Nuka Girl Is The Game We Never Knew We Needed

While there’s a lot to look forward to as a Fallout fan and the eventual release of Fallout 5, it’s worth considering what else is possible with the franchise. Given the success of Amazon’s Fallout series, which has captivated an entirely new audience of fans who may have never played the games, there’s clear demand for exploring new stories and characters outside of the mainline entries.

Aside from the Vault Boy mascot himself, there’s arguably no more iconic or emblematic figure from the Fallout franchise than Nuka Girl, the pre-war pin-up girl who served as the centerpiece of Nuka Cola’s marketing/propaganda campaign. She makes appearances across the wasteland in nearly every Fallout game, and she’s even inspired fan-created mods making her a companion in Fallout 4 (via Nexus Mods).

Nuka Girl is so iconic and beloved among Fallout fans, in fact, that it’s a little hard to believe nobody has jumped at the opportunity to give her a standalone spinoff project of her own.

Nuka Girl Deserves Her Own Fallout Game

The Fallout IP Is Ripe For Reinvention, And Nuka Girl Is The Place To Start

The Fallout IP has become much bigger than the mainline Bethesda RPG cycle now, and it’s clearly ripe for adaptation and reinvention. The success of the TV show has brought the universe mainstream in a way nobody predicted was possible. Further, Fallout 76 has kept the brand alive between mainline games, and Fallout 5 is ages off.

As such, the reality is that Fallout has become too valuable and massive to only exist as one giant RPG that takes a decade-plus to roll out. The universe now supports TV, live-service play, tons of merch, tabletop material, collectibles, and returning interest in older games. That creates room for smaller, more focused games that explore specific corners of the world.

Nuka Girl is a perfect starting point for a new type of Fallout game that dives deeper into pre-war realities or recontextualizes pre-war life in new ways, and is the perfect setup for a strong character-driven story that would expand and enhance the existing Fallout lore. It would also be the perfect opportunity to return to a Fallout: New Vegas-level of storytelling, often considered the gold standard of the franchise.

Fallout: Nuka Girl Writes Itself

What Would A Nuka Girl RPG Look Like?

In terms of narrative, there are endless directions to take with a Nuka Girl story, whether that’s expanding on Nuka Cola’s history, or focusing in on a specific character, potentially a model who posed as Nuka Girl, similar to Walton Goggins portrayal of Cooper Howard before he became The Ghoul.

In terms of gameplay, a New Vegas-style Nuka Girl game would not need to turn Fallout into a superhero story. It would do what Fallout does best, which is take a ridiculous piece of old-world Americana and ask who gets to control it, who gets hurt by it, and whether it can mean something new after the apocalypse.

Personally, I’d like to see a single-player Fallout: Nuka Girl RPG set in a region dominated by the remains of Nuka Cola’s corporate empire. Think bottling plants, test labs, employee towns, a failed space-age attraction, underground vault-like marketing bunkers, and even a ruined “Nuka Galaxy” launch complex.

Because Nuka Girl is currently just a concept or symbol more than a fully established character, there’s a blank canvas with vast potential for adaptation, and we can only keep our fingers crossed that she gets a proper Fallout project of her own someday soon.