There’s no order in Fallout’s decrepit dust-bowel vision of the future, so we’re not entirely sure how former Speaker of the House John Bercow has wound up in the game’s voice cast.
Yes, the scourge of the leave camp, and Nigel Farage’s latest punching bag, has lent his voice to the upcoming fan-made project.
An ambitious expansion to the blockbuster 2015 game Fallout 4, which itself was recently upgraded for the PS5, Fallout London will see players battling warring factions in a post-apocalyptic version of the UK capital. It will mark the first time the series has ventured beyond the confines of its scarred, future America.
One of the characters players will meet in the upcoming expansion (or “mod” as it’s known in gaming parlance) will be a robot speaker of the house, (fittingly) voiced by Bercow. And, he may just be as unreliable as the other droids in the retro-futuristic video game series. In a voice clip shared on the game’s Discord, Mr Bercow can be heard repeating the word “order” before the audio starts to distort.
Does that mean the 61-year-old former MP for Buckingham is a Fallout fan? Do the Houses of Parliament have a hidden gaming room we’re not aware of, where politicians sneak off for rounds of Mario Kart and Fallout between sessions?
Or maybe Bercow became a convert after watching the hit Amazon series, like so many others. We’re not sure how this unorthodox partnership came to be, but it’s definitely one for the gaming history books.
Bercow, who quit as commons speaker in 2019 after a decade at the helm, was last seen departing the US version of psychological reality TV show The Traitors in March.
He joins a voice cast featuring the likes of video game veterans Neil Newbon (Astarion in Baldur's Gate 3), Anna Demetriou (Sophia in A Plague Tale: Requiem), and two Doctor Who actors: Sylvester McCoy and Colin Baker.
"Imagine being Fallout: London and feeling so lucky having all the talented voice actors on the team. But then boosting it further with the fact that we have two Doctor Who actors as VAs... then Neil Newbon messages us and also wants a role," wrote the game’s project manager, Dean "Prilladog" Carter on Discord.
"But the cherry on the top? Who better to represent our mod's version of the Speaker of the House, than a Robot version voiced by John Bercow himself."
Fallout London should be heading to PC soon after an abrupt delay caused by the release of Fallout 4’s next-gen update in late April. However, the developers recently revealed that the mod won’t work with Fallout 4 on the Epic Games Store, due to a lack of feature support, but will run through distributor GOG and Steam.
While it’s not known for its celeb voice cast, the Fallout series has featured a number of A-listers including Liam Neeson in Fallout 3 (who reportedly turned down a chance to return for the upcoming mod, along with fellow Hollywood actor Ron Perlman) and the late Matthew Perry, in Fallout: New Vegas.
