The Fallout TV series went live Wednesday night, April 10th, 2024. I’ve seen the whole season and I really enjoyed the experience.

I have been a huge fan of the series since playing Fallout 3 back around 2010. The experience of being an overwhelmed, outgunned, and generally doomed character in a post-apocalyptic world did something to my gamer heart that I will never forget. It excited my sense of possibility.

I upgraded to an Xbox One specifically to play Fallout 4 on launch day. I was given the Pip Boy Edition that Bethesda sent to Escapist magazine, because my Editor-in-Chief and friend, Josh Vanderwall, knew that I was a huge fan. I will always treasure that pip boy.

If you’ve read my first book, you’ll know that I decided to have a group of characters survive the zombie apocalypse while wearing Kevlar-reinforced Fallout cosplay vault suits. There is a reason for that.

Fallout 4 is probably my personal favorite game of all time because I had the joy of discovering a breadcrumb trail in the game that led to a mind-blowing revelation about the origins of the Great War.

Let me back up: Todd Howard gave an interview with Pete Holmes at DICE a few months after Fallout 4 released, and he was asked if there were any big secrets or Easter Eggs that fans hadn’t discovered. Howard replied, “There’s a couple. There’s one really good one that fans don’t seem to be talking about yet.” When asked for clues, Howard said, “It’s in a terminal somewhere,” and left it at that.

There was a race among players to discover the Easter Egg (which is a hidden reference left by programmers for fans to find, for you non-gamers out there).

I was writing either chapter 5 or 6 of my first book when I found the terminal. I wrote the vault suits into the story as a nod to that discovery. Now, to be perfectly clear, I never thought I was going to be the first guy to find it. This was six or seven weeks after the interview, and lots of players were doing everything they could to find the terminal. I simply got in the habit of paying closer attention to the terminals I came across as I played the game. I found the terminal one night when I was playing my third play-through and doing the Switchboard mission again.

The terminal itself was a nod to Skynet and the Terminator series, and also included references to two other films that had something to do with nuclear war. The references in this terminal all involved P.A.M.: a prototype AI that was born as a computer and then transferred to the body of an assaultron robot. Since assaultrons weren’t introduced until Fallout 4, it’s possible that P.A.M. is the reason that particular model of robot was developed in the first place. It would explain why the robot is explicitly feminine.

When I googled “P.A.M. and Skynet” I got absolutely no hits. That was when I started to think I might be onto something big. The fan base was looking for a terminal that had a big secret which nobody was talking about. This terminal checked off all of the boxes.

I dug deeper and kept finding more clues. There were hints to the mystery in the lore of Fallout 2 (which came out 25 years ago). That game literally has an AI named Skynet (because subtlety is for chumps) and it also casually mentions through a character named Ace that the Great War might have been caused by rogue AI.

Back in the Commonwealth, different sources gave a conflicting account of what actually happened on the day the bombs dropped (the Switchboard defcon terminal says four missiles launched from mainland China as the first strike. The captain of the camouflaged Chinese sub in the Boston harbor tells a slightly different story). The developers were up to something amazing, weaving this totally optional meta detective story into their open-world RPG, and the fanbase had no idea. Nobody was talking about it.

I wrote a blog post about my discovery, then shared it on Reddit. That Reddit post got about 800 upvotes, but it didn’t lead to a confirmation from Bethesda.

My next step was to write an Escapist article about it, which was approved and published. No confirmation from Bethesda.

A year after that, I taught myself how to do video editing using game footage and released a 25-minute video explaining the Easter Egg in great detail. Some of the comments for the video mentioned that someone else discovered this at Escapist Magazine already. Others said they saw it on Reddit. Both of those sources were me. No confirmation from Bethesda.

A popular Fallout YouTuber named Juicehead made his own video about the theories surrounding this mysterious terminal. In his video he talks about my theory but doesn’t mention me by name. He claimed that my theory was the one he felt was the right answer to the mystery. Bethesda eventually confirmed that the Easter Egg was found by someone, but never said who found it.

Now, I will admit that it is pretty frustrating to be denied credit for this discovery. At least it was when it was happening. Time has moved on, however, and this situation has become mostly a footnote of memory for me, in the grand scheme of things.

Personally, I feel that the whole concept of a game within a game being officially confirmed would restore a lot of favor from disgruntled Bethesda fans, who seem to be dissatisfied with everything Bethesda has made since Skyrim.

My main issue with trying (three times: Reddit, The Escapist, and YouTube) to explain this Fallout 4 Easter Egg is that it starts out with one terminal, but then branches out to involve a variety of characters and quests from a very specific perspective. This terminal changes the dynamic of the whole game, and I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like to include it as an official quest, instead of burying it inside of a highly elaborate trail of breadcrumbs. Don’t get me wrong, I had an absolute blast piecing together this theory when I did. However, I completely understand why this Easter Egg didn’t land with most fans immediately.

It builds on lore introduced way back in a game that a solid portion of Bethesda fans haven’t actually played (Fallout 2). More importantly, the whole thing relies on the assumption that inconsistencies inside the game are hints in some elaborate mystery (which they were) and are not simply the product of lazy game design (which they were not). Most reviewers and casual players will assume lazy game design over mystery, every time. I imagine it makes being subtle more difficult and risky from the developers’ perspective.

I actually found even more evidence to support this theory a few years after I gave up trying to convince the Fallout community that something was going on. There is a third terminal at the Switchboard in an office connected to the main room you enter through. This terminal talks about a freak lightning storm that hit the facility shortly before the Great War. That lightning storm references Short Circuit: a 1980s film that deals with Artificial Intelligence. Johnny 5 was hit by lightning and then spent the rest of the film doing what he could to escape death. The same thing makes sense for P.A.M. at the Switchboard. A single bolt of lightning could have been the tipping point for the Great War. Seeing that reference reminded me of the Terminator reference, and the Hunt For Red October reference, and the Wargames reference in the other terminal.

The way I see it, either what I perceived about Fallout 4 is true, or I have stumbled on a series of coincidences that were randomly placed at one particular site which were never intended to raise the question in players’ minds: “What really happened on the morning the bombs dropped?”