Fallout 1 Story Explained: Plot and Endings

Fallout came out in 1997, made by Interplay Productions. It's set in 2161 in what's left of southern California, 84 years after the Great War, and it started the whole series. A young resident of Vault 13 goes out to find a replacement water chip and ends up stopping an army of super mutants. This page covers the whole plot and the ending, so it has full spoilers. (Fallout)

Before the story begins#

The bombs fell on 23 October 2077. Vault 13 was one of the shelters built by Vault-Tec, and its residents had stayed sealed inside for more than eight decades. By 2161 the people running it were the children and grandchildren of the original dwellers, and few of them had ever seen the sky. (Fallout)

Outside, the wasteland had started to rebuild. Small towns traded water and goods, ghouls lived in the ruins of Los Angeles, and the Brotherhood of Steel held a bunker at Lost Hills. Nobody in the vault knew any of this. The other thing they didn't know was that, decades earlier, a doctor named Richard Grey had led an expedition from the Hub to an old army base called Mariposa. He fell into a vat of the Forced Evolutionary Virus and came out as something else. (Fallout)

The water chip#

The vault's water chip, the part that ran its water purification, failed. The overseer, Jacoren, gave one young dweller a Pip-Boy 2000, a little equipment and the job of finding a replacement. He said there were about 150 days of water left. The vault's records pointed to Vault 15, the nearest other vault, as the best place to look. (Fallout)

The first settlement the Vault Dweller reached was Shady Sands, a farming village behind a wall, led by a man named Aradesh. It was being harassed by radscorpions and by raiders called the Khans, who kidnapped Aradesh's daughter, Tandi. The Vault Dweller could deal with both and bring Tandi home. A villager named Ian joined them on the road. (Fallout)

Vault 15 was a dead end. It had been abandoned, its lower levels were wrecked, and there was no chip to take. The search moved on to the trading towns. In Junktown, the sheriff, Killian Darkwater, was in a feud with a crime boss called Gizmo, and the Vault Dweller could side with either. Further south, the Hub was the biggest town in the region, run by merchants and water sellers. There, an old ghoul named Harold told the story of Richard Grey's expedition to the base in the northwest, and of the mutants that seemed to be coming from it. (Fallout)

Necropolis and the mutant army#

The trail for the chip led to Necropolis, the ruins of Bakersfield, home to ghouls ruled by a ghoul named Set. Underneath it lay Vault 12, a vault whose door had never closed properly, and whose residents had become the ghouls when radiation flooded in. Its water chip still worked. The Vault Dweller took it, though super mutants were already watching the town. (Fallout)

The chip went back to Vault 13, and the overseer had a new problem. The Vault Dweller had seen enough to know the super mutants weren't random. They were organised, they were searching for vaults, and there were more of them every week. Jacoren sent the Vault Dweller back out to find out who was making them and to stop it. (Fallout)

The Brotherhood and the Boneyard#

The Brotherhood of Steel had the weapons and armour to fight an army. They only let the Vault Dweller in after a test: a trip into the Glow, a radioactive crater that had once been a pre-war research site. Inside the Lost Hills bunker, the Vault Dweller met the Brotherhood's leadership, including the paladin Rhombus and the elder John Maxson, and learned what the Brotherhood knew about the mutants. (Fallout)

The search then reached the Boneyard, the ruins of Los Angeles. Different groups held different blocks: the walled settlement of Adytum, the gangs called the Blades and the Regulators, the gunsmiths of the Gun Runners, and the Followers of the Apocalypse, who wanted to spread knowledge and opposed the mutants. The Followers warned about a religious group called the Children of the Cathedral, whose church in the Boneyard was growing fast. (Fallout)

The Master and the Unity#

The Children of the Cathedral were a front. The Master lived underneath their church, in the old Los Angeles Vault. He had been Richard Grey. The FEV had fused him with flesh and machinery into a huge psychic mass, and he spoke in several voices at once. He believed humanity's differences would always end in war, and that turning everyone into super mutants would make one people. He called this the Unity. (Fallout)

His army got its new soldiers from Mariposa Military Base, where a mutant called the Lieutenant ran the dipping vats. The Lieutenant explained why vaults mattered so much: people from the vaults had been sealed away from radiation, so their bodies took FEV far better than ordinary wastelanders. Vault 13 was exactly what the Master was looking for. (Fallout)

The Vault Dweller had two jobs left. One was Mariposa. Inside the base, they found the vats, dealt with the Lieutenant and set the base's self-destruct, destroying the source of the super mutants. The other was the Master himself. Under the Cathedral, the Vault Dweller could fight him, or argue with him. Super mutants, it turned out, were sterile. The Unity could never have children, so it could only ever be a dead end for the human race. With the evidence in front of him, the Master accepted it and set off a nuclear device that destroyed himself and the Cathedral. (Fallout)

The ending explained#

With both the Master and the vats gone, the Vault Dweller walked home to Vault 13. The overseer met them at the door. He said they had done more for the vault and for humanity than anyone, and then told them they couldn't come back in. The Vault Dweller had changed too much out there, and if the others saw them and heard their stories, they would all want to leave. For the good of the vault, the hero who saved it was sent away. The last scene shows the Vault Dweller walking off into the desert. (Fallout)

The ending slides then run through the places the Vault Dweller visited. These depend on choices made along the way: whether Aradesh and Tandi lived, who ran Junktown, whether Necropolis was saved, how the Hub and the Boneyard fared. There is also a darker version of the final scene, where the Vault Dweller shoots the overseer before leaving. (Fallout)

The game's message is in that last walk. The vault was meant to protect people, and it stayed sealed so long that its overseer chose to keep it sealed rather than face the world outside, even after the world had been made safer for it. (Fallout)

What later games treat as canon#

Fallout 2 picks up the story 80 years later and settles most of the open questions. The Vault Dweller killed the Master and destroyed the vats, then was exiled, and the overseer was not shot. The Vault Dweller's memoirs, an item in Fallout 2, say the Cathedral fell before Mariposa. The same game confirms Necropolis was overrun by super mutants, with its ghouls scattered to other towns. (Fallout 2)

Shady Sands' ending is the most important one for the series. In the slide where both Aradesh and Tandi live, Tandi helps her father build a new community, and they are responsible for the New California Republic. Fallout 2 follows that version: by then Tandi is the NCR's president. In Fallout: New Vegas, Caesar looks back on Tandi as the NCR's last strong leader, more queen than elected president. (Fallout; Fallout 2; Fallout: New Vegas)

The TV series reveals that Shady Sands, by then the NCR's capital, was later destroyed by a nuclear strike, and that people from Vault-Tec's vaults were behind it. (Fallout, "The Beginning")

What it sets up#

After the exile, the Vault Dweller and a few companions travelled north and founded the village of Arroyo. Their grandchild, the Chosen One, is the hero of Fallout 2, and their old vault becomes the target of the next game's quest. The rest of the series keeps coming back to the threads this game started: FEV, the super mutants, the Brotherhood and the NCR. For where it sits among the other games, see the Fallout timeline and the Fallout story explained. (Fallout 2)