How to make London into a nuclear wasteland

Greenwich Observatory overgrown with grass; tube stations converted into nuclear bunkers; the Oval flooded by radioactive wastewater; the Woolwich foot tunnel stalked by disfigured river monsters. It’s disconcerting to see every corner of the city you live in turned into a nightmare. But in video game mod Fallout London, the eeriness of seeing the capital remade as a post-apocalyptic wasteland is precisely the allure.

Usually, mods — a process in which teams of amateur developers build their own world inside an existing game — are pretty small scale. But Fallout London is anything but. A British adaptation of the hit American video game series (recently turned into an Amazon Prime series), it’s hard to communicate the sheer size of the project. From Camden to Bromley, London is totally re-created, chock full of post-nuclear apocalypse facsimiles of everything from iconic London landmarks to individual tube stations, parks and pubs.

Released just last year, it became a sensation that has, to date, been downloaded well over a million times, more than many major video games. But these kinds of amateur projects are increasingly impossible nowadays. How, in an industry heavily controlled by polished corporate game developers, did a small army of enthusiasts with no funding, and scant experience, outdo the multinational giants and create one of the most influential mods in video game history? The answer is a saga of sleepless nights, sabotage via hackers and a little help from former House of Commons speaker John Bercow.

The Covid ‘coup’

I had wanted to interview Dean ‘Prilladog’ Carter — lead developer for the Fallout London team — in person, maybe somewhere in the city that inspired his post-apocalyptic vision. But there’s a problem. A few weeks ago he saw that there might be snow in the capital, and he impulsively decided to flee abroad. Over email he informs me he’s now in Spain, bound for Morocco before a lengthy stint in the Sahara Desert, his soon-to-be-sand-filled laptop in hand. “Unless you fancy joining me on a camel,” he explains. “It’s unlikely we’ll be able to do it in person.”

Video call it is, and he’s in high spirits when we speak. The idea for Fallout London came, he says, when chatting to a friend one night. A long-time fan of the video game Fallout, he wondered what it might look like if, rather than being set in a dystopian, Cold-War-turned-hot US, it was set in his hometown: London. When Carter posed that question about a post-apocalypse London, it wasn’t a hypothetical. Throughout this life, he’s loved making mods for his favourite games. He started looking across internet forums and found a video announcing a project was already in the works to make a mod of Fallout 4 that would bring the game to London. It was a pretty amateurish affair, filled with terrible video editing and blaring techno music. But the idea was interesting enough in spite of the execution. He joined the community on Reddit dedicated to the mod and asked to become part of the team, quickly mounting a “coup”, as Carter puts it.

Once in charge, he assembled a core team of diehards, cutting anyone who didn’t have the time, will or skill to add to the project. The team now had the basic elements it needed to make a mod, but it was still something of a pipe dream. Fallout’s most recent official instalment, set in Boston, took development studio Bethesda a budget of tens of millions of dollars, a team of hundreds of paid professionals and six years to come to fruition. Fallout London was reliant on people dedicating their free time to the project, just for the sake of making the vision of a post-apocalyptic capital a digital reality.

Then Covid-19 hit, and everything changed. Suddenly this merry band of amateur modders were stuck at home, either furloughed from work or otherwise at a loose end. The team talked every day — as much as an effort to survive lockdown as much as anything else — and suddenly their lead 3D artist, Jordan ‘SunnyDelight’ Albon, had a thought: “We could sit and play games,” he told the group. “Or we could make something.”

How to turn London into a nuclear wasteland

Emily ‘Saffron-rice’ Kemp had never worked a full-time job before becoming one of the lead artists on Fallout London. But she has a very long relationship with modding that goes back decades to Petz 5, a game released in 2002. People like Carter and Kemp, who possess a lot of passion and technical knowledge but not necessarily any professional industry experience, are the lifeblood of the modding community. Usually ignored by major studios, their builds evoke the early eras of the games industry, defined by passionate amateurs building imperfect games for the love of it rather than a paycheque. The Fallout London team were underdogs united by one goal: to turn London into a nuclear wasteland.

But they needed more hands on deck to realise the ambition. By 2021, they had built just enough of their world to make a trailer, designed to entice the volunteer army of modders, industry pros and enthusiasts required to actually construct the game. Mirroring the style of the official trailers for the Fallout games, the camera slowly pans out of a rusted and abandoned 1950s-style double-decker bus, as Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again” echoes tinnily from a discarded radio.

Scenes of this nightmare London flash by, populated by East End gangs, fortresses of aristocratic elites, street militias and mutant humans disfigured by exposure to the toxic waters of the Thames. It gives the impression of being an entire video game in its own right. “It was kind of like a Wild West town,” says Carter. “You could see stuff and think that it looks great, but if the camera moved one more building block over, it was empty. It was a real facade”. 

They released the trailer on YouTube, on 15 June 2021. That night Carter couldn’t sleep, instead watching the video view count, which could mean life or death for their project, crawling agonisingly upwards. Eventually, he surrendered to fitful slumber. When Carter woke up, he nervously opened the trailer’s YouTube page on his phone, to see the updated view count. They had hit a million views. 

Over the next few days, the figure rose higher still, first to two million, then all the way to over 3.5 million views. The team had cannily dropped the clip during the E3 gaming festival, when major gaming studios all release trailers, trying to create hype for their games. And in 2021, for all the millions in funding, PR departments and recognition, this trailer for a random mod from an unknown, amateur team beat them all.

In the aftermath, the Fallout London community blew up. Their subreddit group has more than 30,000 members; its chat on the messaging app Discord, over 16,000. “We realised at that point there was no going back,” Carter recalls. “It was, this will come out.” Suddenly the project was a full-time 9-to-5 job, or 9-to-9 in Carter’s case. Some of the team would come back from a day’s work and spend eight hours each evening working on the mod.

Central to getting Fallout London off the ground was a coherent vision — easier said than done. The world of the Fallout games was distinctly American. Fallout rendered a world devastated by nuclear war in the 1950s, via a weird mixture of mid-century American culture, music and design preserved in aspic but also filled with new factions, characters, cultures and narratives from the harsh, chaotic society that had developed in the centuries since the disaster. Translating all of that to London in an authentic way would be a challenge.

The responsibility of creating this terrible new reality fell largely to one man, Callum Quick. As lead scripter and writer, the world he crafted, much like the American original, pulls together British culture and postwar touchpoints with fevered dystopian imaginings. The end result is an eccentric but endearing blend of things that embody how outsiders see Britain: the knights of Camelot, baked beans, East End geezers, Buckingham Palace — and references that would likely only work for a British audience. Think gangsters in the mould of the Kray twins, specific pubs in the capital (like Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese or The Swan & Mitre in Bromley, which they recreated exactly) or even the bandaged traffic warden from the cult 1984 film Threads (although this was set in Sheffield). Characters, stories, and settings were crammed into the Fallout London world at a scale that would outdo a lot of professional studios.

Things were finally coming together. In May 2022, the team released their first gameplay trailer, 18 minutes of preliminary footage inviting viewers into the world they’d constructed. Millions more people watched. Hype around the project grew, partly because the team had now given a deadline for a 2023 release for the mod. But the bigger they got, the larger the target on their backs — mostly from their own community.

Anonymous messages, hacking and an assist from John Bercow

It’s worth acknowledging at this point that video games are a huge industry; in the UK it's a multi-billion pound behemoth that accounts for half of the entire entertainment market, more than movies, TV and music combined. It’s big enough that the fanbases of various games all have their own internet subcultures. So big, in fact, that even within those communities, there are other distinct subcultures for the people who spend their time designing mods for the games. Among Fallout modders, the culture is, well, radioactive. 

“Between different groups, there’s a visceral hatred of each other,” explains Carter. “People don't really share things with others, and if you do, it's a 'You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ kind of deal.” People in the community can be pretty cynical and distrustful of others. When different modding projects need to exchange designs or art produced by others, they have to engage in a sort of tense, mistrustful bartering exchange that feels like it was taken straight out of the Fallout universe itself. 

It didn’t help that the viral trailers meant their project was taking up a lot of oxygen. There’s a finite number of modders in the world, and Fallout London’s volunteer army was chewing up the human resources other projects needed. Volunteers working on the project told The Londoner they had received anonymous DMs telling them they should quit. And then there were the social media posts directed at the project and its members. The team faced multiple mysterious hacking attempts, as outsiders tried to worm their way into the project and leak their work.

They weathered the storm, but the complications were slowing things down. They were forced to delay release until April 2024. But they couldn’t afford more hold ups, not so much because of money — Carter had savings to burn through, and most of the team had other income streams. But if they took too long, they would risk losing the hype that had shot their project to the stratosphere and provided its steady stream of volunteers. 

Fallout London had no incumbency. It only mattered as long as it was remembered. And the gaming world has a short and fickle attention span. “I didn't care how well it did,” says Carter. “I just wanted to see it through to the end.” He even received a job offer from a Bethesda affiliate in the UK, but turned it down. He would work through the night, only relieved from his fugue state when a team member in Russia would wake up the next day and remind him that dawn was about to break in London.

At this point, they were closing in on the final touches — namely, voice actors to speak the lines they had written and make the characters and stories they had built come alive. Thousands of actors sent in applications to take part, free of charge, including video-game royalty like Neil Newbon, fresh off worldwide acclaim for his role in 2023’s smash-hit Baldur’s Gate 3. The team also started mass-emailing celebrities, asking if they would volunteer their time for free. Liam Neeson and Ron Perlman, who had roles in previous Bethesda games, both said no. But they had surprising successes elsewhere: Doctor Who actors Sylvester McCoy and Colin Baker both chose to take part. As did former House of Commons speaker John Bercow, who voices a robotic version of himself, despite not really understanding what Fallout even was. 

They were inches from the finish line. But Bethesda, the very studio whose game birthed their post-apocalyptic British dream, was about to drop its own nuclear bomb onto the project.

Taking on the gaming goliaths

Bethesda has a complicated relationship with its fans. The American gaming giant is behind some of the most successful games of the modern era, including the Fallout series and Skyrim, which has sold more than 60 million copies since its 2011 release. Part of the reason games like Skyrim have managed to maintain their popularity well over a decade after their release is that, unlike most studios, Bethesda makes it relatively easy for their fans to download mods for their games. In the case of Skyrim, for instance, a whopping 2 billion mods have been downloaded by players since its release.

But much bigger mods (like, say, Fallout London) that could draw too many eyes away from Bethesda’s new offerings risked denting sales figures for their latest projects by keeping players trapped in their old games. As a result, much smaller mod undertakings get the most support from the studio, like new weapons, characters or replacing all the dragons you fight in Skyrim with the trains from Thomas the Tank Engine. Things that keep making you want to re-play their old game, without refreshing the experience so much that you don’t need to shell out on a new Bethesda product.

The Fallout London team hadn’t anticipated their work would be affected by Bethesda much. But the month they were due to release the mod, the TV adaptation of Fallout was released on Amazon Prime. In less than three weeks, 65 million people had tuned in. It was an unrivalled opportunity for Bethesda to direct millions of new fans to its games. So the studio released an update to Fallout 4 that they promised would deliver better content for those new players. But for the diehard fans — the modders — the update was catastrophic. Anything built for previous versions of the game, like Fallout London, would no longer work.

It left the modders winded. “We literally were at the point where we were thinking: ‘Have we just wasted four years or five years of our time?’” recalls Carter. They frantically tried to contact someone, anyone, at Bethesda, but were met with radio silence. Then, a saviour came along. 

GOG, a distribution platform, found a way to integrate the Fallout London mod into the game by allowing players to access a backdated version of Fallout 4. The release was back on, if a little later than planned. Everything was ready, but Carter was off travelling again, Central Europe this time. He pressed the button that released the mod from his phone, on a summer’s day sitting on the banks of the Danube. Within a day, 500,000 people had downloaded it. Within three months, that had hit a million, making it easily one of the most successful — and impactful — mod projects of all time.

It’s easy to see why — you could spend hours walking around the city alone. It’s not just the scale of the mod that is so appealing though, but the meticulous details included: blast-ridden pubs recreated down to the last beer pump; the tattered posters advertising gas masks; or bombed out husks of the 38 double-deckers on the road to Camden. It isn’t perfect — like most amateur projects, Fallout London has its fair share of bugs, and the odd clunky bit of acting and writing. But it did what very few mods have ever been able to do: create a version that rivals the original game that directly inspired it. 

The Fallout London team were instantly propelled into cult gaming stardom. At last year’s London instalment of Comic Con, they hosted two panels. One of the events was so packed, the hosts had to drag in more chairs. Even now Carter says he gets frequently asked about the mod by strangers when he’s wearing Fallout London-branded hoodies in public.

It’s hardly surprising. There are very few other comparable projects on this scale. Fans The Londoner spoke to said the mod was now the bar they held professional game studios to for their new releases. Other reasons were more simple; it represented a rebellion against a world of video games (and culture) that feels increasingly centred on America. As one fan put it: “How many games do we get set in Britain nowadays, eh mate?”

But in my mind Fallout London had an advantage all along: a game that really reflects the capital would always display the scope, diversity and ambition of the city it was paying homage to.