When creating the RPG, the developers consulted a wide range of sources for inspiration.
Fallout creator Tim Cain continues to publish videos on various subjects. Recently he chose to discuss several mechanics from the original game.
The focus was the FEV radiation (Forced Evolutionary Virus). Tim emphasized that he was presenting his own ideas; canon is now defined by Bethesda, so his concepts are not authoritative.
To explain how “radiation” works, he described DNA’s structure: a double helix made up of four bases—A, T, C, and G—paired as A–T and C–G.
If a single base is damaged, the organism can often repair it. However, if radiation removes both bases in a pair, the cell faces a problem: it doesn’t have a straightforward way to restore the original sequence.
If a damaged cell continues functioning with errors in its genetic code, it will produce incorrect proteins, which can lead to cancer unless the body’s defense systems eliminate it.
Tim concluded: “That’s how it happens in real life, and we thought, ‘Alright — that’s how radiation will work in Fallout.'”
Later, the Forced Evolutionary Virus was devised specifically for Fallout, and it functions differently. Like all viruses, it “inserts genes into the host cell” and forces the cell to replicate copies of the viral genome. The distinguishing trait of the FEV is that it converts the DNA double helix into a quadruple helix.
The developers drew inspiration from the novel Elise: A Terrifying Novel of Immortality — a story about a girl who, allegedly as a consequence of her father’s exposure, was born with a quadruple DNA helix and remained seemingly ageless.
The Fallout team’s idea was that a quadruple helix would be more resistant to radiation because, instead of knocking out two bases, radiation would need to disrupt four simultaneously — a statistically far less likely event.
They also introduced infertility. In Fallout the protagonist could confront the Master by proving the super mutants were sterile: the quadruple helix would split into double strands that lacked a mechanism for recombination, meaning super mutants could not reproduce and would eventually die out.
Source: iXBT.games