This week the showrunners of Prime Video’s Fallout TV show confirmed Robert House “will be involved” in Season 2, cementing the appearance of a major Fallout New Vegas character after a pre-war cameo in Season 1.
Warning: Spoilers for Fallout Season 1 and Fallout New Vegas follow.
Given the Fallout TV show is set after all the Fallout games and is considered canon, the confirmation of Mr. House’s appearance in Season 2 has sparked all sorts of fan theories about how he’ll make his live-action appearance, and what it means for Obsidian’s much-loved New Vegas itself.
First, some background. Robert House appears in New Vegas as Mr. House. He rules New Vegas as a brain plugged into a supercomputer that has extended his existence from the pre-war era hundreds of years into the post-war era. Robert House makes a cameo appearance in the Fallout TV show during a pre-war scene in which the then RobCo Industries boss plots with Vault-Tec management and the heads of other companies to not only survive the inevitable nuclear apocalypse, but maybe even trigger it.
Season 1 ends with a Power Armor-clad Overseer Hank stomping towards New Vegas, with The Ghoul and Lucy MacLean in hot pursuit. Much of Season 2, it seems, will be set in New Vegas and deal with the coming together of the main characters there.
As for how this fits in the Fallout timeline, the Fallout TV show is set in 2296, nine years after the events of Fallout 4 and 15 years after the events of Fallout New Vegas. We’ve already seen a debate about which Fallout 4 ending should be considered canon, if any. And now we know Mr. House is in Season 2, presumably in the current post-apocalyptic timeline and not relegated to pre-war flashbacks only, fans are debating which New Vegas ending would make most sense as canon.
Let’s talk about New Vegas’ various endings. Depending on the choices the player, aka The Courier, makes throughout the course of the game, New Vegas can end with victory for the player during the Battle of Hoover Dam, which drives out all factions including Mr. House himself, a victory for Mr. House in which he remains in control of New Vegas and takes over Hoover Dam, a victory for Caesar’s Legion, or a victory for the New California Republic.
There are variations within these endings, but let’s look in more detail at the one most fans now believe will be considered canon as we head into Season 2 of the TV show. If Mr. House is in Season 2 in a post-war setting, as in alive when the main characters turn up at New Vegas, then it’s likely he survived the events of New Vegas the video game.
So, perhaps the New Vegas ending the show assumes to be canon is the one in which Mr. House’s Securitron army takes control of Hoover Dam and the Strip, pushing both the Legion and the NCR out. This ending, the player is told, causes Mr. House to continue to run New Vegas in a despotic vision of pre-War glory. “The streets were orderly, efficient, cold,” the ending says. “New Vegas continued to be the sole place in the wasteland where fortunes were won and lost in the blink of an eye.”
As Fallout co-showrunner Graham Wagner has now confirmed: “Many of our lead characters are Vegas-bound. Las Vegas in the world of Fallout is Robert House’s town. Robert House will be involved in Season 2.”
According to Fallout lore expert TKs-Mantis, the House ending in Fallout: New Vegas “is about to be canon when Season 2 of the show drops.”
House is alive, which means we might have chosen the Dam with NCR, they launch a bomb like shady sands. Maybe it goes downhill siding with House, The Courier is the unknown variable. So perhaps we died, or left. House had to pick a more irreliable apprentice. Caesars Legion??? pic.twitter.com/a7AMNNR58e
— Hector Moya (@Pope831) June 24, 2024
What we don’t know is what happened to New Vegas in the 15 years after the events of the video game. The glimpse we get of New Vegas at the end of Season 1 shows the area in apparent ruins, which is not the state of the place at the end of the video game. If that glimpse does indeed reflect the New Vegas we’ll see in Season 2, how did things get so bad?
But there is some debate about the reliability of the New Vegas teased at the end of Season 1. Some believe the images we see do not show New Vegas in ruins at all, rather just as run-down as most places in the Fallout universe (no-one ever tidies up!). Similarly, there are questions over whether Caesar’s Legion, the NCR, or even The Boomers will have survived. Will the Courier still be around? The only thing that is clear, really, is that there are many questions to be answered.
Fans have plenty of theories about the Snake Oil Salesman’s mysterious serum, for example (this one’s my favorite!). To keep you going until Season 2, be sure to check out IGN’s wide-ranging, spoiler-filled interview with Bethesda Game Studios executive Todd Howard and executive producer and director Jonathan Nolan. In the interview, Howard confirms the bombs that destroy Shady Sands, as seen in the Fallout TV show, fall just after the events of New Vegas.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
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