Fallout Nails Video Game Adaptations by Making the Apocalypse Fun

For decades, it seemed like Hollywood couldn’t get a video game adaptation right. Movies like Double Dragon, Super Mario Bros., and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider were all critically panned, with their creators called out for either sticking too close to the source material, failing to capture the magic of the games, or casting actors who didn’t really embrace the films’ inherent campiness.

In recent years, though, there’s been a shift in game adaptations, with projects like The Last of Us and Werewolves Within achieving critical acclaim and—in the case of the former, at least—a boatload of awards nods.

You could point to a number of reasons to try to explain why game adaptations are getting better (Pedro Pascal, for example), but Jonathan Nolan, co-creator of Amazon Prime Video’s new series Fallout, says he thinks it’s because games often have “more sophisticated, more interesting, and more daring” storytelling than is often found in film or TV.

When Nolan first started playing Fallout 3 in 2009, while trying to write The Dark Knight Rises, he was taken aback. He’d played games almost his entire life, but Fallout 3, he says, was “massively ambitious, beautifully detailed and imagined, hyper-violent, politically satirical, dark and emotional, but also funny and weird and goofy and strange.”

Games like Fallout, BioShock, and Portal have “a punk rock sensibility to them,” Nolan says. “They took weird chances and did weird, unexpected things in a moment which—look, I love the movies, but the movie business goes through these paroxysms of conservatism in terms of the stories they want to tell, where people get scared because the studio lost a lot of money doing something so let’s just do the same old shit over again.”

That’s why Nolan jumped at the chance to adapt Fallout, though he knew it might be a bit of an uphill battle. While most traditional Hollywood adaptations try to expand on their source material—building a visual world described only in a book, or adding characters to a plot in an attempt to appeal to the masses—video game adaptations, and specifically RPG adaptations, effectively have to shrink the world that they occupy. Viewers don’t have the agency that