The Fallout TV Show Proves An Important Point
Continuing a trend of well-received game adaptations, Amazon's Fallout is bringing a lot of new attention to Bethesda's long running franchise.
Uwe Boll (sorry for the jump scare): a name that strikes fear in the heart of any video game fan. For nearly a decade, Boll tortured the souls of gamers everywhere with games to film adaptions. In fairness, traditionally it wasn’t much better going in the other direction with movie to games, though we were blessed with true greatness in Goldeneye 007. Shoutout to Grant Kirkhope for the generational banger pause music – but I digress.
The point is, for the longest time gamers were slammed with bad adaptation after bad adaption until many had given up the hope of seeing their favourite stories and characters on the silver screen doing anything but burning money. Before gaming had become as mainstream as it is now, these films hurt extra hard for those who had friends and relatives hearing about these dumpster fires. Trying to explain that the source material wasn’t the unrepentant mess the movies were didn’t help bridge the gap between worlds.
Now here we are decades later being saved by Amazon’s Fallout. Crawl out through the Fallout, as it were. That’s not to say that the Fallout TV show is the first to prove that video game adaptations can be done remarkably well, but it’s the most recent and one of the best examples of just that with a current Rotten Tomatoes score of 94% from critics and 88% from the audience. Besides continuing the trend of great adaptations as of late, Fallout also proves that there’s value in not just doing it well but doing it right. Saying the Fallout TV show is doing it right may be contentious with a few particularly hardcore fans of the source material, but that’s one of the hurdles any adaptation faces.
Movies and TV, like video games, prove a challenge to get projects greenlit. There’s a certain amount of…certainty that is often required, and that’s often accomplished by casting a broad net to capture an imagined larger audience. In doing so, many adaptations become a shell of their source material that goes beyond artistic license. I’m sure more than a few folks might point at Paramount’s Halo series for best describing this phenomenon, but there are many examples. It seems only more recently that, after a string of adaptation successes, we’re getting much better conversions than we’ve ever seen before. One could argue what the real genesis point of this was, but if I had to guess I’d say the League of Legends series Arcane, and HBO’s The Last of Us are near the top.
These successes are allowing for video game stories and characters to be brought to life on the big and small screen in a far more source accurate way than in the past. They’re paving the way for more to be done “right” in that while at a glance the myriad Resident Evil movies just look like any other action flick, there is no mistaking Fallout is a show based on Bethesda’s games. Translating a video game to film or TV is likely never going to result in a one-to-one adaptation due to the formats requiring some liberties be taken, but Fallout is a great example of finding the right balance between being true to the source material while avoiding the pitfalls of trying to please everyone. It is a show that I can enjoy as a fan of the game universe, but my better half can enjoy as much without that same attachment to the source material. Thanks to those that came before, budgets and attention from great writers and directors mean we’re also getting to enjoy these adaptations being done well. No more getting Boll’d over.
Aernout van de Velde
We’re also seeing the knock-on effects of these well-done adaptations in the gaming space. Games who successfully transfer to the big and small screens seem to have a sizeable uplift in new and returning players. We can see this with Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Fallout New Vegas, and Fallout 3 where the show’s success has seen all four games shoot into the top 10 sales charts in Europe. In fact, Fallout 4 sales skyrocketed 7,500% to hit the number one spot, beating out the wildly popular Helldivers 2 and EA Sports FC 24. Fallout 76, Fallout New Vegas, and Fallout 3 took spots eight, nine, and ten respectively. Those sales are translating into play time as well, with Fallout 4 jumping to a new Steam concurrent player peak not seen since its release window, topping 90,000 players – nearly four times the average post 2017. That’s a pretty incredible secondary effect that I would imagine will be templated in the future for other franchises.
It's hard to overstate just how difficult it must be to find the place in which fans of the source material will be happy with an adaptation while not gatekeeping newcomers who aren’t equipped with in-depth knowledge going in. Not everything can be an inside joke or a deep-cut reference – it has to stand on its own feet, too. Getting it to do so without turning the source material into a glorified costume is the difference between the show blowing up or bombing. When it comes to video game adaptations, it appears that also means the difference between revitalizing a franchise or missing out on some of the best promotion money can buy. Fallout has achieved the former without question and will no doubt force the hand of Bethesda to front load more Fallout projects faster than they perhaps considered previously. With a little luck it will also clear a path for even more great video game adaptations in the future – no bombs required.