In the Presidential Suite of the swanky Tops Casino on the New Vegas strip, an amnesiac courier with a grudge convinces the man who tried to kill her that she's very, very into him. Not in spite of, but because of the murder attempt, no less. With plenty of Charisma and a Black Widow perk, head chairman Benny buys the act. He gets into bed with her and never gets back up again. I've revenge-sexed Benny more than once because I enjoy the twisted sadism of seducing my nemesis before returning the bullet he put in my head. Also I like to steal his snazzy checkered suit jacket.
I've never bothered sleeping with any other characters in New Vegas. I had no idea there were a total of twelve options. But two brisk and frisky speedrunners know how to tango with all of them and have it down to a 28-minute speed seduction. Sex-based speedruns are real, and Fallout: New Vegas has one of the best.
Speed dating
"All Sleeping Partners is a hilarious concept, with what I believe to be a super interesting route," says speedrunner Tomatoanus (who you may remember as Tomatoangus). He's right. How could you see a video titled "Speedrun to sleep with everyone in Fallout New Vegas" and not click it? I did. Beyond that, it was similar to runs that Tomatoanus has already been doing in Fallout 4 called "sex%" where the goal is simply to race to have sex with any character.
All Sleeping Partners came about thanks to another speedrunner, Kungkobra, whose extensive experience with New Vegas speedrunning categories helped him push that trend even further. "I came upon the idea after the Fallout 4 runners started doing 'Sex%' and I thought 'I can do better than that in this game!'" Kungkobra knew he could bed every single one of them. And do it fast, to boot. While Fallout 4's characters mostly won't get down to business until you've completed their personal quest lines, Fallout: New Vegas' locals are significantly more free-loving. What happens in Vegas, and all.
Despite its stated goal, All Sleeping Partners is significantly less salacious than you'd imagine. After all, Fallout: New Vegas' coital cutscenes are just a fade-to-black affair. In practice, it's actually quite a technical run.
"What made this category specifically interesting was that you had to combine a number of glitches that do not see use in regular speedruns of the game," says Kungkobra. That becomes immediately clear if you listen to the commentary that Tomatoanus provides in his video where, almost like a speedrun itself, he's speeding through explanations of all the various glitches and tricks involved.
Tomatoanus and Kungkobra are the only two speedrunners submitting times to the niche category, which apparently doesn't bother either of them. The fun of All Sleeping Partners isn't topping a bunch of other runners. It's more about the journey. "The fun in this run was, in my opinion, to route it out," says Kung.
After seeing runners like Tomato do the Sex% runs in Fallout 4, the thrill was more in proving that it could be done and that a viable route could be plotted out. It wasn't that hard, Kung says, but there was one notable roadblock. "I checked the wiki for which characters you can have coitus with, noted them down and started pondering. A few characters would only sleep with men, and some only with women." So then, to sleep with every character in the game in just one playthrough, Kung would need to change his character from a man to a woman partway through.
"Normally you cannot change the sex of your character after the intro, but then I also remembered that there is a finalizing screen that pops up when you get a certain distance from Goodsprings." The last chance to change your face that New Vegas gives players was the key to a free sex change, but the option is only given once.
No problem for speedrunners, though. Kung had a trick for that too. The Time Stop glitch, which allows the player to keep walking while the rest of the characters around the world are put on pause, lets Kung and Tomato put off the character change menu until they're ready to use it. Luckily, the two characters who will only sleep with men—Maude and Jimmy—are both sex workers at the Casa Madrid, so the courier is able to put two notches in the bedpost at once and then change into a woman for the remainder of the run.
"The rest of the route is built around eggs," Kung says, because of course it is. Red Lucy, the toughest character to spend a night with, requires completing a multi-part quest fetching and delivering monster eggs. Nothing gets a lady in the mood like another lady laden with stolen monster fetuses. Although it's a right pain in the rear, Red Lucy's prerequisite quest Bleed Me Dry provides structure to the rest of the run. Every other character, Kung says, is either located along the Vegas strip (like Benny) or can be bedded during an egg-collecting pit-stop.
That would have been the end of it, but fortunately even scant competition produces ingenuity. "A while after my initial route of the category, Tomatoanus came along and started running it. I then started thinking of improvements that could be made," Kung says. He booted up the official modding tools provided by Bethesda and hunted down places to find Lucy's monster eggs that were even faster to nab than the ones recommended by the quest marker. With them in hand, he could use the Item Duping glitch to shave off more precious time.
Full speed ahead
At the moment, Tomatoanus holds the record for All Sleeping Partners at 28:38. Kung isn't far behind at 29:56, and says that if he runs the category again he has some new tricks planned. "With a newer reroute we would most likely not use Time Stop anymore due to the newer Infinite Dash glitch making us able to get to Westside faster. While I'm sad that we'd have to stop running such a unique version of the route, a speedrun should always strive to be faster, right?"
If Kung plans a new route, he may be able to take the top spot and keep it, as Tomatoanus says "I personally wouldn't find much interest in running the category with that route." It would cut out some of the variance in glitches that attracted him to it in the first place.
Even if it falls out of fashion, banging all 12 characters in Fallout: New Vegas—including a protectron robot named Fisto—is now my favorite speedrunning category for the game.
