Hi, I'm David Barr-Curtley, author of the Book Save Me Please and other stories, and welcome to episode 618 of Geeks Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Chris Avalon, who you may remember from our panel on video games and books and movies back in episode 163.

He's one of the video game industry's top writers, famous for his work on games such as

Plainscape Torment, Knights of the Old Republic 2, Fallout 2, and Fallout New Vegas. And in this

interview, we'll be discussing the role of storytelling in the Fallout series of post-apocalyptic

video games and getting Chris's reaction to the Fallout TV show. And now here's

her interview with Chris Avalon. All right, so we're here with Chris Avalon. Welcome to the show.

Thank you, David. I appreciate the invite. Okay, so when you played the original Fallout game,

what did you think of the story? Well, actually, that's a challenging question. I actually

didn't play it like fresh. I actually got to observe its development, so I watched like its story

take place in stages over time at Interplay in Black Isle Studios. So I got to watch the story slowly

develop. But the nice thing was I didn't know everything about every narrative arc

in the game, so I was still able to be surprised while playing it. And so when you, I mean,

when you look back on it now, or even with that, you know, the benefit of that knowledge,

like what do you think of the story? I thought it was, so the reason I'm pausing is because what I think Fallout did really well is present a very simple premise, a very tropey situation.

We're like, hey, it's a post-apocalyptic world.

It's being threatened by super mutants.

You're the only one who can save the world from destruction. And if I heard that one

sentence, I would immediately be bored. I wouldn't want to play it. I'm like, I know where this is

going. It doesn't sound very interesting. But what really matter was the execution and the tone of the

world, the whole feel of the 1950s view of what the future would be like and then like drop a bunch of nuclear warheads

on it. I thought that the voice cast was amazing, the writing was amazing, but especially

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