There is a moment near the beginning of Fallout 3 – the landmark 2008 action roleplaying game from Bethesda Games Studios – that is imprinted on anyone who experienced it at the time. In it, the player-created main character opens the exit to the subterranean vault they've called home for 19 years, and steps into the blinding light of the Wasteland for the first time, a literal world of potential stretching as far as the eye can see.
‘I was, right out of the gate, blown away,’ says Jonathan Nolan, the co-creator of HBO's Westworld and co-writer of The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, The Prestige and Interstellar, alongside big brother Chris. During a conversation with Total Film in early February, Nolan is reminiscing about ‘looking for a new distraction’ in late 2008, months after The Dark Knight hit cinemas, and being drawn to a copy of hot new thing Fallout 3.
‘I was obsessed with the game, and obsessed with the world of it,’ a visibly animated Nolan says over Zoom. ‘The ambition of it, and the mythology of it, and the sophistication of the world, and the gravitas of it. What really got to me, though [was] the weirdness of it, and the gonzo, satirical, impossible-to-place tone of this thing. You very seldom see anything like this.’
Contradiction is. Take that first in-game glimpse of the open world. The paradox of this moment is that, for all the freedom it promises, everything in front of you is extremely dead. The toxic landscape is dotted with the decrepit relics of a once-thriving civilisation, some two centuries after a nuclear judgement day has driven the haves underground and left the have-nots to fend for themselves on the surface with irradiated cockroaches the size of house cats and even more monstrous mutants.
