Gay marriage, civil war, and power armor: how ‘Fallout 2’ shaped one woman’s life

As part of Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Gaming Made Me series, writer Patricia Hernandez has published a great piece on how the 1998 role-playing game Fallout 2 influenced her life. Growing up in a first-generation Salvadoran immigrant family with strict ideas about gender and identity, Hernandez used the game’s innovative character dynamics to explore her own developing sexuality: “as of this writing, California, the state Fallout 2 takes place in, still hasn’t legalized gay marriage. But it was an option in a game made in 1998, amazingly.” She also took the game’s implicit political critique to heart, using it as a lens through which to view the complex network of relations between the United States and El Salvador, particularly the US-backed civil war that caused her parents to flee their native country. Head over to Rock, Paper, Shotgun to find out how Hernandez first encountered the game, and how its mechanics and style quickly drew her in.