Fallout on Prime is an Actual Video Game Adaptation

There's plenty to dislike. But this is what it should look like when a game becomes a TV show.

If I had been asked to list my favorite video games as a young man, my response would have invariably started with Halo: Combat Evolved, The Last of Us, and Fallout: New Vegas, in that order.

Halo. The Last of Us. Fallout. My three favorite franchises. The games I grew up playing.

The last years should have been cause for celebration, then, as these are the first three serious games, in the same order, that have been adapted to television by major Hollywood studios.

Halo on Paramount+ in 2022. The Last of Us on HBO in 2023. And now Fallout on Prime Video in 2024.

It probably goes without restating that I thought both Halo and The Last of Us were without any merit whatsoever. As adaptations they failed thematically, tonally, and spiritually. As standalone television series they failed in dialogue, character, production design, and narrative totality. They were, in other words, utter shit, not least because they appeared to display active contempt toward the games they supposedly adapted (as well as the players who enjoyed them.)

I expected differently from Fallout. Its first trailer captured something about the franchise’s soul that demonstrated its showrunners had at least some modicum of regard for the source material. It also had a real writing team attached to it, with Jonathan Nolan—brother to Christopher, of Westworld fame—at the helm.

These were good signs. I withheld judgment, but I expected something at least better than The Last of Us. A low bar, but a bar nonetheless.

For once, I was right.

It is April 11, 2024, and I have watched all eight episodes of Fallout. While I think the series is flawed, for the first time in my life I can report that, at least, this series actually is an adaptation of the video roleplaying game franchise of the same name.

In Fallout, Ella Purnell stars as Lucy, a plucky vault dweller who leaves her isolated home in search of her kidnapped father. Walton Goggins and Aaron Moten appear in supporting (and occasionally antagonistic) roles, with the former playing “The Ghoul,” a gunslinging cowboy bounty hunter, and the latter portraying Maximums, a squire in the Brotherhood of Steel. Lucy soon finds herself embroiled in wasteland-wide intrigue, with no choice but to transport the severed head of a scientist across California if she wishes to see her father returned home.

This is as absurd as it sounds.

Fallout, like its source material, is a dark comedy/action apocalypse thriller. The choice to embrace the weird wasteland and maintain the tone of the games helps hugely in making it feel like Fallout and not a cheap rip-off, which is one of countless major problems shared by Halo and TLoU. In essence, its story looks like what another Bethesda Fallout game likely would look like: a cliched main story about finding a lost parent (a la Fallout 3) mixed with a dumb McGuffin to keep up the pressure on the protagonists and keep the story going forward, all within an original and compelling retrofuture sci-fi setting.

This should not be taken as a criticism. Many of my problems with this series rest upon the fact that, as an adaptation, it is an adaptation of Bethesda’s Fallout. It uses the same tired tropes of family drama—deftly avoided by Obsidian—and utilizes what is mostly Fallout 4’s aesthetic, in some places very strongly, to construct its world. Ultimately, this means that it’s a hamstrung by its source material, and could never have hoped to be more than good enough as a result.

But as an adaptation of Fallout 4, Fallout on Prime is truly excellent. It is without any question the best video game adaptation ever put to film. Allow me to elucidate:

In the first episode, Lucy is cornered by a raider. She receives what would undoubtedly be a mortal wound from a knife to her ribs. She gazes downward, eyes wide, and the audience is left to believe that she could not possibly survive.

At this moment, I literally wrote in my notes: It would be hilarious if she makes an effortless recovery after giving herself a single stimpack.

Immediately, she retrieves a stimpack, uses it, and the wound is barely mentioned again.

Later on she receives radiation poisoning, just like in the games. In real life this would mean certain death.

But in Fallout, she can take some RadAway and be fine.

So she does. And she is.

In Halo, the showrunners changed everything about the world, setting, and characters, and could barely be bothered give the Master Chief’s iconic armor its energy shields. In The Last of Us, Joel is immediately given the wrong gun at the series’ start, and there is literally not so much as a token reference to a brick or bottle anywhere to be seen (because Mazin clearly never played the games).

But Fallout is oozing Fallout’s things. The guns. The armor. The medicines. The fights. One sequence is shot in such a way to be clearly evocative of VATS from the modern games, with bullets following in on critical hits as they blow apart limbs. The power armor has the UI from Fallout 4. There’s even a brief scene of a character playing Fallout 3’s stupid hacking minigame!

These things bring me immense joy. Nolan could have made a Fallout series that, like The Last of Us, relied solely upon recognizable aesthetic details, but otherwise deviated in every meaningful way from its source material. He could have phoned it in. He could have been lazy.

But he wasn’t. He sat down to adapt Fallout into television, and he asked himself: what is Fallout?

The answer is the world. It’s the tone. It’s the aesthetic. But above all else, it’s the gameplay. Fallout is its gameplay. VATS, stimpacks, grotesque violence, power armor, and stupid minigames: that’s Fallout, and that’s what we see in this television series.

For all of its flaws, Fallout deserves monumental recognition for this accomplishment. The Last of Us (the game) is about beating people to death with bricks and bottles; this is what its show should have been about, if it wanted to adapt the source material. Halo: Combat Evolved is about shooting aliens to death on a hula-hoop in space; the TV show should have replicated this.

Fallout is a choices-matter open world sandbox RPG series about going on quests and exacting horrific violence on Mad Max rejects. That’s what all of the games are fundamentally about.

And that’s what Fallout on Prime is about, too. That is why I am happy to call it an excellent adaptation.

As for the show itself….

Fallout has the most rabid and devoted fans of any game on the Internet. Gamers love Fallout, especially the Black Isle/Obsidian titles, with vitriol that is not matched in any other community that I can think of.

These people are going to be very upset at some of the creative decisions taken in this series. While it deserves praise for setting its story in the same world and timeline as the games, and thus coexists with them without major retcons (something neither Halo nor The Last of Us even attempted), its new additions to the lore are extremely suspect. I won’t spoil them here, but a major faction from the original games is effectively wiped out offscreen, for a dumb reason, and the context of the War itself is altered significantly.

I’m not a member of any deranged Fallout fan community. But I do really like the games. I’m probably one of the few people who has played, finished, and enjoyed every single title in the series nearly equally, including the Black Isle games. I like Bethesda’s Fallout much more than the average Obsidian-enjoyer.

But I have to admit that I find these changes to the world very upsetting. I enjoyed the first four episodes of Fallout, but as more was revealed, I found it harder to overlook the direction things were going in.

This is not Nolan’s fault. I am 100% convinced that the timeline comes from Todd Howard and the rest of Bethesda’s “““writers,””” if they can be called that. In this way the fact that the setting has been taken in such a stupid and obnoxious direction via this show is almost a testament to the writers’ devotion to the games, because they obeyed Todd even when they, presumably, didn’t need to.

So I want to make it clear that I don’t think it’s fair to blame these disappointing changes on the show itself. They’ve manifested because this is an adaptation of Bethesda’s Fallout, and, unfortunately, Bethesda’s Fallout is what Fallout is in 2024. There’s no getting around that. We’re never going back to Chris Avellone’s New Vegas. That’s something we have to accept. Complaining will do no good.

The Good & Bad

But how is Fallout on its own merits? Ultimately, I suppose the answer is “good enough.” I would recommend it to anyone tolerant of graphic violence and post-apocalypses. As a series, it features several excellent action set pieces, good cinematography, and some truly fantastic production design. It only occasionally feels like a fanfilm.

The contrast with Halo and TLoU is stronger nowhere than in action. Both of these series had convoluted and nonsensical action sequences, lazily shot and confusingly edited together. Considering both were adaptations of action games, this was an enormous failing. Neither had any real setpieces, and the best moments from the games were mysteriously absent, despite potentially being awesome for TV (upside down shootout sequence? Warthog run? I guess not; too hard to film).

During Fallout’s action, you understand where the characters are. You’re rooted to individual PoVs. The camera moves realistically. NPCs do have a bad habit of not shooting at the heroes for no reason, or missing comically with huge volleys of bullets, but I can endure this if the overall effect is compelling.

It is. Fallout nails its action and violence. Its gore is straight out of the games. It’s really good stuff.

Most importantly, it isn’t lazy.

The apocalypse looks much better than The Last of Us. It’s also full of mutants and threats, and it teems with conflict. A lack of conflict is the most fundamental flaw of Craig Mazin’s utterly failed adaptation of TLoU. You never receive the same sense that things are just easy in Fallout. The world is vast and largely empty, but it’ll still kill you. Don’t fuck around.

But something doesn’t quite work. Most obvious is that it appears as though the Chinese dropped sand on America instead of nukes. We’re supposedly in California, but there are now vast dried lakes and salt flats between jungle-like oases? What’s with all the sand? Did nuclear bombs do that? And where are the other settlements? What happened to the Hub? Is the Boneyard now Shady Sands? Where are the super mutants? We see radroaches, a yao-gui, some ghouls, and a fishthing; but where are the geckos? No deathclaws, really? And why aren’t there more factions?

The production design is spot-on, but the worldbuilding doesn’t live up to the games. The setting feels empty and confusing. It rarely comes across as a real place. I never managed to construct an internal map of the world in my head upon which I might have followed the characters’ courses. If I had, I doubt it would have made sense.

The story and characters are more and less successful. Walton Goggins’ Ghoul is the standout from the series so far. A great deal of runtime is dedicated to flashbacks of his past in the Old World, and I found these sections to be some of the most engaging in the show’s totality. But he’s in far too little of each episode, being altogether absent from one, and his ultimate contributions to the plot are minimal at best.

Lucy is the series’ real core. I like Purnell’s performance, but her writing misses the mark. Nolan and his team decided to run with the idea that people from the Vaults are Fargo characters: good-natured Midwesterners who are too naive to understand that not everyone is as kind as they are. This is essentially her “thing” throughout the eight episodes, and they even go so far as to have her say things like “okay den,” in case you didn’t get what they were going for.

Survivors from the Vaults should be normal pre-war people. They are how we introduce the audience to the fucked up world of the wasteland. They don’t need to be comically nice Midwesterners; they just need to be normal, while everyone else is batshit insane. She herself becomes the joke.

But I guess they follow through on her silly kindness, and it isn’t that much of a complaint. Lucy is fine.

The story sags significantly as we get to Maximus and the Brotherhood of Steel. I found Maximus’ performance to be very poor, bordering on amateur, and to such an extent that I expected it to be revealed that he was a synth or mutant or something. Between a weak characterization and a plasticky face, he’s never convincing.

He isn’t helped by the writing. His character has been raised by the BoS—a religious cult—but he has apparently metabolized none of its teachings. He betrays his master in their literal first scene together. He doesn’t seem to believe in anything, unlike Lucy who at least believes in being nice. He has no personality, and he doesn’t seem to take himself seriously.

This is a problem for everyone. Much of the comedy originates from the fact that the characters don’t take their own situations seriously enough. They don’t seem to actually believe that the world around them is real.

But of course it should be real, for them. They should treat it with all of the respect that we would treat our own reality. The fact that the setting is so zany and absurd is what creates humor—not the characters themselves. This is ironically why the Ghoul works so well; he is the only character in the show who takes himself seriously. That role needed to be played by Lucy instead, in my opinion. She shouldn’t have been so silly. She should have been played straight.

Liberty Prime isn’t funny because Elder Lyons cracks jokes about how silly Liberty Prime is. Liberty Prime is funny because everyone takes something so ridiculous with a straight face.

I hope they recognize and correct this deficiency for Season 2.

The story massively overrelies on coincidences to drive the plot forward. The characters stumble into each other constantly, even when hugely improbable, and then proceed to act in ways that barely make sense. There are several fight sequences that conclude awkwardly and in contrived ways. In the end, the twist is so predictable—it’s the same twist as Fallout 4, basically—that I thought it surely was impossible that they’d go with it. But they did anyway.

I’m not thrilled about these decisions, but they don’t infuriate me. My biggest criticism on the whole is the dialogue. It’s far too vulgar in places, in a way that feels like tryharding grit. Some of it is legitimately Reddit-tier, with one character unironically referring to another as, “a gentleman and a scholar.” This is worse early on than later, and seems to be the purview of several of the writing team’s least talented members.

There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments throughout the episodes and several excellent visual gags. But the dialogue’s attempts at humor are weak. I found myself cringing in about half of Lucy and Maximus’s conversations. The attempts at zaniness fall totally flat.

But despite these quibbles, the series possesses a strong sense of narrative progress, and has an actual plot with an actual impetus. Flashbacks to the Ghoul’s life feel like an instrumental piece of the overall puzzle—not padding to extract more runtime in an easy conflict-free way. Cutaways to various characters actually matter in building the story toward the conclusion. Stuff mostly makes sense on the whole, at least so far as motivations are concerned.

Contrast this to The Last of Us, with its countless pointless flashbacks and diversions to meaningless NPCs who do not contribute anything, and Fallout begins to look like Shakespeare in comparison.

In Summary

I have to confess that I found Fallout pretty boring, despite decent pacing in the abstract. But I don’t think it’s Nolan’s fault. I’m at a point where my video game-addled Zoomer brain simply cannot endure television without the help of Twitter. It’s not a medium that’s for me anymore. I vastly prefer games and books. TV is just too slow.

As a show of its own merits, Fallout is a mediocre but occasionally excellent series. Its highs are high enough to compensate for its lows, and it would probably be renewed for a second season and attract a cult following, even without the franchise attached. I give it a 6/10.

As an adaptation of the video game franchise of the same name, Fallout is phenomenal. It demonstrates immense care for the source material from Nolan and the others. It is truly an adaptation, not just of the world but also of the mechanics, into a different medium. There is one incredible moment where Lucy discovers an NCR flag and the New Vegas title theme begins to play. It might be fanservice, but it demonstrates the care for the source material taken by every department involved, from writing to music to production design. Except working in more of an “open world” structure to the story, I do not think they could have done a better job (excepting dumb lore developments). I give it a 10/10.

For reference, I’ve come to think of Halo as 1/10, and The Last of Us as a 1.4/10. I actively loathe both.

But I don’t loathe Fallout. I’m glad to have watched it, and I intend to watch more. It’s even made me excited for a possible Fallout 5—formerly thought to be impossible after the shitshow that is Starfield.

If you have Prime, I recommend you give it a try.

All eight episodes of the series are available now on Amazon Prime.