The Fallout series is known for its immersive environments, detailed lore, and quests that can easily take even the most experienced players dozens or even hundreds of hours to complete. This doesn’t exactly make it the ideal choice for a speedrunner, but a particularly skilled player has managed to complete all main games in the series in under 90 minutes.
YouTube user “tomatoanus” — we’re not sure what that means — reached the end of Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 4 in just an hour and 29 minutes with loading times removed. As you can probably guess, he didn’t do this by playing the games the traditional way, instead relying on exploits and tricks to complete them far earlier than “normal” runs would allow.
The user was able to complete his run of the original Fallout in about six minutes, and he made heavy use of a technique called “speed-clicking” to move faster than normal in the original game and its sequel. By using a glitch in the animation system, he was also able to avoid combat in Fallout, and a healing glitch in Fallout 3 enabled him to do a similarly fast run. Similar glitches in New Vegas and Fallout 4 also allow you to move around the map much more quickly, and clipping into certain rooms can circumvent certain quests and allow you to make it to a later section of the game sooner.
If you’re familiar with the Fallout series, you know a few other games haven’t been included in the speedrun, including Fallout Tactics and Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. Because of debates regarding the series’ canon, they are left out of “Anthology” speedruns — in the case of Brotherhood of Steel, it’s also just not a very good game, so there’s little reason to go back and play it again.
It’s unlikely anyone will be able to do a real speedrun of the upcoming Fallout 76, which moves the series to an online structure with several other players. With nuclear weapons hidden around the enormous West Virginian map, we expect any attempts at finishing certain quests to be cut short by a second apocalypse.
