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The day you're born, you find yourself awake, startled, staring down a man in a doctor's mask. He tells you he's your father, says whether you're a boy or a girl, and gives you a name. Just then, something goes wrong and your mother dies. Your father leaves your side to help, but it's too late. She's gone. A year later, you're with your father again, now more aware of your surroundings. You live inside the nuclear bomb shelter Vault 101. Steel walls encase your existence, but you're naturally curious, venturing out of your confinement to explore this cold, metal world. The sad truth is that you cannot go beyond these walls. You can never go outside. The outside world is a dangerous place, practically a myth to the society dwelling within the Vault.

Nine years pass, then another six, and another three. Over this time, you take tests, learn skills, grow into an adult -- but one day, out of nowhere, your father disappears. No one knows how. No one has ever left Vault 101, and the citizens are in a panic. They think you're to blame, that you had something to do with it. It's up to you now. You have to venture out into the forbidden, the world above the only one you've ever known -- and you find the remnants of a society gone mad, a nuclear wasteland in which an even more frightening war still rages. In this hell on earth you must locate your father, and somehow survive.

This chilling series of events makes up the first 40 or so minutes of Fallout 3, the long-awaited sequel to Interplay's much-beloved series of PC role-playing games currently in development at Bethesda Softworks. Though the game doesn't directly resemble those classics of the computer role-playing genre, an air of familiarity is bound to hit you with this one, as it shares a great deal in common with Bethesda's wildly successful The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Swap out the high fantasy setting and magical powers with a post-apocalyptic world and a whole lot of heavy weaponry, and you'll get the idea -- however, this isn't just an Oblivion redux. There are a lot of differing elements on display in Fallout 3, some staples of the series, some brand-new. While this sort of blending of a heralded franchise with a highly different gameplay engine could potentially spell disaster for longtime fans, if the demo we saw recently is any indication, Fallout 3 could very well avoid that pitfall and deliver a game both Fallout fans and newcomers to the series will enjoy.

The first thing shown in our demo was the aforementioned introductory sequence, in which your character is born. While all of this is obviously heavily story-driven, these scenes also help you build your character. On your day of birth, you choose the sex and name (and, if you're bored and looking for something to do, you can press a button to cry on command). When you're a year old and wandering around your home, you find a children's educational book that you can use to assign your initial statistical points in the categories of strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility and luck (fans certainly know this as the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system). On your 10th birthday, you get the Pip Boy 3000, a wrist-bound PDA device you'll find yourself using a great deal. Finally, you'll take the General Occupational Aptitude Test, or GOAT, to determine what kind of character you'll be. It might just be the most involved gaming childhood ever created, and it seems like a pretty well-executed way to combine tutorial contrivances with early plot exposition.