Does Bethesda’s opus Fallout 3 really predict the future? The game, as everyone knows, is set in a post apocalyptic 1950’s style world which, in some dimension, may have been the case. Regardless, there’ve been some rumors floating about that there are hidden messages in the game that predict the future in our timeline. Bethesda’s denied these claims, of course, but some very attentive gamers have notably found a few codes that may raise some eyebrows. How did players get these codes you ask? Well, it’s quite simple.
In the game there is the Galaxy News Radio that is hosted by Three Dog. This radio station can be heard throughout the game on your PipBoy, and has a string of quests attached to it. Should you kill Three Dog during one of the quests his assistant Margaret takes over for him, so no matter what happens you will be hearing this radio station. However, to unlock the codes you have to skip the Galaxy Radio Quest and go destroy Raven Rock. Once this is done, the radio station will occasionally turn into a “numbers station.” When you hear the “numbers station” a very sad voice actor comes on, reads numbers, then Morse code follows.
Some say the numbers are dates and that the Morse code tells what happens on that date. Snopes.com, an urban legend website, sheds some light onto the dates and the Morse code translation.
• “The Queen has died today. The world mourns, as on days like these we are all Brits.” 4:02 March 19, 2014
• “Have you watched my YouTube video yet, I uploaded myself kicking bums in the nuts.” 24:16 December 24, 2012
• “I can’t believe Britney’s actually won an Oscar!” 21:33 February 27, 2023
• “I can’t believe they’ve actually done it. Not long left. They were warned, but they just had to keep pushing the boundaries of science. The noise. I can’t take the noise anymore. And the light, dear God! The universe is slowly unraveling around us. I’m not going to wait for death. I have a pistol in the attic.” This is actually the only message not preceding by a string of numbers.
Now we all know that the Queen is very much alive and well and is now a great grandmother. There were a few other dates that gave me the shivers, though. The following dates seemed to be correct according to another excerpt from the original post:
“…one-two-five-five-two-eight-two-zero-one-zero. What you talkin’ ‘bout? You’ll be missed.” He realized this referred to the recent death of Gary Coleman, and then quickly realized the numbers were the time and date of death. He immediately scanned through the messages to try and find more examples of this apparent future telling by a game that’s more than a year old. The next message he read shocked him and pushed him to enlist the aid of others to decipher the codes. The message was “nine-four-five-four-two-zero-two-zero-one-zero. Accident in the gulf, several dead. Oil spill apparently averted.” He realized this was the BP explosion and the erroneous day-one assessment that the well was not leaking.
These two should make you hair stand on end, seeing as they came true. Now there is always the possibility that who ever found these codes swayed them into this. That is highly unlikely though seeing that Morse Code is pretty straightforward. Unfortunately finding the signals can be tricky, I’m yet to fire up Fallout 3 again to see if I can find some of them. It is most likely my laziness, I honestly don’t know Morse Code, nor do I have a manual to check all the dots and dashes.
Bethesda’s denied the claims several times, but I don’t know if anyone remembers any of the Disney box art scandal where private parts were drawn by the artist onto The Little Mermaid box art. Disney didn’t know about it until it was pointed out to them, so maybe Bethesda is still in dark about it and doesn’t feel like going through the lines of code to look for them. We’ll know the truth for sure on February 27th 2023, and if Britney wins that Oscar, lots of naysayers will be eating their hats. Err, well, if they have any by
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What do you make of our Fallout future? Is Brit going to blow the critics away? We uncover the gaming urban legends so you don’t have to. Got a mystery you want us to discuss? Tell us below!