Leave hope…

Fallout 2. No, not the second season of the series. It’s Fallout 2. There’s so much in this title for me. Today I caught myself thinking that the weather outside the window and the mood are such that they say “load…run…disappear from this gloomy universe into an even bleaker one. But so familiar…” – the taste of childhood is not “ice cream for 50 kopecks”. It’s when you went to the store with a sore throat to change discs, and one of the two turned out to be Fallout 2. You liked the “dude on the cover”. And you realized that this is exactly what…

I remember the snowy weather, and the fact that my sore throat didn’t get any better after the hike. But then I discovered a whole universe for myself. I spent half a day working on a quest to “open” doors, because I couldn’t even imagine that in a game you could not just “click” but set off a timer-activated explosive, throw it out of your backpack and… blow up that damn door. That was something incredible. This universe was incredible. Because games back then were about possibilities. About tones of text. About stories you lived with and with which you fell asleep and woke up.

Fallout 2 was the revelation for me about how games could be made and how limitless they could be in terms of possibilities. It wasn’t a game, it was a cinematic adventure. I can name a bunch of games from that time, like Phantasmagoria, that stood out from the AAA knockoffs like Assassins Creed that are coming out now. Because back then, games were about the idea, not the cover (pun intended, I know).