25 Things You DIDN'T Know About Fallout: New Vegas

25 Things You Didn’t Know About “Fallout: New Vegas”

Welcome to MojoPlays, and we’ve already looked at lesser-known facts about the “Fallout” series, but as it turns out, there’s a BUNCH of hidden details in arguably the best entry of them all. These are 25 Things You Didn’t Know About “Fallout: New Vegas.” Let’s have a geez.

Might Have a Child

“Fallout: New Vegas” hid a detail about our main protagonist that is fairly substantial. There’s a quest where you’re supposed to meet a wandering guitar player, the Lonesome Drifter. If you’ve picked the Lady Killer perk, you get to ask him if he’s 17, and when he confirms he’s not, you can breathe a sigh of relief. Turns out, the Courier has a little confession: he thinks he might have impregnated a woman in Montana 18 years before the game starts. Considering all the aimless wandering and dodging death across the wasteland, it’s entirely possible the Courier has a secret child roaming somewhere out there. I’m surprised anyone can still make babies with all that radiation.

Brahmin Tipping

I included this one in the full series video, but I have to talk about it again because I’m SO surprised I didn’t know this. Did you know you can tip Brahmin in every main “Fallout” game… except Fallout 4? Yup, it’s a real thing. In “Fallout 3” and “New Vegas,” sneaking up on a Brahmin and interacting triggers a hilarious pushing animation. The poor thing topples over, flops on its side for a few dramatic seconds, then gets back up like nothing happened. Poor little guy, hehe, let’s do it again.

Planet of The Apes?

Did you know about the “Planet of the Apes” ending tucked away in the game’s final DLC? Here’s the setup: at the very end, you’re staring down a bunch of nuclear missiles that are about to go kaboom. If you have the Wild Wasteland perk equipped, you can make the truly chaotic choice: blow up Caesar’s Legion, the NCR, and pretty much everything else in sight. Go rogue, press the big red button, and the game rewards you with a special slideshow set against a backdrop eerily reminiscent of “Planet of the Apes.” Oh, and there’s a voiceover explaining the catastrophic consequences of your… creative problem-solving.

Lottery Win Origins

The first few missions in “Fallout: New Vegas” give you a disturbingly close look at Caesar’s Legion and their… let’s call it “unique” approach to town planning. Take the small town of Nipton, for example. You meet a man who proudly announces he “won the lottery.” Sounds like luck, right? Wrong. The “lottery” was actually a Legion contest: they stormed the town, slaughtered everyone else, and spared only the winners… so they could spread the terrifying news of Caesar’s conquest. Basically, your prize was “survive to traumatize your friends.” It’s a clever nod to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” a short story where the winner also meets a grim fate, stoned to death.

Meat of Champions

Many players have never heard of the hidden perk ‘meat of champions’. And yes… it’s as twisted as it sounds. Activate it, and you get bonus stats by devouring the heads of major characters in New Vegas. We’re talking Mr. House, The King, Caesar, and President Kimball. Before you start chomping down on Elvis impersonators, though, a few warnings: doing this will sabotage most main missions and make your Courier look like the villain of every wasteland bedtime story. In short: dark, cruel, and probably not great for your social life… unless your only friends are radscorpions. The perk grants a temporary bonus of +1 to Luck, Intelligence, Charisma, and Strength for 60 seconds after eating any human corpse... Not bad!

Japanese Changes

The wasteland is filled with powerful tools, but if you really want to feel like the ultimate walking apocalypse, there are two weapons that put all the others to shame. Why? Because they don’t use boring old bullets. The Fat Man and Little Boy. But if you aren’t a history buff, you might not know they are named after the actual bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII. In the Japanese version of the game, the Fat Man was politely renamed Nuka Launcher, but Little Boy stayed. Because, why not?

Ghost Suit

Imagine being trapped in a living suit, dying, and then having your corpse turned into a walking weapon of pure destruction. That’s basically what the Y-17 enemy is in the game. It’s a harness suit designed to bring its user back to home base if they die — except, in true wasteland fashion, the machine is malfunctioning. It doesn’t know if the wearer is dead or where home base is, so it just aimlessly wanders around, killing everything in sight. And while you’re fighting it, the Y-17 might eerily announce: “Hey, who turned out the lights?” That’s a cheeky nod to “Doctor Who,” where a society used similar suits to keep their dead-alive citizens functioning via “ghost data.”

Intelligence Switch

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that your Intelligence stat in “Fallout” doesn’t just affect your character. It also shapes how the entire game world reacts to you. Pump up your Intelligence, and suddenly you’re the witty problem-solver with extra dialogue options. Keep it low, though, and you’re basically stumbling through the wasteland like a confused radroach, but this doesn’t mean it’s worse. Take Freeside during the quest “I Make You Care.” If your Intelligence is on the lower end and you ask a vagrant about weapons and loot, something wild happens: the vagrant suddenly starts speaking clearly and intelligently, warning you to avoid trouble. It’s just like real life, for someone to sound intelligible, you just have to be dumber than them? Nice!

Highway to Heck

“Fallout” loves to put in little nods to its previous games, and even sometimes nods to games ahead. In “Fallout: New Vegas,” while wandering the wasteland, you might stumble across a half-submerged Wrecked Highwayman, a clever throwback to the Highwayman from “Fallout 2.” Pop open the trunk, and you’ll find some Energy… plus either Gold Slouch or My Chrysalis Highwayman playing in the background. It’s wild how much love and detail went into something so tiny. Discovering this Easter egg is pure luck, but the fact that the developers cared enough to craft it so meticulously? That’s the kind of thing that makes you pause, smile, and then carry on looting the wasteland.

Poor Judgement

Early in “Fallout: New Vegas,” you’ll meet a character named Fantastic. And many players don’t realize his facade is total BS. He’s supposedly the head scientist at an NCR-controlled facility, tasked with getting a solar-powered energy plant back online. Turns out, Fantastic is mostly full of hot air. He forged his credentials to get the job and considers himself a genius at everything, despite utterly failing to get the plant running. During the quest “That Lucky Old Sun,” if you arm Archimedes I and spare Fantastic, you might come back to a shocking scene: Fantastic decked out in Legion armor, standing over the body of his co-worker Ignacio Rivas, whom he just offed. His chilling response? “Hey man, when in Rome…” I don’t think that applies to murder, bud.

Skywalker Burn

Who doesn’t love a good “Star Wars” Easter egg? “Fallout: New Vegas” sneaks in a tribute that will make classic “Star Wars” fans both grin and wince. If you’ve got the Wild Wasteland perk and wander into Nipton, you might stumble across two charred bodies named Owen and Beru. Any “Star Wars” fan will immediately recognize them as Luke Skywalker’s doomed uncle and aunt, who got wiped out by the Empire while searching for R2-D2 and C-3PO in A New Hope. Thanks for that fun little Easter egg, “Fallout” ... What the f**k?

Vault 34 Lady

As it turns out, some secrets even hide in the wallpapers Bethesda used to promote “New Vegas.” Take, for example, one featuring a young lady looking all coquettish in a Vault 34 jumpsuit. Turns out, this isn’t just some random Vault Girl — it’s actually Pearl, the leader of the Boomers, back in her youth. Her name even appears next to the picture on the side of the Boomers’ B-29 in the background of their end slide. Basically, Pearl’s been cool and subtly intimidating since day one, and apparently, she’s photogenic enough to double as a marketing poster. Who knew the Boomers had style?

Accidentally Ending Companions

Accidents happen. Eventually, something’s going to go sideways and leave you wondering why the universe hates you. “Fallout: New Vegas” gets this too, and it does it with style. In the town of Novac, an old NCR ranger can teach you a combat move that paralyzes your enemies. Sounds awesome, right? Well… here’s the catch: your companions aren’t immune. If they wander in front of you while you’re practicing, bam, they’re knocked flat and paralyzed. And thanks to some questionable AI programming, your companions love wandering right into the line of fire, so it ends up looking like you’re the villain in your own wasteland story. One minute you’re honing your skills, the next minute Veronica is flailing on the ground. Oops.

Thirst Problems

The number of ways your character can bite the dust in “Fallout: New Vegas” is borderline hilarious. Animal mauling, shot by guns, blown up, stabbed, cliff tumble, or even succumbing to poison. Pretty standard wasteland stuff. But here’s a shocking twist: in Hardcore mode, one of the ways you can die is… from not drinking water. For those who didn’t try hardcore, you wouldn’t even realize this is a gameplay mechanic you completely avoided. It’s both strange and unsettling that something as simple as forgetting to hydrate can kill you in a world where everything else is trying to murder you. Nuclear apocalypse? Sure. Raiders? Fine. But forgetting to drink water? That’s apparently the real endgame.

Celebrity Voice Actors

Video games love sprinkling in a few celebrity voices, but “Fallout: New Vegas” went all out. They got Matthew Perry (yes, Chandler Bing himself) to play the smooth-talking villain Benny. Which most of us know, but wait, there’s more! Kris Kristofferson, Danny Trejo, Felicia Day, Zachary Levi, Rene Auberjonois, John Doman, Michael Dorn, William Sadler, Rob Corddry, Alex Rocco, Wil Wheaton, Zoë Bell, and even Dave Foley, the voice of Flik in “A Bug’s Life.”

It’s basically a celebrity wasteland party, just with more gunfire, radiation, and exploding Brahmin.

Narrator Is An Actual Character

I left Ron Perlman off my list of celebrity voices because I wanted to talk about him now. He’s been the ever-present narrator across the “Fallout” series, dropping lines like “War. War never changes,” with the gravitas of a man with his face. But here’s the thing: while his voice has been everywhere, that intense face has never shown up in the games. He’s basically “Fallout’s” invisible, all-knowing god, Morgan Freeman, if Morgan Freeman ran on RadAway instead of charisma. That said, a bug in “Fallout: New Vegas” let players escape the ending slideshow, and what they found was shocking: Ron the Narrator, a secret in-game character that nobody was ever meant to see. Turns out he’s just a placeholder, still cool!

“Fallout 3” Concepts

While “New Vegas” was technically a spin-off, it was being made by people who knew the wasteland better than Bethesda ever could. These are the kinds of developers who probably measure distance in rads and XP, not meters. Before Black Isle went under, they actually had plans for their own “Fallout 3,” one that stuck with the original isometric style. Sadly, that version never saw the light of day, but a ton of its ideas were scavenged (in true wasteland fashion) and rebuilt into “New Vegas.” The Nevada setting? Hoover Dam? Caesar’s Legion? All concepts first dreamed up for that lost “Fallout 3.”

Originally Playable

One of the best things about “Fallout: New Vegas” is how it lets you truly be whoever you want. You’re not stuck as a Vault kid with daddy issues this time. You can be a noble wanderer, a cold-blooded killer, or someone who just really, really hates giant radscorpions. But Obsidian originally wanted to crank that freedom up to eleven. Back when the game was still called “Fallout: Sin City” (yes, really — and no, not the one with Bruce Willis), players were going to be able to choose from three playable races: Human, Ghoul, or Super Mutant. Imagine rocking up to the Mojave as a giant green brute trying to flirt your way through dialogue checks.

Useless Perk

“Fallout: New Vegas” perks make it so you can boost your skills, get better criticals, or even talk your way out of a gunfight with enough Charisma and bad decisions. But there’s one perk you should absolutely avoid like it’s carrying the FEV virus. On paper, it’s supposed to give you an extra five points of Damage Threshold against energy weapons while wearing metal armor. Sounds great, right? Problem is, thanks to a little coding hiccup, it actually gives you nothing. Zilch. It’s basically a perk-shaped participation trophy. The bug happens because the game checks if the weapon’s file name contains “Energy,” but in the game’s data, they’re actually called “Energy Weapons.” So the perk looks for “Energy,” finds nothing, and politely shrugs.

Huge Fan of The Franchise

We’re jumping back to celebrity voice actors and looking closer at Matthew Perry. Did you know it wasn’t his name, talent, or acting chops that landed him the role? It was pure, unfiltered fanboy energy. Back in 2009, while promoting “17 Again” on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” he suddenly launched into a heartfelt declaration of love for “Fallout 3.” The man practically glowed with Vault-Tec devotion. He even gave Ellen a copy of the game and an Xbox 360 to play it on. Apparently, that moment caught the attention of Bethesda’s higher-ups, who thought, “Well, this guy really likes Fallout, let’s make him a sleazy mobster in the next one!” And thus, he was cast as Benny in “New Vegas.”

Benny is Based on a Real Person

We’re almost done with the Perry adjacent entries. Benny is one of gaming’s all-time greatest slippery bastards. But as it turns out, he was inspired by a real person: Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Like Benny, Bugsy had a thing for flashy suits and bad life choices, and both men built their legacies around the Vegas Strip. He was a full-time mobster and part-time entrepreneur, dabbling in everything from Prohibition-era booze running to good old-fashioned assassination before deciding that gambling was his true passion.

Made in Only 18 Months

“Fallout: New Vegas” has more bugs than a Radroach convention, and there’s a big reason why: Bethesda only gave Obsidian 18 months to make the entire game. Eighteen. Months. That’s barely enough time to finish building one of New Vegas’ casinos, let alone an entire open-world RPG. Honestly, it’s impressive that the game booted up at all. To put that in perspective, Bethesda’s own RPGs usually take around four years to make. Obsidian had less than half that time, an unfamiliar engine, and probably a collective caffeine intake that violated OSHA standards.

Scrapped Romance Options

During early development, Obsidian toyed with the idea of adding romance options for companions. But instead of heartfelt love stories, the plan was for the Courier to have a series of weird, awkward, and probably ill-advised romantic misadventures with their crew. “The Bachelor: Mojave Edition.” Most of these ideas didn’t get far before being scrapped, but one stood out: Cass and the Courier were going to get blackout drunk one night and end up getting married on a whim at The King’s School of Impersonation, complete with an Elvis track playing in the background. That’s not a quest, that’s a Vegas weekend gone perfectly right and horribly wrong at the same time.

Considered a Failure

It kind of feels like Bethesda would rather pretend “Fallout: New Vegas” never happened. Any time the studio talks about the series, it’s all “our games this, our vaults that,” like the Mojave just mysteriously fell into a black hole somewhere between “Fallout 3” and “Fallout 4.” To make things worse, the deal Obsidian got for New Vegas was… well, let’s just say “less than legendary.” They were paid a flat fee up front, with no royalties, and the only bonus they’d get was if the game hit 85 on Metacritic. It ended up scoring 84 on Xbox 360. War never changes, and neither does your paycheck. The lack of royalties and that missed bonus ended up leading to layoffs at Obsidian, proving that in the games industry, business is still business.

Endgame Plan Had to Be Cut

Considering how “New Vegas” never misses a chance to punish (or reward) your choices, it’s kind of odd that the game abruptly ends after the final showdown. Originally, Obsidian had an entire post-game planned, a full endgame experience that got condensed into the infamous slideshow (probably because of the 18-month development cap). If you dig through the game files, you’ll even find remnants of this scrapped content. It wouldn’t have rewritten the wasteland entirely, but it would’ve let you stick around to see how your decisions actually ripple through the Mojave. Mr. New Vegas was supposed to report all the fallout (pun fully intended) in detailed news stories, while enemies would have shown up in unexpected locations depending on your choices. Basically, your chaos would have had consequences you could actually watch unfold, instead of just staring at a series of slides like a post-apocalyptic PowerPoint.