“The experience of reading such a work is too much like staring into one’s own grave," writes Paul Brians of painfully realistic nuclear war fiction. And he would know; he literally wrote the book on it. Instead, we’re much more likely to embrace media depictions the internet has classified with the hashtag #NukePorn: glorified anarchic playgrounds set after everything's gone to hell.
A slew of recent games has embraced this concept in design, casting off the dull settings of dystopias past and instead casting global ruin in bright purples and neon pinks. A study of the genre's history would suggest this acts as a mechanism to control our anxieties over it actually happening. However, the technicolor settings of titles like Fallout 76, Far Cry New Dawn, and Rage 2 have taken #NukePorn to an unprecedented extreme.
For fans of classic titles, these colorful interpretations are hardly anything new. Graphical limitations resulted in several '80s games like Atari's Missile Command and Interplay's Wasteland using bright primary colors to illustrate the nuclear holocaust. Just getting players to be able to make out individual characters and scenery required extreme contrast. By the end of the '90s, however, the original Fallout's release established what would become the genre's dominant color palette in the decades to come: either dark gray, dark brown, or covered in trash.
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