Fallout Creators Reveal Most Important Thing About Adapting the Game

All eight episodes of Fallout dropped on Prime Video last night, and both critics and fans are enjoying the video game adaptation. At the time of the writing, the new series is currently up on Rotten Tomatoes with a 92% critics score and 84% audience score. ComicBook.com's Tanner Dedmon gave the new series a 4.5 out of 5, saying it has "raised the bar for what a video game adaptation can look like." ComicBook.com recently had the chance to chat with some of the folks who brought Fallout to life, including director/executive producer, Jonathan Nolan, and Bethesda's Todd Howard, who not only led the development of the Fallout games but also served as an executive producer on the new show. We asked the creatives what was most important to them when it came to adapting Fallout, and they gave the same answer. 

"The tone," Nolan said when asked what was most important to him as a fan of the games. "The tone is so unusual, so unique. I'd never experienced anything that dark and weird and gonzo and funny and satirical and violent. All the good flavors."

"Well, for me, the key moments were first, the tone," Howard shared. "It's really all about the tone. I could check off: It's got to have the vaults, it's got to have this, it's got to have power. It's really about the tone. It's the most unique thing about Fallout, where it's going to be a serious dramatic western, it's going to be an epic action movie through many landscapes, and it's going to be a dark comedy at times. And weaving those together, I think really is the hardest thing. And one of the things that [Jonathan] and [showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner] who wrote it and worked on it so much, really, really did a great job."

What Is Fallout About?

While the show's main characters – Lucy (Ella Purnell), Maximus (Aaron Moten), and Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) – are entirely new, they fit certain archetypes established in the games. Lucy is a Vault Dweller, and the start of the series centers around her leaving her Vault for the very first time and heading to Los Angeles. Maximus is a squire of the Brotherhood of Steel, while Cooper is a bounty-hunting Ghoul. 

"It's an uncertain time in television. So the art form of season finales has become: provide enough closure, but leave the door open for more," writer Graham Wagner told Total Film. "But we feel we've barely scratched the surface of the Fallout universe. We literally have documents and documents of stuff that we're, in success, eager to dig into. Our fingers are crossed that we're going to get the opportunity to do all that stuff." 

Fallout is now streaming on Prime Video.