Twitter Owner Elon Musk Is Now A Fallout: New Vegas Bad Guy

Fallout: New Vegas might be a 13-year-old game, but fans of Obsidian Entertainment’s open-world RPG continue to tinker with and release mods for it to this day. Hell, just this week, New Vegas received 88 new PC mods and one of them is hilariously on point, replacing one of the game’s main antagonists with X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk, down to the cadence of his speech.

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Created by modder NoUsernameSelected, the Elon House mod turns Robert Edwin House into Elon Musk. In case you don’t remember, Mr. House, as he’s commonly referred to in the game, is the CEO and president of The Strip, a district located in the heart of New Vegas. While cult leader Edward “Caesar” Sallow is the de facto villain, Mr. House can serve as another big bad if you refuse to work with him. Technologically and mathematically brilliant, he’s also arrogant, looking down on plebeians and eventually becoming so full of himself that he believes he must rebuild civilization under his command to save humanity. It’s not hard to see why one modder had the bright idea of replacing the New Vegas Strip’s CEO with one of our era’s wealthiest and most impetuous business magnates.

This is where NoUsernameSelected came in. Using artificial intelligence software such as the text-to-speech synthesizer ElevenLabs, OpenAI’s automatic speech recognition system Whisper, and the deep-learning text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion, NoUsernameSelected was able to construct a remarkable and uncanny recreation of Elon Musk in Fallout: New Vegas.

NoUsernameSelected

As you can see, when the player walks up to the screen, which would normally contain Mr. House, they’re greeted by a soulless-looking Musk. With the player—presumably NoUsernameSelected—choosing dialogue options to chat with Mr. Musk, you can hear just how accurate the voice sounds.

In an email to Kotaku, NoUsernameSelected said this is the most impressive mod he’s made thus far. As a big fan of the Fallout series, NoUsernameSelected thought both figures—Elon Musk and Robert House—were surprisingly similar, and figured someone should swap the two. Taking inspiration from a 2020 mod that replaced Mr. House with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, NoUsernameSelected sought to bring his vision to life. But first, he had to learn how to use AI tools.

”I’m more or less self-taught,” NoUsernameSelected said, crediting the nonprofit research group EleutherAI with facilitating his learning. “I thought it would take a while to make because I was learning how to use some of the tools involved for the first time, but I actually put this together in less than 24 hours from start to finish. I already had the Elon picture just from messing around in Stable Diffusion a few weeks ago. The rest was basically just figuring out how to rip the game’s voice lines open, transcribe them with OpenAI Whisper, voice them with Elon’s AI voice on Elevenlabs, and put them back in the game. The overall API and subscription costs were only a few dollars for [about] 600 lines transcribed and voiced. With the right know-how, this kind of content is actually surprisingly easy to create.”

With his previous modding experience being only small personal projects that haven’t been shared anywhere, NoUsernameSelected explained that artificial intelligence wasn’t the only tool that helped him out here.

“I also did a bit of manual batch editing in Audacity to make him a bit more robotic like House’s original voice through his speakers, because it was too ‘real’ and crystal-clear compared to the original voice acting otherwise,” NoUsernameSelected said.

Kotaku has reached out to X for comment.

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It makes sense seeing Elon Musk replace the most arrogant and calculating character in Fallout: New Vegas. Considering that Mr. House has amassed colossal wealth but has little regard for how his decisions may impact the lives of others, the parallels between the two are close enough.

 

Gamescom Showcase Interrupted By Bill Clinton GTA 6 Guy

Geoff Keighley and a rogue audience member stand on stage at Games Com Opening Night.

Screenshot: The Game Awards / Kotaku

Game Awards host Geoff Keighley has once again been accosted by an irreverent, clout-chasing youth, this time at the 2023 Gamescom Opening Night Live showcase. A man rushed the stage to tell the audience that “Bill Clinton wants to play GTA VI.” Keighley’s disappointment was palpable.

The incident occurred in the opening minutes of the multi-hour “celebration” of gaming, between Starfield composer Inon Zur performing one of the main themes from the open-world sci-fi RPG and director Todd Howard coming on stage to walk viewers through the gameplay. Keighley was gloating about getting to play the game early right before an audience member walked up the platform and tried to get a few seconds on the host’s hot mic.

“Very disappointing,” Keighley said several times as stagehands escorted the man and his friend out of the room.

The unscripted interruption recalled a moment during last year’s Game Awards ceremony when a kid snuck up on stage behind the Elden Ring development team and proceeded to talk nonsense about Bill Clinton and Orthodox Judaism. He was eventually detained and questioned by police before later being released and revealed to be Matan Even, an online troll who had gone viral for several in-person stunts in the past.

“This is such a special night for so many developers and it’s really dissapointing to see someone act that way but we’re gonna move right on with the show,” Keighley said today. “Really it’s just so sad to see something like this happen on a night we’re here to celebrate games hand how much they mean to us.”

Fortunately, Howard showed up moments later to the swelling music of Starfield without missing a beat. He said it was his first time ever at Gamescom.

           

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