Entire Fallout Timeline Explained: When Every Fallout Game Takes Place In Canon

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As one of the classic franchises of the RPG genre, has built up an extensive timeline across its many games — one that can be confusing to keep track of with each new addition. Developed first by the now-defunct Black Isle Studios and then by Bethesda (and Obsidian, for ), as a series has gone through a number of distinct changes, with each game putting a post-apocalyptic spin on a new region of the United States.

While every game takes place in the same world and is part of a continuous timeline, individual entries are only loosely connected — while certain factions, like the Brotherhood of Steel, might appear across multiple games, each game tells its own standalone story. In part, this is because each entry takes place in a different location, making reoccurring characters a rarity, but it also serves as a way to deal with the relatively open-ended stories that are typical of, allowing developers to progress the series without having to designate certain endings as «canon.»

The timeline of the Fallout TV series, including games like New Vegas, gets clarified by executive producers Todd Howard and Jonathan Nolan.

It might be best for newcomers to play games in a certain order, but the series also has a canonical timeline for when each game takes place, and though it's not necessary to know any game's specific place in the timeline to enjoy its story or gameplay, it can provide additional context. For the most part, games chronologically take place in the order that they were released, with only a few notable exceptions, but the different games are often set years apart, sometimes by as much as multiple decades.

Title

Year

2102

2161

2197

2241

2277

2281

2287

(2024 TV series)

2296

Broadly speaking, the series can be split into two categories, with the first being the «classic» games — the original,, and. For the most part,these games form the earliest parts of the timeline, taking place before the «modern» games of,, and. The only exception is —