The person you spend the most time thinking about in a Fallout game is the build-a-bear murderer you assemble in character creation—an amalgam of traits, facial blemishes and inventory items glued together by a haphazard personality you’ll develop on the fly.
Eventually, though, the other voices start to seep in. Preston stops speaking for a bit and you begin to hear from a wider cast of freaks and weirdos—companions, villains, chancers and kings of one-horse towns. Each has been transformed by the wasteland, and may be changed in turn by contact with you. A handful have made such an impression that they’ve stuck with us afterwards, like radiation on a Fancy Lads Snack Cake. These, we contend, are the best characters in Fallout.
10. Gizmo (Fallout)
A figure of grotesque theatre, Gizmo is the pinnacle of early Fallout’s clay-based conversation cutscenes. More jowl than man, he slurps when he speaks and whines through his tiny nostrils when pausing for breath. His first act upon meeting you is to commission a murder; his second, should you say no, is to murder you himself. “Don’t cross me,” he wheezes. “I still got the kneecaps from the last one who tried.”
Getting into a fight with Gizmo is fantastic, since his animations seat him exclusively in his chair. He lives and dies in that thing, slumping forward onto his desk when shot through the chest with an uzi. Hey man, you should’ve got out more. Nobody ever said on their deathbed that they wished they’d worked harder.
In a brilliant demonstration of Fallout’s moral complexity, helping Gizmo actually helps civilization. In one ending, Junktown becomes a “new boomtown under the careful, and profitable, guidance of Don Gizmo. He profits the most, and continues to increase the size of his casino, and the scope of his power, until he chokes to death while eating some iguana-on-a-stick.”
9. Three Dog (Fallout 3)
The voice on the radio and most reliable source of feedback. Likes to refer to you as “the little prick from Vault 101” if you rack up enough bad karma. And you have to respect that.
8. Piper (Fallout 4)
A career in investigative journalism starts one way: with the childhood solving of your own father’s killing and subsequent whistleblowing of the corrupt town mayor. That’s how Piper ultimately became a professional thorn in the side of the Diamond City establishment—publishing exposés in Publick Occurrences, the local newspaper. A cell in the settlement’s jail became known as the “Piper Suite.”
By 2287, two centuries after the bombs, it feels as if the world has little chance of being rebuilt. It’s rare indeed to find someone in the wasteland determined to push for change—particularly with a pen, rather than a powerfist. Piper’s determined naysaying has made her unpopular, and dare we say it, a little lonely. But for her, truthtelling is a compulsion. By travelling together, you have the opportunity to make someone happy through companionship and mutual respect. And to be teased constantly for being 200 years old.
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)
7. Dogmeat (Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout 3, Fallout 4, the Amazon show)
Technically a name belonging to several dogs over a span of centuries, Dogmeat has proven to be as disposable and replaceable as his namesake. And yet he’s been a steadfast companion to countless players—remaining beloved among Fallout fans even as the series’ canine cast has expanded to include Rottweilers, cyberdogs and a pre-war border collie named Roosevelt.
Why do so many pick Dogmeat over the chattier alternatives? Some do it for the stealth. Others for the peace and quiet. And the rest out of a desire to channel Mad Max. The original Dogmeat automatically joined any protagonist wearing a Gibson-style leather jacket, don’t you know.
That same Dogmeat was canonically shredded by a laser wall in Mariposa Military Base, and you know what? Based on personal experience with his pathfinding, I can confirm he did absolutely nothing to prevent this. As if by way of apology, his Fallout 4 equivalent can disarm and retrieve landmines. On balance: a pretty good boy.
6. Harold (Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout 3)
What is Harold? Fallout’s first ghoul? A freak born from early exposure to Super Mutant juice? All anyone can say for sure is that he’s a one-off. Found in a nondescript corner of the Hub, where the locals have been “picking on him like a bad booger,” he’s an unlikely font of history.
Want to know what the sirens sounded like when the bombs fell? The origin story of Fallout’s villain? Harold was there for all of it. He’ll even give you a vague direction for the source of the Super Mutants—nothing less than a secret lead on the RPG’s endgame if you’re wanting a speedrun.
For a decade, Harold was one of the series’ few constants. By Fallout 2, the parasitic plant on the side of his head had grown into a branch. By Fallout 3, the man had become a tree. And at no point did he ever develop an air of wisdom befitting his grand age. That’s likely the key to his charm.
“I’m doing great for being dead,” he cackles. Or is that a hacking cough? Hard to tell with old Harold.
5. Fantastic (Fallout: New Vegas)
Sometimes a side character takes you by surprise and cons their way into your permanent memory banks. Fantastic isn’t the first idiot in the series to be put in charge of a nuclear power plant—that honour goes to Fallout 2’s unwashed ghoul, Festus—but he is the most entertaining.
The New California Republic believes that this dope in sunglasses is fixing up Helios One to keep the lights on in their home states. Instead, he’s killing time to fund an addiction to every kind of chem out there. “Got the whole NCR suckling my teats, and it feels so good.”
Fantastic is the man in control. He pushes buttons. He turns dials. Sometimes he makes up little stories in his head about what the numbers mean. “Like one time I imagined they were a code to get into a vault full of naked women. Man, how cool would that be?” A moron at the centre of a geopolitical standoff, he is Obsidian’s greatest punchline.
Once you arrive to sort the situation, Fantastic offers to put in a good word for you, and spits out the best line in New Vegas: “They asked me how well I understood theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics. They said ‘welcome aboard.’”
4. The Master (Fallout)
Poor old Richard Grey started out as the hero of his own story. A “doctor and philosopher”, still warmly remembered by his one surviving friend, he was the first to hunt for the source of the monsters that troubled caravan routes across the desert. Not so different from yourself.
In the tradition of supervillains, however, his origin tale ended with an accidental fall into a vat of dangerous goo. Half a century of mutation later, Ricky’s the centre of a computational hive mind, dedicated to the generational upgrade of wastelanders into hyper-evolved human beings who can weather the toxic wastes. Or, as you and I know them, Super Mutants. “Who else, the ghouls? Please. Normals? They brought nuclear death to us all.”
The great tragedy of The Master is that he’s misguided, and one nudge away from realising it. Bring the right information to his doorstep and he’ll basically turn himself in —realising that his Mutants are sterile, and that his long-term plans have been in vain. What sticks with you is the body horror—the experience of reasoning with a desktop computer covered in melted skin that speaks in three voices. No, please don’t show us your rig. No more.
3. Veronica (Fallout: New Vegas)
“With regret comes a girl… smiling sad, brown robe, name Veronica, half here. Wraps her and her heart up like a pack, in the pack, a key, some say. Forecast: Cloudy, with a chance of friendship.” —The Forecaster
Many Fallout fans first met the Brotherhood of Steel in Washington DC. There, they manifested as a straightforwardly heroic sect of techno-knights, out to save the wasteland. It was New Vegas that reminded us of the faction’s iffy founding values. In the Mojave, the Brotherhood are hoarders, holed up in a bunker—so loath to accept new blood they’re at risk of dying out.
Veronica is our view from the inside of that intransigent and fearful organisation. She exists on the surface in disguise, trading for supplies to bring back to her comrades. Yet her assignment has given her perspective: the Brotherhood must adapt to survive, moderating its views and opening its gates to newcomers.
Her peppiness becomes poignant as you follow her journey to convince the Brotherhood elders of their errors. You watch her faith falter in the face of repeated knockbacks. But any sadness is leavened by her sarcastic wit, and the comedic clang of her powerfist felling another gecko in a single strike.
2. Maximus (Amazon TV show)
The motivations of Maximus are shared by roughly 60% of all Fallout players. He saw a dude in power armour and thought: how do I get me some of that? It’s that fundamental relatability, and increasingly troubled relationship with his own opportunism, which makes him such a wonderful guide to life in the Brotherhood of Steel.
The quintessential Maximus scene is the one in which he fights a losing battle to win back his armour from a trio of raiders —with a wrench for a sword and a toilet seat for a shield, in a desperate parody of knighthood. He is a reminder that, for most, life in Fallout is a hardscrabble existence in which choices are slim and grim.
Eventually, Maximus begins to forgive himself for what he’s done to survive. As protagonist Lucy says: “I just threw acid in an innocent man’s face, and I’ve only been up here two weeks. The wasteland sucks.”
1. Nick Valentine (Fallout 4)
Diamond City only really starts to feel like civilization once you meet its resident robot gumshoe. From the very instant you halt Nick Valentine’s interrogation at the hands of mobsters, he’s on the case. “Gotta love the irony of the reverse damsel-in-distress scenario. Question is, why did our heroine risk life and limb for an old private eye?”
In the same moment, Nick lights a cigarette and raises it to his lips, as if daring the remaining plastic on his face to bubble and fall off. The flare from the match illuminates the deep chasm in his cheek and the metal hinge of his jaw. It’s that duality which defines him: a flagrantly artificial physique, matched by a self-assured humanity that somehow bypasses the fears of a wasteland bracing for synth invasion.
Of course, the more you get to know Nick, the more that contradiction starts to nag at the both of you. As a born problem-solver, he’s drawn to the mystery of his own creation: whose pre-war mind is he using? Where did he get the memories that tell him his own name?
Throughout his existential crisis, Nick continues to lend a distinct voice to Fallout 4—altering the tone of the series in the direction of noir. And who better to deliver that voice than Stephen Russell, the actor behind Thief’s Garrett.
