“I studied at University College London where they have the Jeremy Bentham auto-icon and the whole concept of that is weird,” Fallout: London project manager Dean ‘Prilladog’ Carter tells me.
“For those that don’t know, basically he mummified himself and he called it his auto-icon and in his little box in UCL is his skeleton. His head didn’t get mummified correctly, so it all melted, so they gave him like a plastic wax head,” he continues. “Literally, I love the idea so much because that alone in the real world – it’s there now – seemed very Fallout. I was like, let’s put Futurama in this kind of deal. We’re gonna whack that head in a glass thing sitting on a Protectron and yeah, the rest is what you see in the mod.”
Thus was born Fallout: London’s Jeremy Bentham bot, a mechanical marvel which lets you see just how dire a failed mummification can be for a person’s hairline. Oh, and it also lets you debate the state of post-apocalyptic London society with the founder of modern utilitarian philosophy.
It’s just one of the great little touches which make Fallout: London feel not just like a Fallout game, but an unofficial entry in the series that makes use of its setting to craft a truly unique Fallout experience, one unafraid to openly snigger at the strange society that lives on our little island of sadness and teabags.
“I’m from London, born and bred, and lots of the team is from the UK,” Carter explains, “We understand our own culture. We are the biggest self-parodies out there, we don’t hold back. We’ve actually had more feedback from people not from the UK, [saying], ‘Oh, are you sure that’s allowed?’, ‘Can you say that?’ It’s like, yeah, I’m from the country, we can say that, it’s completely fine.
“We know for a fact that our class system is bonkers and we definitely play into that. We’ve done it to the extreme. You meet The Gentry, they are what people envision in the UK. So, if you’re from the lower classes, I hate the terminology, but if you’re from the lower class, you would look at The Gentry or the toffs, and you’d be like, ‘Okay, yeah, that’s what I envisioned them to be’. Then, if you look at it from the [other] way [round, looking down], it’s that. So, we’ve just done what I think is a very old class system and we just took it to like the nth degree. I don’t think anything should be off the table for that, because we are a parody as a country.”
The result, naturally, has been a game that touches on a lot of the same themes and talking points that you’ll hear in discussions about UK politics and current events – especially times as newsworthy as those we’re currently living through.
“People on Reddit have already said that our PR campaign needs to slow down,” Carter jokes. “They said ‘is this all part of an elaborate thing that Fallout: London [was planning]?’ Obviously we’ve had the elections come up, and we’ve got the sort of things that have happened from that, and now we have riots happening in the UK and they’re like, ‘Fallout: London’s PR is off the wall’. Like no, it’s got nothing to do with us. If people want to draw their own comparisons and stuff then that’s up to them.”
For someone who lives or has grown up in a country as old and strange as England, to understand the ethos that underpins a society with enough historical baggage and bizarre entrenched traditions to fill about 20 thousand BBC-produced podcasts featuring professors from Cambridge and Oxford, understanding it enough to parody it might not be too difficult. But what if you’re from somewhere else in the world, and have never stepped foot in drizzly Blighty?
“When we brought on new writers, at the very start, we actually had like a required reading list or a required watching list. [There] were things like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, [we were] like you need to watch these to even remotely understand the tone that we’re going for, because a lot of the jokes and the references are based around those sorts of movies,” Carter tells me. “So, people watched those and we had a Brazilian guy, fantastic writer, he wrote one of the best companions in my opinion, and he came back after watching them and was like ‘Now I understand’. Because he’s come from a completely different culture which doesn’t understand Britain, he watched these movies, and it’s like now I understand what you’re going for.
“Also, for the day-in day-out, we use voice chat quite a lot. We always sit in [that]. So, we have a lot of, as you [can] imagine from anything when you’ve worked here for five years, it’s like a huge water cooler in there and we just sit around the water cooler talking. We have personal jokes, and you do have a sense of community where you have these people that are not from the UK having to very quickly learn what my jokes are like and what other British people’s jokes are like.
“We literally almost have like a trial period, where if you don’t understand us within a month, you’re probably not going to and you’re probably not a great fit. Whereas we’ve literally had people insulting me within one week of joining. And it’s weird because I’m like, ‘yeah, you’re my [kind of] person, welcome aboard’ type of deal. That’s just how we’ve worked, and it’s that sense of family. I know it’s a cliche but that sense of the family is definitely something we feel like we’ve [cultivated], and that has bled into the game, and I really, really like that.”
That said, not all of Fallout London’s nods to British culture were planned out or thought up early on. Specifically, the inclusion of much-memed former UK Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow to voice a robot that presides over that same house in the mod, and all of this effort to make the mod’s depiction of the UK feel genuine fit in alongside Team FOLON’s efforts to simply make Fallout: London the kind of Fallout game the group had in mind.
“I think that was one of the things where we definitely delved back into the older games,” Carter says. “In my opinion, I love what Bethesda has done with the series, but it definitely was a bit more sugar-coated for like some of the niceties, they glazed over some of the darker elements that the original games definitely had in. We wanted to sort of bring that back somewhat and I think the humour from the original games fits very well with the sort of dark humour that we have in the United Kingdom. So, we can be serious when we want to be serious, but at the same time, we will just say some of the darkest jokes going.
“You have to offset it, because if you make it too dark, then it’s just a depressing game and it doesn’t feel like Fallout and if you put too many jokes in it, then it also doesn’t feel like Fallout. There is a fine line. I think personally, I’m obviously biased, I feel like we hit it, but judging by some of the feedback, I feel like people have understood what we were going for and that’s great.”
When it comes to doing things the classic Fallout way, Carter does pick out one area where the team is planning on making additions aimed at those who prefer the ways of more modern Fallout. “The biggest criticism we got back was that some people said that we didn’t explain a lot of things going forward, as in like when you come to say Thameshaven or you come to the Swan and Mitre, you’re like ‘Who are these people?’ Now you can find that out through conversation, but I feel like a lot of the feedback we got is because people are expecting something a bit more like Fallout 4, where you almost have the first person you meet sits there and explains A, B, and C. We didn’t want that. We wanted it to be like Fallout 1 and 2. Maybe that’s on us for thinking that people still play one and two and there’s the element of people who just need things explained.
“So one of our I guess like a smaller update [will be] those people will appear that will do that for them. Allow the lore monkeys to actually go and get the lore that they want and they can get all that like really in-depth stuff that they are really looking for without having to hunt through like 10 different conversations, but also for the people that need it a bit more spelled out, then they can go and get that as well. So, we just try to cater to everyone and that’ll be like a smaller update, we’re going to contact the voice actors and be like, ‘Can you help do these things?’ and do that.”
Meanwhile, when it comes to finding lore and interesting characters in the world of Fallout: London, Carter cited its at least partly Peaky Blinders-inspired gang war questline as something players shouldn’t overlook, even if it “stops at the moment prematurely” due to the absence of the Wild Card quest arc the team plans to add back in down the line. “I don’t know why we decided to do the gang war quest line, because that hasn’t really been done as far as I’m aware in any of the other games, you simply have your main quest line and then that’s it.
“I mean that’s what people don’t quite realise, is that Fallout: London basically has almost two main quest lines. You obviously have the main quest line, where you go and meet the Fifth Column, Camelot, etcetera, etcetera, or you then go off with The Vagabonds and you do what we call the gang war quest line, but that is still like a three-part endeavour. It’s not as fleshed out as the other one, but yeah, you can still basically have a full game.
“If you were to just do The Vagabonds and then stop at the end of that, that’s as long as some of the previous games have been, yet you also then have the other route. I don’t know why we chose to do that, I’m glad we did. It allowed us to build up these characters more and put more information in them, I just think it just adds to the world, personally.”
Carter also says he’d love to see other modders have a go at adding their own touches to bits of the game like the gang war, saying: “I want to see an ending where, I don’t know, [Sebastian] Gaunt becomes the King of England. Like, sure, mod that in, go for it with our permission, just don’t use AI.”
One thing modders won’t have to add into Fallout: London, however, are contraceptives. Yep, in a fun twist, Carter confirmed to me that the condoms – dubbed jimmy hats – you may find as you explore London are not a bit of British slang you might not be aware of, but a product of Team FOLON’s efforts to import plenty of ideas from the original Fallouts and the cancelled Van Buren. Though, he couldn’t tell me for certain why they offer the 20 rad resistance that they do.
“I think the stats were something similar like that, or it was just something that was an idea to sort of prompt them, because they’re not the most common of things,” the modder said, “I know there have been conversations on Reddit [with] people envisioning how they help. Some people said would you be wearing them as a swimming cap? Is it a full body suit? It’s just whatever you want it to be.”
So, there you go, there’s no definitive answer to Fallout: London’s condom conundrum. At least until someone mods in a way to ask the Jeremy Bentham bot which way of wearing a jimmy hat will bring the greatest amount of rad resistance to the greatest number of Wayfarers.
