Fallout 1 remade via Doom mod in this incredible looking fan game

After seemingly vanishing for three years, a fan-made Doom mod with a Fallout theme has resurfaced with a new trailer and release window.

It has been a long time since the last wholly original Fallout game was released. Multiplayer entry Fallout 76 has continued to receive updates and Fallout 4 saw a re-release for modern consoles last year, but that’s all in the last decade.

The success of the Fallout TV show has no doubt incentivised Microsoft and Bethesda to fast-track new projects, but while multiple new games are reportedly in the works, including Fallout 5, nothing has been officially announced.

Aside from simply replaying the older games, fans have to rely on community-made projects, such as the impressive Fallout: London mod for Fallout 4, that launched last year. And now there’s a reimagining of Fallout 1, that’s been made as a mod of Doom.

Dubbed Fallout: Bakersfield, the project was initially teased all the way back in 2022 but seemed to drop off the map, as many of these fan projects do. It turns out the team have been chipping away at it ever since and sharing regular updates on its progress since September 2023, though only through a website called Boosty, that we’ve never heard of before.

Regardless, a new trailer has dropped this week and it manages to look like both Doom and Fallout. Unlike the modern Fallout games that blend role-playing mechanics with real-time gunplay, the original Fallout was a traditional role-playing game with turn-based combat.

It’s often forgotten, but Bethesda did not invent Fallout, they bought the franchise from defunct publisher Interplay and by the time they released Fallout 3 in 2008 there were already four other games preceding it.

Judging by the name and trailer, Fallout: Bakersfield isn’t adapting the entirety of the first game and is instead focusing on one area: the Necropolis. This is a city built in the ruins of Bakersfield, California and is now home to mutated ghouls.

The mod is being built with the GZDoom engine, which is based on the engine for the original Doom and a popular choice for Doom mods. So, it’s probably more accurate to say Fallout: Bakersfield is reworking Doom to be more like Fallout rather than the other way around.

Not only does it use the same style of 2D pixel artwork from Doom for the player character and enemies, even the heads-up display at the bottom of the screen is similar to Doom’s, complete with a render of the player character’s head that reacts to taking damage.

The pixel art and HUD’s design have been updated to resemble Fallout’s post-apocalyptic aesthetic and while the mod doesn’t appear to retain any of Fallout 1’s role-playing mechanics (at least from what we can tell), the HUD does have a text log that’s constantly narrating your actions, just like the original.

To be honest, it’s very impressive and we really like the way they’ve used the Doom engine to make something that’s reminiscent of the era the first game came out in (the first Fallout was released in 1997, just a year after Quake, when there were still plenty of Doom clones around).

Although the trailer focuses on exploring and shooting, there won’t be a complete absence of spoken dialogue, as it ends with the player confronting Harry, leader of the super mutants, complete with different dialogue options for the player to make.

As for when it’ll be available to play, the tail end of the trailer only promises to have it out before the 2020s are up (so 2029 at the latest).

Apparently it’s currently 60% complete and though the team appears to consist of only two people – Alexander ‘Red888guns’ Berezin and Denis Berezin – the popularity of the trailer may well act as a recruitment tool to get more people helping out.

Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter.

To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.

For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.

MORE: Fallout London has finally been released – this is what you need to play it

MORE: Fallout 3 remaster is still a ‘while’ away says source as Oblivion is confirmed

MORE: Atomfall review – Fallout in the Lake District is a fun nuclear disaster