Musical Complaints and Compliments about the Fallout 76 Radio Station

The biggest innovation that Grand Theft Auto 3 brought to video games was The Radio Station. You get in the car and, looky there, it has a radio. If you’re driving from this part of town to that one, why not listen to some tunes? It’s what you do when you drive to Costco, after all. GTA 3 had a bunch of radio stations and cheap-to-license songs and it slowly came to dawn on the player that its main selling point was the commercials and, eventually, the talk radio station. Listening to Laslow was preferable to listening to K-JAH for the umpteenth time.

Well, Fallout 3 seemed to do one better. It not only (famously) used cheap-to-license songs from the era, it added The DJ. Three Dog. So in-between hearing Danny Kay/The Andrews Sisters and Roy Brown and Billie Holiday, you’d hear Three Dog show up and give an update on what you’d recently done in the game. If you had positive karma and did something good, he’d say “nice goin’, kid” and if you had negative and did something bad, he’d say something like “not cool at all”.

Fallout: New Vegas did something positively brilliant by upping the ante: They got Wayne Newton to be the DJ “Mister New Vegas”. He’d not only give updates on what the player was doing but, occasionally, he’d tell the player “I love you” and that would just make the game so much better. Thanks, Mister New Vegas. I have high karma because of you.

When Fallout 4 was announced, I wondered “How in the heck will they outdo themselves for the radio?” I mean, they went out and searched and found one of the few people on the planet with more charisma than Three Dog and they found him. How do you top that? Well, Fallout 4 didn’t even try. The Fallout 4 DJ was awful. Awful! He’d break records. He’d come back after a song and it’s obvious that he was crying during the song. He’d read news announcements and stutter and fumble his way through them. He’d tell jokes and the jokes would fall flat. He was a *TERRIBLE* DJ. And you know what? It worked. You found yourself rooting for the guy despite yourself.

There was a mission where you would find the guy and give him an ego boost and then he turned into a “good” DJ. At which point, he ceased to be even remotely interesting. Seriously, that quest ruined the radio station.

When Fallout 76 was announced, I didn’t really give the radio station much thought. If I wasn’t going to play it… why does the radio station matter? Well, as I’ve mentioned, I was gifted the game and then I started playing and, once I started playing, I started listening to the radio station in Fallout 76.

First things first, the DJ isn’t as charismatic as Three Dog or Wayne Newton… but who is? Seriously, that’s a tall order. She (it’s a she this time) is embodying a different paradigm: The is the cool older/younger sister who is playing music to encourage you as you wander around the wasteland. She talks about herself and why she became a DJ, she offers encouragement to the player as s/he wanders around, and plays some good tunes.

HOWEVER. She makes, ugh, jokes. She makes jokes about the music.

I mean, take the Ink Spots song “I Don’t Want To Set the World on Fire”. A perfect little tune showcased perfectly in the original Fallout 3 teaser trailer:

Seriously. I just watched it again and it still gives me goosebumps. Dang. That is a *PERFECT* teaser trailer and it gets kicked off by a beautiful song in a decidedly horrific setting.

The song shows up in Fallout 76. The DJ talks about the song when she plays it. “Looks like somebody beat you to it!” she chuckles and then says “Too soon?”

I wince every single time that joke comes up. Quit explaining the joke, darlin’. Just play the next song in the rotation.

Oh. It’s the Beach Boys.

Many essays could be written about how the people who chose the songs were alternately brilliant and boneheaded. The Beach Boys, for example, have a handful of divinely PERFECT songs and those songs include “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”.

But the Beach Boys do not belong in the Fallout Universe. We went a different direction in that universe. I mean, most of the songs in Fallout 3 were from between the mid-30’s and, apart from the occasional atom bomb-related novelty song, the oldest ones were from somewhere around the Truman administration. Pet Sounds came out in 1966! Post-Kennedy!

That said, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” is a perfect song and it’s absolutely lovely to listen to as I am shooting ghouls in the wasteland.

There are a handful of other anachronistic songs but they benefit of matching the setting. Tennessee Ernie Ford sings Sixteen Tons (from 1955), he sings the beautiful Shenandoah (from 1961) and The Chordettes show up to sing Mister Sandman (from 1954) and those feel a little bit out of place but there is also a cover of Ring of Fire from 2018 and a cover of Take Me Home, Country Roads from 2018. I suppose you can’t do a song in West Virginia without Take Me Home, Country Roads but… I feel like Robin Williams in Jumanji. “WHAT YEAR IS IT?!?!”

But it feels weird to complain about Pet Sounds, Ring of Fire, and Take Me Home, Country Roads. (That said, seriously, they don’t belong in the game.)

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They say that the biggest problem with The Simpsons now versus when it began is that the people who wrote seasons 1-7 grew up with all sorts of weird and esoteric media and the people who are writing the shows today grew up watching The Simpsons.

In that same way, I grew up with media that referenced other media but I didn’t know about the other media.

For example, this commercial for Freshen-Up Gum makes reference to the song “I Didn’t Know the Gun was Loaded”.

I knew the commercial because of Sorrell Booke (the cop) because he played Boss Hogg in The Dukes of Hazzard.

Well, the original song shows up a lot in Fallout 76. I didn’t know that there was an original song! Anyway, in 1978, they put the song in a gum commercial.

Another thing that showed up is a song that I first heard from Led Zeppelin. Zepheads know this one:

The album Presence mostly sucked, but that song is a gold coin in a pile of crap and, rightfully, is pretty much the only song on the album that got airplay in the late 80s/early 90s.

I never listened to the original but… dang. It’s better. And, thanks to Fallout 76, I’ve finally listened to it.

So as I wander about the Appalachian Wasteland, I listen to a handful of original songs that are better than the songs that came after, a handful of cover songs that are pale reflections of the songs that came before, and a DJ who encourages me to keep trying.

I’m not sure that I’d call Fallout 76’s radio station as success in the same way that 3 and New Vegas hit it out of the park… but it’s not a failure. Sometimes that’s enough.

So… what are you listening to?

(Featured image is the radio tab of the Fallout 76 Pip-Boy. Screenshot taken by the author.)