Nuka-Break: the real deal

Just a note that someone else has been doing their own version of a Fallout: New Vegas Tour ... and doing it better. Wayside Creations has created a series of short films fanfic'ing the Mojave Wasteland - and they're brilliant. Here's the season opener at YouTube.

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They riff on both overt and covert aspects of the Fallout games - watch out for the Mysterious Stranger - complete with costumes, props, and location shots featuring the same places I visited, including Goodsprings! 

They're now raising funds for a second season on KickStarter. If you enjoy their work, please support them. 

Or for a taste of the locations they use as a backdrop, read My Fallout: New Vegas Tour, starting here.

One year on

It's one year today since I took my trip to the Mojave Wasteland, and it's been a blast bigger than a Van Graaf 'caster. Over 26,000 video viewings, 300,000+ pageviews, and around 300 Facebook Likes. It wasn't a business trip, but the 25 articles and 40 people who've contacted me - including several on the Fallout: New Vegas creative team itself - have driven some fresh billings for my marketing business, Chris does Content. So thanks to everyone for visiting; I hope it was worth your fast-travel.

And the visits haven't dried up yet. If you're new to this site, here's where you start.

Postscript: how to escape the Sierra Madre with all 37 gold bars

Still geeking: as a bit of a postscript, I discovered how to escape the Sierra Madre vault with all 37 gold bars.... if you take steps to make every second count.

Most of the methods for doing this seem to involve elaborate setups with landmines or cheating with console commands; this method works on my unmodified XBox with patches to date and needs no hackery, although it'll probably take you a few tries 'n dies to make it.

Here's a scribbled walkthrough.... and just for proof, a snap of all 37 bars laid out back at the Brotherhood of Steel bunker, which by the way is ideal player housing for the rest of the game, containing a functioning Sierra Madre vending machine. (You did win the complimentary voucher back at the casino, right?) This is also on my newly-relaunched personal blog, chrisworth.com. Enjoy!

My Fallout: New Vegas Tour

The site's now complete. In less than a week it's approached 100,000 pageviews and over 5000 people have watched the videos. But doing a tour based on a videogame remains a fundamentally silly thing to do. So a few people have asked: why did I do it?

Here's my answer: because life itself is fundamentally silly. We're born. We eat, sleep, reproduce. And then we die. We're each an eyeblink even in human history, let alone the history of the universe. There's not a lot of point to any of it; life has no innate meaning or purpose, save that which we impose upon it. So the worst thing you can do is take it too seriously.

Besides, the American West is among my favourite places on earth. The vast distances, the extremes of climate, the hardscrabble characters eking a living from motels and dime stores. There are millions of stories scratched into the sands of the Mojave, with millions more left to be written. In its own tiny way, this trip was one of them.


The only thing left to do is thank my special friend Melissa, source of the idea. (Herself a midwesterner, she once did a tour of Rome based on the much-panned film "Hudson Hawk".) I haven't seen the movie yet, Melissa: it's waiting for us when I see you again.

So there you have it: my Fallout New Vegas Tour, a real-world journey around 34 locations that appear in the game. If you've just arrived at this blog, here's where you start.