The death quarry from Fallout: New Vegas looks like the Fallout 2 cover with an enclave soldier from above

Games are designed for eye-level viewing, maybe from the nearest hill at most. A top-down view usually stays a technical angle reserved for designers, map editors, and people who mess around with fly console commands, which is exactly why things that were never meant to be seen sometimes turn up there.

That is what happened with Quarry Junction, a limestone quarry northwest of Goodsprings in Fallout: New Vegas.

Looked at straight from above, the location outline lines up suspiciously well with the helmet of the Enclave power armor soldier from the Fallout 2 cover art. Apparently players spotted this easter egg only 16 years after the game launch.

Two puddles sit right where the eye lenses would be, a rock outcrop on the right reads like a side filter, and the quarry wall curves like a corrugated hose behind the head.

In the game itself the quarry is known for something completely different. It works as a designer roadblock, a den of deathclaws that cuts off a low-level Courier from the short route north and gently redirects them onto the long road through Primm, Nipton, and Novac. You can sneak around it, but surviving inside it at the start is nearly impossible, and tens of thousands of players got their first taste of the legendary deathclaw mother right there.

The case for this being intentional holds up fairly well. Obsidian Entertainment is made up of Black Isle Studios veterans who worked on the first two games, and New Vegas is already packed with references to the original duology even without hidden geometry.

The terrain in the Mojave isn't procedurally generated either, someone placed every rock and every puddle by hand, so the theory of a level designer sneaking in a joke sounds more plausible than pure coincidence.

Skeptics point to pareidolia, the brain tendency to see faces in random shapes. It's a fair pushback, too, since the real helmet has details missing from the quarry, and a well-chosen screenshot crop is doing a lot of the work in making the resemblance look this close.