Pioneer Saloon, Goodsprings

A video game sent tourists to this bar, and they are still coming.

Goodsprings is an unincorporated community in Clark County, Nevada, with a population of 162 at the 2020 census, and it often gets called a ghost town. It was named for the cattle rancher Joseph Good, whose herd used a spring in the southeastern foothills of the Spring Mountains.

The mining came first. Mormon miners found lead at Potosi Mountain in 1856, and gold turned up in the region in 1893. Goodsprings became the heart of the most productive mining district in Clark County, and over the years lead, silver, copper, zinc and gold all came out of this ground. Before 1900 there was a small cluster of tent cabins, a mill and a post office. Lincoln County established Goodsprings Township, and in 1904 Salt Lake City mining interests platted it. Most of the early buildings went up during the boom the railroad brought in 1910 and 1911.

Two of those buildings are still working. The Pioneer Saloon and the Goodsprings Schoolhouse were both built in 1913 and are both still in use. The schoolhouse is on the National Register of Historic Places and is the oldest school in Clark County that was built as a school. It nearly closed in 2009 on cost grounds, was down to around ten students by 2016, and has since reached its final year.

The modern draw is stranger. Fallout: New Vegas, a role-playing game set in southern Nevada after a nuclear war, opens in Goodsprings and uses it as the tutorial area, so a generation of players learned to walk and fight in a digital copy of this town before ever seeing it. David Schwartz of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas has presented work on exactly that: a real place receiving real tourism because of where a game chose to begin.