CNN ended the way everyone expected: with a hilarious gaffe. After they ran a story on Russian Hacking, gamers on Reddit were quick to recognize the computer alleged to be behind this breach of security as a computer from Fallout 4.
While some have wondered if this was the exact computer, or just an accidental replication, if it's not the same, it's damn close. Regardless of what we think, though, Bethesda (the developer of Fallout 4) seems to fall one way on this issue.
Mr. Robot, of course, is the popular show about a man who works as cyber security/vigilante hacker. While Bethesda didn't directly name CNN, treating this more as a clever wink, people certainly got the joke.
Responses to this Tweet are almost entirely referencing the CNN Russian hacking article. "Bethesda got bullets. god damn," one user writes. Another says "hoping that's not hacking the CIA or something."
Gaffes like this aren't unprecedented, but it's nice to see a game developer being in on the joke. CNN has yet to respond in any capacity about this issue, and I doubt they will. It's also worth noting that this was just b-roll, akin to someone googling "computer hacking" and using the first image they find. Unluckily for CNN, the image they landed on was from a popular video game that no one in the gaming community would mistake for anything else.
Usually when something like this happens, though, it's not with a major news network. One fringe channel once used a screenshot from Metal Gear Solid 4 in a segment on Child Soldiers, which is particularly embarrassing, but they also didn't have the pedigree of CNN.
