I am old enough to have seen this reviewed in a magazine, thought it looked like something I would like, from a company I already liked, went down to my local INDEPENDENT games store one Saturday, and did what I did every Saturday with other gamers and the staff for a couple hours, talk about gaming! Back then it was more Commodore 64, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, and, of course, PC.
The staff (manager and one staff member only!) had been playing the game for a week and both raved about it. Someone else had played the demo and we all laughed about the 4mb computer you get to find in the demo, where you luckily have a chip on you to get it working and get to go to a Fallout folder on the PC and play the game on it (not really!) with your avatar saying 'cool game!'!!
This was the good old days, when no one had heard of 'next gen' or 'multiformat' and gaming was a hobby much more than the past-time it is today!
Younger gamers wouldn't appreciate today that back then people (like me!) could buy a game based on how good the manual was - or how thick it was - or how many floppies/CD's it came on! We didn't worry about swapping disks, we just knew the more disks the bigger the game - and gameplay hours was big back then, with games getting negative scores if they had less than 30 hours of gameplay!
When I took one look at the 'Vault' manual and glanced at the first few pages I knew I wanted the game - all that talk about how nuclear bombs were made, etc! I loved the whole style of the box and that night found the packaging style was continued in the game!
The following Saturday I was down at the store and everyone wanted to know what I thought of Fallout, I was so gushing about it, but back then, amongst fellow gamers it was perfectly acceptable!
We spent nearly 3 hours at the store that Saturday, and Fallout was all we talked about. How why did so many games not come up to Fallout's standard, and what game's were like it!
The store manager told me the following month that Fallout had been his biggest seller of the years so far, and that my enthusiasm helped him sell 2 or 3 extra copies! For this is gave me a 20% discount on a compilation he thought I would be interested in. It was called 'The Ultimate RPG Archives' and it had a dozen classic RPG's on it, like The Bard's Tale series, Ultima Underground 1 and 2 and a game called 'Wasteland'....... The forerunner of Fallout! Needless to say when I saw that, I bought it there and then!
The mid to late 90's were a great time to be a gamer. The chainstores and supermarkets were only selling console games, there was no Amazon or Steam, and if you wanted a game, you had mail order or your local independent store, ran my gamers for gamers! On top of that you had all those wonderful big boxes with big manuals - and all those genres from hardcore simulations (ie Falcon 4.0) to adventure games (ie The Longest Journey) and educational games (ie Carmen San Diego) that we don't see any more in the mainstream marketplace.
So good times all around, and for 6 months Fallout was at the centre of it!
By the way, I still have that big box Fallout I bought that day, with it's excellent 'vault' manual, and I still have that Ultimate RPG Archives compilation! I am playing Fallout again right now, and just before Christmas last year, I finished Wasteland - for the third time For me, the 00's cannot touch the 90's when it comes to classic PC games. And based on this year, I think the 10's will not match the 00's. in other words I think we are now into the twentieth year of PC gamings decline when it comes to the quality and quantity of PC game releases!
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