Summary
- The Manhattan Project and the invention of the atomic bomb have been referenced in various forms of media, including video games like Tennis For Two and the Fallout series.
- The Fallout series features a fictional company called Manhattan Projects Inc. That produced nuclear weapons before the war, and Los Alamos, the testing site for the bomb, is also mentioned.
- Braid, a puzzle platformer game, incorporates references to the Manhattan Project through its storyline and hidden clues, potentially serving as an allegory for the bomb's creation. Metal Gear series also explores the consequences and personal impacts of the bomb, with characters connected to the Manhattan Project.
One of the most world-changing events in the past century was the invention of the atomic bomb. Its use on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 ended World War 2 and began the Cold War, where the threat of more nuclear launches left people living in fear.
Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer goes through the life & times of its key creator J. Robert Oppenheimer. But it’s not the first piece of media to delve into the Manhattan Project and the A-Bomb. There are plenty of books, movies, TV dramas, and more, but there are also some video games that referenced the project.
6 Tennis For Two
Oppenheimer is one of the most famous scientists involved with the bomb if only for his grave recitation of the Bhagavad-gītā to illustrate how he felt about the weapon (“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”). But there were others involved, like William Higinbotham.
He and his team were responsible for the bomb’s electronics and ignition mechanism. A decade later, he worked at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. It was here, in 1958, that he used some old oscilloscope tech to create Tennis for Two, arguably the first-ever video game. It was a simple little tennis game that just happened to be made by the man who made the bombs explode.
5 Fallout
It's tricky finding specific references to the Manhattan Project and the original atomic bomb as most games involving nukes tend to be contemporary (there was a lot of nuclear scare media in the 1980s), or set in the near to distant future. For example, the original Fallout was set in 2161, nearly a century after a nuclear war between the USA and China. After that, it was up to the player to survive in the wasteland left behind.
However, before the war devastated the land, a company called Manhattan Projects Inc made nuclear weapons for the world powers. What was once a secret project was now a brand name, with their last warhead- Plutonius- being worshiped as a god in Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel. Los Alamos was also going to be a location in Black Isle Studios' “Van Buren” design for Fallout 3 as “The Reservation,” which now only exists as a Fallout: New Vegas mod.
4 Wasteland 2
That mod was made by InXile Entertainment, the company behind the sequels to Fallout's spiritual predecessor, Wasteland. It saw the world fall to nukes in 1998, with the remainder of the US army policing the Southwest US as “Desert Rangers,” where they dealt with rogue AI, machines, and bomb-worshiping cults like The Servants of the Mushroom Cloud and the Holy Detonation Cult.
Wasteland 2 had its own callback to Los Alamos, the testing site for the bomb. In California, players could find Los Alamitos, a site surrounded by deadly radiation and robots, and containing only a scrapyard and a dogcatcher called Dekkar. It’s a good spot for items, like cat litter to upgrade radiation suits, and befriending Dekkar and his dogs for extra XP.
3 Braid
Jonathan Blow’s puzzle platformer Braid was everywhere back in the PS3/360 days. The mixture of traditional level hopping with time-manipulating trickery to get past obstacles was engaging. It also had its own twist on the typical platformer story, where the player thinks Tim is trying to save the princess, but he’s actually the villain trying to recapture her. And possibly a nuclear scientist. Players had to collect enough jigsaw pieces to get more lore that suggested the latter.
The 0-8 Epilogue refers to a bunker and an event called “The Birth of the World” that makes someone say, “Now we are all sons of b*****s,” a remark Kenneth Bainbridge made to Oppenheimer himself after "Trinity," the first detonation of the atomic bomb. Then, if Tim reaches the Princess in the game, everything explodes. On top of being an anti-Mario game, it may be an allegory for the bomb’s creation too.
2 Trinity
Though why would Blow mix his anti-Mario game up with the Manhattan Project? The reason might be hidden in his 2016 game The Witness, which contained a lecture by Brian Moriarty called “The Secret of Psalm 46.” The lecture itself doesn’t contain the answer directly, but Moriarty’s back catalog does. He used to make games for LucasArts and Infocom, one of which was called Trinity.
It was a 1986 text adventure game that saw the player narrowly avoid a nuclear attack on London by hopping into an interdimensional door that appears out of nowhere. From there, they can enter other doors that lead to the sites of other nuclear strikes, both fictional and real, until they end up at the original Trinity test. By then, the player has to put together the clues they found at the other sites to prevent a catastrophe at the Trinity site.
1 Metal Gear
Players don’t need to go back to the Amiga or DOS computers to see storylines about nukes. As convoluted as the series gets, Metal Gear has generally been about one super soldier trying to stop someone from using the latest piece of tech to launch a warhead for one reason or another. On top of being made in Japan, the country that suffered the bomb's power directly, the series has a firmer stance against the Manhattan Project.
MGS: Peace Walker revealed the Boss tried to assassinate John von Neumann, one of the bomb’s key developers, based on false intelligence. MGS1 revealed Otacon’s grandfather also worked on the Project, which left his son Huey with a radiation-induced birth defect that left him paraplegic. Otacon summed his family up best when he said, “We must have the curse of nuclear weapons written into our DNA.”