| Megaton | |
|---|---|
| Fallout location | |
 Megaton, as seen facing towards the town's center from above inFallout 3 | |
| First appearance | Fallout 3 (2008) |
| Genre | Action role-playing game |
| In-universe information | |
| Location | Virginia, United States |
| Characters | Lucas Simms, Moira Brown, Confessor Cromwell, Colin Moriarty, Manya Vargas, Walter |
Megaton is a fictional settlement in the 2008action role-playing gameFallout 3, created as part of theFallout franchise byBethesda Game Studios. It is one of the first locations that the player, controlling the Lone Wanderer, may encounter upon exiting out of theVault 101 fallout shelter in search of their father James. Megaton's exterior is a cone-shaped structure with an automatic gate to protect its residents from hostile outsiders, although it will open to allow the Lone Wanderer in. The town is run by a mayor and sheriff named Lucas Simms, who will ask the player character for help in defusing an undetonated nuclearwarhead at the settlement's center. The interior of Megaton is a hole-like shape and is made up of bent pathways and wooden sheds held bygirders that surround the bomb. Although the main quest of the game is finding their father, early on by asking Megaton's residents for clues, they can trade with local vendors and perform side quests like fixing water pipes for a handyman named Walter and helping out a mechanic and vendor named Moira Brown in writing theWasteland Survival Guide by performing various tasks at the outside world, effectively serving as a "secondary tutorial" for in-game features.
In the game's lore and prior to the main events, the crater served as both a shelter for people who needed protection from sandstorms and failed to seek refuge from Vault 101 and a trading post. Megaton was founded by multiple people who based its construction on the wealth they accumulated during trade and sought to build a fortified structure around the bomb to protect themselves from hostile groups. The warhead also became a center of worship for a religious faction called the Church of the Children of the Atom. The player is presented with the option of either defusing the bomb on behalf of Lucas Simm and the rest of Megaton or detonating the bomb atTenpenny Tower at the request of Mr. Burke and his boss Allistair Tenpenny, both of whom want it destroyed because they disliked its view.
Megaton has been positively received by critics who argued that it was one of the best and most memorable locations in theFallout series given its early game presence and perceived liveliness and usefulness of the town. Writers have highlighted Moira Brown as a standout character within the settlement due to her quirky but friendly personality, usefulness as a mechanic and vendor, and her questline involving her to-be completed guidebook. The side quest around detonating or defusing the bomb has also been described by critics as showcasing the large-scale consequences that the player character and others are exposed, with many expressing guilt for detonating the warhead and thus destroying the settlement and killing nearly everyone there in the process.
Megaton, located just south of Springvale, Virginia,[1] is a relatively large-sized settlement area within the Capital Wasteland in the 2008action role-playing gameFallout 3, developed byBethesda Game Studios as part of theFallout franchise. In 2277, 200 years after the United States was obliterated by a nuclear war as part of an alternate world history, the Lone Wanderer (the player character) finds themself exitingVault 101 in search of their father James who fled the fallout shelter to resume a water purification project called "Project Purity" to provide radiation-free water for the area's residents.[2][3] After the Lone Wanderer exits the vault, players may tend to notice Megaton as one of the first structures while setting out for exploration. The exterior of Megaton appears as a cone-shaped structure on a small hill with arches around it pointing upward towards the sky, serving as a gate. Guarding the gate is a robot called a Protectron, which greets all human visitors like the Lone Wanderer upon approaching it but protects the area from other creatures like giant ants. Once near the structure, the bulky metal sheets will be automatically lifted so that the Lone Wanderer can enter the settlement. As opposed to the exterior cone-like shape, the interior area is shaped more like a large hole in the ground.[4][5] Upon first entry into Megaton, Lucas Simms, its mayor and sheriff, will greet the player and ensure that they did not arrive to cause trouble. He will also ask the player that if they are interested, they could disarm a live bomb in the middle of the town.[6][7] The name Megaton is derived from the undetonated bomb that Lucas asks them to defuse.[8]
The town's structure is made up of irregular pathways and a cluster of wooden sheds held up bygirders where its residents live in that surrounds a crater and an atomic bomb that failed to detonate upon impact. The bomb itself is worshipped by a religious organization led by Confessor Cromwell called the Church of the Children of Atom, which worships a monotheistic god and personification of atomic power named Atom. Cromwell loudly preaches about Atom directly at the bomb site to his praying followers and baptizes himself with the nearby irradiated water.[1][3][9][10] The multiple buildings that the player can visit within Megaton include several townhouses, two pubs, a waterworks, a church, a hostel, an armory, a shop, and bathrooms.[11] The Lone Wanderer can visit Colin Moriarty of Moriarty's Saloon to gain information regarding the whereabouts of James; Moriarty will redirect the player towards visiting Three Dog ofGalaxy News Radio for clues.[12]
Also residing in Megaton are vendors who the Lone Wanderer can sell their collected items to in exchange for bottle cap-based currency. The player can also pursue side quests given by the town's residents. For instance, the player character can help to fix water pipes using the Repair skill for the handyman Walter at the area's water processing plant. One of the most prominent quest-givers living in Megaton is Moira Brown, a quirky and cheerful vendor and mechanic who runs the Craterside Supply, and who asks the player to help her write a guidebook calledWasteland Survival Guide. To complete her book, Moira will task the player with performing dangerous tasks at the outside world so that she can write about how to survive based on the player character's deeds. Many of these tasks involve exploration far from Megaton and may likely require encounters with hostiles like raider groups and irradiated creatures. Some task examples include scavenging for food and medicine or exposing oneself to heavy amounts of radiation. The quests from Moira effectively act as a "secondary tutorial" for the player so that they understand the game's mechanics not taught from the early game sequences from Vault 101.[1][13][14][15]
The nuclearwarhead at the middle of Megaton is the center of focus for a side quest potentially given by Lucas that the Lone Wanderer can address. To disarm it at the request of the town's mayor, the player character needs a high-enough Explosives skill. Once the Lone Wanderer successfully defuses it, Lucas will reward the player with caps, a slight karma stat boost, and a key for a house within Megaton that the player character can reside in; the house can be upgraded by Moira to the player's liking and comes with a robot butler, a Mr. Handy named Wadsworth, who can provide purified water, restyle the player character's hair, and tell jokes.[8][13][12][16] Alternatively, the Lone Wanderer can visit Moriarty's Saloon to talk to Mr. Burke, an individual under the distant employer Allistair Tenpenny. Mr. Burke and his employer want Megaton wiped out via the nuclear warhead's detonation because they believed that they disliked seeing it from the farawayTenpenny Tower, where they reside. If the Lone Wanderer agrees to blow up Megaton, Burke will hand the detonator to the Lone Wanderer and tell them to meet him at the tower after they set the bomb to explode. After walking to Tenpenny Tower, the Lone Wanderer can detonate the warhead from the balcony of Allistair Tenpenny, destroying the settlement and killing nearly everyone in Megaton. The Lone Wanderer will be rewarded with payment of caps and access to a suite at the tower but also lose massive amounts of karma points in the process. The only survivor of the explosion at Megaton is Moira, who becomes "ghoulified" (mutated massively as a result of large amounts of exposure to radiation) but is still willing to forgive the Lone Wanderer and continue with herWasteland Survival Guide.[4][12][5][8] If the player chose to disarm the bomb, the Lone Wanderer will later encounter hitmen sent by Tenpenny who will attempt to kill them.[12] Likewise, if they instead chose to destroy Megaton, hostile former Megaton residents may attempt to ambush the player as may vigilantes of the "Regulators" faction as a result of the Lone Wanderer's negative karma.[17] A localization team ofBethesda Softworks revealed in 2008 that they tweaked the Japanese version ofFallout 3 to remove both Mr. Burke and the ability to destroy Megaton by activating the nuclear warhead. This was due to the cultural sensitivity regarding theatomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 during the end of World War II, in which Japan was the only nation to have been hit by nuclear attacks.[18]
The player can interact with Megaton resident Manya Vargas, an elderly granddaughter of one of Megaton's founders, to hear about the history of Megaton. In the early ages, she tells the Lone Wanderer, wasteland survivors used the crater to avoid sandstorms and as a shelter because they were rejected from refuge in the largely isolated Vault 101. Some of them began to worship the bomb there, thus forming the Children of Atom religion. She explains that back when her grandfather was born, the crater became a significant location where people set up a trading post. Her grandfather, using his wealth gained from caravan trading, worked with several other people to cofound Megaton by building walls around the crater to protect themselves from hostile groups like raiders and super mutants, with more residents deciding to move in.[19] According to the epilogue of theFallout 3 Official Game Guide, Moira in 2297 confirms that the Lone Wanderer helped to save Megaton from the warhead and complete herWasteland Survival Guide, which became a popular book in the Capital Wasteland.[20] In an interview fromIGN, the director of the 2024 showFallout,Jonathan Nolan, revealed that the Californian town of Filly was largely inspired by Megaton given the "trashy" appearance of both and that the protagonists of bothFallout 3 and the TV show likely arrive at their respective areas early on.[21]
InFallout 3, the locations vary in density and organization from "remote bastions of life" like Megaton to the central hub Rivet City. The fewer number of NPCs ingame reflect the harsh nature of the series' setting. The game's lead designerEmil Pagliarulo emphasized that they were focused on making "better NPCs" — ones who do not just engage in small talk but address others by name and talk more about themselves and their goals in life. He cited Lucas Simms of Megaton as an example, elaborating that the player character can talk to him when he is near his son for dialogue specifically about his child.[22] In a behind-the-scenes video called "The Making ofFallout 3", Pagliarulo briefly discussed his observation of a player's "priceless" reaction and satisfaction of his detonation of the Megaton bomb; executive producerTodd Howard used the discussed reaction as an example regarding how the game does not hide whether the player does something bad in-game and instead makes evil acts "visually entertaining".[23]
Megaton has received positive attention among game critics, with Ritwik Mitra ofGame Rant referring to theFallout 3 town as "easily one of the most iconic locations in video gaming history" and one that any new player should visit.[24]Screen Rant's Kyle Gratton said that Megaton's "odd location" made it memorable and "a big contribution toFallout 3's world design". He also wrote that its "close proximity to certain death" (the nuclear bomb) is a good representation of the harsh life in the Capital Wasteland.[19] Multiple game magazines had positively referenced Megaton within the context ofFallout 3, withPC Zone editor Will Porter in 2007 referring to the location as "a lovingly constructed area."[6] In the same year of the release ofFallout 3,PlayStation Official Magazine – UK considered the quests of Megaton to be among the game's side quests that add hours to gameplay and enhance the liveliness of the setting. The magazine expressed favorability of the morality and reward for helping to defuse the bomb, including for getting the humorous robot butler Wadsworth.[16]PlayStation: The Official Magazine in 2009 acknowledged that the game in relation to Megaton allows the player to roleplay as an "unapologetic bastard," from the "humorous" eventual death of a nearby hobo Mickey if they reject providing purified water to him to the "sadistic fun" of detonating the Megaton bomb.[25]
Many retrospective works onFallout 3 have positively covered Megaton in bigger detail, withExtra Lives: Why Video Games Matter byTom Bissell recording the author's observations in its introduction that he spent a few hours exploring Megaton and getting to know of its residents and then acknowledging that in essence of open-world games, his first few hours there were in fact optional and therefore evidence of "an awesome range of narrative variability".[26] Diego Arguello ofInverse remarked that Megaton is easy to get lost in given its unconventional pathways, which he said was ironic because it was much smaller than anotherFallout 3 location called Rivet City. He argued, however, that the smaller size of Megaton was no negative quality because of the townsfolk who make the settlement "a world of its own" from "the Children of the Atom religion to Moira Brown's excitement over creating a survival guide for the world outside these walls". Furthermore, he stated, it was "a strong example of a design philosophy that few open-world games have since managed to replicate, one in which density trumps scale, creating a sense of place that strives to be remembered", being an early example of a game that emphasized space over time as early as 2008. In comparison, he felt that neitherFallout 4 norFallout 76 were able to replicate the feeling of livelihood for a residential area.[27] Cameron Kunzelman ofVice compared Megaton to "a rusted metal flower blooming in the wasteland" where people could live normal and productive lives, citing both Moira Brown for her guidebook research with the intention of making the lives of people living outside safe shelter better and Lucas Simms for trying to maintain law and order to make life for his people better. He compared it to Tenpenny Tower, in which its wealthy elite intend to get rid of what they saw as a new world intending to replace the old and violent world favoring the rich, pointing to the player character as having potential agency in making their goal come true.[4] TheEdge magazine staff wrote that the consequences behind destroying Megaton teaches players in part that one should caution taking drastic in-game choices until at least after they have done all available and relevant side quests. They felt that the game also has the player question whether it was all along worth it to gain a suite in Tenpenny Tower in exchange for blowing up Megaton on behalf of some evil people. The staff remarked that the game would feel emptier and worse with Megaton gone and brought up the possibility that the player would just kill everyone at Tenpenny Tower before reloading to before the Megaton bomb was detonated.[11]
The A.V. Club writer Drew Toal discussed Vault 101 as an authoritarian location in which freedom is sacrificed in exchange for security, then comparing it to Megaton. He argued that Megaton was like "an enormous flaming trash barrel" that lacked the protections and hygiene from the fallout shelter but was "the ideal post-apocalyptic neighborhood" because of the residents depending on each other to get along. Toal felt that while Megaton had obvious flaws that it was better than the Republic of Dave (with an unstable government), Rivet City (with high amounts of classism), and Vault 101 (of which it and Megaton represented "two competing visions of society").[28] GB Buford, writing forKotaku, argued that the area between Vault 101 leading up to Megaton made it easy for new players to ease into the world ofFallout 3 by understanding where to go without immediate distractions. He said that while he found the side quest involving defusing or detonating the giant bomb interesting that the real highlight of Megaton is Moira Brown. Buford acknowledged that Moira has been a subject of ridicule from some players but voiced that he never understood why; he argued that she was quirky but always friendly, was the game's best mechanic early on, is a good vendor for selling items to, and has quests that unlock notable in-game perks. He continued that most importantly, Moira's side quests for her written work,Wasteland Survival Guide, are a "fantastic way to get an introduction to the world" given that her quests normally have the player going far and getting distracted by in-world events and locations, therefore both teaching the player additional in-game mechanics and encouraging them to seek out exploration.[14]
Megaton's nuclear bomb and the side quest have both also been under critical commentary. Brendan Graeber ofIGN considered that having to watch the destruction of Megaton that he caused because he decided to be greedy for a Tenpenny Tower luxury suite exposed him to large consequences not normally seen in many other RPGs and made him feel remorseful for the firsthand destruction and for paying back the hospitality of the settlement with a nuclear detonation.[29]Eurogamer editor Robert Purchese of the opinion that no other moment of video game destruction compared to the nuclear warhead wiping out Megaton due to "some idiot atop a tower who stood to make only a measly 1000 caps for doing so". His return to the site made Megaton "the one, and only, virtual object [he had] ever felt guilty about destroying".[30]TheGamer editor Jade King expressed that the bomb "acts as a compelling moral dilemma for the player to deal with" given how it easy it can be to use it for evil. She said that on her first playthrough, she refused to have Megaton's warhead be detonated and instead chose to kill Burke because she felt that it was justified despite lacking any reward. She then said that the player character being able to see the ruins of a destroyed Megaton and a ghoulified Moira showed howFallout 3 was unafraid of showing people how evil they could be.[5] In another retrospective, she reflected that moral polarity of the choices regarding the Megaton bomb was a flaw inFallout 3 but one that reflected moral systems of other game series of the time likeMass Effect andInfamous as opposed to the later games with themes around moral grayness likeThe Witcher 3 andBaldur's Gate 3. She additionally explained her interest in an option to sit out of the Megaton bomb conflict and see what happens to the town should a future remaster or remake come out.[31]
Megaton and its nuclear bomb have also been the focus of several academic works. Marcus Schulzke, writing for the journalGame Studies, considered the side quest regarding the Megaton bomb to be entertaining but criticized it for the rewards being too parallel in experience points and residency along with the karma points given for disarming the bomb being disproportionately low compared to the massive karma loss for detonating it.[32] Daniel Singleton, dedicating a chapter of a book to video games and science fiction, highlighted that whileFallout 3 intended to showcase the effects of nuclear destruction on the world, players can "transform" nuclear weapons into their own personal toys and decide how they want to use it. He elaborated that many players may choose detonate the nuclear bomb on behalf of Allistair Tenpenny just to see what happens before reloading the game just to defuse it and continue on afterward.[33] James Schirmer, writing a chapter on morality inFallout 3, pointed out that Megaton's side quest around the bomb is likely the first opportunity presented for the player to shift their in-game karma points and suggested that it had similarities to the post-apocalypticsocial science fiction novelA Canticle for Leibowitz on the basis of the connection between religion and science. He suggested that the cultlike worship of the nuclear warhead in Megaton by the local members of the Church of the Children of the Atom was likely a reference to the science fiction filmBeneath the Planet of the Apes, which similarly features humans worshipping an unexploded atomic bomb. Furthermore, he wrote that although the religious group viewed the bomb as a "creative and unifying holy element" that their deaths do not negate the negative karma gained from detonating it because of the non-cult members that the Lone Wanderer would also kill in the process.[17]
Dan Staines of theUniversity of New South Wales was more critical of the content of Megaton, considering both Simms and Burke to lack enough emotional depth beyond being moral opposites for the player to be personally invested in either character and especially criticizing the latter as being cartoonishly evil to the point that good-aligned role-players have no real reason to engage with him. He also acknowledged Cromwell as a kooky character and a "parody of real-life street-corner evangelists", considering him to be a slightly more interesting, albeit narratively "underdeveloped", individual of the location because he neither comments or nor attempts to sway the player character on what to do with the nuclear warhead. Staines argued that although the characters of Megaton do have a personality, players cannot personally relate to them due to a lack of reason for such, that a character's motives or actions are connected more to gameplay quests and rewards than narrative. He also criticized the quest involving the Megaton bomb as too "stark[ly] black and white" in morality, which he suggested left no moral ambiguity. In comparison, he continued, anotherFallout 3 location called the Oasis made a better case for moral ambiguity.[34] Lars De Wildt and his fellow coauthors, writing for the journalReligions, analyzed the Church of the Children of Atom, providing context of the post-war religious faction being formed based on the belief that the 2077 nuclear devastation was a holy event by their god Atom. They discussed further lore context where the faction, formed in Megaton byFallout 3, had attained a popular following throughout the United States as seen inFallout 4. Atom as worshipped by Cromwell and the rest of the Church of the Children of Atom, they stated, was "omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent" and was described as a "masculine, incomprehensibly opaque deification of atomic power". The religious nature of Oasis in comparison, they continued, contrasted with that of Megaton in that the romantic spiritual cult there called the Treeminders worship nature in the form of a talking tree called the "The Great One", who himself is mortal and can be killed by the Lone Wanderer.[9]
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