The Last of Us set a high bar, but there's a new contender coming for the video game-to-TV crown — Amazon's Fallout TV show, adapting the twenty-five-year-old post-nuclear roleplaying game into a big-budget live-action series.
It's been a long time coming. The first game, a janky top-down RPG that very much shows its age in 2023, was released way back in 1997. Since then, the series has undergone radical change, switching hands from original developers Interplay to Skyrim creators Bethesda in the mid-2000s. They released the first modern title, Fallout 3, in 2008. It sold like gangbusters, the franchise's popularity surging through the roof. Nowadays, sales and the fervour of its attendant online fandom would put Fallout on par with the popularity of GTA and Assassin's Creed.
And now, as is the increasingly inevitable next step in the ladder for hugely popular (and, crucially, critically appreciated) video games, a TV show. So what's Fallout about, specifically? If we were to properly nerd out on the reams of lore that have built up over the last twenty-five years, we'd be here all day. The long and short of it: Set in a retro-futuristic America decades after a devastating nuclear war laid waste to the world, Fallout sees humanity clamber out of underground bunkers — called vaults — to start anew.
If that sounds dark and dreary, it sort of is, but the franchise has made a staple out of its campy, parodic sense of humour, lampooning the jingoistic exceptionalism of American society in the 1950s. Mad Max: The Road Warrior was a major influence on the original game — think that but cheesier, with Forbidden Planet style robots, and gigantic radioactive ants.
The series was announced in mid 2020, and shot between 2022 and ‘23, reportedly finishing early this year. It’s being headed up by Westworld co-creator Jonathan Nolan, brother of Chris. Here's everything we know about Amazon and Bethesda Game Studios' upcoming Fallout TV show.
X content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
The Fallout show is headed to Los Angeles
Prime Video confirmed in August that Fallout will be set in Los Angeles, which Fallout nerds will recognise as a mega callback. The first one, you see, was set across California, and you could visit the bombed-out remains of L.A. It had been transformed into a settlement known as “The Boneyard,” grimly named after the steel skeletons of the skyline that stood there before the nukes dropped.
We know that the Fallout show will follow its own story distinct from any of the existing video games. What we're yet to find out, however, is how much artistic license Nolan and his team have wielded in adapting the Fallout world — will they pave over The Boneyard, for example, and build something else? Just how much of L.A. would've survived the bombings, anyway? Guess we'll find out as soon as a trailer drops.
There's a Fallout trailer! Sorta…
…about that trailer. Good news! It exists. The bad news: it was exclusively shown to fans at the Gamescom conference in Germany this week, after Bethesda's showcase for their new upcoming original game, Starfield. There may or may not be a leaked, incredibly blurry smartphone capture of the teaser doing the rounds on fka Twitter (X), which you may or may not be able to find if you search “fallout trailer”. Not that we can confirm or deny…
Fortunately a handful of nimble newsies have already shared reports from the ground. In his article, GamesRadar's Josh West describes three key scenes which will be familiar to Fallout aficionados. One, a “wall of Brotherhood of Steel soldiers… their suits rich with detail,” the Brotherhood of Steel being a major faction from the games (if you've ever seen the cover art for a Fallout title, aside from New Vegas, you'll be familiar with their mega power helmets).
He also writes on a scene evoking one of Fallout's more iconic images: a jumpsuited Vault Dweller emerging, hand over their eyes, from a vault. Lastly, a scene of a “shootout in a western-inspired town,” which shows off a “gunslinging mutant in a cowboy hat,” presumably Walton Goggins' ghoul protagonist, as IGN's report suggests.
So, what do they think of the footage? Early reviews are the bomb. “While we only had a very small look at the show, it's clear that the production values are high, with the visual effects looking impressive,” IGN's Simon Cardy writes. West concurs. “This very early tease showed an understanding and respect of the source material, and a willingness to play with the Fallout vibe in a way that really impressed me,” he says.
So, when's the bomb (show) gonna drop (come out)?
As has been long suspected by internet sleuths stringing together their pushpin clues, Fallout was confirmed to have a 2024 release date in a late-August tweet (…post) from Prime Video's official Twitter (X, whatever) page.
X content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
Crank up that Pipboy radio, wasteland girlies, and sing it with me: “I've got spurs / That jingle, jangle, jingle…”
Who has been cast in Fallout?
Yellowjackets star Ella Purnell was cast in an undisclosed role in the series, with Variety reporting that sources describe her character as “upbeat and uncannily direct with an all-American can-do spirit,” which sounds very, very Fallout-y.
She joins Walton Goggins of Sons of Anarchy, as reported by Deadline in February. The outlet notes that Goggins is expected to play a ghoul — humans ravaged by nuclear radiation before and after the war, persecuted for their rotting, zombie-like appearance. To say it's an apt casting might seem a little ungenerous, but anyone who saw him play the skittish sheriff Chris Mannix in Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight will know he always turns up.
