Fallout

Fallout is the 1997 post-apocalyptic role-playing game from Interplay that essentially restarted the CRPG genre after years of dormancy, and a substantial portion of the genre's modern vocabulary traces directly back to its design choices. You play the Vault Dweller, sent out of Vault 13 in 2161 to find a replacement water chip before the vault's hundred-odd inhabitants die of thirst. The wasteland you walk into is a savaged 1950s-imagined retrofuture where civilisation collapsed in 2077 and the survivors are still picking through the ruins of what the bombs left.

The SPECIAL system anchors everything. Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck define your character at creation, with skills, perks and traits layering on top, and the resulting build genuinely shapes how the game plays through to the ending. A high-Charisma character can talk through encounters that a high-Strength character has to fight through; a high-Intelligence character can hack and reason through mysteries that a low-Intelligence character can barely understand. The branching dialogue and skill checks are the game's main interface to its world.

The Pip-Boy 2000 tracks your map, quests and bookkeeping. Bottlecaps serve as the post-collapse currency. Turn-based tactical combat handles the violence when conversation breaks down, with action points governing how much you can do per turn. Settlements scattered across post-nuclear California — Junktown, the Hub, the Boneyard, Necropolis and the rest — have their own factions, their own histories, and their own moral economies, and your decisions in each ripple forward through the rest of the game. The narrative skeleton — an underground enclave sending a single representative out into a corrupted world — became one of the most-imitated structures in the genre.