaped a battered Germany into an economic superpower.

But war never changes.

In the 21st century, war was still waged over the resources that could be acquired. Only this time, the spoils of war were also its weapons: Petroleum and Uranium. For these resources, China would invade Alaska, the US would annex Canada, and the European Commonwealth would dissolve into quarreling, bickering nation-states, bent on controlling the last remaining resources on Earth.

In 2077, the storm of world war had come again. In two brief hours, most of the planet was reduced to cinders. And from the ashes of nuclear devastation, a new civilization would struggle to arise.

A few were able to reach the relative safety of the large underground Vaults. Your family was part of that group that entered Vault Thirteen. Imprisoned safely behind the large Vault door, under a mountain of stone, a generation has lived without knowledge of the outside world.

Life in the Vault is about to change.
Ron Perlman, Fallout intro

Overseer intro[]

The overseer intro is a cutscene designed to give the player character the first quest and background information about the situation at hand in Vault 13.

Ahh, you're here. Good.

We've got a problem. A big one. The controller chip for our water purification system has given up the ghost. Can't make a new one and the process is too complicated for a work around system. Simply put, we're running out of drinking water. No water, no Vault.

This is crucial to our survival. And frankly, I...I think you're the only hope we have. You need to go find us another controller chip. We estimate we have four to five months before the Vault runs out of water. We need that chip. I've marked your map with the location of another Vault. Not a bad place to start I think.

Look, just be safe, OK?
Vault 13 overseer, Fallout overseer intro

Notes[]

The Telephone exchange name for Vault-Tec is KL-5743, which is the equivalent of a fictitious 555 number. The KL specifically stands for KLondike.

Behind the scenes[]

Tim Cain asked me to write a game intro, so I wrote this rambling piece where some half-crazed fellow was ranting about his ancestors and cursing what had happened to the world - what it must have been like to live in a world where brahmin had only one head. What actually went into the game was *much* better ("War Never Changes"), but Tim wanted to stick some drunken barfly somewhere in the game which spouted the original dialogue. It never happened though, and the dialogue's been long lost.Scott Bennie, Fallout Bible 8
We had no early draft of the intro designed, and the outro was always supposed to be some sort of hero's welcome for saving the vault and defeating the master. When we started planning the intro, Jason and I designed pretty much what you see, with things like the guy being shot being added during development - but overall, we designed it very quickly and executed on that design. For the second part, Tim wrote the narration and we put together the images underneath it, that was about all the design that went into that one. The visual of the waterchip just evolved into a visual joke while I was modeling it - I thought it would be funny to be showing the simplest, most basic motherboard type thing while the overseer was describing something so complex they couldn't hack together a workaround. That was how a lot of the design went on those things - we'd just come up with something we thought was funny while we were filling in the details. A specific detail I've never seen anybody mention is that the schematic behind the waterchip is actually for a Moog synthesizer. I've told the story of the ending before, but, in essence, it just occurred to me and Jason when we actually sat down to do the thing that #1, we had no idea how to make a 'celebratory scene' impactful, and #2, there was no way that their xenophobia would ever let them allow the player back in the vault.​Leonard Boyarsky, RPG Codex interview with Leonard Boyarsky
We tried to model the power armor as T-Ray did in the opening movie and game, but he could get away with clipping that would look really bad at close distances or certain angles. Simply put, building the Fallout power armor as it originally looked would have resulted in a suit with a tiny range of motion or a hilarious amount of clipping. We changed as much as we needed to allow for more flexibility in movement, but tried to stay very close to the original design whenever possible.J.E. Sawyer, NMA

Gallery[]

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