James Lucas is an Executive Editor from Newcastle, England. They have written for sites like IGN, NME, GaymingMag, and VG247, with a special focus on FPS games, Soulslikes, and survival horror.
We’ve trekked across plenty of the West Coast in the Fallout series, venturing all the way from Bakersfield to San Francisco and Las Vegas, covering a vast expanse of post-apocalyptic California, but never Area 51.
This reclusive military base is shrouded by all manner of conspiracy theories, detailing little green aliens and UFOs secreted away by the government, an idea that Fallout has played into wholeheartedly since its inception. In the very first game, you could find an alien blaster with a sticker reading, “Property of Area 51”, hinting that the US had quietly made first contact, and was now keeping its findings in a dusty hanger under lock, key, and armed guard.
However, even as we ventured into the Mojave in New Vegas, the desert never stretched far enough for us to cross the once heavily-manned border into the base, leaving its contents a complete mystery. But, after 28 years, the Prime Video series has remedied that, opening up the pearly gates of Area 51 to us; you can take a wild guess at what was inside.
What s Inside Area 51?
Immediately after the Brotherhood of Steel pulls open the hanger bay doors, one trooper stumbles in and finds a freezer, prying it open to find a frozen popsicle of an extraterrestrial. With all the same reverance of a Fallout fan, they push it aside, smashing it against the ground into tiny little pieces, more excited by the container it was hiding in. Yeah… aliens aren’t exactly popular, the Mothership Zeta DLC even less so.
Josh Sawyer decided against including Area 51 in New Vegas due to how empty the desert between would be.
Still, it’s fun to see the Fallout series leaning into the sillier side of the games, following the breadcrumbs laid out by Black Isle Studios and Bethesda over the last few decades. And anyway, it was only a matter of time before the pre-war hoarding fanatics decided to pull apart this treasure trove of classified tech.
Area 51 Nearly Appeared In Fallout 2
Fallout Season 2 opened with Lucy and the Ghoul venturing into Vault 24, finally answering the long-standing mystery of the cut jumpsuit from New Vegas, but it’s not the only scrapped idea from the games that Prime Video is tapping into; Area 51 was meant to appear way back in Fallout 2.
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In early concepts, Black Isle Studios planned for us to meet Joanne Lynette in the ruins of this secretive military base, where she would have been the spokesperson for a group of scientists held up in the ruins. True to the game’s more comedic tone, Chris Avellone mused that, rather than pre-war tech, it might have featured a fake moon landing set, satirising the popular conspiracy theory.
Lynette instead appeared in Vault City as its First Citizen, tasking us to solve the Gecko powerplant problem.
There’s no fake moon landing set in the show, but the little green alien at least ties it back to the UFO we found crashed in the California desert back in the original game. Though I’m still confused why there was a portrait of Elvis in the ship. Does everyone revere him in the wasteland?
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