[Can't wait to play Fallout 4? Neither can we. Check out the mod's we'd most like to see while you wait.]
It's the kind of idea we all wish we'd come up with: A fellow named Seth placed a preorder for Fallout 4 directly from Bethesda Softworks, paying for it entirely with bottle caps. He boxed up roughly 2240 of them, "everything I've been able to save since I played Fallout 3 for the first time," and while he wasn't really sure about the caps-to-dollars exchange rate, he said he hoped his post on Imgur would become popular enough that "their PR department will be too nervous to turn me down."
"Fallout 3 was my favorite game for several years, so I made the rational choice to start saving up bottle caps. Turns out 4.5 years of undergrad and 3 years in a Master's program leads to a lot of drinking," he wrote. "It ended up being 11.2 pounds of bottle caps. You don't want to know how much it cost to ship it to Maryland."
Yesterday, his gambit paid off. He received an email from Matt Grandstaff, Bethesda's global community lead, with a photo of the opened boxes of caps, a complaint that his office smells like beer, and a promise that Seth would receive a copy of the game in November because he's "the first person to do this"—the obvious implication being that anyone else who tries it won't be so lucky.
"I just wanted to say 'thank you' to everyone who helped in making this happen," Seth wrote in a follow-up. "People were simultaneously worried about my rate of drinking (I'm fine, thanks), and were also disappointed in my lack of drinking (I'm fine, thanks). Someone on imgur even offered to gift me a copy of the game if I didn't get one."
For those not in the know, and thus missing out on the joke, bottle caps are the standard currency in the Fallout universe. Grandstaff said he would deposit the payment at the People's Bank of Point Lookout.
