Amazon’s Fallout finally answers mystery fans of the game have wanted to know for years

When the Amazon adaptation of Fallout released last week, it was met with such acclaim from both fans of the games and newbies to the series that it became an instant global hit – and did so whilst also confirming a major bit of information that’s been a mystery for players of the games for years. Bethesda and Amazon have confirmed Fallout TV is canon and will be treated as such, so a big mystery has literally been solved.

WARNING: Huge spoilers for Fallout series one ahead – read on if you wish. 

In the final episode of Fallout on Amazon, the TV show answers a major lore mystery that the games has never confirmed previously: Who actually dropped the first nuclear bomb that started the war and ended the world. The Fallout games have never explicitly said, although it’s always been thought to be either China or the United States.

Cooper Howard in Fallout, who obviously becomes The Ghoul in the present day post-apocalyptic world, used to be a Vault-Tec poster boy who advertised their benefits to the world. He got into this because his wife Barb worked for Vault-Tec – he was previously a famous actor who did a lot of Westerns.

When Cooper gets more suspicious of the Vaults and Vault-Tec in general, he bugs Barb’s Pip-Boy so he can eavesdrop into a Vault-Tec meeting. What he hears is harrowing.

When the execs are talking about how to maximise profit and return on their Vaults investment, Barb comes up with the killer blow “we drop the bombs ourselves.” Harrowing.

She then says “A nuclear event would be a tragedy, but also an opportunity,” Barb continues. “Perhaps the greatest opportunity in history, because when we are the only ones left, there will be no one to fight. A true monopoly.

“This is our chance to make war obsolete. Because, in our current societal configuration, which took shape without intentional guidance, we have friction. We have conflict and we have war.

“And war, well… War never changes.” War never changes, for any fan of the games, is a constant saying throughout.

Whilst we haven’t yet seen Vault-Tec officially push the button that launches the nukes – considering how the world turned out, it seems legit that this is what started the world ending. Horrific. The mystery from the games about who pushed that button in Fallout has been solved by the Amazon TV show.

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