We are currently playing Fallout 4 at home and it really is an amazing game (we even got the collector's edition, which came with a Pip Boy, a wrist mounted computer – well, actually it's a very bulky case for your smartphone). The story starts at the time when the bombs fall in the 2070s. The protagonist flees with their family into Vault 111 (an underground bunker) where they spend the next 200 years or so frozen in a cryo chamber. Only shortly the protagonist wakes up during to see how their baby child is kidnapped. Once properly woken an unspecified time later, the protagonist starts to search for their child in the post-apocalyptic ruins of Boston.

As usual you get to see quite a few local sights on your way through the game. The baseball stadium for instance is now a safe home to a number of people and called 'Diamond City', Fort Independence has to be freed from monsterous crabs and you get to walk the Freedom Trail to discover the secrets of Old North Church. Of course you meet plenty of super mutants, raiders and other folks on the way.

A new feature I really love is the possibility to build communities in many locations, for instance around your former (now destroyed) home, a drive-in cinema or a small mid-town alley. You can build shacks with beds from stuff you find everywhere, provide for enough water and plant crops for the people who want to live there. It's a almost an additional game inside of the game.

Well, anyway, while doing all kinds of stuff in the ruins of Boston we listen to Diamond City Radio, which provides the right background music for our adventure. In addition to the brilliant collection of music you get a quite insecure DJ who also comments on things that happened to you in the game. The soundtrack the developers dug out in the archives is just amazing, I think. All of them are 'real' songs, meaning they were actually played on the radio in our world at some time.

I want to share with you some extractions from my favourite songs here. If you want to know more of the songs you can find them all linked on Fallout Wiki.

The first song we already heard in the trailer to Fallout 4. It's one of a few in the soundtrack telling about love, loss and sorrow, which seems to be fitting to the story of the game. Some of these songs are quite cheesy.

It's all over, but the crying

And nobody's crying but me

Friends all over know I'm trying

To forget about how much I care for you

It's All Over But the Crying

1947 by The Ink Spots

I like that they also added 'I don't want to set the world on fire' to the soundtrack again, which they have already used in an earlier game. I find it very ironic in the context of Fallout.

A completely different category of songs are those with some kind of atom bomb theme. It's hard to believe that someone at some time actually sang stuff like this.

Atom bomb baby, little atom bomb

I want her in my wigwam

She's just the way I want her to be

A million times hotter than TNT

Atom Bomb Baby

1957 by The Five Stars

It goes on like this for some more lines. I just wonder why their TV tower is radioactive and the wigwam also doesn't seem very appropriate. There are other songs like this. 'Uranium Fever' for inastance tells us about some guy who goes to search for uranium ore because 'I've been told uranium ore's worth more than gold'.

The next song made my jaw drop the first time I heard it. From today's point of view it's just so amazingly politically incorrect. The song tells us about a group of natives in the jungle who are visited by a missionary and one of them refuses to follow them to civilisation because he prefers to stay where he is.

So bongo, bongo, bongo I don't want to leave the Congo, oh-no-no-no-no-no

Bingle, bangle, bungle I'm so happy in the jungle, I refuse to go

Don't want no bright lights, false teeth, doorbells, landlords, I make it clear

That no matter how they coax him, I'll stay right here.

Civilisation

1947 by Danny Kaye and The Andrews Sisters

If you'd sing anything like this today you would certainly end up in the news and be flooded by letters of protesters (or they would post on your facebook account).

The last song I want to share with you is actually meant to be funny. I find it quite disturbing, to be honest.

Crawl out through the fallout, baby

When they drop that bomb

Crawl out through the fallout

With the greatest of aplomb…

Crawl Out Through The Fallout

1960 by Sheldon Allman

I don't want to spoil this with any comments I could make at this stage, I think the song speaks for itself. And if all this was too much for you, you can of course switch to Classical Radio, where they play you some nice Beethoven, Brahms or Debussy. But you'll definitely miss out on something.

Last but not least here's another trailer with some more in-game soundtrack – I really like this one: The Wanderer by Dion, 1964.

Tavaron da Quirm

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