Megaton (Fallout 3)

Megaton
Fallout location
Megaton, as seen facing towards the town's center from above in Fallout 3
First appearance	Fallout 3 (2008)
Genre	Action role-playing game
In-universe information
Location	Virginia, United States
Characters	Lucas Simms, Moira Brown, Confessor Cromwell, Colin Moriarty, Manya Vargas, Walter

Megaton is a fictional settlement in the 2008 action role-playing game Fallout 3, created as part of the Fallout franchise by Bethesda Game Studios. It is one of the first locations that the player, controlling the Lone Wanderer, may encounter upon exiting out of the Vault 101 fallout shelter in search of their father James. Megaton's exterior is a cone-shaped structure with an automatic gate to protect its residents from hostile outsiders, although it will open to allow the Lone Wanderer in. The town is run by a mayor and sheriff named Lucas Simms, who will ask the player character for help in defusing an undetonated nuclear warhead at the settlement's center. The interior of Megaton is a hole-like shape and is made up of bent pathways and wooden sheds held by girders that surround the bomb. Although the main quest of the game is finding their father, early on by asking Megaton's residents for clues, they can trade with local vendors and perform side quests like fixing water pipes for a handyman named Walter and helping out a mechanic and vendor named Moira Brown in writing the Wasteland Survival Guide by performing various tasks at the outside world, effectively serving as a "secondary tutorial" for in-game features.

In the game's lore and prior to the main events, the crater served as both a shelter for people who needed protection from sandstorms and failed to seek refuge from Vault 101 and a trading post. Megaton was founded by multiple people who based its construction on the wealth they accumulated during trade and sought to build a fortified structure around the bomb to protect themselves from hostile groups. The warhead also became a center of worship for a religious faction called the Church of the Children of the Atom. The player is presented with the option of either defusing the bomb on behalf of Lucas Simm and the rest of Megaton or detonating the bomb at Tenpenny Tower at the request of Mr. Burke and his boss Allistair Tenpenny, both of whom want it destroyed because they disliked its view.

Megaton has been positively received by critics who argued that it was one of the best and most memorable locations in the Fallout series given its early game presence and perceived liveliness and usefulness of the town. Writers have highlighted Moira Brown as a standout character within the settlement due to her quirky but friendly personality, usefulness as a mechanic and vendor, and her questline involving her to-be completed guidebook. The side quest around detonating or defusing the bomb has also been described by critics as showcasing the large-scale consequences that the player character and others are exposed, with many expressing guilt for detonating the warhead and thus destroying the settlement and killing nearly everyone there in the process.

Megaton, a fictional town located just south of Springvale, Virginia,^[1] is a relatively large-sized settlement area within the Capital Wasteland in the 2008 action role-playing game Fallout 3, developed by Bethesda Game Studios as part of the Fallout franchise. In 2277—200 years after the United States was obliterated by a nuclear war in an alternate world history—the player character, called "Lone Wanderer" in the game, exits Vault 101 in search of their father James who fled the fallout shelter to resume a water purification project to provide radiation-free water for the area's residents.^[2][3] After exiting the vault, the protagonist finds Megaton while exploring. The exterior is a conical structure on a small hill surrounded by arches pointing upward towards the sky, serving as a gate. The gate is guarded by a robot called a Protectron, which greets human visitors while protecting the area from creatures like giant ants. Once near the structure, the bulky metal sheets will be automatically lifted so that the Lone Wanderer can enter the settlement. As opposed to the exterior cone-like shape, the interior area is shaped like a large hole.^[4][5] Upon first entry into Megaton, Lucas Simms, its mayor and sheriff, greets the player to ensure they do not intend to cause trouble. He also asks the player whether they could disarm a live bomb in the middle of the town.^[6][7] The name Megaton is derived from the undetonated bomb that Lucas asks them to defuse.^[8]

The town's structure is made of irregular pathways and a cluster of wooden sheds held up by girders where residents live in that surrounds a crater with a dropped atomic bomb that failed to detonate. The Church of the Children of Atom, a religious organization led by Confessor Cromwell, worships the bomb as well as a monotheistic god and personification of atomic power named Atom. Cromwell loudly preaches at the bomb site to his praying followers and baptizes himself with the nearby irradiated water.^{[1][3][9][10]} The buildings accessible to the player include townhouses, two pubs, a waterworks, a church, a hostel, an armory, a shop, and bathrooms.^[11] The Lone Wanderer can visit Colin Moriarty at his saloon to gain information regarding James' whereabouts; Moriarty redirects the player towards visiting Three Dog of Galaxy News Radio for clues.^[12]

Vendors also reside in Megaton with whom the Lone Wanderer can exchange collected items for bottle cap-based currency. The player can pursue side quests given by the town's residents. For instance, the player character can help fix water pipes for the handyman Walter at the area's water processing plant. One of the most prominent quest-givers in Megaton is Moira Brown, a quirky and cheerful vendor and mechanic who runs the Craterside Supply. She asks the protagonist to help her write a guidebook called Wasteland Survival Guide. To complete her book, Moira tasks the player with performing dangerous activities outside the town. Many of the tasks involve exploration far from Megaton and require encounters with hostiles like raider groups and irradiated creatures; examples include scavenging for food and medicine or exposure to heavy amounts of radiation. Moira's quests effectively act as a "secondary tutorial" for the player that help understand the game's mechanics not taught from earlier game sequences in Vault 101.^{[1][13][14][15]}

The nuclear warhead at the middle of Megaton is the focus of a side quest potentially given by Lucas that the Lone Wanderer can address. After successfully defusing it, Lucas will reward the player with caps, a slight karma stat boost, and a residence within Megaton; the house can be upgraded by Moira to the player's liking and comes with a robot butler who can provide purified water and restyle the player character's hair.^{[8][13][12][16]} Alternatively, the Lone Wanderer can visit Moriarty's Saloon to talk to Mr. Burke, an employee of Allistair Tenpenny. Burke and his employer want Megaton wiped out via the warhead's detonation because they dislike seeing it from the faraway Tenpenny Tower, where they reside. If the Lone Wanderer agrees to blow up Megaton, Burke will provide the detonator and tell the player to meet him at the tower after the bomb is set to explode. Once at Tenpenny Tower, the Lone Wanderer can detonate the warhead, destroying the settlement and killing nearly everyone in Megaton. The Lone Wanderer is rewarded with a payment of caps and access to a suite at the tower but loses a large amount of karma points. The only survivor of the explosion is Moira, who becomes "ghoulified" (mutated massively as a result of large amounts of radiation exposure) but is still willing to forgive the Lone Wanderer and continue with her Wasteland Survival Guide.^{[4][12][5][8]} If the player chose to disarm the bomb, the Lone Wanderer will later encounter deadly hitmen sent by Tenpenny.^[12] Likewise, if they instead destroy Megaton, hostile former residents may attempt to ambush the player as may vigilantes of the "Regulators" faction due to the Lone Wanderer's negative karma.^[17]

The player can interact with Manya Vargas, an elderly granddaughter of one of Megaton's founders, to hear about the history of Megaton. In the early ages, she tells the Lone Wanderer, wasteland survivors used the crater to avoid sandstorms and as a shelter because they were rejected from refuge in the largely isolated Vault 101. Some of them began to worship the bomb there, forming the Children of Atom religion. She explains that when her grandfather was born, the crater became a significant location where people set up a trading post. Her grandfather, using his wealth gained from caravan trading, worked with several other people to cofound Megaton by building walls around the crater to protect themselves from hostile groups like raiders and super mutants, with more residents deciding to move in.^[18] According to the epilogue of the Fallout 3 Official Game Guide, Moira in 2297 confirms that the Lone Wanderer helped to save Megaton from the warhead and complete her Wasteland Survival Guide, which became a popular book in the Capital Wasteland.^[19] In an interview from IGN, the director of the 2024 show Fallout, Jonathan Nolan, revealed that the Californian town of Filly was largely inspired by Megaton given the "trashy" appearance of both and that the protagonists of both Fallout 3 and the TV show likely arrive at their respective areas early on.^[20]

In Fallout 3, the locations vary in density and organization from "remote bastions of life" like Megaton to the central hub Rivet City. The fewer number of NPCs ingame reflect the harsh nature of the series' setting. The game's lead designer Emil Pagliarulo emphasized that they were focused on making "better NPCs" — ones who do not just engage in small talk but address others by name and talk more about themselves and their goals in life. He cited Lucas Simms of Megaton as an example, elaborating that the player character can talk to him when he is near his son for dialogue specifically about his child.^[21] In a behind-the-scenes video called "The Making of Fallout 3", Pagliarulo briefly discussed his observation of a player's "priceless" reaction and satisfaction of his detonation of the Megaton bomb; executive producer Todd Howard used the discussed reaction as an example regarding how the game does not hide whether the player does something bad in-game and instead makes evil acts "visually entertaining".^[22] A localization team of Bethesda Softworks revealed in 2008 that they tweaked the Japanese version of Fallout 3 to remove both Mr. Burke and the ability to destroy Megaton by activating the nuclear warhead. This was due to the cultural sensitivity regarding the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 during the end of World War II, in which Japan was the only nation to have been hit by nuclear attacks.^[23]

Megaton has received positive attention among game critics, with Ritwik Mitra of Game Rant referring to the Fallout 3 town as "easily one of the most iconic locations in video gaming history" and one that any new player should visit.^[24] Screen Rant's Kyle Gratton said that Megaton's "odd location" made it memorable and "a big contribution to Fallout 3's world design". He also wrote that its "close proximity to certain death" (the nuclear bomb) is a good representation of the harsh life in the Capital Wasteland.^[18] Multiple game magazines had positively referenced Megaton within the context of Fallout 3, with PC Zone editor Will Porter in 2007 referring to the location as "a lovingly constructed area."^[6] In the same year of the release of Fallout 3, PlayStation Official Magazine – UK considered the quests of Megaton to be among the game's side quests that add hours to gameplay and enhance the liveliness of the setting. The magazine expressed favorability of the morality and reward for helping to defuse the bomb, including for getting the humorous robot butler Wadsworth.^[16] PlayStation: The Official Magazine in 2009 acknowledged that the game in relation to Megaton allows the player to roleplay as an "unapologetic bastard," from the "humorous" eventual death of a nearby hobo Mickey if they reject providing purified water to him to the "sadistic fun" of detonating the Megaton bomb.^[25]

Many retrospective works on Fallout 3 have positively covered Megaton in bigger detail, with Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell recording the author's observations in its introduction that he spent a few hours exploring Megaton and getting to know of its residents and then acknowledging that in essence of open-world games, his first few hours there were in fact optional and therefore evidence of "an awesome range of narrative variability".^[26] Diego Arguello of Inverse remarked that Megaton is easy to get lost in given its unconventional pathways, which he said was ironic because it was much smaller than another Fallout 3 location called Rivet City. He argued, however, that the smaller size of Megaton was no negative quality because of the townsfolk who make the settlement "a world of its own" from "the Children of the Atom religion to Moira Brown's excitement over creating a survival guide for the world outside these walls". Furthermore, he stated, it was "a strong example of a design philosophy that few open-world games have since managed to replicate, one in which density trumps scale, creating a sense of place that strives to be remembered", being an early example of a game that emphasized space over time as early as 2008. In comparison, he felt that neither Fallout 4 nor Fallout 76 were able to replicate the feeling of livelihood for a residential area.^[27] Cameron Kunzelman of Vice compared Megaton to "a rusted metal flower blooming in the wasteland" where people could live normal and productive lives, citing both Moira Brown for her guidebook research with the intention of making the lives of people living outside safe shelter better and Lucas Simms for trying to maintain law and order to make life for his people better. He compared it to Tenpenny Tower, in which its wealthy elite intend to get rid of what they saw as a new world intending to replace the old and violent world favoring the rich, pointing to the player character as having potential agency in making their goal come true.^[4] The Edge magazine staff wrote that the consequences behind destroying Megaton teaches players in part that one should caution taking drastic in-game choices until at least after they have done all available and relevant side quests. They felt that the game also has the player question whether it was all along worth it to gain a suite in Tenpenny Tower in exchange for blowing up Megaton on behalf of some evil people. The staff remarked that the game would feel emptier and worse with Megaton gone and brought up the possibility that the player would just kill everyone at Tenpenny Tower before reloading to before the Megaton bomb was detonated.^[11]

The A.V. Club writer Drew Toal discussed Vault 101 as an authoritarian location in which freedom is sacrificed in exchange for security, then comparing it to Megaton. He argued that Megaton was like "an enormous flaming trash barrel" that lacked the protections and hygiene from the fallout shelter but was "the ideal post-apocalyptic neighborhood" because of the residents depending on each other to get along. Toal felt that while Megaton had obvious flaws that it was better than the Republic of Dave (with an unstable government), Rivet City (with high amounts of classism), and Vault 101 (of which it and Megaton represented "two competing visions of society").^[28] GB Buford, writing for Kotaku, argued that the area between Vault 101 leading up to Megaton made it easy for new players to ease into the world of Fallout 3 by understanding where to go without immediate distractions. He said that while he found the side quest involving defusing or detonating the giant bomb interesting that the real highlight of Megaton is Moira Brown. Buford acknowledged that Moira has been a subject of ridicule from some players but voiced that he never understood why; he argued that she was quirky but always friendly, was the game's best mechanic early on, is a good vendor for selling items to, and has quests that unlock notable in-game perks. He continued that most importantly, Moira's side quests for her written work, Wasteland Survival Guide, are a "fantastic way to get an introduction to the world" given that her quests normally have the player going far and getting distracted by in-world events and locations, therefore both teaching the player additional in-game mechanics and encouraging them to seek out exploration.^[14]

Megaton's nuclear bomb and the side quest have both also been under critical commentary. Brendan Graeber of IGN considered that having to watch the destruction of Megaton that he caused because he decided to be greedy for a Tenpenny Tower luxury suite exposed him to large consequences not normally seen in many other RPGs and made him feel remorseful for the firsthand destruction and for paying back the hospitality of the settlement with a nuclear detonation.^[29] Eurogamer editor Robert Purchese of the opinion that no other moment of video game destruction compared to the nuclear warhead wiping out Megaton due to "some idiot atop a tower who stood to make only a measly 1000 caps for doing so". His return to the site made Megaton "the one, and only, virtual object [he had] ever felt guilty about destroying".^[30] TheGamer editor Jade King expressed that the bomb "acts as a compelling moral dilemma for the player to deal with" given how it easy it can be to use it for evil. She said that on her first playthrough, she refused to have Megaton's warhead be detonated and instead chose to kill Burke because she felt that it was justified despite lacking any reward. She then said that the player character being able to see the ruins of a destroyed Megaton and a ghoulified Moira showed how Fallout 3 was unafraid of showing people how evil they could be.^[5] In another retrospective, she reflected that moral polarity of the choices regarding the Megaton bomb was a flaw in Fallout 3 but one that reflected moral systems of other game series of the time like Mass Effect and Infamous as opposed to the later games with themes around moral grayness like The Witcher 3 and Baldur's Gate 3. She additionally explained her interest in an option to sit out of the Megaton bomb conflict and see what happens to the town should a future remaster or remake come out.^[31]

Megaton and its nuclear bomb have also been the focus of several academic works. Marcus Schulzke, writing for the journal Game Studies, considered the side quest regarding the Megaton bomb to be entertaining but criticized it for the rewards being too parallel in experience points and residency along with the karma points given for disarming the bomb being disproportionately low compared to the massive karma loss for detonating it.^[32] Daniel Singleton, dedicating a chapter of a book to video games and science fiction, highlighted that while Fallout 3 intended to showcase the effects of nuclear destruction on the world, players can "transform" nuclear weapons into their own personal toys and decide how they want to use it. He elaborated that many players may choose detonate the nuclear bomb on behalf of Allistair Tenpenny just to see what happens before reloading the game just to defuse it and continue on afterward.^[33] James Schirmer, writing a chapter on morality in Fallout 3, pointed out that Megaton's side quest around the bomb is likely the first opportunity presented for the player to shift their in-game karma points and suggested that it had similarities to the post-apocalyptic social science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz on the basis of the connection between religion and science. He suggested that the cultlike worship of the nuclear warhead in Megaton by the local members of the Church of the Children of the Atom was likely a reference to the science fiction film Beneath the Planet of the Apes, which similarly features humans worshipping an unexploded atomic bomb. Furthermore, he wrote that although the religious group viewed the bomb as a "creative and unifying holy element" that their deaths do not negate the negative karma gained from detonating it because of the non-cult members that the Lone Wanderer would also kill in the process.^[17]

Dan Staines of the University of New South Wales was more critical of the content of Megaton, considering both Simms and Burke to lack enough emotional depth beyond being moral opposites for the player to be personally invested in either character and especially criticizing the latter as being cartoonishly evil to the point that good-aligned role-players have no real reason to engage with him. He also acknowledged Cromwell as a kooky character and a "parody of real-life street-corner evangelists", considering him to be a slightly more interesting, albeit narratively "underdeveloped", individual of the location because he neither comments or nor attempts to sway the player character on what to do with the nuclear warhead. Staines argued that although the characters of Megaton do have a personality, players cannot personally relate to them due to a lack of reason for such, that a character's motives or actions are connected more to gameplay quests and rewards than narrative. He also criticized the quest involving the Megaton bomb as too "stark[ly] black and white" in morality, which he suggested left no moral ambiguity. In comparison, he continued, another Fallout 3 location called the Oasis made a better case for moral ambiguity.^[34] Lars De Wildt and his fellow coauthors, writing for the journal Religions, analyzed the Church of the Children of Atom, providing context of the post-war religious faction being formed based on the belief that the 2077 nuclear devastation was a holy event by their god Atom. They discussed further lore context where the faction, formed in Megaton by Fallout 3, had attained a popular following throughout the United States as seen in Fallout 4. Atom as worshipped by Cromwell and the rest of the Church of the Children of Atom, they stated, was "omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent" and was described as a "masculine, incomprehensibly opaque deification of atomic power". The religious nature of Oasis in comparison, they continued, contrasted with that of Megaton in that the romantic spiritual cult there called the Treeminders worship nature in the form of a talking tree called the "The Great One", who himself is mortal and can be killed by the Lone Wanderer.^[9]

• Megaton at Nukapedia, the Fallout Fandom wiki
• Megaton at the independent Fallout wiki