Game Theory - How Much Are Fallout Bottle Caps REALLY Worth?

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

Join former Game Theory Host MatPat as he finds out exactly how much a Fallout Bottle Cap is actually worth!

More never changes. Oh look, shaving! Cool! Hello internet! Welcome to Game Theory! And first things first, just in case you've been living deep underground in a surprisingly clean, roomy and self-sustaining bomb shelter for the past month and a half, as part of a series of games announced at this year's E3 conference, which left many a gamer weeping for joy.

Bethesda grew my cold, scientific heart three sizes that day, probably through radiation more than love, when it announced fallout, Fallout 4 isn't only a real game, but that it'll be here before the end of the year. Now that is how you make an announcement. Take that vague Kingdom Hearts 3 trailer. But for one gamer out there, this wasn't just super exciting. It was the culmination of almost eight years of careful and diligent work. Sort of. In case you've never done yourself a favor and played the Fallout series before, the games take place in an alternate universe where among other things,

World War II never really ended, everyone is afraid of getting invaded by China, and in 27 a nuclear war takes place which wipes out civilization as we know it. Humans that haven't mutated into deadly monsters or zombies live in small communities that dot the radioactive wasteland, and instead of printed money, people have taken to using discarded old bottle caps for currency. Knowing this, a little over a month ago, a clever fallout superfan named Seth, who goes by Gator Machete Jr. on Imager, so as not to get him confused with Gator Machete Sr., obviously, sent his collection of bottle caps to Bethesda, a whopping 2,240 caps,

aka 11 pounds of bottle-toppers, aka the remnants of an entire undergrad and master's degree worth of parties, all in the hopes of pre-ordering the game using the franchise's own currency. Shortly thereafter, employee Matt Grahamstaff confirmed that Seth would indeed be receiving a copy of the game when it's released on November 10th. unless they decide to pull a Scott Cawthin and release it like a week ago. Now other than being an extremely cute, encouraging story about how seriously Bethesda takes the dedication of their fan base, this got the wheels in my head turning a bit. Just how much are bottle caps from the Fallout Universe worth in real-world US dollars? And how many of those bottle caps would it take to actually reach the real-world monetary value of a brand new copy of Fallout 4,

aka 5999, plus tax. with exclusive in-store pre-order bonuses like dirty brown skin one, dirty brown skin two, useless rifle that you'll feel compelled to keep since you got it as an exclusive pre-order in-store bonus, and your own real-world pit boy. Okay, now that last one is actually pretty cool. So saddle up, strap on your power armor, and grab your laser Tommy guns, because now I'm going to use my patented version of mind vats to walk you through exactly how we're gonna figure this out. To understand the math behind bottle cap cash, you first

have to understand how currencies work. When you think of money, you probably think of pill... Pills. Huh, okay. When you think of money, you probably think of bills and coins as having worth. But a bottle cap? It seems absurd, right? But really, it's not. That piece of paper you hold in your hand is just as meaningless as a bottle cap. They're both useless objects. In fact, the bottle cap is probably more useful. The only difference, though, is that we've all agreed that the paper has some sort of greater symbolic value, and that the bottle cap is just trash. I mean, did you know? that just a few years ago dealers were using Tide detergent as an acceptable payment for drugs? Seriously, laundry detergent. The stuff that gets your whites whiter and brights brighter was the go-to currency for your heroin fix. Brings new meaning to the term money laundering. Am I right? Am I right? All right. Or think about the classic example of cigarettes having value in prison. Currency is merely an agreement that some object, like a bottle cap or jug of tide, or a set of objects, like a set of objects, like,

like a piece of paper and round chunks of metal has value. Historically, these items were really just kind of an IOU. The bill that you held in your hand was backed by something. It represented some amount of a more valuable resource. Walk into the bank, hand over your money, and theoretically you could walk out with your rightful amount of that resource. Most often, gold and silver. Which, it's also worth pointing out, are two metals that, again, are only valuable because we've all agreed they have value. Seriously, what are you really good?

going to do with a big brick of gold? Bludgeon someone with it? Doorstop? Bicep curl? Today though, most money is what's known as fiat money. No, not the savings that you've put away for your fancy Italian car. It's money that's not backed by anything. In the Fallout games, this isn't a problem because bottle caps are backed by another valuable resource, water. Water is the valuable resource in the post-apocalypse. Why bottle caps? Well, the reasoning behind bottle caps was that they're impossible to counterfeit. No bottle cap factories existed after the world ended. That also means that they're in limited supply Which preserves their value against inflation a huge issue we discussed during our economics of World of Warcraft episode

So what is the value of a bottle cap? Well since we can't put a firm price on the value of water in the fallout universe We have to compare them to something that's generally considered to be a valuable resource across all of history The aforementioned gold in the fallout new Vegas ad on dead money you can collect 37 gold bars during the heist of the century's mission. Each one can be sold at an optimum value of 10,539 caps. This also tells us that gold is a good standard to compare against because this is one of the highest value to items in the game, meaning that even in the post-apocalypse, gold is still something that people value. Now the carry weight of each of these bars is 35 pounds, so all we need to do to figure out the value of that gold is converted to bottle caps and we have our answer. To begin, the value of gold is most often measured in ounces.

But not ounces like Americans know them where there are 16 per pound, rather Troy ounces, a unit of mass specifically for gold and other precious metals and gemstones. A Troy ounce is actually heavier than the United States ounce, which isn't even its official name. Technically, U.S. ounces are called Avuardupois ounces, but just saying that word makes me feel pretentious, so let's move on. Doing the conversion, a 35-pound gold brick is actually 510 Troy ounces. But that's not all. We also have to consider how pure the gold is.

Loyal theorists will remember when we calculated the cost of Minecraft diamond armor using the four C's of gemstones. One of those Cs stood for carrot, or weight of the diamond. Gold is also measured in carrots, but this time with a K, a word originating from the carob beans that old merchants used to use to weigh gold. Carab with a C, not a K. And carrot with a K now measures gold purity, not weight, like carrot with a c. see, displayed it originally being inspired by a measure of weight. You know what? They really just f*** the whole system up. So 24-carat gold is pure gold.

This can also be expressed by saying that it's 99 out of a thousand parts gold, which again isn't technically pure 100% since there's that one missing thousandth, but whatever, gold merchants are dumb. So in Fallout we see the gold bar being marked with 99.9.9, telling us that this is a pure chunk of 24-carat gold. As such, thankfully we don't need to do any other funky calculations. So the price per gold in the Fallout Universe is 10,539 caps divided by 510 troj ounces, or about 21 caps per Troi ounce of pure 24-kart gold. Now to finally relate it to something we know, the price of gold in dollars.

And I wanted to do that as accurately as possible, which meant pinning down the exact year the Fallout Universe completely diverted from our own time. Which according to developers is when culture essentially froze where it was. After reading as many interviews as I could find The best I could conclude was that the split occurred sometime around the 1950s But here on game theory, I'm not satisfied with just rough estimates I had to get a little creative The only real connection I could find between fallouts universe and our own reality Besides a few dialogue references and landmarks was the music that plays on your in-game radio on the various stations you pick up on your Pipboy

So I organized all the real world songs into a list and after checking the original release dates of each recording The most recent song on either of the game's soundtracks was a cover of the classic song Blue Moon by Frank Sinatra Which plays on Radio New Vegas in Fallout New Vegas and places the timeline split a little later than I expected Squarely in 1961 more specifically January 3rd So armed with a date some gold and a fistful of bottle caps we can Finally, reach our conclusion, in 1961, the cost of gold was about $35 per Troy ounce. That would mean each bottle cap would be worth $1.67.

Wow, that's surprisingly expensive, actually. Those are some valuable caps. In other words, Gator Machete Jr., by paying 2,240 caps, you technically overpaid by $3,680.80. Hope you get plenty of play hours out of that one. In the words of an old-timey person from 1961, you care. But that's just talking about 1960s money. How about in today's economy?

How does this all translate to 2015 dollars? Well, gold nowadays runs for the astronomical $1,095 per Troy ounce. Oh, what a difference 50 years can make, right? And you can see where this is going. Gator Machete Jr., you got home. At those prices, each individual bottle cap would be worth $52. You practically could have bought the full Pit Boy edition with two measly caps. But by handing overall 2,240 of the bottle caps in your collection,

in the world of Fallout, you actually paid, get this, $116,480. Hopefully Bethesda throws in some DLC. for you buddy. Seriously, for that price you could have bought something useful, like a house, or this picture of Mount Dogmore that I found. Etsy is a weird sight. Now, I've done this enough times to know that some of you in the comments will complain about me using comparisons to in-game gold. Oh, it's fictional currency, but-p-ba-ba, okay fine. So let me run one last calculation. Finding out how much real-world bottle caps are worth today and figuring out how much gator machete actually paid. Well, here's how dedicated I am to you. I got in contact with Crown Holdings, the company who originally founded Crown Cap enclosures, the bottle caps you see featured in the games, and asked about the

composition of bottle caps made by the company in 1961. A very helpful woman named Sheila informed me that at the time caps were made from 100% carbon steel. From more research, I found that a single steel bottle cap weighs between 160 and 190 milligrams, or about 0.005 pounds. To calculate out the current monetary value of a single bottle cap, I went to a website I absolutely love called Quandle, which is basically a search engine for numerical data, which yes, I recognize makes me sound incredibly nerdy, and check the current market price of steel, which as of June 11th, 2015, is about $100 per metric ton, or approximately 2,204 pounds. One metric ton is equal to 1 billion milligrams, so just in case you're having trouble doing the

the math in your head, just divide that by the weight of one bottle cap, which averages out to be 175 milligrams, and we can see that to get $100 worth of bottle caps, aka one metric ton of them, you'd need 5,714,285 caps. Divide that by the $100,000,000,285. Divide that by the $100, and we can equate $1 U.S. dollar to 57,142 caps. That is quite the collection. which makes a $60 pre-order for Fallout 4 worth 3,428,571 bottle caps. Our pal Seth and his big bag of real-world caps paid less than a tenth of a percent of what he would need for a straight trade. Seriously, he paid like four cents for the game! So good trade, Gator Machete Jr. I'm sure you've done Gator Machete Sr. proud.

And hey, let's be honest, four cents for the game? It's a whole lot more than he would have gotten had he traded it into GameStop. And now, to close us out, remember, that's just a theory. A game theory! Thanks for watching!