Thank God The Fallout TV Show Isn't Adapting The Games

Most modern video game adaptations are based on story-heavy games like Resident Evil, The Last of Us, Mortal Kombat, and Tomb Raider. They’re largely linear and allow less room for the player to make the narrative their own, so they’re more pliable for other mediums to adapt. RPGs are a completely different beast, however.

They’re often enormous, 50-80 hour stories with expansive worlds to explore and characters to fall in love with. That means we spend our time in the quieter moments uncovering side stories, moving away from the urgency of the main quest that put us on this path to begin with.

We might grind for XP or drag companions and party members along for journeys that other players don’t like or simply never meet, and we might make completely different decisions, choosing to be a pious bastion of morality rather than a callous merc in it for the money.

RPGs are all about roleplaying, letting us jump into worlds and stories and making them our own. Fallout: New Vegas captures this idea the second you step into the light of Goodsprings, rescued by its townsfolk after being shot in the head. You either help them with their bandit problem or join the escaped convicts in ransacking the town and claiming it for themselves. A choice is thrust upon you, and it immediately shapes your standing in the Mojave.

When they announced a Fallout TV show, I was sceptical. Talk to any fan and they’ll recount a completely different playthrough. They may have found Megaton’s inhabitants grating and crass, put off by the constant rubbing of cold shoulders. So, when a suave, sweet-talking businessman offered to pay them a pretty penny to wipe the rust bucket off the face of the Capital Wasteland, it seemed tempting. Megaton doesn’t look like much, and getting a wad of caps that early on is a huge help.

For others, the mere idea of arming a bomb and wiping out the people of a town for something as shallow as a quick payout would make them take a righteous stand, turning in this crook and unravelling his plot. Trying to tell that story in a TV show, ripping away our agency and the mechanical motivations behind the roleplaying, simply woulstatic.aayyy.com/topic/dn/’t work. Without the input of the player, it becomes a painfully simple tale. The vault dweller walks in, a stranger says, ‘Blow up the town’, and they say, ‘No, you monster.’ Interactivity is what gives this quest its meat.

But Fallout has a rich world. It’s set to a retro-futuristic 1950s backdrop in the aftermath of a nuclear arms race that came to an ugly head, leaving the world in ruins. A greedy corporation called Vault-Tec, even in the face of human extinction, decided to experiment on those it promised safety to by turning its protective vaults into laboratories and its inhabitants into test subjects.

A faction of knowledge seekers has risen from the ashes and wants to hoard all of the old world’s secrets for itself, while governments hell-bent on returning to democracy fall into the same pitfalls as their ancestors, all while trying to subjugate anarchists.

There’s a reason the Fallout games have spanned generations and continue to grip audiences - the world itself is a fascinating dystopia reflecting our worst fears and bigotries with an incredibly unique aesthetic. So, even if the story is too driven by choice and interactivity to adapt directly, there’s a canvas worth visiting in other mediums. The best bet is to do what the games do - pick a new location we haven’t seen before and weave a new narrative, which is exactly what Amazon Prime appears to be doing.

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The world can be brought to other mediums and expanded upon in a unique way that the games can’t replicate, telling tighter, more character-driven drama. Bethesda has tried to mixed results, asking us to find family members who left the vault, but because our characters’ dialogue is picked by us and who they are is determined by our choices, the conflict and emotion are never able to reach the same heights as it would with a scripted character.

Amazon stepping into the world of Fallout and telling its own story is a far better idea than trying to adapt one of the games directly, using the medium of TV effectively rather than simply transplanting ideas from one place to another. While it remains to be seen if it veers closer to The Last of Us or Resident Evil, it’s already made the greatest step it can take.

Fallout

Fallout is a franchise built around a series of RPGs set in a post-nuclear world, in which great vaults have been built to shelter parts of humankind. There are six main games, various spin-offs, tabletop games, and a TV series from Amazon Studios.