There's something about having everything you know being blown sky-high or reduced to rubble that's almost enamoring. Key word, "almost," because in today's fear-driven society, it's also a bit terrifying. The appealing portion isn't so much the destruction aspect, that part can make you pray to whatever God you like if you think about it too long. Rather, it's what comes next, after the smoke clears.
The idea that you're now free to do things the way you want. If the old society is has the reset button hit, whether by zombies, nuclear war, or the dictatorial reign of Snookie's child, so too are many of the things that once held it together, be it laws, technology, petty morality, or as any wannabe Vault dweller knows, even currency. Everything before you is now brand new, even if it's a nightmare world infested with mutant wolf chickens trying to rebuild society anew. Still brand spankin' new as the muddied, yellowed, radioactive snow.
My own personal fascination with the genre came with an old arcade beat 'em up that found its way to the Sega Genesis called Two Crude Dudes by Data East. The plot was your generic sort of dystopic drivel, "city gets blown up, bad guys come in, send in the good guys to save the day," and many of the game's enemies were a generic sort of copies of creatures from popular movies, or homages to the stars of the WWF (yep, I'm that old). But I'm rambling.
The setting seemed to be at it's zenith in the early to mid-90's, as you couldn't throw a stick without hitting a game that factored in a post-apocalyptic setting in one way or another, though I'd sooner ask why the hell you're throwing a stick around so many games in the first place. The genre seems to be experiencing a bit of a resurgence lately, with more Fallout games, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Metro: Last Light, Rage, the upcoming The Last of Us, etc., but you could argue that maybe we never really left the theme behind, even if sometimes it was hiding just below the surface, like in Ocarina of Time, Final Fantasy X, maybe even Pokemon depending on your view of the series, and what message board you visit.
There's not a whole lot left to conquer in the modern day, and the past as we know it is limited. But the future is a brave new world, even if it's ravaged by whatever disaster of the week happens to strike.
Life in the post-apocalypse is the sheerest definition of a survival story. A sort of fable along the lines of Cinderella, without all the carriages and magic. It's a give or take though when it comes to the talking rats though. Suffice it to say, you come from nothing (because let's be frank, that's often all that's really left in the wake of Armageddon), and if everything works together, you can become a hero of whatever's left. The player is free to make the world their own.
The audience wants the hero to prevail, but at the same time, the player wants options, which can often get in the way of what typically makes a hero a hero, like nuking an entire town, or massacring the residents of a lonely tower.
At the base, the post-apocalyptic genre is no different from horror, in that both provide a form of escapism. I remember playing Fallout 3 for the first time, and when I finally made it out of the safety of Vault 101, I was struck by the overwhelming bleakness of the Capital Wasteland. Looking at the landscape was just depressing, and the feeling of isolation was just crushing, likewise when you finally stumbled across some of the famous sites that make D.C., well, D.C: the ruined Capitol building, a dug out White House lawn, splintering Washington Monument. But it is for all the escape that the games provide and the feelings they instill, they're still just stories.
