All Hail To The King, The Unsung Hero Of Fallout: New Vegas

I don’t know exactly what it is, but every bone in my body tells me not to trust a man who’s a walking gimmick. Whether that gimmick is embodying a certain rock-and-roll pioneer or wearing ominous clown make-up, it doesn’t matter. When someone has dedicated their life to being a walking manifestation of something, you just don’t know what they’re really thinking, what they’re really feeling behind their slick veneer.

Also, living your life as the leader of a street gang of Elvis impersonators just seems a little unhinged, don’tcha think? So when I first ran into The King, leader of the Kings gang in Fallout: New Vegas’ gritty district of Freeside, I was understandably a little wary of this slickster with the deep southern drawl and his not-so-subtle integration of Elvis song titles into his everyday speech.

From the off, The King is disarming. He’s genteel, welcoming, and doesn’t swear like most of the other shithead gangs in town. Sure, he doesn’t waste much time in using me as his little errand boy, but that’s just the RPG way of things, and he makes a solid first impression.

Nevertheless, I’m just waiting for the mask to slip. He tells me about how the Kings are “different to all the other gangs,” but doesn’t every gang leader think that about their own? When I return from my first quest for The King having failed to find out any meaningful information about one of his underlings who he suspects of a little too much business on the side, I think I start to see his dark side. He is pissed, and tells me in no uncertain terms to haul ass back out into the street and find out what’s what, refusing to reimburse me for the money I coughed up to the underling.

Don’t recognise him from your playthrough? That’s because I’ve modded the game to high heaven.

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Once you get in the King’s good books however, he’s not only respectful to you, but becomes one of the most level-headed and honest characters in the game. In the absence of any higher authority in the slums of Freeside (apart from Mr. House’s Securitrons guarding the gates to the Strip), The King is the closest thing to a Sheriff in these parts, and while being a gang leader you could expect him to run it like some kind of extorting, morally corrupt Mafioso, he doesn’t. He’s simply accepting of the reality that you need a little violence to maintain order in a violent world.

The key quest that you embark on with the King is G.I. Blues, which follows the Kings’ conflict with the New California Republic (NCR), who have established a small humanitarian presence in Freeside that’s got people worried. The King expresses that locals aren’t too happy about all the NCR newcomers turning up in Freeside, but crucially doesn’t immediately cast blame on the outsiders. He’s simply saying there are troubles; the NCR and locals are fighting, but he’s not jumping to any conclusions before you find out what’s been happening, and who’s responsible for a certain recent attack on the locals.

It transpires that the NCR stopped handing out food to locals, reserving them only for NCR folk, after their envoy was attacked by the Kings. It’s at this point that I finally think that the King’s game is up. ‘Of course,’ I think to myself. ‘Threatened by the new folk in town, the King’s been orchestrating a smear campaign against the NCR to keep people onboard with the Kings, sabotaging any hopes for peace talks. Ah well, probably not long before I have to sneak up behind him and blow his brains out all over that weird Elvis strip-dancer dude on the stage in front of him.’

But when you report what the NCR told me back to the King, he’s clearly confused. Your chat gets interrupted by trouble in the streets, where you find Pacer, the King’s troublesome right-hand man, pinned down under heavy gunfire from the NCR. The penny drops that it was Pacer fomenting trouble between the NCR and the Kings, and as soon as The King becomes aware of the misunderstanding, he mobilises to remedy the situation, initiating peace talks with the NCR (even though we see that several of his own men were lost in the skirmish).

It’s at this point that you realise The King, unlike just about every other faction leader in the game, isn’t driven by power or a desire to extend it, but by a desire to maintain some semblance of order in the closest thing the Mojave Wasteland has to a city. He doesn’t have that tribal gang sense of turf, as he’s happy for the NCR to have a foothold in the city so long as he sees that they’re out there helping the people (which they are with their food kitchen).

An AI-generated rendition of The King that I knocked up. Bit too much bling maybe, but not bad at all

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He’s cautious, as evidenced by the fact that he’s not just straight-up asking you to kill people or rough them up, but find out what’s going on—scope out the situation, then only once the full picture is clear come up with an action plan. He has a good nose for bullshit, and the work you do for him stems from his concerns that people are being unfairly treated in one way or another (tourists being scammed by Orris, locals not receiving food handouts from the NCR).

Oh, and he has a semi-robotic dog called Rex, who he cares enough for that he sets you on a quest all around the wasteland to find some replacement gel for his little doggy brain, which wobbles around precariously in a glass tank carved into the dog’s head. I mean, sure, I suspect plenty of dictators and serial killers had pet pooches they genuinely cared for, but you can’t help but feel that anyone with a close dog bond has at least an ounce of humanity in them.

The King isn’t a typical ‘good guy’ by any means; he has no qualms about killing those who cross him (though only once he knows they’ve crossed him), oh and Lord forbid you try to turn off his jukebox while he’s listening to it, which will cause him to absolutely lose his shit and try to kill you. But hey, we all have our foibles, those hairpin triggers that make us see red, right? And credit where it’s due, the guy seems somewhat self-aware of his explosive tendencies, as suggested by his rueful tone when he tells you of a time when he got into some blind rage and knocked a doctor’s teeth out.

In his own rough-and-ready way, The King is one of the most standup characters in New Vegas, and to this day I wish there was some means by which you could team up with him (and perhaps a few of the other half-decent factions, like The Followers of the Apocalypse) to take over and rebuild New Vegas. Were that a possibility, I wouldn’t even try to take power for myself, but leave him in charge, while I ride off into the sunset with my dog companion like the classic Fallout protagonist I am. The Kings’ somewhat objectivist ideology that “every man is a king in their own right” would be a perfect fit to run a den of iniquity like New Vegas. Would he turn the city into some kind of humanitarian utopia? Probably not, but at least it’d be run with a level-headed humanity that’s hard to find in the Mojave Wasteland.

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