I have had a lot of difficulty for a very long time trying to put down how I feel about Fallout and what it means to me. It wasn't just my first game in the series, it was my first experience with genuine, guttural, post-apocalyptia, to say my first exposure to the genre. When I was small, so small I can't remember the specific age, I found this in my dad's box of pc games he had when we were moving into a new house, along with copies of Planescape, Baldur's Gate and VtM: Bloodlines. I was more interested in Baldur's Gate because of the innate attraction young boys have to glowing skulls, but my dad was insistent I would enjoy this more, so he installed it for me. I can't really catch how booting the game up for the first time and hearing Moribund World hit my ears was here without strong tinges of bias and nostalgia, but it was the first time a computer game had ever made my sugar and milk addled brain feel something at the time.

I was divorced from this game for a very long time, I had gotten to Junktown then, but my mom, being measurably more conservative than my dad had, asked him to uninstall the game and I had to wait some time to play it again. I was 16 when I got my hands on it.

In my experience it is uniquely difficult for a computer game to depict quiet, pure, silence and stillness, not just dead air or an empty atmosphere, but truly nothing. Fallout's game world is uniquely empty, but empty the same way your psyche stills itself when you think of your own death.
This silence is the nexus of how you engage with and experience the narrative. Just as important as dialogue, The feeling of still air and the edge of death coalesces into navigation and movement. In the early game you have to tread carefully, the reduced encounter rate in comparison to other rpgs means you'll rarely ever find adversity, but the scale and nature of your enemies, and of the world itself and its inhabitants, are not forgetful to remind you of your place, but in the mid game it comes as release. A more well armed survivor's respite, the conclusion to the edge, or the stillness, is incredible violence. Your release comes in your ability to perform violence with the nuclear powered armaments that ended the old world, and as you become stronger the game world dies more, the introduction of full combat with the games strongest enemies, a gang of super mutants, occurring in a literal necropolis.

Tim Cain has stated that what he sought to explore wasn't just a sci-fi setting, but human nature and it's proclivity to violence, and the inevitable conclusion.
"War never changes" is the tagline because of the trend in history of inventing a weapon so brutal no one would ever wage war with it. From the longbow, to gunpowder, and now the nuclear bomb. People believed they'd made a weapon so vile and evil no one could want to wage war with it. The master wielded a new weapon to end war. In his plan, post-humanity, the mutant race, and the end of human dominance would save the world but he had only engendered another world ending weapon, and no weapon, of any devastation, will ever be more powerful than the human capacity to use it.