As if Bethesda don't toy with our emotions enough when it comes to news of a Fallout sequel, the fans are doing it too. Late last year we all fell for the teaser website hoax, as what looked like the start of a viral campaign for a new Vault adventure turned out to be the creation of some jerk who wanted to get everyone's hopes up. Soon after leaked documents confirmed that Fallout 4 would be coming at some point, but nobody's bothered to actually tell us that officially yet. So in the mean time, people have been busying themselves making stuff up about earlier games in the series as well. One of the craziest (but most fun) hoaxes was about Fallout 3, and boy is this one a doozy. War, war never changes, but then neither does people being hella gullible on the internet. Earlier this year a series of posts on the GameFAQs forum claimed that a Numbers Station you can find on your in-game radio was broadcasting messages in morse code that were predicting the future. Amongst the more outrageous claims these predictions made were that the Queen would die on March 19, 2014 and Britney Spears would win an Oscar by 2028. Bethesda themselves stepped in to debunk that particular hoax, but they weren't needed for this last one. Or you would've hoped not, but plenty of people still fell for it. On the basis of an edited, 2-frame gif that saw your canine companion Dogmeat shooting a Wazer Wifle laser beam out of his mouth, people started trying all kinds of outrageous methods to unlock this amazing weapons capability. Which you couldn't. Because it wasn't real. You rubes.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
