"Fallout" and the video game adaptation gold rush

I will be the first to admit that I didn’t expect much from “Fallout” (2024). The television series, which premiered on Prime Video on April 10, 2024, faced a daunting task: distilling the titular video game franchise– eleven titles released over the course of twenty-two years – into a brief eight-episode adaptation. 

The “Fallout” franchise, which follows the grim aftermath of nuclear war over the course of centuries in a world aesthetically stuck in the 1950s, has a black-comedy, cheesy-retro-futuristic, just-plain-weird tone that’s difficult to replicate. Not to mention the difficulty of balancing the preservation of this tone with the series’ doorstopper-length and the franchise’s often contradictory lore – mess it up, and you risk alienating both casual viewers and the intense fandom the franchise has amassed over the years. 

And yet the show left me, and everyone else, surprised. It’s currently sitting at a 93 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Stars Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten and Walton Goggins’ performances have received a glowing reception from a wide range of critics. Prime Video reports that “Fallout” is one of its top three titles to date, and renewed the series for a second season a week following its release.

The past few years have ushered in an era of successful video game-to-television adaptations. “Fallout” is the latest in a series of hits that have not only proven themselves to be good, but have also broken out of the traditional video game demographic and attracted a wide, casual audience: “The Last of Us,” “Arcane,” “Castlevania” and “Halo,” to name a few recent examples. Adaptations of “Tomb Raider” and “Devil May Cry” are coming out in the next few months; it seems that every week, some new video game adaptation is announced to be in the works, from “Bioshock” to “Disco Elysium” to “Borderlands” to “God of War.”

I hadn’t really thought about the trend much until I started making my way through “Fallout,” except with vague concern. Video game TV adaptations are the latest hallmark of our current age of live-action remakes: characterized by the entertainment industry (and streaming in particular) falling back on reliable moneymakers in lieu of creative innovation. “Fallout,” though, gives me hope that these two things are not necessarily mutually exclusive. 

A video game adaptation, by definition, must be transformative. While adapting literature or animation to live-action might require a few tweaks here and there due to the inherent differences between the original and new mediums, it's usually possible to recreate the original work whole-cloth in live-action. In contrast, any video game that offers its player choices (as almost all do) creates story elements that are mutually exclusive: any hopeful live-action adapter must pick one and leave out the other. Which story route do you choose to depict? Which ending, and why? A player can take any number of paths through even the most linear of games (backtracking, choosing where to take their time) – what path should be adapted to the screen?

The "Fallout" video game series is a franchise of mostly open-world titles: massive, diverse worlds packed full of so many sidequests and potential choices that it'd be impossible for any adaptation to portray their stories in full. "Fallout" the television series recognizes this and chooses to chart its own path instead. It follows the basic story beats that punctuate each of the first few “Fallout” games: a “vault-dweller,” someone raised in a nuclear bunker built by Vault-Tec to repopulate the Earth in the aftermath of a nuclear winter, leaving their isolated home and discovering that Earth repopulated itself centuries ago with all sorts of curiosities and horrors. But the story it chooses to tell within this framework is an entirely new one about an entirely new character. And it is only one of several stories following a quirky ensemble cast – who pay homage to factions and creatures from the original “Fallout” franchise while simultaneously being their own distinct thing, unrelated to the plot of any of the games.

Even if you’re not one for video games, you’ll probably get a kick out of “Fallout.” I hope it’s a signifier for video game TV adaptations to come.