Why people love wandering the world of Fallout, Stalker and The Last of Us so much
Post-apocalypse. Post-apocalypse never changes. The world after the end of the world is one of the most recognizable modern settings, and the images of the world after a nuclear war or an epidemic are familiar even to those who have not heard of Fallout, Crossout or Stalker. But where did he come from?
In a more or less modern form, the post-apocalyptic genre took shape at the beginning of the 19th century. Mary Shelley gave the world the monster of Frankenstein, but much less known is her three-volume saga, The Last Man, about Europe being ravaged by plague and climate shocks. Raider gangs, insane religious preachers, and people trying to keep islands of order in an insane world — modern post-apocalypse fans would find surprisingly many familiarities. Shelley’s book was ahead of its time, and it was only reprinted in 1965. Just when the topic of the end of the world and the death of mankind became extremely relevant.
In the shadow of a bomb
Now it is difficult to imagine, but people have lived for more than forty years, expecting that a nuclear war could really start at any moment. Actually, even the Fallout Vaults are just a free fantasy about completely real projects that were developed in the United States for much more mundane purposes than creating the entourage of video games.
Cover of Life Magazine (1961) featuring a “radiation protection suit for civilians”
The Pentagon pondered a lot about what to do if a rocket with a sickle and a hammer and a star appeared in the backyard of an ordinary American. The most ambitious was the project of Herman Kahn, who proposed building multimillion-dollar shelters. The post-nuclear future in his projects was like a concentration camp. Inhabitants of these vaults were required to wear color-coded clothing indicating the dwelling unit and rank. Their whole life would be subject to the strictest regulations, the observance of which was to be monitored by the security service; a punishment cell was necessarily created in each residential block – in a word, the brave scientist did not forget about anything. True, such monstrous shelters demanded a lot of money for construction and maintenance.
But in the late 50s and early 60s, businesses flourished selling ready-made nuclear shelters. In the most budgetary version, a happy man in the street for two hundred bucks received a set of metal sheets, a set of parts and instructions on how to assemble a bunker of the “bury yourself” model from all this. The cost and quality of the more expensive and complex options were limited only by the imagination of the customers – there were family shelters for the middle class, and VIP bunkers with imitation of landscapes and starlight, bars, barbecue areas, jacuzzis and swimming pools. Entrepreneur Gerard Henderson loved his own hideout so much that he lived right in it and died safely at a depth of ten meters. Advertising of such shelters was in a purely American spirit – on one of the posters, an exemplary American married couple looked with smiles at the children frolicking in a nuclear bunker,
The paranoia was fueled by the regular incidents of the loss of nuclear weapons in every possible way. It got to the point of curiosity when, after accidentally dropping an atomic bomb (the warhead itself did not detonate), newspapers published requests to the townsfolk to return pieces of nuclear ammunition that had fallen into kitchen gardens and stolen as a keepsake. One of the “lost” bombs in general still lies in the swamp of North Carolina – they did not get it because of the great depth and the risk of setting up an accidental explosion.
All this time, the military made plans for each other more beautifully – from a proposal to win the Vietnam war with a massive nuclear strike to the creation of sabotage special forces with knapsack bombs for explosions in East Berlin. Over Vietnam, by the way, it was planned to detonate more than a hundred atomic warheads. It was assumed that American soldiers, better equipped and prepared for combat in the face of radioactive contamination, would be easier to endure radiation than the Viet Cong. But from such bold ideas, politicians began to clutch at their hearts, and the military had to confine themselves to ordinary carpet bombing, napalm, defoliants and similar simple joys.
Red end of the world
The Soviet Union had its own history. The bomb shelters were created centrally, and literally every student knew what to do in the event of an attack – the lessons of basic military training were taken seriously. But they have repeatedly tried to adapt the nuclear bomb for the peaceful needs of the national economy. For example, with directed nuclear explosions at different times, it was proposed to bomb the ice of the Northern Sea Route so as not to interfere with navigation, and once Academician Zeldovich, at the dawn of Soviet cosmonautics, generally suggested sending a satellite to the moon equipped with a nuclear warhead and stuck with detonators like a sea mine. Zeldovich, of course, wanted to do this not for fun and not in order to frighten the Americans. It was just that space technology was just being created in those years, and he wanted to check whether such a satellite would reach the Moon at all.
Civil defense poster
So for the Soviet Union, the topic of the peaceful and military atom was also, for obvious reasons, close. The nuclear apocalypse gradually penetrated into Soviet cinema as well. For example, in 1986 the film “Letters of a Dead Man” was released, which took place just after the atomic war. The film was a success and even shocked the audience. Moreover, it came out just during the largest nuclear disaster of its time – the Chernobyl one. By the way, the exclusion zone turned out to be interesting not only for the huge number of “abandoned”. For example, at one time there lived a “tarzan” boy, a homeless child who hunted with a homemade crossbow. After rumors of a wild man, the patrol found “Tarzan” butchering the carcass of Przewalski’s horse. The horses were brought in for the purpose of a scientific experiment, and they grew up in real “mutant” zones – they quickly multiplied and began to terrorize the wolves. Observers told eerie stories about how Przewalski’s horses hunted lone wolves for a long time or threw them up with their hooves and dropped them to the ground. Another kind of “mutants” were giant catfish that settled in the pond, which originally served to cool the reactor, and … feral cows. They don’t have two heads like the brahmins in Fallout, but they quickly developed social skills. The nuclear herd is headed by an old bull, under his command, other bulls guard cows and calves, fight off predators, and not only survive, but also feel good. They don’t have two heads like the brahmins in Fallout, but they quickly developed social skills. The nuclear herd is headed by an old bull, under his command, other bulls guard cows and calves, fight off predators, and not only survive, but also feel good. They don’t have two heads like the brahmins in Fallout, but they quickly developed social skills. The nuclear herd is headed by an old bull, under his command, other bulls guard cows and calves, fight off predators, and not only survive, but also feel good.
Note that we deliberately put the word “mutant” in quotation marks. There is no talk of any mutations: scientists working in the Chernobyl zone note that animals feel more than at ease here – primarily due to the almost complete absence of humans. And even if it was not possible to find some unseen monsters, but observing how the behavior of animals in an unexpectedly wild area is changing, gave a lot of valuable information to scientists.
However, the post-Soviet space has produced many ghost towns and objects, on which only winds and stalkers walk. For example, in Pavlovsky Bay there is a whole cemetery of submarines – not only the remains of the base have been preserved there, but also the boats themselves awaiting disposal. So for the former USSR, the interest in post-apocalypse is easily explainable – this is a reality that is not so far from us.
Pavlovsky bay
Gypsies roam California in a noisy crowd
The reality around us, by the way, shows literal examples of how people live in a post-apocalypse regime. Many countries in the Middle East have literally implemented the wasteland life scenarios from “Mad Max” and the same Fallout. Fortunately, even with deserts everything is in order there – not with nuclear ones, but, so to speak, with natural ones. What is a game for us is part of life for regions like the African Sahel. Raiders, disintegration of the country into zones of control of groups with insane leaders – everything is obvious. True, in practice, post-apocalypse turns out to be a rather resource-intensive phenomenon. A world “like in Wasteland” can only exist if food, fuel and ammunition are regularly thrown from the outside. After all, “post-apocalyptic” cars devour gasoline and spare parts as if not into themselves – just because they are assembled and repaired by artisans, and they do not drive on highways. And the ammunition for the guns is flying away rapidly. This is not to mention the fact that even small communities need to constantly eat and drink. So the post-apocalypse zone in real life is constantly exchanging resources with more prosperous places.
Sometimes the schemes are even very intricate. For example, the Tubu tribe lives in the north of Chad. Gold mines form the basis of its prosperity. Many people in Chad need gold, but the government is weak and the tuba are armed. Therefore, after mining, gold does not go to the capital, but to the border with Libya, in which a civil war is raging. Through Libya, gold is transported to the Mediterranean Sea, to Misurata, a port city that no one calls a state, but which has successfully spat on all governments. And from the free city, nuggets go on ships to those buyers who do not ask where they came from. So two post-apocalyptic communities feed on such a caravan route – both “NKR” and “Arroyo” of this real Fallout.
Well, well, it’s clear where the genre’s legs grow from. But why do they love him at all?
Life itself among the ruins and radioactive dumps, it would seem, will please few people. Even without asking stupid questions about how the Asylum Dweller looks for a dentist when needed, and where Max Rokatansky gets toilet paper. But still – what is the attraction of the genre, where almost all people were killed?
Painting “The Last Man” by the artist John Martin (1849), who was very fond of painting scenes of the apocalypse
Perhaps the answer is that post-apocalypse is freedom. We live, whatever one may say, in a fairly prosperous society. But this well-being itself is based on a thousand restrictions and rules. There are no deadlines, no boss, no taxes in the wasteland – not only the world of supermarkets has disappeared, but also the world of oppressive hierarchy. In the romantic version of the post-apocalypse, we are our own masters, not burdened by a million social obligations and a criminal code. But all feelings are real, and life is a struggle not in the sense of boring overcoming bureaucracy, lack of money and aging, but enchanting burning, live fast – die young. There are few people here, but everyone is important. The standard of life, death and power can be felt, although it is not measured in gold, but in gasoline and cartridges. You will not wish life in the established mode of the end of the world to anyone – but for an escapist, crushed by everyday life,
