OLD VEGAS didn’t start with a fashion moodboard. Long before there were graphic tees, artifacts, corrupted signals or a clothing archive, a lot of the world behind the brand was already sitting somewhere in my head.
For years, I was drawn to games built around wastelands, abandoned cities, infected streets and civilizations that had already gone wrong. Some of those worlds were brutal, some were strangely beautiful, and most of them were a mixture of both. Over time, they shaped the kind of atmosphere I naturally gravitated toward, long before I ever thought about translating it into clothing.
These aren’t necessarily the five greatest games ever made. They are simply the five that stayed with me the most, and in different ways they helped push me toward the idea of taking that post-apocalyptic feeling outside of games and turning it into something wearable.
This is not a list of games OLD VEGAS copies. It is closer to a list of places the signal passed through before it reached us.
1. Fallout: New Vegas — The One That Started Everything
There was never going to be another game at number one.
I first played Fallout: New Vegas roughly ten years ago, and nothing else on this list has had the same impact on me since. It wasn’t one specific mechanic or one memorable mission that did it. It was the entire world: the story, the characters, the weapons, the politics and the freedom to move through the Mojave while slowly realizing that almost everyone you met had their own idea of what the world should become.
New Vegas made the apocalypse feel bigger than destruction. Civilization had collapsed, but ideas had survived. People were still fighting over power, territory, beliefs, money and control. Old technology sat beside improvised weapons, casinos still glowed in the desert, and pieces of the previous world had been recycled into something new.
The DLCs pushed that even further, especially Old World Blues, which remains one of my favorite parts of the entire game. It took Fallout’s retro-futuristic side and made it stranger, mixing insane technology, abandoned research facilities, experiments and dark humor into a world where intelligence had clearly progressed faster than common sense.
That combination stayed with me, but there is an important distinction. OLD VEGAS was never based around Fallout factions, characters or recreating the Mojave in clothing. I wasn’t interested in making NCR shirts, Legion graphics or game merchandise. What Fallout: New Vegas gave me was something broader and more useful: the desire to build a world of my own.
It showed me how powerful an atmosphere could become when every weapon, building, character, sign and piece of damaged technology felt like it belonged to the same universe. Years later, that instinct became part of OLD VEGAS. The idea that a graphic could feel like an artifact, that clothing could look like evidence, and that you could take the feeling of a ruined future and translate it into fashion without literally copying the world that inspired it.
New Vegas didn’t give OLD VEGAS its designs. It helped give me the urge to create it.
2. Dying Light — Run Through the Collapse
Dying Light gave me a completely different version of the apocalypse.
Fallout lets you wander through what is left. Dying Light makes you move through it at full speed.
The first game is still the one that matters to me. The combination of parkour, improvised weapons, infected streets, interesting missions and constant movement made the world feel more immediate than most other zombie games I had played.
There was something incredibly satisfying about how the game forced you to interact with the environment differently. You weren’t just walking toward an objective marker. You were climbing buildings, jumping between rooftops, escaping infected, improvising routes and constantly looking for another way through the city.
The atmosphere was one of the strongest parts of it. During the day, Harran was dangerous but manageable. At night, the same streets suddenly felt completely different. The city had not changed, but the rules had, and that shift made the world feel genuinely hostile.
That idea of familiar places becoming unfamiliar is something I still find powerful in post-apocalyptic imagery. Buildings remain standing, roads are still there and signs still hang where somebody once put them, but whatever made the place normal has disappeared.
Dying Light contributed a different type of energy to the world that eventually became OLD VEGAS. Fallout gave me world-building. Dying Light added movement, aggression and urgency.
3. Days Gone — Sometimes You Just Need the Horde
There are a lot of reasons Days Gone works for me. The abandoned roads, the motorcycle, the wilderness, the survivor camps and the feeling of crossing huge areas of America after most of the population had disappeared all contributed to the atmosphere.
But the real answer is much simpler.
The hordes.
Nothing else in the game came close to the feeling of seeing an enormous mass of infected pouring out of a cave, building or abandoned site and realizing every single one of them was now coming toward you.
You could prepare as much as you wanted. Ammo, explosives, traps and escape routes could all make you feel ready, but once the horde started moving, the plan usually lasted about fifteen seconds before everything became chaos. That was exactly what made it so fun.
Days Gone also had a visual world I really liked. Abandoned highways, motorcycles, forests swallowing what humans left behind, destroyed towns and weathered survival gear all made the world feel like a recognizable America that had been emptied out and left to decay.
That visual language obviously sits comfortably next to the kind of atmosphere OLD VEGAS later developed, even if there was never a direct or deliberate connection.
Not every influence needs a deeper philosophical explanation. Sometimes the apocalypse works simply because hundreds of infected are chasing you and you somehow manage to survive.
4. Resident Evil 4 Remake — Darkness Done Right
I should probably make something clear before Resident Evil fans come after me: Resident Evil 4 Remake is the only Resident Evil game I’ve played.
I’m not going to pretend I grew up with the franchise or compare every version of the characters. I played this one, and I loved it.
The first thing that stood out was how strong the visual presentation was. The environments, lighting, character models and overall atmosphere made the darkness feel incredibly detailed. Villages, forests and underground spaces didn’t just exist as backgrounds; they created tension before anything had even attacked you.
The game felt deeply wrong in exactly the right way, and that is probably the biggest reason it belongs here.
Resident Evil 4 gave me a different kind of darkness than the other games on this list. Fallout mixes destruction with satire and retro-futurism. Dying Light gives you infected cities and movement. Days Gone leans into wilderness and hordes. Resident Evil moves closer to pure horror, where people stop behaving like people and ordinary places slowly become threatening.
What I find especially interesting is that the game is visually beautiful at the same time.
That contradiction matters. Darkness does not have to mean ugliness, and something can be brutal, uncomfortable or disturbing while still having incredibly strong visual direction.
That idea carries into OLD VEGAS as well. The brand can use skulls, death, corrupted bodies, warning symbols or destroyed worlds without treating darkness as an excuse to make everything visually chaotic. Horror can still have composition, violence can still have design, and the end of the world can still look beautiful.
5. Metro Exodus — When the Apocalypse Feels Real
Metro Exodus earns the final position for almost the opposite reason.
It felt believable.
The world was harsh, resources mattered, combat could punish you and the environment itself often felt like an enemy. Weapons didn’t always behave like perfect tools, and surviving rarely felt effortless.
That difficulty made the world more convincing because the game constantly reminded you that living in a place like this would be uncomfortable, exhausting and dangerous.
The world itself was just as important. Metro Exodus created environments that felt lived in instead of simply designed as levels. Old structures had a purpose. Vehicles looked used. Weapons looked maintained because somebody genuinely depended on them. Settlements felt as if people had actually tried to build lives there.
That level of detail is probably what stayed with me most. A fictional post-apocalyptic world becomes much stronger when you can almost believe somebody could actually exist inside it.
This is also where small details become more important than giant ones. A warning label, a damaged symbol, a repaired object or a machine still running years after it should have stopped can make the whole world feel more credible.
Metro understood that, and that is why it belongs here.
Five Different Versions of the End
Looking at the list now, one of the things I like most is how different the five games actually are.
Fallout: New Vegas is about world-building, politics, characters and the civilizations that grow inside the ruins of the old one. Dying Light turns the apocalypse into movement, improvisation and constant danger. Days Gone gives you empty roads, wilderness and the pure chaos of the horde. Resident Evil 4 Remake brings horror, darkness and grotesque beauty. Metro Exodus makes survival feel physical, difficult and strangely believable.
They all approach destroyed worlds from different directions, but somewhere between all of them is the territory I have always found interesting: not one exact version of the apocalypse, but the broader idea of what happens when normality disappears.
So What Does Any of This Have to Do With Clothes?
More than I realized at the time.
OLD VEGAS was not created by taking screenshots from games and turning them into graphics. That would have been the least interesting way to use those influences.
The effect happened much earlier. Years of exploring fictional broken worlds gradually shaped the things I found visually compelling: ruined America, warning systems, radiation, old technology, industrial structures, survival, weapons, horror, isolation, dark humor and the strange beauty of things continuing to exist after the system around them has failed.
By the time OLD VEGAS became a fashion project, that visual vocabulary was already there. Fashion simply became the medium through which I could rebuild those ideas into something original.
That is also why OLD VEGAS has never been about dressing like a character from the apocalypse. As we wrote in our guide to post-apocalyptic streetwear, the interesting part is taking the atmosphere of ruined worlds and translating it into something that still makes sense on a real street.
The graphic can carry the story while the clothing still has to function as clothing.
Building Our Own Wasteland
There is another reason Fallout: New Vegas sits at the top of this list.
It didn’t make me want to recreate Fallout. It made me want to create something of my own.
That difference matters because the games on this list already have their worlds. OLD VEGAS needed another one.
That is where the archive, artifacts, transmissions, warnings, corrupted imagery and broken-future language come from. Not from one reference, one franchise or one specific apocalypse, but from a collection of influences absorbed over years and eventually rebuilt into something different.
You can see pieces of that thinking throughout our graphic tees, hoodies and the rest of the OLD VEGAS archive, but none of those pieces are supposed to look like gaming merchandise. They are fragments from another place.
Our place.
OLD VEGAS is my version of that world — not a game universe recreated on a T-shirt, but everything those worlds made me feel, rebuilt into something you can actually wear.
THE WORLD ENDED. THE SIGNAL SURVIVED.