Gamble on Survival: Vault-Tec’s Vault 100 Unveiled in New Vegas

The champagne was flowing and confetti was raining from the sky as the sound of "Blue Moon" echoed off the statuesque, 30-foot vault door. Vault-Tec’s Vault 100 had officially been opened in the heart of New Vegas. As the proud executives basked in the radiant lights, one couldn’t help but be charmed by their beaming smiles, not suspicious in the least of the strange, rad-roach shaped pins they were ceremoniously wearing.

While the PR head failed to mention the notoriously high mortality rates of previous vaults, his steady stream of words painted a picture of idyllic underground life. Vault 100, he proclaimed, was a “gambling paradise” in which residents could earn extra rations based on their winnings at the Poker table, dispelling any and all suspicion that Vault-Tec executives took up residencies in Las Vegas for its fabulous casinos.

The vault's ‘Vault-Tec Wasteland Survival Game Room’ features a myriad of gambling machines, each more dangerous than the last. For those wishing to spice up their daily routines with near-death experiences, the ‘Rad-Roulette’ is a clear choice. Here, contestants can bet on which of the 36 contaminated chambers in the spinning wheel will release a rad-scorpion when opened.

But not everything revolves around life-threatening games of chance. The vault’s ‘Environmentally Controlled Biosphere’ boasts a breathtaking array of glowing fungi and nightstalker nests that can be admired from a safe distance in case radioactive lizards aren’t your preferred game buddies.

Then there's the vault’s ‘Vault-Tec Educational Facility’ which focuses on specialised courses such as ‘How to Use Bottle Caps as Currency 101’ and the deeply popular ‘Post-Apocalyptic Wine Tasting: How to Distinguish Between Rads and Reds’. It’s just like home-schooling, if your home was a 100-foot reinforced steel bunker with limited lighting and a staff of robots.

Who would have thought that a shelter designed for humanity’s survival would provide a dose (or 10) of necessary, atomic-age styled gambling thrills? Only Vault-Tec! What an era we live in. One minute you're hoarding canned goods in anticipation of the end times, the next you're training rats to fetch bottle caps in a posh, retro-style Las Vegas casino, all while humming along to old-world tunes played on a rusty jukebox.

But one can't help but ask, did the Vault-Tec execs go too far with their new vault experiment? After all, it is a question of survival and, more pertinently, is it ethical to gamble on it? Nonsense! As one executive confidently put it, "Where better than New Vegas to gamble on mankind’s survival!” To which we can only add: “Double or nothing, indeed!”

As they say in New Vegas, "what happens in the vault, stays in the vault!" Except the tales of ceaseless rads and relentless mutated crickets, of course. Those make for excellent dinner party stories.