War never changes. The retrofuturistic apocalypse world of Fallout has graced fans with pretty regular releases since 1997, letting us explore the North American wasteland in the aftermath of a nuclear war in a variety of regions.
It can be a little hard to keep track of the series’ timeline if you aren’t listening to every holotape in every game and keeping your own log of events. On top of the best Fallout games, we now have to consider where the new Fallout TV show fits in the timeline. We aren’t going to get into every timeline detail here (the series’ lore is surprisingly deep and detailed) but we will let you know exactly what year every mainline titles takes place in and how you can play them in order.
Fallout games by release date
The Fallout series is coming up on its 30th anniversary, and there are a few more entries than most people think there are. While the mainline games get a lot of attention, there are a handful of oddball spinoffs as well.
- Fallout (1997)
- Fallout 2 (1998)
- Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel (2001)
- Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (2004)
- Fallout 3 (2008)
- Fallout: New Vegas (2010)
- Fallout 4 (2015)
- Fallout Shelter (2015)
- Fallout Pinball (2016)
- Fallout 76 (2018)
- Fallout Shelter Online (2019)
Fallout games in chronological order
The Fallout series takes place after what is referred to as the Great War, a global thermonuclear war that took place on Saturday, October 23, 2077. Nuclear blasts across the globe wiped out civilization in a matter of two hours.
The games have not been released in an entirely linear timeline, so to play them in chronological order, you’ll need to bounce around a little. Here’s every mainline title and its place in the Fallout timeline:
- Fallout 76 (2102 – 2104)
- Fallout (2161)
- Fallout 2 (2241)
- Fallout 3 (2277)
- Fallout: New Vegas (2281)
- Fallout 4 (2287)
- Fallout TV series (2296 – 2297)
