Fallout: How Amazon Adapted a Video Game Without Breaking It

Fallout, the Amazon Prime adaptation of the Bethesda video game series that dropped in April, is the best video game adaptation any major studio has produced. I want to open with that because the comparisons are, by necessity, with a low floor (Assassin’s Creed, Warcraft, Uncharted, the various Resident Evils) and with a small set of recent good ones (The Last of Us, Arcane). Fallout is better than all of them.

The source material problem

Video game adaptations traditionally fail because the thing that makes a video game work, the specific agency and duration and interactivity of gameplay, does not translate to passive viewing. A first-person shooter becomes a generic action sequence. A role-playing game becomes a generic fantasy adventure. What gets lost is the specific feel of spending sixty hours inside a world making small decisions that accumulate.

The Fallout games, developed by Interplay in the late 1990s and then taken over by Bethesda in 2004, have a specific and unusual source-material advantage: the tone. The series’ signature is a retrofuturist American-nuclear-apocalypse aesthetic, Eisenhower-era optimism shattered by atomic war, 1950s-era propaganda posters encountered in 200-year-old irradiated ruins, a specific black humour running through every encounter. The games are not, primarily, plot-driven. They are tonally distinctive.

Jonathan Nolan and his writers’ room (including wife and collaborator Lisa Joy) have correctly identified the tone as the thing worth preserving. The show’s plots are all original. The show’s tone is scrupulously faithful.

The three-protagonist structure

Fallout follows three parallel protagonists across its eight episodes:

• Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), a resident of Vault 33, a preserved pre-war American community living in an underground shelter. Lucy leaves the vault in the first episode after her father is kidnapped, and she has to learn how the surface world actually works.
• Maximus (Aaron Moten), a young recruit in the Brotherhood of Steel, a pseudo-medieval faction that worships pre-war technology.
• The Ghoul / Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins), a radiation-mutated, effectively immortal former actor who was a Hollywood star before the bombs fell, and whose pre-war life we see in flashback.

The three plotlines converge and diverge across the season, with the Ghoul’s flashback subplot gradually revealing the specific backstory of how the war happened and who, exactly, was responsible.

Ella Purnell’s work

Ella Purnell’s Lucy is the show’s heart and the performance that will be remembered. Lucy is, in the first episode, almost catastrophically naïve: a product of a controlled underground community who believes, genuinely, that the surface world will be mostly like it was before the bombs fell, only dusty. Purnell plays this naïveté without condescending to it. Lucy is not stupid. She is mis-informed, and Purnell lets us see the specific quality of her American-wholesome character meeting the specific brutalities of the wasteland.

The best Lucy scenes are the quiet moments where Lucy has to recalibrate. Watch her face, for example, the first time she realises her vault’s wholesome documentation of the surface world was propaganda. Purnell plays the recognition in three beats: the initial shock, the attempt to hold the original worldview, and the specific quality of intellectual capitulation as the evidence becomes overwhelming. This is sophisticated acting in a genre that does not traditionally require it.

Walton Goggins, doing Walton Goggins

Walton Goggins as the Ghoul/Cooper Howard is the show’s other major performance, and it is, unsurprisingly, extraordinary. Goggins is playing two roles: the pre-war Cooper, a cowboy-actor in the dying days of the pre-apocalypse film industry; and the post-war Ghoul, a radiation-mutated, morally-ambiguous, specifically-tired figure who has been alive for 200 years and has seen every possible way a human being can disappoint.

What Goggins does, across both versions of the character, is stage a specific continuity of personality. The Cooper who was a second-tier cowboy actor in 2077 is recognisably the same person as the Ghoul who is a wasteland mercenary in 2296. The aging has hardened him, stripped him of his illusions, and left him with a specific grim humour that has become his survival mechanism. The performance is a character study across two centuries, and Goggins is working at the very top of his range.

What the show argues

Fallout is, at its core, an argument about American post-war exceptionalism and the specific cost of the exceptionalist project. The pre-war sequences are increasingly interested in showing us the specific corporate-military-government entanglements that produced the bombs. The post-war sequences are interested in what the survivors have inherited and what they have chosen to do with the inheritance.

This is, interestingly, a more political argument than the Bethesda games traditionally made. The games, across their various installments, tended to be politically ambiguous: you could side with almost any faction without the game insisting you were choosing rightly or wrongly. The show, by contrast, has opinions. It is, across its season, fairly specific about which corporations and which military choices produced the catastrophe. The specificity is new, and I welcome it.

Season 2

Amazon renewed Fallout almost immediately after the first season dropped, and the second season is already in production. Whether it can sustain the first season’s balance of tone, character, and world-building across another eight episodes is the open question.

I am cautiously optimistic. The show has a specific institutional discipline that most streaming productions lack. It knows what it is. It trusts its source material without being enslaved to it. It hires good actors and gives them room.

Watch Season 1 across four nights, not one. Let the world build. Pay attention to the pre-war flashbacks. The show gets better the more time you spend in it.