These Are Our Favorite Fallout Easter Eggs and References

Joab Gilroy
Games Fallout
Games Fallout
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The Fallout series has always blended brilliant pop culture references with a fantastic attention to real-world detail. With Fallout 76 now out in stores, we’re taking a look at some of the best Easter Eggs from the series since it went first-person.

Greenbrier in Fallout 76

The Greenbrier Resort

Game: Fallout 76

Right off the bat, Fallout 76 plays host to an amazing IRL easter egg. In the game’s fictionalized West Virginia, players can visit The Whitespring Resort. If they went to the same location in real life, they’d find The Greenbrier Resort. And beneath the lush hotel — a National Historic Landmark — lies a real-world fallout shelter, designated Project Greek Island. It’s a Vault you can visit both in and out of the game.

Reign of Grelock minigame in Fallout 3

A Game Within a Game

Game: Fallout 3

If Fallout 3 isn’t enough game for you, head to Hubris Comics, a little southwest of the Citadel. On one of the Terminals inside, you can find “The Reign of Grelok” — a text adventure game in the vein of the classic Zork series. You can play it, too, although instead of entering text prompts in the classic sense, you select them from a list — the way you interact with every option in Fallout 3, of course!

Mayor MacReady in Fallout 4

References Squared

Game: Fallout 3, Fallout 4

Little Lamplight, which you visit on the main path of Fallout 3, is a hotspot for pop culture references. The settlement itself is one of the many Mad Max references Fallout is famous for, alluding directly to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome‘s Lost Tribe of children survivors.

Mayor MacCready, who you meet when first attempting to enter the settlement, actually has two first names, Robert James — a direct reference to R.J. MacReady, the main character of The Thing. And when Mayor MacCready shows up again in Fallout 4 — where you can recruit him as a companion — he can unleash a hearty “Tunnel Snakes Rule,” a reference to the notorious gang that terrorizes the Fallout 3 protagonist as a child.

Fridge Skeleton in Fallout: New Vegas

The Bone Zone

Game: Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 4

Skeletons have been used to great effect in the Fallout series.

With the “Wild Wasteland” trait activated in Fallout: New Vegas, if you head south of Goodsprings — the starting city — you can find a refrigerator on the side of the road. And within that fridge hides a suave looking skeleton wearing a fedora — referring to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, where Indy survives a nuclear blast inside a fridge.

If you then head to Nipton in the southern Mojave Wasteland, you can find two charred skeletons named Beru and Owen — the names of Luke Skywalker’s aunt and uncle, who burned to a crisp in Star Wars: A New Hope. I guess they should have farmed more moisture.

In Fallout 4‘s Far Harbor add-on, if you swim north of the Nucleus you’ll stumble across two skeletons clinging to a door — a grim reminder of the end of Titanic.

Cheers Bar in Fallout 4

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Game: Fallout 4

It’s a little-known fact that near the Massachusetts State House in Fallout 4, down a few stairs and not marked on your map, lies Prost Bar. In German, Prost means “Cheers”, and that’s exactly what you’ll find within — a bar modeled after the eponymous Boston drinking hole from the sitcom Cheers. Everything within is laid out exactly as it was in the TV show — up-to-and-including Norm and Cliff, sharing one last drink before the apocalypse.

Blade Runner homage in Fallout 4

Running with Blades

Game: Fallout 4

These Easter Eggs in Fallout 4 are only for those of you who would pass a Voight-Kampff test. First up is Power Noodles, and its Protectron owner, Takahashi. With its Neon Light aesthetic and not-quite-correct Japanese, he’s a robotic evocation of the White Dragon Noodle Bar owner Howie Lee from Blade Runner.

They don’t stop there, either. Get yourself onto the roof of the Mass Fusion Containment Shed — a long walk North East from Diamond City. There you’ll find a human is sprawled on his back, and before him a Synth, dead in the same pose as Roy Batty at the end of Blade Runner. At least this moment wasn’t lost in time like tears in rain.

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Joab Gilroy
Joab is a games critic from Australia with over 10 years of experience and a PUBG tragic.