How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Jokes About Nuclear War in ‘Fallout 76’
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3paja/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-jokes-about-nuclear-war-in-fallout-76
In a fallout shelter underneath the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia, someone in a large foam Vault Boy suit cavorts around a delegation of journalists and YouTubers. “I just love him,” Debbie Loudermilk, a retired park ranger and a tour guide at the fallout shelter, says, nodding at Vault Boy. “He’s so non-doomsday. That’s very cool.”
I traveled to West Virginia at Bethesda’s invitation—to be among the first people to play Fallout 76. I was nervous because I love the Fallout series and I was worried Bethesda was going to fuck it up. But I was also nervous to be underground in a fallout shelter Congress would have used in the event of a nuclear war. Fallout was changing in ways I didn’t like. In a first for the series, Fallout 76 is a multiplayer game, which allows players to nuke each other. To me, that sounded disrespectful of the terror my parents and their parents had lived through, when Americans thought that a nuclear attack from Russia was a real possibility.