Summary
Every singleFalloutgame, canon, unfinished, or otherwise, takes place in a real part of America. The Interplay and Obsidian titles are set on the West Coast, whilethe Bethesda games are set on the East, exploring an alternate history that resulted in a retrofuturistic apocalypse.
One fan is ambitiously piecing together all of the maps across the series' 30-year history, pinpointing exactly where each Fallout takes place. The project has become so big that they’re even calling on those interested in their progress to support them on Patreon so that they can continue the work.
The West Coast
The Fallout series began in California with San Diego and Los Angeles along the coast. The first two games, and the cancelled third–codenamed Van Buren–almost perfectly fit 1:1 with the real world. So, they slot nicely over the West Coast, with Fallout 2 taking us further up north to Sacramento and San Francisco.
You can see the map in more detail via their Discord, complete with in-game overlays and vaults.
Fallout, Van Buren, andNew Vegas’maps crossover slightly, with the Strip smack bang in the middle of the two Interplay games. Van Buren has by far the biggest map, spanning Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and Wyoming. It would have included Hoover Dam, which is a pivotal part of New Vegas, so it even stretches into theMojave.
The East Coast
Tunnel Snakes Fool has recently moved onto the Bethesda games, namely Fallout 3, and has not only been mapping Washington DC, but also expansions like The Pitt. Since it’s more linear than the base game, its rendition of Pittsburgh fits onto the real-life American map almost perfectly.
They have even mapped Anchorage, which they say is “the one time Bethesda (thus far) has had a scaled map”.
The capital is a lot more complicated, so TSF has had to split Fallout 3’s map into sections for more accurate results. However, they did tease that Fallout 4 is “better section wise”, so shouldn’t be as much of a problem to fit into the wider picture.
Soon enough, thanks to TSF, we’ll have a definitive map of every Fallout game laid on top of America, giving us a complete picture of the Wasteland so far. It’s fun seeing how the games compare to the real world, and it has even shed light on certain theories like the Courier nukingShady Sandsin New Vegas–going by the TV locationandthe games, they’d have completely missed.
Fallout
Fallout is a franchise built around a series of RPGs set in a post-nuclear world, in which great vaults have been built to shelter parts of humankind. There are six main games, various spin-offs, tabletop games, and a TV series from Amazon Studios.
