Fallout: Video games really CAN make amazing TV!
This new series is like a Stimpak direct to your eyeballs
The last time I was really invested in a show based on a gaming property, it was the excellent Arcane series on Netflix.
I’ve never even played League of Legends. Just the very concept of MOBAs (That’s ‘Multiplayer Online Battle Arena’ to you) leaves me a bit cold. In addition, as the game has been running since 2013 it has grown to feel impenetrable to someone coming at it new, featuring 168 different champions. Who has that sort of time?! (Turns out a lot of people do: 180+ million monthly active players as of 2022, fact fans).
By contrast, the show sucked me right in. I had no idea who any of the characters were going in, or why they might (or might not be) important. I didn’t care. It was superb. I now hear Jason Spisak’s voice everywhere as a result.
Falling back in
I am much more familiar with the Fallout game series. My memories are a little hazy though, as I was mostly invested in Fallout 3 which was released in 2008 (woah). I did start on Fallout 4 (2015) but I am not sure I got very far at all. A first-person nuclear wasteland action RPG, but with a strange (and lovable) sci-fi / 1950s / Steampunk kitsch cross-over going on.
(Bethesda loved the game engine behind it all so much that playing their most recent offering, Starfield, is like stepping back in time to 2008. The Creation Engine’s old-tech style of NPC conversations has not aged well when compared to other recent releases such as Baldur’s Gate 3. I grew bored of the game within a few hours.)
What’s great about the new TV show is that it 100% passes the vibe check, which is not something that can be said for all Amazon creations (I’m looking at you, Rings of Power!). That whole strange 1950s vibe of the Vault Dwellers is just nailed on, particularly so by Lucy with her ‘Oh Golly!’ Can Do attitude. Except in this world, that Can Do approach is extended to removing the head from a corpse as part of a mission to find your father. The beauty of the storytelling here is that her actions doesn’t seem unreasonable at all.
Fallout, or at least the main timeline, is set in a post-apocalyptic world. The start of all of this is brilliantly done in the first episode, and the show knows what it is doing: Teasing the audience by always having a waiting-to-be-nuked cityscape in the background of a lot of the shots. Society is split. ‘Vault Dwellers’ have been sealed away in their little perfect underworld utopias. Survivors on the surface have scavenged their way to survival, but there are raiders and Ghouls (mutants!) making life very dangerous. In the games, and this show, THE WORLDS COLLIDE. Hence Lucy’s quest.
Lucy is great, but a couple of the characters do seem a bit derivative by comparison. ‘The Ghoul’ is the bounty-hunter cowboy trope, complete with some nicely derived Westworld-style audio cues (I’m talking ORIGINAL Westworld here, of course). Maximus’ characterisation as a fish-out-of-water super soldier questioning his loyalties just screams ‘Finn from Star Wars’.
I can forgive both of these purely with Dale Dickey’s portrayal of Ma June. She steals the show every moment she is on scene in her episode, and it feels like her eyes are staring deep into the soul of any other character.
The show looks totally authentic to the games. Be that those perfect little Vaults, the ‘Pip Boy’ gadgets and their functionality, Nuka-Cola signage… the list goes on. Oh, and of course I can’t forget the T45 Power Armour which is centre stage. And this is what I love: All of these things are not included as Fan Service. They don’t feel out of place or thrown in. It all just works. There are no characters looking at the camera, winking, and saying things like, “I hope we don’t… Fall Out…. over this…”, like we’ve come to be spoon fed by more traditional Hollywood movies in recent times.
And the thing is, at the time of writing this, I am only three episodes in! So I really hope the rest of the series is not absolutely terrible, but my confidence is very high so far.
I’ve now come full circle: As a result of my Fallout experiences being reawakened by the show, I want to dive back into the games again. Perhaps I will finish Fallout 4 this time. And did I ever actually play Fallout: New Vegas?!
People, we’ve come a long way since DOOM (“A bland lifeless piece of science fiction fodder that really doesn't pay homage to the game.” - Cinema Crazed).
I haven’t played any of the games but I loved all 10 episodes. Like a sillier, gorier version of Silo.
It is making me wonder if I should give one of the games a go, but where to start? Fallout 76 and work backwards?
I think Fallout 3 (and ES:Oblivion) were made in the Gamebryo engine. Just before the in house Creation engine.