Playing Games with Umbra and Fallout 4. Tropes? Or Has Someone Read My Novel?
I don’t often pre-order video games, giving them time for the developers to get the post-release bugs ironed out. Now I am more inclined than ever to wait for the game to release (thanks, Cyberpunk 2077 and CDProjektRed), so in the meantime, I decided to fall back on some of the games I’ve played and completed, to come back with fresh, older eyes and see if they still hold up.
If you are someone who’s read my blog before, you know I’ve been a fan of Fallout since Wasteland came out in 1988* (and for that matter the post-apocalypse, especially nuclear apocalypse) and couldn’t play through enough times, getting to the point where I started challenging myself to speed runs. Nowadays, I don’t have the patience and there are FAR TOO MANY games out there begging to be played**, but I did want to get myself back into the “mood” to rework the second part of Umbra that I hadn’t ever gotten around to revising.
Loaded, booted up, started to play…
As I am working through the narrative, a thought occurred to me. Several, in fact. There seemed to be a lot of “coincidences” in Fallout 4 as in my novel (for that matter, there are some “coincidences” between Umbra and Mad Max: Fury Road, too, but that’s for another blog). Umbra was written originally as an almost totally different novel during NaNoWriMo 2011, and I finished the extensive revisions to published the final novel on 3 May 2014. (For reference, Mad Max:Fury Road came out a year later in 2015, and Fallout 4 followed that November.)
Note: (in fact, make that a BIG NOTE:) I am NOT accusing Bethesda of plagiarizing anything. Of course there are going to be similarities, as anything post-nuclear is going to be mirroring the tropes.*** If anything, that’s what made the original Fallout and Fallout 2 so awesome – all the pop culture references woven through the narrative. A place like the world in Fallout was so dark and so gritty that those little punctuations of humor proved vital to the balance. Like a little salt in your cookies to define the sweetness. (Fallout 3 and 4 really missed the mark there, but Fallout: New Vegas worked some of it back in with the optional “Wild Wasteland”. R.O.U.S. anyone?)
What about the tropes, the common elements? Well, they’re not what I’m referring to, because that’s all those little expectations, what readers need to see in their preferred genres. No, I’m referring to some of the details I found that had me laughing and thinking maybe, just maybe, they had someone scarfing up anything and scouring it for additional ideas, including Umbra.
Why do I think it’s possible? For one, there was a whole year between my publication and the release. While they do need time for the game to go gold and get published, it’s also well known that game developers put their people into a nasty crunch to get it ready enough for the master to go to press. Why not cut a few corners for some ideas to throw in by combing through pre-existing material?
For what it’s worth, it’s not like they are huge parallels, like lifting the plot of my novel and putting it in the game (although FO4 does have a prominent character solving murders, he’s only a little like Vera in that he’s an outsider only just accepted by the people of Diamond City). There’s The Wall (complete with capitalization in both game and novel). There’s the left-jaw burn scar that appears on Vera’s chin in the novel that’s happily available in the character creation. There are plenty more, so if you’ve read the book and played the game, feel free to put any you’ve found in the comments below.
All in all, though, little things. Which makes me think at least someone got something from reading my novel.
*Yes, I know, but if you know ANYTHING about either game, Fallout was what they called they called the “spiritual successor” of Wasteland, and boy, did it ever satisfy in that regard.
**Okay, so I kinda contradict myself there, replaying newer-old games again when there are many to be played… just call me Miss Dichotomy
***And I used something in my story that I won’t divulge in case you haven’t read it and would like too, but let’s just say there’s an element that gives a nod to Predator (another of my faves) that was also introduced in the Fallout series back when it was still under EA/Black Isle.
