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
For the first 5 years after the Great War, House struggled with power outages and system crashes caused by his defense of New Vegas without the Platinum Chip. After rebooting his data core however, he fell into a coma for several decades.

After waking up, House bided his time until the first NCR scouts entered the Mojave. Realizing they were no mere group of tribals, he quickly activated the Lucky 38's Securitrons and recruited the tribes that would become the Three Families, building New Vegas before the NCR reached it. During this time he also contacted Vault 21, and his representatives engaged in a gambling competition to size control of the vault, as was it's custom. He stripped the Vault of it's advanced technology, before filling it with concrete. He was convinced by Sarah Weintraub to spare the top floor, which she turned into a hotel and gift shop. With the Families' support, he cleared the Strip of all other tribals, including what would later become The Kings.

Upon the NCR's arrival, House leveraged his force of tribals and Securitrons, knowing that the NCR couldnt beat him and the Legion, so instead he offered a treaty. By the terms of the treaty, the NCR got control of Hoover Dam and McCarran Airport, and an embassy inside New Vegas. However, in exchange, New Vegas maintained it's independence under House, and water and 5% of the power from Hoover Dam would be sent to the Strip, vitally important to House as the Lucky 38's reactor was still offline from the Great War, and activating the Securitrons drained the reserves on his emergency power generators. The NCR was also forced by the treaty to take no action to prevent it's citizens or soldiers from going to the Strip.

New Vegas prospered from the influx of tourists and their caps, although House had to abandon Freeside and focus on the Strip after building the walls around it. Using the caps, House hired teams of scavengers to comb the ruins of Sunnyvale, looking for the Platinum Chip. Once it was finally located, he used Victor to place an order with the Mojave Express, hiring 7 Couriers, though only 6 would accept, with one, Ulysses, refusing at the last minute. All except one was given a single decoy item to carry, with Courier Six being given the Platinum Chip. Meanwhile, House used thousands of caps to pay for mercenaries to clear the routes being used. He preferred this method over simply having an armed caravan as it would have attracted the attention of groups such as the Brotherhood of Steel and the Great Khans. Unknown to him however, the real threat was the leader of the Chairmen who had been with him since his tribe was first hired, Benny. Using a reprogrammed Securitron named Yes Man, Benny hacked into House's systems and found Courier Six, shooting him in the head outside Goodsprings.

Interactions overview
The Computer monitors of Mr. House have these SPECIAL statisitics: However, the version of Mr. House inside his pod has these SPECIAL statistics:

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 Snow Globes found in the game, and will pay for each one the Courier collects. The snowglobes can be given to Jane in exchange for 2,000 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.