Meet the speedrunner who shagged his way to a Fallout world record
“If you don’t know what a Sex% run is, it’s the act of starting a new game and having sex as quickly as possible.”
This is how Fallout speedrunner tomatoanus - which I assume refers to the green part of a tomato - describes the Fallout Anthology Sex% run in his latest speedrunning video, posted after setting a new world record last week.
“I first saw speedruns back in 2011 when a friend showed me AGDQ 2011,” tomatoanus tells me. “At the start of 2017 I was sick of Dota and was looking for a new competitive hobby. AGDQ 2017 was going on so I watched pretty much every run of it and decided to do runs of my own. My first run was of Fallout 4 Any% and I’ve been running the Fallout games ever since.” Tomatoanus actually holds the Any% world record for Fallout 4, having completed the game in just 11 minutes, 12 seconds.
“Sex% was a category made in 2016 by a runner named JshaKhajiit,” tomatoanus explains. “After enough pestering [in my Twitch chat] I finally caved, and did a few runs of it in 2018.” Tomatoanus was unsatisfied with his times in the category, and although he left Sex% behind for a while, he made a mental note to come back to it in the future. And that’s exactly what he did.
Last week, tomatoanus managed to have sex in all five mainline Fallout games consecutively in just 23 minutes and 7 seconds. Because the Sex% run is governed by the same rules as Any%, glitches are allowed. Naturally, a run of this magnitude features some interesting exploits, some of which lead to hilarious (and disturbing) results.
“In Fallout 3, you can totally have sex as a ‘baby’ if you leave the vault by clipping out of bounds,” tomatoanus says. “It's actually incredibly boring since the baby movement speed is so slow.” Luckily, despite the fact that you technically leave the Vault as a baby, Bethesda seems to have taken great pains to ensure that babies can’t actually have sex. “I put baby in quotation marks," he continues, "because when you're a baby in the game, you’re actually just a shrunken adult model. They didn't actually make a baby for the character to play as.” So you’re not underage. You’re just kinda small.
Although having sex as a baby in Fallout 3 is technically just having sex as a shrunken adult, you really can have sex as a 10-year-old. In fact, that’s actually the fastest way of completing Fallout 3 Sex%. “The idea of the run in Fallout 3 is pretty funny,” tomatoanus continues. “You celebrate your 10th birthday and then abuse quicksaving and quick-loading while walking into walls to ditch your surprise birthday party and spring to Megaton to have sex instead.”
Fallout 4 has some interesting Sex% strategies, too. Sex% runners change the language from English to German in order to increase the dialogue speed and save time in the long run. “If you play through the whole game in Any%, French is actually the fastest language, being around 11 seconds faster than English,” tomatoanus explains. “If you're doing Sex% though, then you’re really only playing through the intro of the game, and German is about two seconds faster than French in that timespan. So we use German for Sex%.” German, the language of love.
Although the language swap seems like more of an egghead strategy than having your 10-year-old Lone Wanderer lose his virginity to a Megaton working girl, there’s room for silliness in Fallout 4’s Sex% strategies too. “When we get to the Third Rail in Goodneighbor to have sex with Magnolia, she's actually in the middle of singing a song,” tomatoanus explains. “Naturally, we can't speak to her while she's performing.”
In order to rectify this, the Sole Survivor needs to make a bit of a scene. “While we’re running up to the stage where she's singing, we hit one of the patrons at a table with a security baton,” tomatoanus tells us. “This makes everyone in the area become our enemy and aggro to us immediately, including Magnolia. When we put away our weapon, they all forgive us, and Magnolia doesn't go back to singing. This means we are able to talk to her and can convince her to have sex.” Interesting romantic strategy, but it really is the quickest way to finish a Fallout Anthology Sex% run.
Although the Sex% run might seem like it’s all fun and games, there’s a serious competitive circuit among Fallout speedrunners. “The thing is that for the past year or so, the Sex% category for Fallout 4 is actually the most competitive,” tomatoanus says. “Myself, Jinjenia, and Duchys have all traded the record back and forth a good amount. Kinda ironic coming from a category called Sex%.”
As for other interesting Fallout runs, tomatoanus and some of his fellow Fallout speedrunners have a few things in mind at the moment, one of which tomatoanus was willing to share with us. “One that I’ve talked about in the past on my stream is something that another runner named Jinjenia came up with,” tomatoanus explains. “The speedrun is to get Mama Murphy in Fallout 4 to overdose. It starts like normal, but your primary objective is to kill her with drugs.
“The route for it consists of warping across the map like normal, and then using an exploit to get a container to spawn drugs over and over until you get the right ones,” tomatoanus said. “After that you just go and give them all to Mama Murphy.” I mean, Mama Murphy does claim to have a special kind of magical power called “The Sight,” which she says can only be channelled through the use of chems. So you’re kind of helping her, if it wasn’t for the whole death part.
It’s important to note that tomatoanus holds a plethora of other Fallout records, too. If you visit speedrun.com/Fallout, you’ll see that he places incredibly high on the Any% leaderboard for every mainline Fallout game, as well as holding most of the Sex% records. He also holds the record for the fastest official Fallout Anthology Any% run, meaning that he beat all five Fallout games consecutively quicker than anybody else with a time of one hour, 29 minutes, and 47 seconds. If you’d like to see more of tomatoanus’ runs, you can check him out on YouTube and Twitch.
My favourite thing about this whole article was probably the fact that “tomatoanus” doesn’t even have a red squiggly line under it in Google Docs. It’s a real word.