One Rule From The FALLOUT Game Developer Led To The TV Series Telling an Original Story
Prime Video’s upcoming Fallout series is set in the same universe as the video games, but it will tell a completely original story. I always liked the fact that this series would not be a direct adaptation of the games, but there’s a reason why the creative team opted to go in that direction.
Bethesda's Todd Howard, the director of the games, was involved in producing the Fallout TV series, and he was very much involved with the development of the show. In fact, there was one rule that the creators of the series had to follow and that rule led to them crafting an original story.
During an interview with SFX magazine, co-showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet revealed that Howard didn't want the series to contradict any of the major endings in the game. So, the show is set years, and, in some cases, decades after the events of the games. The creative team was looking to tread new ground in this universe.
Producer Lisa Joy talked about wanting to tell an original story over adapting one from the games, saying: "We felt like that would be the best thing to honor the gamer’s experiences, and the most truthful.”
She added: "If we adapted one specific game, it would not have actually been truthful because it’s an open world game and everyone’s experience is different. So had we taken any of the setups of any of the games and just done it 'straightforwardly', a lot of gamers would be like, 'That’s not the order that I played it in.'"
Fallout is the story of “haves and have-nots in a world in which there’s almost nothing left to have. 200 years after the apocalypse, the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind — and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird and highly violent universe waiting for them.”
The world of Fallout is “one where the future envisioned by Americans in the late 1940s explodes upon itself through a nuclear war in 2077. In Fallout, the harshness of the wasteland is set against the previous generation’s utopian idea of a better world through nuclear energy. It is serious in tone, yet sprinkled with moments of ironic humor and B-movie-nuclear-fantasies.”
As for the series, it is set in future post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, and it will tell an original story based on the Fallout games and this new story will be part of the canon of the games.
The series comes from Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, and it stars Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, Walton Goggins and more.
Fallout is set to arrive on Prime Video on April 12th, 2024.