Mr. House

Mr. House or Robert Edwin House is the founder, President, and CEO of RobCo Industries, a vast computer and robotics corporation before the Great War. In 2281, he is the sole proprietor of the New Vegas Strip in the Mojave Wasteland.

Pre-War
Born on June 25, 2020, House grew up in the Las Vegas area. He was orphaned at an early age when his parents died in a freak accident involving an auto gyro and lightning, and his older brother, Anthony House, cheated him out of his inheritance.

Robert House attended the Commonwealth Institute of Technology and founded his own company, RobCo Industries, on his 22nd birthday. Within five years, RobCo was one of the most profitable corporations in the world. House traveled extensively and dated starlets, his wealth allowing for the acquisition of REPCONN Aerospace and the establishment of the House Resort and Country Club.

In 2065, House projected that atomic war would devastate the world within 15 years, and began preparations to save Las Vegas. He devised defensive technologies to protect the city's structural integrity. House commissioned a high capacity storage device known as the Platinum Chip which contained vital software upgrades for defensive robots known as Securitrons and the city's missile defense grid. House created a chamber to allow the extension of his lifespan, integrating himself with the subsystems of the Lucky 38 via a cerebral interface.

Great War
When the Great War took place in 2077, the Platinum Chip was lost in transit. House's networked mainframes were still able to predict and force the transmission of disarm code subsets to 59 warheads, neutralizing them before impact. Laser cannons mounted on the roof of the Lucky 38 destroyed nine warheads, and remaining bombs struck outside of the city limits. During the bombardment, software glitches set off a cascade of system crashes, and House took the Lucky 38's reactor offline to avoid meltdown. For five years, he struggled with power outages and additional system crashes until he successfully rebooted his data core with an older operating system version, but the effort caused House to fall into a coma for several decades. <!--

Post-War status

 * Leadership: Mr. House survived the war, of course, and would later recruit the Three Families, negotiate the Treaty of New Vegas, and rebuild the Vegas Strip. While these achievements yielded many immediate benefits, they were all part of House's master plan to re-ignite mankind's quest for technological advancement, a plan without which the human race has nowhere to go, and nowhere to turn. ** from obit

He would bide his time until the arrival of the New California Republic when he would reform several tribes in the New Vegas area into the Three Families to turn New Vegas into a civilized city again under the oversight of his Securitron army. Starting with the Las Vegas Strip, Mr. House rebuilt several of the casinos for each of the Three Families to bring the former glory of pre-War Las Vegas back to the Mojave. With the New Vegas Strip acting as an autonomous body, he entered a tenuous partnership with the NCR as they marched into the Mojave to seize the Hoover Dam.

House regained consciousness in 2138. He entered the world stage once again in 2274, when Securitrons under his command emerged from the Lucky 38. This action was prompted by the arrival of New California Republic scouts at Hoover Dam. In order to establish his rule, he enlisted the help of tribes living in New Vegas (later known as the Three Families) and rebuilt the city just in time to welcome the arrival of the New California Republic Army's advance forces. In exchange for help with Hoover Dam and permission to use McCarran International Airport as its headquarters, House signed the Treaty of New Vegas, ensuring cooperation from NCR and, for a time, protecting the Strip from annexation.

House resides in the Lucky 38 and is in charge of the Securitrons that roam New Vegas. At some point after emerging from stasis, House won the leadership of Vault 21 in a bet, stripped it of all useful technology, and then planned to permanently seal the Vault away by filling it with cement. At the pleadings of Sarah Weintraub he left the top section of Vault 21 as it used to be, and she converted it into a hotel (all the casino equipment was already there from the vault experiment).

Mr. Houses' top priority was to re-acquire the Platinum Chip, lost to him on the eve of the Great War. For years during his awake period, House would spend cumulative millions of caps on scavenger teams and prospectors to find the Platinum Chip. The expenditure ultimately paid off in 2281 when the Platinum Chip was found after 204 years. Mr. House contracted the delivery of it to the Mojave Express, and to cover up the importance of the package, Mr. House tried obfuscating it through various dummy packages of miscellaneous novelty junk items. Mercenary teams were also dispatched to screen the routes for potential dangers.

Mr. House felt betrayed, as he considered Benny as a protégé that could be his right-hand man able to achieve tasks he alone could not, but misjudged his drive for supremacy.

Opening his isolation chamber dooms House to death within a year due to contamination.

Mr. House seeks to restore New Vegas to its pre-War glory as a crown jewel of technological innovation and a bright neon paradise of business and fortune. Having experienced pre-War Vegas first-hand, he has long been enamored with the city's beauty and grandeur. His ultimate goal is to guide civilization's progress and forge a new future for mankind, free of the corrupting influences of the past. -->

Effects of player's actions

 * Upon his death, the quest The House Has Gone Bust! will simultaneously trigger and fail, and the note A Tragedy Has Befallen All Mankind will appear in the player character's inventory.
 * If the player character takes Mr. House out of his stasis chamber, he will ask them why they have ruined his plans and he will react differently depending on what they tell him.
 * If told they did it in the name of the NCR, he will belittle them for working for them, declaring them "snakes," and call the Courier a "sad, misguided whore."
 * If told they are acting on behalf of Caesar, he will be horrified at the prospect of slavery being humanity's future.
 * If told they did it for Yes Man, he will tell them their "vanity project" is doomed for failure.
 * If saying it was "just business," he will retort by saying that they should have worked for him if what they wanted was personal gain.
 * Finally, if the player character says they did it just because they didn't like him, he will call them a fool for letting their feelings about him jeopardize humanity's future.

Other interactions

 * Mr. House has an interest in the collectible snowglobes found in the game, and will pay for each one the Courier collects. The snowglobes can be given to Jane in exchange for 2000 caps each. Snowglobes found in Sierra Madre (Dead Money), Big MT (Old World Blues), Zion National Park (Honest Hearts) and the Divide (Lonesome Road) will automatically be removed from the player's inventory and replaced with 2000 caps (with the exception of the Sierra Madre snow globe, which adds 2000 Sierra Madre chips). Once the Courier has sold a snowglobe to Jane it is placed on display (on a mantle) in the Lucky 38 presidential suite. However, if the player kills Mr. House, the snowglobes will stay in their inventory and Jane will disappear.
 * The Courier can also attempt to pickpocket Mr. House, but he does not yield any items.
 * Mr. House counts as an abomination for the Abominable challenge. Because he is considered an abomination, shooting him with the flare gun results in the "The abomination panics and flees!" message, but nothing else happens.
 * House is one of the characters that the player character must eat in order to earn the Meat of Champions perk.

Appearances
Robert House appears only in Fallout: New Vegas and is mentioned in Fallout 4 and Fallout 76.

Behind the scenes

 * Mr. House is the King of Diamonds in the deck of Vault playing cards included with the Collector's Edition of Fallout: New Vegas.
 * Mr. House was written by John Gonzalez with inspiration taken from real world Las Vegas billionaire Howard Hughes.
 * Josh Sawyer stated that "Mr. House doesn't care about other people and what they do as long as Vegas remains prosperous and he remains in control."
 * A House Resort portrait resembles one of Hughes in 1934.
 * The challenge A Slave Obeys requires the player character to kill Mr. House with the 9 iron or Driver Nephi's golf club. This is a reference to the video game BioShock, where one beats an antagonist, Andrew Ryan, to death with a 9 iron while he repeats the words "A man chooses, a slave obeys."
 * In casino parlance, "the house" refers generally to the gambler's opponent, the casino itself, as in the idiom "the house always wins."

Bugs

 * A Medicine check of 35, gaining XP each time, can be accessed in Mr. House's dialogue repeatably.
 * Activating Mr. House fails to start dialogue, rendering him useless (the mainframe). This might be the result of resetting ally status of Securitrons when they are hostile due to a faction error with Vault 11 robots. To fix this, enter the following commands into the console:, , , , ,.
 * The dialogue ending "at Fortification Hill" may cause a crash once he is finished talking.
 * The stasis version of Mr. House will sometimes break, turning invisible.