Fallout 3, “Prepare for the Future”

Fallout 3

To launch Fallout® 3, the highly anticipated game from Bethesda Softworks, innovative agency AKQA partnered with animation and design company Gasket to help produce a series of original promotional commercials seeded as virals and presented on the website: prepareforthefuture.com. 

The site is a carefully rendered retro-futuristic 1950’s world as delivered through the screen of a television, complete with spots that represent key content in the game which takes place in the “Capitol Wasteland” in and around Washington DC.

For the “That’s Rig ht Abe” commercial, AKQA employed the concept of the tourism bill boa rd come to life as an introduction to exploring the fully-realized world ofWashington D.C decay on the Fallout launch website. Gasket used a traditional hand-drawn animation process in the style of “Duck and Cover” nuclear war preparedness psa–fitting, consider the apocalypse to come. All of the drawn materials, from the character design of Abe to the background map and the animation were created by Gasket.

Once the animation was complete Gasket applied compositing and visual effects to the live action father/son footage, adding detailed lighting cues and grungy, disintegrated static. As with many of the elements in this presentation, That’s Right Abe is part playful, part eerie. The spectre of what might be is always just around the corner.

AKQA set out to show the over the top violence of Fallout® 3 through a humorous 1950’s after school special. What would you do if instead of dealing with a bully’s shenanigans, you could destroy him (and all living things within 200 yards of him) with your personal tactical nuclear catapult? If you said, “Heck yeah! I’d pull the trigger!” then Vault-Tec has your number.

Thanks to the G.O.A.T. all those worries and anxieties about what you’re going to do with your life just melt away. Vault-Tec does the hard work for you. All you have to do is live your life and follow the rules as laid out by your friendly Vault-Tec representatives!