Fallout 4 - The hidden history of the institute

Hidden History is brought to you by G2A.com and our supporters at Patreon. When it comes to the story of Fallout 4, it’s easy to make the case that a single faction is the most important: The Institute. Born out of the Commonwealth Institute of Technology, the original intention of the organization was simply to further Pre-War Science, eventually though the group became much more ambitious and, depending on who you ask, much more sinister. And like many things in the Fallout universe, you can trace the inspiration behind the organization back to a few fictional and real-world sources. Let’s start with the latter. As many of you probably know, the Commonwealth Institute of Technology is inspired by Boston’s own Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The CIT Ruins even mirrors MIT’s Great Dome found on their campus. Probably to no one’s surprise, there is quite a few Fallout fans at MIT and after finding out that they would be referenced in the game, they created a Fallout themed banner to hang in the dome. MIT research scientist Philip Tan even weighed in on the game saying: “I think it’s pretty flattering that Bethesda has imagined a future where much has been obliterated in a nuclear exchange, but MIT still exists in some form, Walking by all the defense research labs in Kendall Square, it’s easy to imagine malfunctioning warheads coming home to roost.” Also mirroring the plot of Fallout 4 is the fact that MIT actually is busy making some pretty strange looking robots, like this artifical cheetah that they created last year. Which is either really cool or really creepy looking, we’ll leave that up to you. The connections to MIT might not stop there though. Take the head of The Institute's Bioscience Lab, Clayton Holdren. This character shares a last name with one of MIT’s most influential graduates in recent years: John Holdren, the current Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy under the Obama administration. And graduating from MIT is not the only the only thing that makes Holdren a fitting person to reference in Fallout 4, there is also the fact that much of his earlier work kind of lines up with Fallout’s themes. Books like 1986’s “Earth and the Human Future” and 1987’s “Strategic Defenses and the Future of the Arms Race” explore the scientific questions raised by nuclear proliferation and the effects of Earth’s growing population. Moving on to fiction, one possible piece of inspiration comes from the sci-fi master who coined the term “robotic”: Isaac Asimov. Who’s Robot series, most famously “I, Robot”, a series of short stories that explored the morality of creating artificial intelligence. The robots are created by U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men Incorporated. Which shares quite a few similarities to The Institute. Like the Fallout faction, both companies started in the New England area with fairly innocent intentions. The first generation of synths was created to simply help people, much like U.S. Robot’s early robots, who were manufactured to serve human customers. Also like The Institute, things eventually took a darker turn. Asimov’s work isn’t the only piece of science fiction that influenced The Institute. Another reference to the author is found on a terminal, where a man named “Isaac” is complaining about the “principles” they were programming into the robots, saying they were probably going to backfire anyway. This is a reference to Isaac Asimov’s famous three laws of robotics, which, unsurprisingly to anyone who has seen the Will Smith adaptation, do tend to turn out to have been a bad idea in his most famous robot stories. Next up we have our comment showcase. Toby Vanderwater had a very interesting theory about the Fallout 4 board game, Blast Radius. He noticed that the game can be broken down into nuclear materials, which may seem a little strange for a children’s game. But it could be a reference to a real product released for kids in America in 1950: the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory. The science kits intention was to allow children to create and watch chemical reactions that they created themselves. It sounds like a decent idea, and the U.S. government even voiced their support of the idea, believing it would help drive public interest in science. There was only one problem: the set included actual radioactive material. Which, as you can probably tell, was probably not a good idea in retrospect. So what do you guys think, was Blast Radius inspired by the infamous Gilbert set. And of course we can’t forget our Shoddy Comment, which comes from Milan Maes, who says “HI HOW'S IT GOINH? REMARKABLF! DIGESTION WELL-TO-DO WHAT'S YOUR OPINION ABOUT THAT, GU|S !!!” Actually maybe this comment is genius, there’s no way of knowing. Now it’s time for some trivia. Last week we asked you, what planet the KOTOR character Bastila shan was from and the answer was, B. Talravin. This week we have a Fallout 4 question for you, what year was the Institute founded?