Ever since reading an excellent travelogue through, and review of, all the bars in The Witcher 3,¹ I’ve been taking better notes about the beer I find when I play games. It’s the same impulse that leads me to document the relevant clues in the crossword; where and how beer shows up can tell us something about its place in the wider culture. And since moving to Washington D.C., I’ve had occasional flashbacks to the Fallout games² — the first one I played is set here, so let’s start with that and then compare and contrast a few others.

In Fallout 3 (2008) — and indeed the two earlier games — beer is just Beer, not further specified. It has a minor in-game effect when you drink it,³ and along with similarly-generic whiskey and wine (etc.) it’s just another part of the fabric of the Wasteland, the retro-futuristic post-nuclear-war 23rd Century U.S.A. in which the games are set. Most players will soon stumble into Moriarty’s Saloon and find a few other bars along the way, but they’re pretty basic in their design, with little to style them as distinct from other shops — which admittedly fits the cobbled-together nature of making do after the bombs. Fallout: New Vegas (2010) is much the same, but added a little Easter egg in the form of an out-of-the-way shack where someone had been brewing Strategic Nuclear Moose, a nod to the strongest beer in the world when the game was developed, BrewDog’s Tactical Nuclear Penguin.

By the time of Fallout 4 (2015), though, the representation of beer rapidly evolved. Different styles (Pilsner, Stout, etc.) exist in-game under a brand clearly inspired by Sam Adams, which has two fairly well-modeled breweries you can visit. The bars are more realistic in layout and furnishings and — since that installment is set in Boston — there’s one downtown called Prost which is a grim but faithful replica of the set of Cheers. You can even find a robotic companion called Drinkin’ Buddy; a walking, talking homebrew machine. But the whiskey and the wine are still just Whiskey and Wine, so it’s not simply that increasing sophistication of underlying game technology leads to more detail everywhere — the demographics and interests of the developers and their presumed playerbase are obviously having an effect. Then in Fallout 76,⁴ they kept going, adding craftable fermentation stations and beer-themed base-building elements so the player is more directly involved, and in-game events have collectible steins as souvenirs. Other drinks were gradually fleshed-out a little, and the iconic Nuka-Cola remains the hero brand of the entire franchise, but beer is the adult beverage of choice in this particular post-apocalypse.

It’s almost entirely absent from the original Mass Effect triology,⁵ though. Set in a similarly-timed but very different future to Fallout’s, this was a galaxy-spanning space opera where exotic alien alcohol-equivalents are mentioned occasionally but I get the impression maybe they felt that beer would be too grounded, too jarring a contrast. That is, until you play Citadel (2013), its last piece of bonus content, which slots into the timeline just before the climactic final battle. You and your crew get some downtime, throwing a party which serves as a nice epilogue to a lot of story threads from the saga, with — among other drinks, familiar and fictional — plenty of beer that looks a lot like Stella Artois. Then, in the (I think) unfairly-maligned follow-up Mass Effect: Andromeda (2017) there’s a side-quest that tasks you with looking for ingredients to improve everyone’s drinks, and thereby their morale, after a rough start in a new galaxy — beginning with a missing crate of hops from home.

In the nearer cyberpunk world of the Deus Ex prequels,⁶ set just a few years from now, beer is much more integrated and commonplace. There’s a few different styles from various in-game brands which each get a little flavour text from someone clearly familiar with the subject matter and its marketing. I noticed it most when the impossibly-gruff protagonist wearily ordered another beer in a convenience store in Prague, standing in front of a pile of what must be a Heineken reference.

In the grim corporate dystopia of Hardspace: Shipbreaker (2020)⁷ you and your comrades talk of sharing a beer after a dangerous day deconstructing spacecraft, and one of the few ways you can bring some humanity to your cramped orbital living quarters is with your choice of posters for the wall — so naturally I went with beer and chips. Your job in Dave The Diver (2023) still occasionally puts you in peril, but you’re more an equal partner in the endeavour and share many successes with your team, usually depicted over a beer. The sushi restaurant management side of the things includes a pint-pouring minigame with a bonus for just the right amount of foam, and reading forums online full of people desperately seeking instructions on how to achieve that is nicely reminiscent of how, in the real world, it’s a matter of practice and knack and very hard to teach in words.

Dave probably owes some thanks to Stardew Valley (2016) for paving the way to its success. It’s a similarly-cute pixel-art game whose superficial simplicity hides a staggering number of interlocking systems within.⁸ You inherit a small farm, become part of the local community — which has a pub as one of its gathering-places — and can (but don’t have to) explore various secrets lurking around the edges. Among the many things you’re able to produce is beer, its recipe simplified down to chucking wheat in a keg⁹ and waiting a while. Weirdly, you can also make pale ale by doing the same with raw hops — the (solo!) developer choosing a strange way to relitigate and reverse an old taxonomic shift. I noticed that even in the late stages of the game, with my farm mostly optimised into a winery for the fictional Ancient Fruit for efficiency reasons, I still kept a small hop field and regularly brewed. Apparently I only ever take my role-playing so far, and remain a beer person.

And there are plenty of other unreal places in which to be one, but I’ll need to gather more screenshots for that. I do want to highlight how beer through history has been portrayed in the longrunning Assassin’s Creed series and the surprisingly-realistic breweries found in the latter Far Cry games. I’m also curious to hear of any other interesting depictions (good or bad) other people have found…

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1. With thanks to Boak & Bailey, who pointed to it in one of their longrunning weekly roundups.
2. When I first visited, the buildings and monuments were predictably familiar from their appearances in everything from The West Wing to Spider-man: Homecoming. But stepping down into the Metro gave me the most intense feeling — hang on a minute, I’ve been here. It took me a while to realise that the distinctive underground architecture had been accurately depicted in Fallout, so it was in my mind long before I was in the subway.
3. A little boost to Charisma and Strength and the expense of Intelligence, you might notice from the screenshot below. So very much its pharmacology in the minds of teenagers, not that of the real world. In the original games, it merely reduces your Perception for a while. Score one for old-school realism, I suppose.
4. Aren’t sequel-naming trends fun? 2, 3, New Vegas, 4, 76; perfectly sensible. Technically 76 came out in 2018, but the brewing and distilling was added in 2019, gameplay was overhauled in 2020 and updates are ongoing. I played it a lot during pandemic lockdowns in Melbourne, which added a strange extra layer — although, I suspect that a lot of the appeal of such a setting is partially explained by the insights in Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built In Hell about how disaster and breakdown provide strangely meaningful moments of agency.
5. 2007, 2010, and 2012 — with no confusing discontinuities in sequel-numbering.
6. Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011) and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2016)
7. Just Shipbreaker to its friends. This is genuinely one of my favourite games and a striking contrast to the sprawling open-ended worlds of all the others mentioned here. It’s a tight, compelling little puzzle game — in hazardous conditions, with an incredible soundtrack, and a genuinely affecting story of worker solidarity. I’m generally quite a completionist, but to get 100% on this game I’d have to break a strike and Fran Drescher taught me better than that.
8. I hadn’t played it for a long time and loaded it up just recently to take some screenshots — since it’ll actually run on the laptop I have with me, unlike everything else here — and it was so disorienting to have my character wake up in a place full of complicated machinery and workflows that made perfect sense at the time; things I built myself, whose purpose and function is now a mystery. The learning curve was so gradual on the way up, but I’ve apparently tumbled far down it in my time away.
9. As opposed to a cask, which you can use to age many goods (including beer) increasing their value. So, in this world at least, fresh is not best.