Fallout 76 takes place in the future of an alternative world. However, that doesn’t stop the game from presenting fun allusions. One of these allusions references a popular movie and serves as a small retrospective on Bethesda’s history.
What to see: A little northeast of the center of Cranberry Bog, there is a place on the map called “Pylon V-13.” This is located right next to the workshop Bog Town and consists of several tin and wooden huts as well as a homemade staircase.
This staircase leads up to the monorail, for which the Pylon was originally used as support. However, the old rail has been repurposed by a scientist. The Pylon itself is an important location for your search for the Nuka-Cola skin for the Power Armor.
What kind of place is this?
If you search around for a while in the monorail, you’ll find a generator and the holotape of a certain Professor Greebley next to a pile of batteries. There’s also a button at the end of one of the train segments.
An allusion to “Back to the Future”
The entire levitating train could be an allusion to the movie “Back to the Future,” in which Marty McFly and Doc Brown time travel with their DeLorean. Because that’s exactly what Professor Greebley talks about in his press release:
I tell you that time travel is not only possible but can also be conducted interdimensionally! I have developed this radical concept, a new way to jump from timeline to timeline. Instead of using gravity to travel through time in a traditionally clumsy way, I discovered a method to tear a hole in the fabric of our reality.
If one races through this rift at high speed, a time travel effect should occur. In just a few weeks, I will attempt to travel between the dimensions using a monorail as a vehicle.
The same concept appears in “Back to the Future.” Doc Brown modified a DeLorean so that it time travels to a predetermined date when it reaches 88 miles per hour (about 140 km/h).
If you activate the button at the end of the train in the monorail in Appalachia, you turn on the power supply of a strange construct along the railway. Directly in front of the monorail is a circle covered with metal parts, equipped with Tesla coils, where heavy radioactive radiation prevails.
It is quite possible that this coil is meant to imitate the flux capacitor of the DeLorean, which enables time travel.
By the way, it is not possible to run through fast enough. I and unfortunately an unknown NPC had to find that out, whose skeleton can still be seen on the ground under the circle.
Fan Theory: The journey succeeded
There are some fans on reddit who conclude from Professor Greebley’s press release that the time travel was successful. He left before the war and arrived after the war.
However, since the monorail is destroyed in post-nuclear Appalachia, he had no way to travel back. He was stuck – and died.
Is Bethesda making fun of itself?
Some other fans point out that the name “Pylon V-13” itself is already an allusion. There used to be a “Project V-13” (for Vault 13, the Vault you start with in Fallout 1), which belonged to the Fallout franchise and was supposed to be an online title.
Project V-13 was later renamed Fallout Online shortly after Bethesda took over the franchise. However, after legal disputes, Fallout Online was scrapped, and Project V-13 was picked up by another studio as an independent project.
Project V-13, or Fallout Online, is thus a kind of foreshadowing of Fallout 76. Players see Pylon V-13, especially in connection with time travel, as a small homage from Bethesda to its own history.
What do you think? Is this an Easter egg for Back to the Future, a tribute to Project V-13, or both?
Another Easter egg in the game is significantly more macabre:
