Watching the romantic speedrun of the legendary cool Fallout: New Vegas is a pleasure.
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The 2025 charity fundraising event Awesome Games Done Quick takes place last week and includes such wonderfully absurd runs as an Elden Ring saxophone boss controller presentation and a Crazy Taxi speedrun performed by a live band. As a Fallout fan, I was glad to see Tomatoangus (aka Tomatoanus) take on a full-fledged romance run in New Vegas, the kind of niche speedrunning record we’ve written about before.
There are 12 romantic characters in Fallout: New Vegas, and collecting them all, Pokemon style, in one playthrough is usually impossible. Its NPCs have a pre-determined orientation, and it is usually not possible to change your character’s gender to suit their preferences mid-game. However, as Tomatoangus explains in this test, a quick save and quick load right before you’re asked if you’ve completed character creation means the pop-up continues to appear throughout the game, allowing you to quietly rebuild your character halfway through.
Abuse of fast loading is a recurring theme as it allows you to skip dialogue as well as move forward. A glitch in the revolver’s reload animation can also result in free dashes clinging indefinitely if you jump into the middle. There are a lot of things that the average New Vegas fan doesn’t even know about, and that’s part of the fun. Did you know that if you go out of bounds, you are reborn at the entry point of the location you are in? It’s a convenient way to get around New Vegas at speeds you’d never know about unless you were trying to jump across the desert in record time.
Another trick that plays a central role in this run is the time stop, which is activated by right-clicking on the Pip-Boy card. For some reason, this freezes the AI and allows you to complete quest objectives in relative safety, such as collecting all the monster eggs you need to impress one of your romantic partners. This is what ladies like.
I’ll leave the rest for you to find out for yourself. If you want more, Tomatoangus ran the legendary Fallout Anthology speedrun in 2020, in which he destroyed Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout 3, New Vegas, and Fallout 4 in a row in 2:16:21. It’s an entertaining and wild ride.