Fallout Show Creators Want It to Feel Like a Brand New Game

Yesterday, Prime Video gave viewers a first full look at its upcoming Fallout show. Based on the RPG franchise by Interplay and Bethesda, the series definitely looks like it belongs with the actual games, and that wasn’t just the mission statement—for all intents and purposes, this is their idea of Fallout 5.

Showrunner Graham Wagner basically said as such during a roundtable interview at CCXP. In deciding to treat this as “just another installation” of the franchise, Wagner and his collaborators—executive producers Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, plus co-showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet—wanted to ensure this stood alongside the games and captured their collective spirit. In lieu of a custom-made character, for example, they decided to split the narrative across three characters: Ella Purnell’s Lucy, the daughter of Vault 33’s Overseer who leaves home to explore the wasteland of Los Angeles; Maximus (Aaron Moten), a member of the Brotherhood of Steel; and Walton Goggins’ Ghoul, a bounty hunter that’s hundreds of years old.

Nolan noted that in the games, the player-made Vault Dweller can be whatever the story needs them to be, which doesn’t easily translate to TV. With the three leads, the creators came up with a “brilliant hack” to use them as a representation of the games’ RPG mechanics, and to also draw on Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad, & the Ugly for further inspiration. “Having these characters occupy these very different corners of the fallout universe gave us a chance to encompass some of the ambition of the games,” he explained. “Not just in terms of world building, but in terms of morality and in terms of the gray area. It’s a very different mode of storytelling.”

While Fallout 76 hit the five-year mark in mid-November, there hasn’t been a single-player Fallout game since 2015’s Fallout 4. It might be a good number of years before an actual Fallout 5 sees the light of day, so depending on when that game releases, and how long the show runs, Wagner and company’s decision to treat this show just another mainline installment may not be an entirely bad one.

Fallout hits Prime Video on April 12, 2024.

[via IGN]

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