The brilliant Impossible Mission, from Epyx, started the journey, putting me into the mysterious tights of a mysterious man on an even more mysterious (and impossible) mission. Armed with only his wits and a fantastically rendered somersault trick, the mystery man managed to maneuver his way through a maze-like secret complex, avoiding deadly traps and thwarting evil robots along the way. The absence of other human beings in this complex, yet abundance of human objects, suggested a bustling installation which somehow, and for some reason, had been rapidly evacuated. Either the designers at Epyx had brilliantly conceived this game as part of a long-range plan to soothe my shattered ego, or my imagination was humming at just the right frequency to perceive IM's empty hallways and eerily unpopulated work stations as post apocalyptic. Either way, the game's sense of atmosphere moved me profoundly.
I hesitate to mention Mad Max, for the NES, because it is honestly not that great of a game, but it did make the Apocalypse seem fun. Fast cars, half-naked women, vast desert landscapes (all imagined, of course - the graphics looked terrible); for a kid with an apocalypse fetish, it was a must-have. I had it. It helped. Let's move on. Like that girl at that party that night that I was upset about that other girl going off with that guy, it's best we don't talk about it in any great detail. Someone bought it for me. Or maybe it came with my NES. Please, let's just move on.
Many years later, I found the bright, shining champion of post-apocalypse gaming. Half-Life, with its brilliant artificial intelligence, engaging story and near-perfect immersion, placed me into the suit of a man just trying to survive the unimaginable in a way no game had ever done before. Crawling out of the shattered passageways of the Black Mesa complex was like crawling out from under half a lifetime of repressed fears and barely-remembered emotional scars. I'd been waiting for a game like Half-Life for a very long time. It brought me one step away from completing my journey.
Fallout, Black Isle's innovative post-apocalyptic RPG, finally forced me to face my darkest fears. In Fallout, the world has been reduced to rubble - yet you survive. You begin the game inside a community fallout shelter called a "Vault," where you have lived for your entire life. The Vault Elder informs you that there is a problem. The water purifier is failing, and the elders have decided that someone has to go outside to find a new one. They've chosen you.
Not since the heady days of Glasnost and Infocom text adventures had a game begun with a more pitch-perfect set-up. The massive door of the Vault opens and you are unceremoniously thrust out of the only home you've ever known and into ... well, The Day After. Only, in the game, it's actually been decades after. And, as bad as we've been led to believe the world will get in the days following World War III, in the years following that, it's become much, much worse.
