To intensify the claustrophobic feeling within Vault 101, where your people have lived in confinement since the bombs began, the game begins at your birth, then fades in and out of your childhood. Said seaboard includes a wrecked Washington DC, a place called Rivet City built inside the rotting hulk of an aircraft carrier and smaller places primed for nonexistence, such as the town of Megaton with its worshipped, unexploded nuclear bomb.

Even the part of this game before you come to the surface, with its wrecked Eastern seaboard, sounds like a slice of RPG genius.