‘Fallout’ Dwellers Join Tinder to Find Love in an Atomic Wasteland

(Kotaku)

Finding love can be difficult in a desolate atomic wasteland. So the denizens of the “Fallout” (the setting of the the hit game franchise of the same name) have taken to Tinder to find the non-irradiated person of their dreams.

If those sentences made no sense to you, let me explain. If you aren’t familiar with the Fallout franchise, it takes place in a nuclear wasteland, where humanity survives in clusters of underground vaults.

The latest installment, Fallout 4, is coming out this fall. To whet gamers’ appetites for the new title, developer Bethesda has created an iOS and Android base-building game called Fallout Shelter. And in Fallout Shelter, there’s a character called Vault Boy.

With me so far? Good, because here’s where it gets amazing: According to Kotaku, a Tinder user was recently browsing the dating app when — amid the flurry of left and right swipes — he stumbled across a user named Vault Boy.

According to Vault Boy’s profile, he’s 25-years old and wants to “build a brighter future together…underground.”

You see, in Fallout Shelter you take on the role of the leader of one of these vaults. Your goal is to keep everyone alive and happy in order to ensure the continuation of the human race.

And that means having children. A major part of the game actually involves getting your vault dwellers to come together in the biblical sense so your vault’s population will continue to grow.

So it makes sense that Vault Boy — and his counterpart Vault Girl — would take to Tinder to help improve their chances of finding love.

Now you might be asking yourself if these are joke accounts. Surprisingly, they aren’t: Vault Boy and Vault Girl are official accounts made by Bethesda. In fact, the official Fallout Twitter account has been tweeting images of potential vault dweller mates with the hashtag #dateadweller.

If you come across either Vault Boy or Vault Girl’s profiles in Tinder and swipe right (indicating interest), you’ll eventually get a message from one of them asking you to download Fallout Shelter.

Is all of this necessary? Absolutely not. Fallout Shelter has already received a lot of love from the press, and Fallout 4 is almost guaranteed to be a hit based on its pedigree alone.

But is finding a Tinder account for a cartoon atomic war survivor who spent his life underground and just wants to be loved incredibly funny and a great way to market a product? My god, yes.

Email Daniel at dhowley@yahoo-inc.com; follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley or on Google+.