For almost 24 hours, eager Fallout fans showed up online in droves to watch... well, basically nothing. On its Twitch channel yesterday morning, developer Bethesda streamed a continuous shot of a Vault Boy statue, placed against the background of a monitor displaying the message “Please stand by.” (Its official Twitter and Facebook accounts posted the same message around the same time.) Occasionally, something weird would happen — like a strange sort-of puppet show or someone would appear and play with balloons to break up the monotony.
The stream ended with a teaser for Fallout 76, but not before Bethesda’s Todd Howard made an appearance to remind everyone that millions of us wasted precious minutes of our lives. “We have had over 2 million unique visitors to this stream to watch, I don’t know what, nothing,” he said before stepping offscreen. For most of the stream, there were more than 100,000 people watching at any given moment. What followed was a minute-and-a-half trailer offering more questions than answers, presumably to be addressed at E3 in June.
The actual announcement time doesn’t justify the wait for some fans; a few could be seen screaming “IS THAT IT” in Twitch chat as the stream ended. Still, the sheer absurdity of a 24-hour stream is its own sort of novelty, and the 15 million-something total views it racked up in the meantime means most of us did not suffer alone. Cheer up, Fallout fans! It’s still better than literally watching ice melt.