From New Vegas to the Pioneer Saloon

Fallout Fandom Finds Home in Goodsprings

By Constance A. Dunn

*A crowd gathering at the main entrance of the Pioneer Saloon during the Fallout event. Credit: Jonathan Guillen of Space Cabin Studios*

Editorial Note: This article may contain spoilers about the Fallout games and the Fallout TV series

Introduction to Fallout: Game Difficulty Setting–Easy

All Fallout stories begin with a crisis that thrusts the player into a post-nuclear wasteland shaped by the Great War. Rather than revisiting U.S.– China conflict from the games, Amazon’s series centers the catastrophe on the fictional corporation Vault-Tec's betrayal. In the wasteland, survival leads people to form factions, each with distinct values and quests; the show follows vault dweller Lucy as she searches for her father.

What does this have to do with a party at the Pioneer Saloon outside Las Vegas? Both Fallout: New Vegas and season two of the Amazon series trace stories beginning west of Las Vegas and moving toward the city in pursuit of Mr. House, a billionaire visionary reminiscent of Howard Hughes who preserved New Vegas. Fallout: New Vegas opens in Goodsprings, Nevada, home to the real Pioneer Saloon featured in the game. Fans have long visited the bar, and in 2023 it launched the Fallout Fan Celebration to welcome them. After Amazon’s 2024 Fallout season two premiere, fan attendance surged to an estimated 5,000.

*A friend sporting a Vault 33 costume in front of the New Vegas sign at the Pioneer Saloon. Credit: Jonathan Guillen of Space Cabin Studios*

Dreams and a Haunting

Since 1913, the Pioneer Saloon has been the beating heart of Goodsprings, Nevada. Any town that touts a saloon as its community center is going to have a wild history of both triumph and deprivation. And the Pioneer does not disappoint. Since the early 20th-century, there have been few new additions to the interior of the building. Among the few that exist is an altar to Fallout arranged with care in the corner of the dining room.

Stephen Staats, aka Old Man Liver, tells me, “Folks would come in and say “Yeah, do you have anything Fallout?” and “...I felt like I was disappointing people by not having more stuff. So we dedicated a wall in the dining room.”

Another new addition is the fryer, thanks to a Fallout-fan kitchen manager who relocated to Goodsprings at Stephen's suggestion, you can now order fries. Besides working long hours at the saloon, the new kitchen manager helps plan the Fallout Fan Celebration, now the premier event of the year for the saloon.

The Pioneer is just the kind of place that city slickers with a penchant for the Wild West cream their pants over. Original tin tiles with rusty patina (and bullet holes) cover the dining room walls, and a massive iron stove heats the interior of the main bar. It also houses several resident spirits.

Gordi Siddons (aka Easy Pete in Fallout: New Vegas) is one of them. In the Fallout games, the player’s character meets Easy Pete on the porch of the Pioneer Saloon, where he gives you information about a quest. Gordi’s not quite dead yet, but he tells me he’s come close a few times. “I’ve been in 23 car accidents and shot at, head [makes a cutting sign at his neck] off. I’ve been through a lot. I am still here. I’m here for some stupid reason.”

Gordi (aka Easy Pete) is the real deal in Goodsprings.
Credit: Victoria Koelkebeck

He tells me a story about fixing up an old, condemned trailer that belonged to his mother, and something about a fish tank I don’t understand. And with that incongruous set of images in my head, he explains how he laid his ‘grinder’ [angle grinder] down, the wheel shot off, hitting his chin and nearly decapitating him.

He was born in Goodsprings and never left. I asked him about what it was like there 28 years ago. “It’s when my mama worked here. I’d help her clean up, and what have you, then these guys bought it and saved my life.” I ask what that means. “Cause they bought the bar. I came with the bar when they bought it,” he replies as if it were a dumb question.

“I ask him if he’ll die in the saloon and come back to haunt it. He replies, ‘Probably a ghost now, you never know?’ He’s right, you don’t know. He has the look of a man who came of age in another century and found his way here by accident. I tell him he needs a memorial of his own. He says, ‘I am a memorial.’ Can’t beat this guy.”

A conversation with Gordi is less like an interview and more like a ride down a country road. “I can’t handle a lot of people. Not a people person,” he tells me. I tell him I remember seeing him in 2023 among the crowd at the fan celebration. He had a look on his face then of a panicked jackrabbit that couldn’t wait to run.

I ask him about the other spirits that haunt the place. He looked at me with a skeptical glare and changed the subject.

If the ghosts do exist, good on them for keeping the place standing for over a hundred years. The same can’t be said of the spirits at Stephen’s property. Two weeks before our interview for this article, his house burned down. “I like to think the ghosts may have put the fire out as opposed to starting it,” Stephen tells me.

For a man who purports he is “not a big fate guy,” both destiny and spirits were mentioned more than once in earnest in our 30-minute chat.

“It was really weird. I kept dreaming about it [Pioneer Saloon]. I’m not a big fate guy, but I really feel like it, in a way, it picked me. ‘Cause I couldn’t get it out of my head. I’d wake up at night and think I got to have the Pioneer Saloon, and I didn’t know why.’ It might not suit the character of Old Man Liver to confess that he believes in synchronicity, but it is refreshing to hear from Stephen. I ask him if I can make an observation, and I point out that the man I am talking to isn’t the kind of man I expected from looking at his website.”

At the time of writing the first draft of this piece, the header image on the homepage of oldmanliver.com showed Stephen seated between two attractive women wearing bikinis. He is fully dressed, donning a cowboy hat, one cigarette in his mouth, another in his right hand, and a bottle of his signature Old Man Liver whiskey in his left. His header image has since been changed to Stephen with his guitar amid the desert. I own an album of Fallout songs played by local bands produced by Stephen and sold in the general store next to the saloon. He appears in the final track of the album as Old Man Liver. He is aggressively unconventional. A book written by Stephen sold in this same store claims it is written by “The World’s #1 Most Offensive Writer.” His merch promotes the three Ws: “whiskey, women and weed” as his primary ‘likes’. One of the songs listed on the music section of his site is called “Necrophiliac Cowboy.”

But the man I spoke to keeps his mouth shut about his business dealings and is conscientious about the empty bottles of his whiskey in the background of Zoom calls. He also suspects that his dreams may mean something.

I asked Stephen about how he came to be the proprietor of the saloon, “I was really excited when it was for sale because I had been to Pioneer and I loved it… But there’s no way I can compete against all these big-money offers. You know, they had corporations and people pooling their funds to get in… people were very passionate about the place, so I’ll let them know I’m interested and see what happens from there.”

That’s when his dreams began.

I confess, I was expecting to interview a Los Angeles-to-Vegas hustler who stumbled across a gold mine with Fallout. Instead, what I found was a man who credits a ghost for saving what remains of his house and prevented a historic saloon from going corporate.

I ask Gordi, “Were you happy it [the saloon] didn’t get bought by a corporation?” He replies, “My face turned into a smile,” and illustrates this with a grin. “Were you worried it would be corporate?” I ask. “Nah, I don’t worry about nothin’. Why should ya’?” He shrugs.

On Dec. 20 of 2025, the Pioneer screened episode one of Amazon’s Fallout season two on the side of its building. While the screening audio was being fixed, I mentioned Stephen’s house burning down. A fan who overheard said, “Oh yeah, you know that place is haunted AF.”

November 2023 - Parade of factions

In November 2023, the Fallout Fan Celebration was in its infancy with only one event under its belt, but already the crowd had swelled to thousands. Drinks and food were available exclusively from the saloon’s bar and kitchen, which meant lines wrapped around the building for two days.

We stayed the whole of Saturday, but left before the after-dark festivities kicked off. The day was bright and cool to start, warming up to balmy winter temps in the afternoon. In other words, the perfect fall day in the Mojave. In the morning, we followed Stephen on a tour of Goodsprings with a parade of costumed factions—now a Saturday tradition that allows Stephen to promote the Pioneer’s charity arm, the Asshole Association.

The barrier to entry for Fallout cosplay is low. You could spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours building elaborate power armor, or you could do what I did and become a roamer in the wasteland. To achieve this, wear your own clothes with dirt rubbed on them. Clothes are difficult to come by in the wasteland, so any random selection of tattered items from your closet will work. Given that your character has likely wandered in a dusty, bloody desert for days, if not longer, giving your clothes a good roll around in the dirt only adds to your costume’s authenticity. In 2023, my husband wore a hoodie with his own design of Matthew Perry as Benny as his ‘costume’. Perry, the voice of Benny, an instigating character in the main quest of the Fallout: New Vegas game, passed away not long before the celebration that year. He upgraded my costume with a custom-printed shirt sporting a Fallout pre-war car company logo—Corvega. And he dressed our dog in a shirt printed with Pariah Dog stats—a dog companion from Fallout 2 that gives the player terrible luck. My man uses these designs to identify two real-world factions—the new fans and OG gamers.

Dark Lore

In 2023, Tim Cain, one of the co-creators of the original games, talked about what influenced the Fallout game creators on his YouTube channel, “Vault-Tec was a stereotype of every greedy, poorly managed defense contractor that flourished in the United States during the Cold War and after… It still exists today. I think we all see a little Vault-Tec in these defense companies,” Cain explains. “We just wanted to make fun of those.”

*Vault Boy Cookie Jar at the Fallout Amazon series Season 2 premier hosted on the deck of Pioneer Saloon. Credit: Victoria Koelkebeck*

Vault-Tec plays a central role in the Fallout games. It advertises itself as a squeaky-clean, scientifically minded company with the good of the community at heart. But inside each vault, or custom-built bunker, is a new kind of hell where vault dwellers are subjected to sinister scientific and social experiments. Some vaults are darkly funny, like Vault 56 (non-canon), where residents were forced to watch a terrible comedian tell the same jokes over and over again until they rebel and massacre each other. Others are more insidious, like Vault 19, where subliminal messages delivered in the form of random beeping, blinking lights, and random tasks with no purpose slowly break the dwellers down. While Vault 19 is Kafkaesque in its cruelty, others are downright gory. In the end, all who dare are invited to enter by advertising with a wholesome cartoon character called Vault Boy.

The Fallout universe, and the vaults, stretch across the nation, but the New Vegas world between the California border and Las Vegas is a favorite. It seems to be a consensus that Fallout: New Vegas is a good game. Some argue it's the best of the game series. Based on the influences that inspired the lore, our neck of the woods is the ideal setting. You do not have to have much imagination to look at the desert surrounding Las Vegas and imagine a dystopian post-nuclear wasteland. And vintage 1950s Las Vegas, with its Atomic tourism and retro kitsch corporate versions of paradise, is the essence of Fallout.

Gordi remembers giving the creators of Fallout: New Vegas, from the game company Bethesda Softworks, a tour of Goodsprings almost 20 years ago. He tells me they wanted to see an old mine shaft. Gordi explains how the mine shaft is covered with a grate that allows bats and “whatever is in there” to get out and prevents us humans from getting in. I ask what he remembers about the people he took there, and what their names were. He shrugs his shoulders, “Pez and spez? No, that’s the [candy] dispenser,” he laughs. He seemed more concerned about the bats.

On the Pioneer Saloon patio, I spoke with a couple on their way to Chicago for the holidays. They planned a pit-stop in Goodsprings for the Fallout show screening. Carson is the gamer of the duo; he tells me, “We’re here today specifically because of the games.” He says his favorite game is New Vegas, “I got it when I was eleven, and it instantly became my favorite game…The ones that came out afterward aren’t the same…” He pauses to find the right word, “Quality.”

Fallout Fan Celebration at Goodsprings. Credit Nikola Mihaelj Ross

The main quest of New Vegas is straightforward. The locations are meaningful and closely resemble their IRL counterparts. The desert wasteland, unlike the overgrown hills of Fallout 76, is a blank slate, which makes sense for the lore and sets the stage nicely for endless modifications (known as ‘mods’) by independent developers. Mods are changes to a video game programmed by anyone with the talent and tools that can be installed on top of the original game. These changes may be new locations, storylines, characters, or small design elements that add another layer to the original storyline. It would be impossible to list what a mod can be in one article. Suffice to say, the possibilities are only limited by the imaginations of the modders. I spoke to one such modder at the screening. Vanessa Zaccagnino is part of the team of developers responsible for a recently released mod called Long 15, and an organizer/speaker for one of the celebration’s panels called “Meet the Modders.” When I ran into her, she had just celebrated the success of Long 15 in Vegas the night before. “There were a bunch of videos and articles written about [it]...We broke the record. There’s this thing called Mod of the Month. We broke the record. We got the most votes of any New Vegas mod EVER.”

Vanessa is a long-time gamer and professional in the industry, so I ask what she thinks about the show and the new fans it attracts. “When the show came out, there was a massive bump. And that happened for everybody,” she explains, “I’m grateful for new fans.”

*A gun made by Vanessa Zaccagnino, Hard Surface 3D Artist and Mod Creator. Credit: Victoria Koelkebeck*

Gameplay mods are not the only form of creative output inspired by the lore. Everything from writing, to art, and short films, to the record-breaking series on Amazon. One of my favorite riffs is a form of Creepypasta, an internet horror story genre. A creator known only as drb0sch, a play on Hieronymous Bosch, posted ‘real’ playthrough videos on YouTube of locations outside the boundaries of the Fallout: New Vegas game. His posts can be found at youtube.com/@drb0sch.

As drB0sch wanders, a static radio station begins to play on his Pip Boy that emits a sound resembling the UVB-76 (The Buzzer) signal, a real-life mysterious pulse surrounded by conspiracy. The Pip Boy is a wearable computer developed by a fictional Fallout corporation called Rob-Co. It’s worn on the player’s wrist and is where a player accesses their task lists, inventory of weapons, maps and radio receiver, among other things.

What unfolds is a journey that ties together Fallout lore, game history, art, literature and modern mysteries.Francisco Goya’s so-called “Black Paintings” make an appearance, as does the Gnostic text Trimorphic Protennoia, and the Hobo Signs of the Great Depression. What it all means is for the viewer to try to puzzle together, but the ominous vibe suits the landscape of Fallout well.

The Fallout universe is dark. Inside it are heavy concepts for gamers like the 11-year-old Carson to parse about survival and power. We are nothing but rats in an experiment. Nuclear bombs have fractured reality. Deathclaws, terrifying lizard-like mutated monsters, have moved in next door. Mom has joined a faction of raiders to keep food on the table.

'“It begs the question, why is everyone at this Pioneer Saloon Fallout Fan Celebration so fucking happy?”

November 2024 - The New California Republic (NCR) gets all the cool toys

At the 2023 celebration, my friends and I agreed the NCR military recruits had it figured out. Several attendees from this faction of soldiers had built thematic camps among the dead mesquite trees near the saloon. Readily available military surplus and World War II reenactment gear make NCR costumes easy to come by. This faction has a strong showing at the Fallout celebration. It’s not that the NCR’s values are more appealing than any other New Vegas faction, but it is indicative of the number of people from California attending the celebration.

At this year’s celebration, the NCR tent in the vendors' area was collecting taxes. California collecting taxes even after the bombs dropped was a nice touch. I laughed. Again, the NCR faction of fans gets it. I visited the tent to sign up for the NCR and made an awkward joke about being fleeced in California even after a nuclear holocaust. I don’t know if it was the word ‘holocaust,’ but the LARPer on the other side of the table stared at me blankly and replied, “No, you join the NCR, and we pay caps. Then you give back the taxes.” Yes, sir, I get the joke.

The night before the 2024 celebration, I spent in the Silverton Hotel nursing a mini-bottle of red wine, waiting for the call from my friends asking to be picked up from the airport. What I got instead was a call saying they weren’t coming. Something about a gnarly virus and high fevers.

Constance sings to her sick friends at the Pioneer Saloon. Credit Candace Lieber.

I had booked two camping spots and now only had three people joining. In 2023, we saw, or at least we thought we saw, the fenced camping area just beyond the vendor booths. It looked flat, and folks could park at their sites, which were right next door to the saloon.

When we arrived in 2024, the camp sites had been moved to a hillside adjacent to the vendor area. All of us would be sleeping on an incline, and our gear had to be hauled uphill. No cars allowed. I immediately regretted bringing a Rubbermaid full of cooking gear. We chose a spot next to a Joshua tree and a gully where we could pee discreetly in the middle of the night.

Our site rewarded us with a view of the back of the saloon, the vendor area located behind and across the street from the saloon, and a hill with trails that attendees like to hike in groups. Shortly after we set up camp, a local ATV company selling rides attempted to take a group to the top of the hill. We watched with bated breath, muttering invocations of “Shit, there he goes”... “He’s going”... “Oh no, he’s going. He’s gonna flip”...” Oh my god.” In the end, they made it and joined a large battalion of Caesar’s Legion, another New Vegas faction, in a ‘hoo-yah’ at the top.

My husband and our dog arrived later. A sharp snapping sound startled the dog, who retreated into the tent. Turns out the NCR shooting range was at the base of the hill… and would be open all day.

The Fallout celebration weekend is always jam-packed with activities: Fallout-themed karaoke, burlesque, guest panels, film screenings, gameplay, parties, bands and the Burning Man-esque Mojave Madness party that takes place in Sandy Valley, to name a few. We found the most entertaining to be random happenings, less organized than manifested: impromptu street battles, the guy ‘selling chems’ (short for chemicals, New Vegas slang used for drugs) in character, and the cigars we shared between the creosote bushes while we people watched.

Temperatures dropped to below freezing that night. Between slipping down hill in a sleeping bag, the 24-hour party at the saloon, and the cold, we didn’t get much sleep. But as I pointed out to Stephen, you can’t break Fallout fans.

War. War Never Changes

We’ll gladly mock duplicitous corporations in the game, but in real life, we will buy that Jones Fallout Soda Box at Costco and the Vault 33 jumpsuit (Vault 33 is where the Fallout show begins) on Amazon. I shoved six free Fallout-branded Arizona Iced Teas in my satchel at the 2025 celebration, thank you very much. The friends who attended the celebration with me in 2025 are not gamers, but they still enjoy fan culture. They bought costumes and a foam plasma gun from Amazon and had them shipped to my address. You can pick up a Fallout 76 T-60 Power Armor action figure from Walmart in Las Vegas today, along with a bobblehead ghoul (another creature of the wasteland), Vault-Tec lunchboxes and a winking plush Vault Boy. We may consume these things with a twinge of irony, but we will still consume them.

Everyone is getting in on the game.

“We were just at the Atomic Museum. They had a whole exhibit about it. There were official people there in costumes where you could take pictures,” Carson told me when we spoke. He and his wife were delighted with the exhibit.

While making our rounds of activities in 2025, we came across a very professional-looking set up of characters racing live roaches on a miniature track in front of the saloon. Bets were placed via a roulette table, and official-looking swag was being handed out as prizes. One of the crew was particularly committed to his character and twitched his way through a crowd of onlookers asking for ‘chems’. He was professional, rehearsed. It was impressive. It was also all paid for by Amazon.

Stephen tells me how this went down, “In the middle of the night, between Friday and Saturday night, Amazon showed up and created this whole post-apocalyptic delivery van scenario with a roulette table outside and literally roach racing. So, this was Amazon and these subsidiaries that they use to set up these kinds of things.” Amazon also pitched to Stephen an idea they had to surprise fans with a couple of celebrities from the Fallout TV series who would reveal themselves by bartending at the saloon. “Even though it was pouring rain, they [Walton Goggins and Aaron Moten] all showed up, including Jonathan [Nolan], one of the producers… They clearly enjoyed it as much as any of the fans enjoyed it,” Stephen told me.

Different schools of thought have developed among fans online around the corporate annexation of the Fallout tropes. But no one who attends the celebration in person seems to care a jot about who wants to spend their money where. And by contributing to the heated discussions online, folks become something the creators of the original games foresaw–warring factions. Probably a deeper lesson here about life imitating art imitating life. Vanessa put it well when she told me, “The Fallout community gets a bad rap because of people online. A lot of clashing ideologies, which is kinda funny because that’s what happens in the Fallout games.”

Yeah, it is kinda funny.

We can escape neither our proclivity for tribalism nor our desire to consume. The question isn’t whether it will happen, but rather which faction you will join. Will you join the faction that yearns for the way things were? Or will you join Mr. House in New Vegas and his dream of the future? You have other options, of course. But one thing will never change, and we all know what that is.

*The shuttle line at Buffalo Bill’s in Primm. Credit: Jonathan Guillen of Space Cabin Studios*

November 2025- Walton Goggins braves an atmospheric river for us

My friends who had cancelled in 2024 made good on their promise to attend in 2025. As instructed by the event’s landing page, we parked at Buffalo Bills’ in Primm (Bison Steve’s in New Vegas’ game’s version of Primm), and visited the check-in table at the lobby of the old casino.

Buffalo Bill’s, once a popular casino and family fun spot for Las Vegans, announced its closure not long before the fan celebration in 2025.The petition for closure stated that COVID-19 was mostly to blame. Business just never recovered.

Between a pandemic and a shift in the Vegas economy, Buffalo Bill’s fate was sealed. But life “realises in fact what has been dreamed in fiction,” because what it has become is a perfect fucking set for a post-apocalyptic LARP session.

Rain and sunlight streamed in through a hole in the roof above a 30-foot faux redwood tree, dampening a patch of red carpet on the ground. The slot machines made bings and pings nearby, and locals filled seats at the one bar open to people-watch. We tried to record this surreal scene, but were stopped by a security guard.

Check-in for the event was the only place without a line. Sheriff deputies warming a couple of stools at one of the closed bars inspected and labeled our fake weapons—a plasma gun made of foam and a plastic revolver. I asked if they needed to label my mini-nuke. They laughed and said, “No, those things don’t exist." “Yet,” I added, and we headed to the shuttle line, now overflowing from the sidewalk onto the landscaping.

Fallout Fan Celebration, Goodsprings 2025. Credit Jonathan Guillen of Space Cabin Studios

We started the day by stumbling from one vendor tent to another, minimizing our exposure to the rain. Braver attendees stomped through the mud with intention, adding to their battle-worn costumes. We escaped a downpour by elbowing our way to a corner on the covered patio at the back of the Pioneer Saloon. Along the way, I noticed new additions to the celebration—more food trucks, the Fallout-branded Arizona Tea giveaways, and more vendors near the general store. The rain was torrential by the time we reached our corner, and the patio began to flood, forcing me up into a nook formed by two branches of a tree growing beside it. After settling in, I looked up towards the stage. The gleaming forehead of Walton Goggins met my gaze. Goggins directed some words of love and appreciation I couldn’t make out towards the crowd. Phones popped out of every rucksack, armor and pocket. My friends and I ate THC-loaded gummies and steeled ourselves for another round of wandering in the rain.

We arrived home freezing and drenched after standing in line for an hour for a shuttle back to Buffalo Bill’s. I suggested turning on my projector and watching a playthrough of Fallout: New Vegas to get fresh context for what we had just experienced.

While I set up the projector, we talked about the fan in front of us for the shuttle, wearing flip-flops and shorts. His crew stood close to him, singing “Jingle, Jangle, Jingle” by Frank Loesser and Joseph J. Lilley (a song on the Fallout soundtrack) to keep him warm. We covered ourselves with a large fabric piece on my costume and hummed along. We talked about the double rainbow we saw out the shuttle window on the way back to Primm. We’d never seen a rainbow glow neon like that. We talked about the couple who married the day before in Las Vegas and were honeymooning at the fan celebration. You can’t break Fallout fans.

I found a playthrough with minimal commentary, shut off the lights, and pressed the power button on the projector.