Remember Phil Spencer’s Fallout 76 CAMP getting nuked? Here’s how that whole thing looked from Bethesda’s point-of-view

It’s not often you get a chance to cause damage to a video game executive’s actual stuff in a video game. However, just last month, as you probably heard, Xbox head honcho Phil Spencer’s Fallout 76 CAMP had an entire atomic bomb dropped on it by a player.

While, as its perpetrator soon revealed, the nuking wasn’t - as some had theorised due to the timing - some kind of reaction to Xbox shuttering a group of studios headlined by Redfall developer Arkane Austin and Hi-Fi Rush creator Tango Gameworks, it was still a pretty interesting thing to have happen in a game.

So, with that in mind, during an interview with Bill LaCoste at a preview for the Skyline Valley expansion, I asked the lead producer on Bethesda’s 76 team what the game’s developers had thought watching all of that go down in their creation.

“I mean, it's amusing,” the developer said, “I think the great part about this is because Phil is also now able to launch nukes. So, I think more if anything, the fact that Phil plays the game a lot and gives a lot of feedback to it, also shows fans that Phil is a fan of this game and makes a lot of statements about 76 and they're all very positive.”

“I think there were a lot of people who may do that thinking that it's a negative, or is some sort of way [of] like ‘I'm gonna show Phil’ and it's not really what it is for us,” he continued. “You know, we look at it as fun, because I think Phil looks at it as fun too and he's like, ‘okay, well now that I've been nuked, I'm gonna nuke some people’. So, I think it's a lot of it’s just in real good fun and, and I think it's great, because again, it just puts more press out there for the game of Fallout 76.”

While Spencer hasn’t, as of yet, responded to that nuke from user real1090jake with some atomic firepower of his own, it is cool to see LaCoste allude to that as something he and the 76 team might get a kick out of seeing. When your boss accidentally becomes the final boss of your game, at least in the eyes of some hardcore players, watching him embrace that role a bit is something you certainly can’t blame developers for.

Here’s hoping if Spencer ever properly does so, he doesn’t bite off more than he can chew and end up on the wrong end of a gang of level 1000 vault dwellers armed with enough ordinance to essentially re-create the great war.