RobCo’s Secret 

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I know he's not pre-war. But Hancock is another interesting note as he sought out a drug that overnight seems to have turned him into a ghoul. 200 years after the bombs, in an era where being a ghoul is a death sentence, he found a drug that ghoulified him almost immediately. That's... Some weird screwed up stuff.

Ghouls having radiation resistance, being extremely long lived, and barely needing to eat would be pretty useful for traveling the stars- the pre-war research could tie in with a lot of factions aims for star travel

The saddest thing about the Feral ghouls is that at one point most of all of them were aware and humanish at the start of the war. Makes me wonder how long many of them lasted as their fellow ghouls started going feral. That would be an interesting side plot in a game.

Take a shot everytime he digresses

Hancock and WInter both say the process felt great. I guess pre-war Ghoul making feels different to the weird "Oh I'm falling apart now" sickness that affects postwar ghouls. No postwar ghouls has said, "Yeah I felt great while turning into an immortal turbo-leprosy victim"

Back then I‘d never imagined someone would surpass Oxhorn, Fudgemuppet, ShoddyCast and so on, but the past two years you became my absolute favorite channel ❤

41:24 Please note, this drug is likely the same one that you missed mentioning during the Eddie Winters section (Nick mentions Winter’s doctor giving him an “experimental anti-radiation drug”), and that Hancock took in his quest for a new high that led to his ghoulification.

If the "X-Factor" was FEV, this would explain what happened to Thaddeus in the Fallout TV series: The Snake Oil Salesman gave him FEV, and given that the whole wasteland was radioactive, this will eventually ghulify him

like the mysterious stranger he always knows when to arrive and fire off an epic game theory like a revolver

Getting a new video from Nate is like seeing your food come to your table at a restaurant

I thought you'd mention Harold. He's arguably not exactly a ghoul, but he transformed into a ghoul-like mutant after falling into a vat of FEV. And he lives with the ghouls of Gecko as one of them. I know it's from the old-timey games but it's also interesting in my opinion.

When i hear about the doctors experiment, I think that doctor roberts fully intended the ghoulification to happen, but needed a volunteer so he made it sound like it was for the betterment of radiation medicine. Once he got one he actively lied and turned ger into a ghoul. Then when she either got stuffed into the upstairs, or stuffed herself in there. He did it again with others. Many others. Itd make a effectively depressing fallout story lol

It's interesting that the ghoul sentry says the super mutants don't attack their settlement, because in Fallout 4, the Slog (a ghoul-only settlement, at least when you first find it) has a problem with super mutants attacking them regularly.

You forgot about Hancock,who became a ghoul by taking an experimental drug.possibly a later version of what made eddie winter a ghoul

Don't let the iceberg paralyze you. This is fun. This is art. This is not work. Release it whenever you feel it's done. We all trust your judgment around here, man. Don't let any one project drive you crazy

Considering that Ghouls can exist as sentient life with no nutrients and massive parts of their brains missing, the most likely explanations are either an FEV variant, Zetan experiments/accidents or something related to Lorenzo's artifact (which might also be Zetan?) - you could imagine a Cabot family member unknowingly unleashing a disease to the world that became the basis for FEV but was also mutated by radiation, for example.

About the head thing, there were many depicted throughout Fallout 3 as well. Seems to be a callback to some 1950's deco stuff. Nate mentions that the head being at the bottom of the ritual site is used to justify a connection with the same head in the RobCo building, but if anything, it actually lends even more credence to Bethesda reusing assets that just *looked* like they could fit in a particular instance for creep value, like the ghouls.

We were all wrong, it's magic yellow ghoul vape juice.

I wonder why you didn't mentioned Moira Brown at all. I mean she got 'ghoulified' pretty much instantly after we blew up Megaton. Wouldn't that be a critical part in this investigation? Anyway, love the video, keep it up!

Yeah I always thought gouls were attracted to glowing ones, like that was cannon lore. You always find gouls near them, or near radiated places in general. So they're just attracted to radiation

That's why so many people were added to the vaults. Everyone who was predispostioned to ghouling was left outside.

Not even a small mention of Hancock, who used a pre-war serum to turn himself into a ghoul. Or at least a ghoul like being. This has implications about ghouls pre-war.

One person you have missed: Jason Bright from RepCon facility near Novac in Fallout New Vegas. While being ghoulified in effect of Great War, he is the only known sane and friendly glowing ghoul

Great video! I do think Dean Domino would be a pre-war ghoul to include amongst these other folks. You find him at the Sierra Madre in Dead Money in Fall-out New Vegas. He claims that he never lost his mind because of his obsession to break into the casino vault despite being relatively isolated in the Villa.

I actually kind of love it when RU-vidrs don’t upload for like a few months or even a year and just all of a sudden upload something like nothing happened Edit: I say this because there was that one time when he didn’t upload for like a year and I just think its funny when that happens

God I love that bell. Thanks for the top tier fallout content!

I actually have (what I think, at least) is a really good biochemical explanation for why ghouls seemingly age much slower while simultaneously seeming to "decay" physically AND eventually go "feral". It actually has to do with why we, generally, get cancer later in life. I want to keep this as simple as possible, but in order to keep living, we need to replace cells that die off. As our body grows new cells from our chromosome's DNA, but there is always a risk that the process can create a mistake. That is a mutation and the basis for evolution, but it is also what leads to cancer which is just bad cells that do nothing but grow more bad cells, that's tumors, basically. In order to reduce the likelihood that the growth of new cells will lead to cancer, at the ends of each of our chromosomes that are split and copied is a portion of DNA that is nothing but "junk" data, called telomeres. The reason it is there is because each time our cells split, it's most likely that a little bit of our DNA at the end, those telomeres, gets cut off in the process. So, the telomere sections get shorter and shorter the older you get and the more cell copies are made. Once you run out of "junk" data to lose, when you're older, it starts becoming more and more likely that you will lose essential data needed to grow a functional new cell and it will fail, or it will grow a cancer cell instead. That is why it's more likely we will get cancer when we are older - bad cell copies. My theory is that Ghouls look the way they do, and live for as long as they do, because their process of cell division is either radically slowed or stopped completely. I theorize the ghoulification process actually causes a strengthening in the cell membranes which allows the cells to become stronger, but too strong to allow for easy cell division, effectively stopping the growth and division process. This is why child ghouls stay children and why ghouls don't seem to age. They don't need to eat as much because they aren't actually using any energy to grow new cells. That is why their skin seems to decay, because they aren't growing new skin to replace any that dies or is lost, BUT since each cell membrane is stronger, that is harder to have happen. Since they can't grow new cells, they can't grow new cancer cells either. They can't catch most diseases because viruses can't penetrate the stronger cell membranes. This also explains why they eventually go feral as well, since becoming feral is really just a symptom of losing too many essential brain cells in the areas that are maintaining personality, aggressiveness, reasoning, etc. This is by no means an iron-clad explanation, but I think it is a reasonable one, or at least one that is on the right track, but my ego certainly won't be hurt if someone has a reason to blow this out of the water lol. I'm a chemical engineer and nuclear professional, not a biologist or doctor or anything. So, if there is someone that is that can improve on this, I'd enjoy hearing it as much as anyone 😁

I remember watching this anime about the Nagasaki Bombing for a class. It was based on the actual first hand account of the author. And in the aftermath this he and his mother set up a place for survivors to come and get water and rest. But I specifically remember a lot of the people who came to them were mutilated beyond saving, and were burnt head to toe missing limbs, missing a peace of them, but the fascinating part was that they were able to walk here make it there. Then when they drank water and rested, their bodies finally gave it up, like the bodies will to survive, like Mother Nature alone was keeping them alive long enough, and I remember seeing them and making the connection to ghouls, they looked mutilated and ghoulified. I’m not sure if that had any impact on ghouls design or conception but I thought it was a fascinating real world parallel which you could consider a real like ghoul from an atomic bomb.

I always got the impression that Research Assistant Peters was working on making a more advanced version of RadAway. She says that the serum was not ineffective at toxic levels which sounded to me like she was working on improving RadAway so it would work on people who would normally be too irradiated for even normal RadAway to work.

17:46 Ive had a hunch that Thadeus was going to turn into a supermutant and not a ghoul in the show. Our proper intro to them will be them catching Thad, sensing he one of them, and making him essentially a squire for a supe warlord or something

So I have a question about something I noticed when in the Mechanist lair, before the war the lair was a lab for human experiments on robobrains but in a room where they would do the operations I noticed on one of the boards showing X-rays is 2 images of a deathclaw head, why would that be there?

I think the FEV explanation is impossible solely because of the crew of the Yangtze. They were in a sealed, underwater submarine, and from China. They would have had 0 exposure to FEV. The social isolation explaination for ferocity is also disproven by this (and that the group that glowing one guy in Nuka World is from) as Zhao makes it clear he was very close to his crew. Another note, that may just be a gameplay feature, is that many feral ghouls are seen with makeshift metal armour, meaning they must have been non-feral at some point and sought out armour.

I can't believe how time flies been a member of this channel for almost 2 years and do not regret being one, I still love the videes!!

2:44am.... scrolling through, looking for something to wind me down so I can sleep, and what do I find? A juicy, irresistible video from Nate that is bound to be a treat for sure. Always top tier. Always something I missed or just didn't know about the lore, even after a few thousand hours.

24:33 had me in stiches... especially after nate had realized what he had said... I'm sorry big guy... but you made some of us chuckle more than you'd imagen!

Watching this channel grow over the years fills me with so much joy.

Been a tough few years… but Nate and his fallout videos have gotten me through all of them!!

26:10 i love the game he plays while waiting to record the audio tape and you can see him jump for joy when he succeeds its so wholesome and cute

The super mutants not attacking ghouls reminds me of a movie where an entire hoard of zombies would ignore any regular living human if they were sick, but the zombies had to have some sort of sixth sense of knowing who is sick and who isn't without being able to see the sickness.

Nate I’m absolutely biased when it comes to your fallout content. The vibes are just always immaculate. I digress, take as much time as you need, I’ll simply rewatch them.

Just wanted to say i love your content and appreciate the amount of work you put in these videos.

Been watching you for years man! I've always loved you content and I especially love your more in depth and longer videos. Please keep making this amazing content just like you always have!

It genuinely makes me so happy that you're back posting again Nate. Great work fr!

Nate: *uploads an hour long deepdive on ghoul lore*. Amazon's unreleased Fallout series: *sweats*

I'm more inclined to believe the first theory you mentioned about the X factor being genetic. The Nuka-World DLC for Fallout 4 sees the Sole Survivor having to clear several theme parks, including Kiddie Kingdom which is inhabited by ghouls. During the course of clearing the park you can find a lot of terminal entries detailing the story of the park employees who took shelter in the tunnels beneath it. They were out fortifying their defenses one day when a rad storm rolled in and they were caught in it. After that, they all started ghoulifying and all eventually went feral, except for 1 who you meet near the end of clearing the park. In the entire series, all we've ever seen as results of FEV exposure is super mutants. So I'm inclined to believe ghoulification is genetics based and that whatever gene is responsible was fairly common in the wider population before the war.

I’m so glad this channel still updates. I still love Fallout just as much as I did YEARS ago when I started listening to Nate. Please never stop

thank you for doing more Fallout 4 or fallout itself content. I just love this game and the lore in it, it's so diverse and awe inspiring, also inspires a lot of theories itself. I love this stuff.

Another amazing and informative video. Thank you for this content, always nice to learn more about the Fallout universe

Hey Nate there’s an editing error here 39:22 You say “so” and it’s cut suddenly. Just making sure we didn’t miss out on something important you were saying about the first holo tape by the researchers assistant

God the joy I feel when there’s a new EpicNate video is the closest thing I’ve felt to Christmas morning since I was tiny. Absolutely stellar work, 12/10💛

Always good to see another video from you dude. Funnily enough, I have just startsed a new Fallout 4 playthrough.

This channel is great. Thanks for keeping at it!

These videos are always such a delightful surprise when they drop

great video can't wait to see what you cook up when elder scrolls VI comes out

Love your videos man, it always makes my day! Keep it up!

This channel as well as fallout and TES have become such an integral part of my life, thank you for contributing and making such an impact!!

just when i needed something to allow my brain to focus while i do other things nate comes in clutch!! so glad you're back nate

I love the research assistant’s tapes. The way it starts you think she’s just some heartless scientist… but it turns out that she’s sacrificing herself for a theory she truly believes in and thinks will help everyone. It’s somewhat alarming that she asks for “permission” to abort the trial, as that implies that there actually IS a moral-free scientist involved… DAMN YOU ROBERTS!!! (Also, please do a Bostonian accent every single time you say doctor from now on: let’s get that in the channel mythos…) And I do think that Occam’s razor is far more likely with regards to the ghouls and mutants in the Mechanist lair. It’s entirely possible that the robots brought live or post-mortem specimens back for the mechanist. She was convinced that the tech worked, if we consider this. Therefore, wouldn’t it be far kinder to use mutants and ghouls for the brains, rather than human prisoners? I expect this didn’t work, in fact of course it didn’t - she’s completely wrong about the tech! And thus it was abandoned. The system is automated, after all. And this accounts for the total absence of any evidence for the research being done on pre-war ghouls and mutants. Not saying I’m right; just that the converse does require quite a large assumption, based on what we are presented with (the utter lack of document evidence, the mechanist’s belief that the process is viable and her complete shock that the robots are explicitly attacking everything they find). Just an observation, doubtless crammed with holes and gaps. ;)

You're srill epic Nate, thanks for the great work

Impressive well crafted video. It shows how much work you put into this. Subscribed !

thank you for the video, always enjoy watching these when i have a bit of time to sit and simmer for awhile

I have always kind of theorized ghoulifaction has something to do with the new plague. Maybe people who have the gene to be a carrier or something also means they become ghouls when mild FEV exposure and radiation mix. It doesn’t fully explain it, though.

The "longest week or two" in history

Getting ready for the New Vegas festival in Goodsprings! Hope to see many of you guys there!

Man I seriously love everything you post. You're the best Nate! 😁

I saw a mudcrab the other day. Horrible creatures...

The goat is back!

Always great to hear these! No matter if they have previously known info, it's always great to hear everythin' again to catch up!

@TheEpicNate315 Thank you so much for another deep dive into the lore behind another aspect of a beloved franchise. Your hard work is most definitely appreciated and cherished. So much respect and love bruh! Bless

NOOO! You failed me, why didn't you show whether or not the spoon was placed correctly????

The incredibly loud "BUT" @25:14 made me laugh so hard...

So glad you put up another video. You know how many times I watch your videos over and over again while I travel. Especially when I'm not able to play. I really hope you do a new Skyrim video soon.

the best Bethesda games lore man, my favorite fellow "lore-maniac", love you Nate ❤

I thought this said robocops secret and was very confused for a solid 30 seconds

He returns once again! Happy with the content! Keep it coming as long as you can!

We are obliged to spread the love for Paul, we are all a part of the MittenSquad.

Raul (if i remember his name correctly) in New vegas is the only person to get close to the supermutants in black mountain, He is a ghoul. "But he is forced to be there" yes, by nightkin. Nightkin in new vegas have attacked ghouls and other supermutants because of their addiction, even so supermutants see the problem and want to help them. Not sure if this is mentioned but it also helps prove that Supermutants see ghouls as some sort of ally/help.

thank you for your content, man. i’ve been real depressed and nerding out on Fallout lore always helps a bit. not all heroes wear capes, buddy! you’re awesome!

39:22 Absolutely well said, sir. Beautifully put and written. So indeed

One of your best video's yet. Love the long form.

The first ghoul, from pre-war. just imagine, the lore and story potential. Like a surviving adolescent boy, whose family comically took a vacation stop on their boat, at bikini atoll during its nuke test. Or a resentful survivor of hiroshima. Or that one Japanese person who looked inside that reactor, and had his DNA erased entirely by radiation in real life , leading to his skin peeling off and organ failure over time. He'd be the first glowing one. A Fallout ghoul parody of Doctor Manhattan.

Is it just me or did Nates voice get deeper.... ???😲

Ay Nate I watch you videos to go to sleep ain’t ran out of content yet and I’ve been doing it for a while keep it up g

Love all of your content man! Thank you for the video!

I’m surprised aliens weren’t involved

*"Ghouls are distasteful... To me."* -John "get the fuck" Kramer

So glad to have more of your fallout content

I want to thank you Nate, for reteaching me how to play games. I’ve missed so much in these games that I never would’ve known.

I love Nate. Best RU-vidr ever

rest in love, mitten squad.

The Lore King is back! Thank you for an excellent video, Nate🙂

But I digress

Didn’t Hancock turn ghoul because of a drug? What if the government and companies only told you it was the rads to cover their actions?

I NEEDED THIS VIDEO TONIGHT, THANK YOU

Nate, I love your presentations! You have an excellent voice for video.

Thumbnail of my ex wife

I wasn’t thinking it….until you said “dont”. Now I can’t stop.

33:17 The body language of how excited you got balancing the soup bowl on the checker board seems to be a universal thing lol gotta wiggle the mouse or right stick a bunch and jump around cuz how else are you gonna celebrate?

This is an incredible video. Thanks Nate. You've been great for yonks, but youre just getting better and better. 55:04