Shortly after launching, the official Fallout 4 website started producing some strange error pages. Were they simply due to overloaded servers, or could they hint at something more?
It’s totally possible that these are indeed just themed error messages that some viewers received because of the stress of so many people hitting the website at once. However, there have been plenty of examples of information being put out there for games pre-release in strange little website-related ways—so sometimes it’s better not to write anything off too quickly.
After we had one of the sections of the Fallout 4 website open for a while, this is what we eventually saw:
A second error message was found on another part of the site, one with a similar messages:
“A system failure has been detected and Masterbrain has been activated. Vault-Tec Central Mainframe has been restarted. Please attempt re-access. Have a pleasant day.”
(Masterbrain is, of course, the robot that controls all of the other security robots in the Vault-Tec headquarters.)
Also of note is the strange video static-esque image that was attached to the first error message, which we’ve included in full below. What could it be for? It doesn’t seem to be a background tile graphic for a webpage, because it doesn’t properly line up if repeated horizontally. Could it be something meant for another part of the site that’s yet to be revealed? Or—thinking even crazier—could it contain some sort of hidden message?
So—is this all just Bethesda’s own Vault-Tec mainframe rebooting from the stress of thousands of Fallout fans trying to watch the long-awaited reveal of Fallout 4, or could all of this have a deeper meaning?