The Fallout 76 charity drive Fallout For Hope is back, and as part of this holiday's festivities, organizers have prepared an in-game performance of A Christmas Carol, with Bethesda senior vice president Pete Hines playing Jacob Marley.
The post-apocalyptic stage production will cap off this month's Fallout For Hope charity events, which have already begun over on Twitch. The big show airs Friday, December 17 at 3pm PST / 6pm EST / 11pm BST, and plenty of other events are planned for the days ahead. You can find more details and the full schedule on the charity's dedicated Tiltify page. In particular, "Whose Apocalypse Is It Anyway", a riff on the improv show Who's Line Is It Anyway scheduled for Saturday, December 11, looks like another big one to watch.
Fallout For Hope began raising money for charity last year, and it's expanded considerably throughout 2021. Its current fundraising block, which runs through December 19, will support St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Tiltify and St. Jude are official partners this time around, and founder and organizer Kenneth Vigue says this was a huge boon for the cause.
The story behind the play is a little meta, akin to Noises Off where the play is about a play being put on
Kenneth Vigue
"Fallout For Hope as a whole we started planning with St. Jude back in January right after the first event did so well," he tells us. "Originally I had wanted to do A Christmas Carol last year, but we ran out of time. The stages in Fallout 76 I built last month. I’ve gotten to know Wes Johnson a little bit through organizing some Fallout 76 community events and through his voice acting class I took. Wes was really instrumental for getting word out to some of his fellow Fallout voice actors when I asked if he was interested in playing Scrooge and this was for charity."
"With our stage, it’s wired to have working stage lights that can be changed to different colors and some other special effects to show the ghost of Marley’s face on Scrooge’s door and with Scrooge’s tomb blowing open at the end to reveal his ultimate fiery fate," Vigue says, adding that the original story has been tweaked ever so slightly to better reflect Fallout 76's Appalachia.
"The story behind the play is a little meta, akin to Noises Off where the play is about a play being put on," he explains. "In this case, Wes Johnson plays the head of a travelling troupe of surviving actors who made it out of New York City and travel the post-apocalyptic wastes performing in exchange for food, lodging and caps. Unfortunately for them they arrive in Appalachia and are swiftly taken out by a Scorched Beast. The survivors hold a casting call to fill [the parts] of their deceased comrades and you end up with a mix of professional actors with raiders, the mad and Brotherhood. The conflict that stems from that as they try and perform this classic play seriously with a threat in the background revealing itself towards the end in a way that is both dark and very Fallout."
Seeing Hines play the role of Jacob Marley, the first spirit to haunt old Ebenezer Scrooge (who will be played by Johnson, of The Elder Scrolls fame) ought to be a treat, and we can also look forward to performances from Craig Sechler (the voice of Butch and many other Fallout characters), Mike Rosson (who voiced "most of the ghouls" in Fallout 3, among others), Courtenay Taylor (the voice of Fallout 4's female survivor), and Jan Johns (Scribe Haylen in Fallout 4, and many other characters).
As for official Fallout performances, Bethesda boss Todd Howard says that Fallout TV show is still happening.
