Fallout Super Mutants and Ghouls: FEV, Radiation and Real Science

Fallout (1997) hid its monster's origin in a military base. Interplay's game, set in 2161 in a California a century after a nuclear war, sends the player from a sealed vault to find a water chip and into a war against super mutants, green giants who are raiding the surface for captives; the base they come from, Mariposa, turns out to be a pre-war research facility where the contractor West Tek had developed the Forced Evolutionary Virus to make American troops immune to biological weapons and radiation. After the bombs, a caravan merchant named Richard Grey fell into a vat of it and became the Master, a mass of flesh grown into the base's computers, who conceived a plan to unify humanity by remaking it: every human dipped in FEV would become a super mutant, and the super mutants would be one people with no war.

The plan fails on a fact. The player can win the game by proving to the Master that FEV sterilizes its subjects, so that his new race would die with its first generation; confronted with the evidence, he destroys himself and the base. It was the first game whose final boss could be defeated by an argument, and the super mutants it left behind, scattered across the later games as raiders, tribes and, in Fallout 4 (2015), the Institute's escaped experiments, are the remains of a philosophy rather than a species.

FEV makes its subjects larger and simpler. A super mutant stands well over two metres, weighs several hundred kilograms, has green or yellow skin, no hair, and a strength that lets it carry a minigun one-handed; it is immune to radiation and most disease, heals fast, does not age, and, in the Mariposa strain, thinks about as well as it did before the dip if it was healthy and far worse if it had been exposed to radiation first, which is why most of the ones the player fights are dim and a few, like Marcus of Fallout 2 and New Vegas, are not. All are sterile. Nightkin, the stealthy super mutants of the Master's elite, went insane from the stealth technology they used; centaurs, the crawling things in the games' ruins, are what FEV does to a mix of species in one vat.

Fallout 3 (2008) moved the vats to Vault 87 under Washington, and Fallout 4 to the Institute, a scientific enclave beneath MIT whose FEV program produced a strain that keeps growing, so that its oldest subjects are behemoths the size of buildings. Every game since 1997 has kept the rule that a super mutant was somebody. The television series (2024) made the point on screen with a character who chooses the dip, and the second season, in 2025, sent its survivors to New Vegas and the strain that lives there.

Ghouls are what the games say radiation does when it does not kill. A human caught in the bombs or exposed for years to the wasteland's hot spots may, the games' account goes, survive the dose that should have finished them and emerge changed: the hair gone, the skin necrotic and sloughing, the voice a rasp, the nose eroded, and the body thereafter healed by radiation rather than harmed, so that a ghoul can live for centuries and walk through a reactor. Harold, Set, Gob, the Ghoul of the television series, played by Walton Goggins as a bounty hunter who was a Hollywood actor before the war: the games and the show have made ghouls the wasteland's memory, the people who saw the bombs fall and are still around to be prejudiced against.

The feral state is the games' second rule. A ghoul whose mind degrades, whether from the initial exposure, from age or from isolation, becomes an animal that attacks on sight, and feral ghouls in packs are the series' zombies; the series (2024) added a drug that holds the change off and a trade in it, which makes going feral a matter of money. Ghouls are barred from most towns in the games and have built their own, Underworld beneath Washington and the Slog north of Boston, and the games' human characters are as ugly about them as the writers could manage.

The wasteland has a real address. Fallout: New Vegas (2010) is set in the Mojave around Las Vegas, and its map includes the Nevada Test Site and the base the games call Area 2; the real Area 51 lies just north of it, and the hundred atmospheric tests fired at the site between 1951 and 1962 are the closest any landscape has come to the games' premise. Their fallout drifted over Utah and Nevada ranches whose residents were called downwinders and, decades later, compensated. Fallout 3's Mothership Zeta expansion (2009) put aliens in the series outright, abducting the player onto a saucer full of frozen abductees from every era, which is the abduction narrative played for a game, and the alien blaster hidden in every game since is the series' running joke about the lore.

Real radiation does not make ghouls or giants. The Hulk entry walks through what a lethal dose does, and it is the first half of ghoulification with no second half: marrow failure, gut failure, infection and death within weeks, and, for the survivors of smaller doses, cancers years later. No exposure confers immunity to more exposure, and the animals that live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone are ordinary animals with shorter lives. The games know this and say so through their own scientists; the alien video games article places Fallout among the series that used the lore of the atomic age with the most affection and the least belief.