Many find Fallout 3 similar to Philip K. Dick's 'The Penultimate Truth'

by David Hinkle on Jun 15th 2009 2:44PM

Written by sci-fi superstar Philip K. Dick in 1964, The Penultimate Truth follows people living in underground shelters, for fear of a World War III that they are told is being waged on the surface above them. We could go into more of the similarities between the book and Bethesda's Fallout 3, but then that would mean venturing into dangerous, radiation-strewn spoiler territory.

Of course, if one wants to say that Bethesda plagiarized The Penultimate Truth, then one must look to previous titles in the Fallout series, as well. Vaults were featured in previous games, and upon exiting these vaults, hubs of civilization were also found among what was thought to be a post-apocalyptic barren wasteland. So does that mean Interplay plagiarized The Penultimate Truth or that, perhaps, the idea isn't entirely unique in the first place?

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Tags: bethesda, Bethesda-Game-Studios, Bethesda-Softworks, fallout-3, Microsoft, Philip-K-Dick, post-apocalyptic, RPG, the-penultimate-truth, Xbox-360

Reader Comments (77)

Dr. Strangelove sez hai.

Resident Evil and Dead Rising were rip-offs of Night of the Living Dead (and subsequent sequels). God of War rips off greek mythology in general. Guitar Hero ripped off Guitar Freaks, which ripped off Air Guitar (the original rhythm game). DDR ripped off DANCING, DJ Hero and Scratch are ripoffs of BeatMania. Oh yeah and who fucking cares? You mean Fallout isnt the first story ever to deal with the nuclear apocalypse? Say it isnt so! Oh yeah sarcasm aside, thanks Joystiq for the reading tip. I do enjoy a good book.

That movie kicked so much ass!

"Mein Führer! I can walk!"

Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the war room.

Where others dared to dream, Philip K. Dick got there first.

And yes, I'd imagine there is some loose references and basis of the Penultimate Truth to the Fallout series. Doesn't make it any less of a game. In fact probably makes it a better game considering how amazing Philip K. Dick books are.

If we decide Interplay plagiarized "The Ultimate Truth," every high-fantasy game in the last few decades plagiarized Tolkien and a few others like him.

After reading the summary of the book, (and I'm not trying to defend Interplay or Bethesda) the only real similarity I can find is that the president in both cases are [spoiler alert] actually computers pretending like humans. Hinding underground is just something you'd expect to do during a war that wipes out civilization and I'm not sure if sending someone out to get a fake pancraes had anything to do with having to leave your vault get a waterchip. You have to look at WHY each of these things are done and once that's over, you might realize that the motivation for the similar events are completely unrelated. Similar situations are undoubtedly going to have people taking similar actions.

"every high-fantasy game, book and movie in the last few decades plagiarized Tolkien."

FIFY. Basically, ever modern fantasy thing you can think of either comes directly from Tolkien's work, or was heavily inspired by it.

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45909000/jpg/_45909582_badartists.jpg

You could also make the argument that Brendan Fraser's movie "Blast From the Past" ripped off Philip K. Dick. But who cares?

i thought of that movie to, i also want to read the book

Wow, life after an atomic holocaust, how innovative and exciting. Here I was, thinking we'd all perish and die, but then Dick published his book and suddenly survival was a possibility.

*rolls eyes*

Or maybe they both got the idea from real world cold war era paranoia.

Shakespeare plagiarized most of his work, and about 98% of everything since has copied him. Meh.

Once upon a time there was a war...
This was no ordinary war; this was a nuclear war (the baddest type of war in the world)...
This meant that many people died and those who survived stayed in underground shelters, where they would spend the rest of their lives reproducing to recover the human race's population.

^^^ An extract from my upcoming novel- The Life of A Generic Man Living in a Nuclear Wasteland in an unspecified era of time.

I think you should title it, "The Reproducinator".

Why must we look at the earlier fallouts? Since they're all approximately the same, what would that prove? That Interplay plagiarized 3 times? It's not like any of these games pre-date the 1960's and can fling a "Oh yeah? well you copied us!" out there.

However, if they only copied portions of the premise, I don't think anyone will be getting sued. Well, or EVERYONE will be getting sued...because premise-copying happens constantly.

Fallout pulls from a lot of different sources. From Mad Max to Doctor Strangelove.
Trying not to spam but you can check it out here:http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_Wiki

It's cool, you're not spamming if it's relevant to the conversation.

ENHANCE YOUR MAN SAUSAGE WITH V14GR4!!

Did the poster even read 'The Penultimate Truth'? "Vault" similarities aside, they're really not that comparable. I suppose if you only read the book jacket or peruse through the wikipedia entry you can conclude they're similar, but if you read the book I think you'll come to a different conclusion. Besides that, what's this "news" story about? The author even comments on the bottom how it's the general background of Fallout that shares coincidences, not Fallout 3's story specifically. And! Instead of backing up the claim with evidence, he just makes an allusion to spoilers. What's the point of the article?

Just as a little nugget of knowledge:

"Penultimate" means "second to last"

It's a really useful word for those special moments you want to sound pretentious. An example would be using it to guess the penultimate song in a Top 10 countdown.

But in a top ten countdown last is number one.. so which is penultimate, number two or eight?

ugh, I mean two or nine.. gotta love no edits.

It would usually be #2.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 *2* 1

Did you guys miss "A Post-Apocalyptic Film Festival"?
http://static.bethsoft.com/blog/Fallout_Film_Fest.jpg

Yay slow news days...

It was(if anything) inspired by it.

Just like how Hideo Kojima is inspired by several movies, and leaves homages to them throughout the game. Did he plagurise the works of those movies? No, merely inspired by them.

Hal and Dave is a good example.

your comment about kojima was made more interesting by your kojima avatar.

Go watch Escape from New York and From Russia With Love, then tell me this Kojima guy isn't a dirty thief.

I don't think he's a thief. He even aknowledges his sources. Thieves don't admit their sources.
In MGS2, I think Solid Snake uses the alias Plisken, no?

Hell, I got the guy's wallet in my desk!

The Fallout series has never shied away from borrowing elements from other stories with a similar background, and it does it well. Hello... "Dogmeat," is blatantly from Mad Max 2 (/The Road Warrior), considering in FO2, he follows you if you wear a black leather Jacket.

There are tons of references to other movies, books (There's a mission straight out of Lovecraft in FO3), lore, games, everything. It does so on purpose and it does it really well, paying almage to the other stories, not ripping them off.

Not to mention, there are a dozens and dozens of books, movies, TV shows, and so on, based on the "1950s bomb shelter" scenario. I mean, didn't we all fall in love with Brendan Frazier's pop-fifties Naivete in "Blast From the Past" !?

I know I did!

"Oh my lucky stars -- a Negro!"

Also, the quest "The Replicated Man" is very Dickian. The idea of an android believing itself to be human is a key concept in several PKD stories (allegorical to from Cold War paranoia/the McCarthy witch hunts etc), most obviously in "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". The title of the quest probably comes from Ray Bradbury's "The Illustrated Man" though.

I really don't think there is any issue of plagiarism though, there's a difference between plagiarism and homage.

Okay reading the wikipedia entry, all I can see the similarities in are vaults and a pseudo-fake president. Everything else is different. I mean, the book has a time-travelling Cherokee or something. I really don't think the two can be called 'similar'.

Funny, someone on reddit pointed this out the other day.

http://marriedtohitler.com/2009/06/11/3/

It's a lot less superficial than LOL UNDERGROUND GUY NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST.

That stretches a bit. Sure, the identity of the president is the same, but it stops there. No one is rebelling against the claimed government, the Enclave invades the wasteland. There wasn't an uprising in Vault 101, Dad left to finish a his life work and the Overseer went nuts and wants you dead, plus roaches infested the place. The experiments are back with Fallout 1, and the first two games were parodies of the post-apocalyptic genre, so that was expected (besides, Bethesda got Penny Arcade to make a story, that gives you a clue to the universe).

P.S. - That's the same effing link as above.

We're all influenced by anything we've ever seen heard or read. Star Wars was influenced quite a bit by Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, but would you say it plagarized those fictions?

No, it plagiarized Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress"

Most people actually say Tolkien

@zodduska: Here's the ironic part. Star War not only became a pop culture in USA, but also in Japan. A lot of Japanese love Star War. I don't hear any Japanese saying Star War is a rip-off or it's a American bastardrization of Samurai.

I don't know about you, but I haven't stolen dick from Phillip K.

I love how any realistic concern (fear of nuclear war during the Cold War, worry about terrorism when incidents are reported almost every day, et cetera) is now dismissed as 'paranoia' and 'fear-mongering' by our lovely post-modern 'intellectuals'.

As for the Philip K. Dick story - let me guess, did it involve people using drugs?

Blah, blah, liberals, left, blah, blah, blah.

People like you are why the republican party is now a footnote in America.

An excellent point. The very real fear that an imperialist, aggressive Soviet power armed to the teeth with multimegaton weapons aimed at the US might take its chances with a nuclear strike is now described as "paranoia" by the revisionists who were on the wrong side of history then and retroactively seek to claim the intellectual high ground now. Fortunately, the strength of the very credible deterrent force advocated by the military and most of the government throughout the Cold War brought us a future very different from that which in we get to play in Fallout 3.

And no, Bethesday and Interplay owe no debt to PKD (where did this post come from, anyway?): the idea of braving a nuke fight in underground shelter, and then trying to survive thereafter, was an extremely popular subject for fiction in all media from the mid-1950's on. through the collapse of the Soviet Union. Luckily for us PA fans, it is once again becoming popular.

I think the post-nuclear theme is a pretty recurrent one.... well, because it's fun. I bet we've all fantasized on one moment or another about what would happen if society as we know it collapses. I bet there are hundreds of works that deal with it, not just this one.

It's almost like accusing Oblivion of plagiarism because of its medieval / fantasy setting.

What happened to the Fallout 3 DLC for the PS3? Its supposed to release later this month and I havent heard any news on it. Does anyone know?

Name stealer!

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Many find Fallout 3 similar to Philip K. Dick's 'The Penultimate Truth'

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