A jaw-dropping mod to remake part of Fallout 1 in Doom has resurfaced after 3 years of silence

Developer Alexander “Red888guns” Berezin has just released a new trailer for Fallout: Bakersfield, his project to recreate the ghoul city of Necropolis from Fallout 1 as an FPS campaign in the GZDoom Engine.

The last we saw of Fallout: Bakersfield was a 55-second teaser all the way back in September 2022. Berezin’s incredible art and familiarity with 2D Fallout immediately set the mod apart. But after two years and no further word, I had assumed Bakersfield had been mothballed entirely in favor of other projects.

Not so: Today’s four-minute trailer showed off way more of Fallout: Bakersfield than ever before, and now we have a better idea of the scope of the project. Berezin’s art is still the star of the show: He previously worked on the Fallout mods Sonora and Olympus 2207.

Meanwhile, his YouTube and Artstation pages feature amazing “what if” mockups of the classic Fallout style extrapolated into full 3D. My favorite Red888guns specials are New Vegas’ Goodsprings presented in old school isometric style, and his mockup of Arcanum 2⁠—a theoretical follow-up to Fallout devs Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, and Jason Anderson’s 2001 RPG that we never got.

Berezin’s style is a perfect match for the 2.5D presentation of Doom, and my favorite part might be his unholy union of the health/status/ammo bar from Doom with the one from Fallout⁠. It even has the vacuum tube, monochrome green message readout for damage numbers, environment observations, and cheeky jokes.

It also looks like the mod will be a straight retelling/recreation of the Necropolis sequence from Fallout 1, rather than another story set in the same location. The trailer concludes with the confrontation with super mutant Harry that serves as the boss of the zone in the original game.

We might be in for a long wait though: The trailer is followed by a readout showing the mod’s development as 60% complete, with a slowly populating release date of “??/??/202?”—though for a split second before the video glitches out and the final digit ticks over, it looks like Berezin is teasing a release year of 2027. The long wait makes sense: Berezin is a dev on New Blood’s Fallout-style throwback RPG, and he even thanked New Blood boss Dave Oshry in the new Bakersfield trailer. If you want to follow development more closely and support the project, you can subscribe to Berezin on the Patreon-like service, Boosty.