Technically, the leading lore theory is that culture progressed, and then regressed as society started to crumble with the Resource Wars, Sino-American War, and the New Plague, with fascism rising.
The evidence for this is largely in New Vegas referencing the hippie movement and other cultural artifacts.
And it’s interesting how much pushback in studio they got from the Fallout 1 developers when the Fallout 2 team wanted to move in that direction. It was pretty intentional with Fallout 1 to keep it where you didn’t need a pop culture encyclopedia to understand everything.
Timothy Cain has a wonderful youtube chanel, lots of interesting stories.
Technically, the leading lore theory is that culture progressed, and then regressed as society started to crumble with the Resource Wars, Sino-American War, and the New Plague, with fascism rising.
The evidence for this is largely in New Vegas referencing the hippie movement and other cultural artifacts.
plus fallout 2 has lots of references to 90s music and culture, although that could just be considered borderline noncanonical easter eggs
To be fair, that's 90% of Fallout 2, lol.
And it’s interesting how much pushback in studio they got from the Fallout 1 developers when the Fallout 2 team wanted to move in that direction. It was pretty intentional with Fallout 1 to keep it where you didn’t need a pop culture encyclopedia to understand everything.
Timothy Cain has a wonderful youtube chanel, lots of interesting stories.