Wasteland Culture

Fallout 3 came out in 2008 and I have been playing it ever since. Sure, High Fantasy can be cool, I mean look at how big World of Warcraft is, and Science Fiction really gets my juices flowing, but let me tell you, there is something about post apocalyptic wastelands that really makes me happy. Now, I call anything that is post-apocalyptic, dreary and harsh “Wasteland Culture”. There is no specific way a wasteland has to be formed for me to like it, it just has to have the following:

1) Broken off highways
2) Vast vistas of nothingness and death
3) Monsters of some kind be they Mutants, Zombies, Cannibals, Giant Bugs, Mutated Animals etc.
4) Factions of every messed up kind
5) A dog
6) Hope of Salvation
7) Lovable yet horrifying creatures
8 ) Makeshift technology that is held together by duct tape
9) Brutal weapons/Disease and Sickness
10) A loner bad ass

Movies have tried their hand at Wasteland Culture many times with films like Mad Max and Escape from New York. It is not an easy thing to pull off Wasteland Culture – if you don’t believe me, go and watch Doomsday. Wasteland Culture needs a fine balance of despair and hope, practical and impractical, humor and horrifying. For instance, being in a wasteland sucks, but there is always some artifact or fertile piece of land that will save humanity. People in a wasteland don’t have many materials to use in their day-to-day lives so they scavenge, but they also wear ridiculous outfits to make themselves look scarier and crazier than the person next to them. Finally, when living in a wasteland you see horrifying images of brutality, but oh lord, when somebody steps on your lunchbox mine and gets random debris stuck in them,now that is funny.

To me, Fallout 3 has set a new standard for Wasteland Culture with its fascinating world that is full of personality while at the same time is so bare you really see no point in living.

Let us see some examples of Wasteland Culture

Mad Max was one of the first wasteland movies I remember seeing and it seems that Fallout 3 takes a good amount of influence from it.

Vampire Hunter D also captures a good sense of the WTF atmosphere. We see our half vampire/half human standing beside his lovable cybernetic horse as giant desert manta rays burst out of the ground and fly through the air…….yeah, I know it is awesome.

Last but not least is the new film with Denzel Washington, Book of Eli. Here is the trailer:

Pretty cool if you ask me, even the font of the title of the film looks like Fallout 3’s font.

A Kotaku reader went through the trouble of laying out some similar shots. Let us take a look:

So the question is, what makes all this a “Culture”? Well, if you live in Russia you would know..

Full list of the pictures can be found here