The Fallout Series: Overcoming a Difficult Beginning to Reach New Heights

A new successful adaptation

With the television series Fallout, video game adaptations are on the rise. A real success for Amazon, the series broadcast on Prime Video in full from April 10 has just been renewed for a second season. Excellent news which rewards the work of the production and which confirms all the good things that the first spectators thought of it while this first season has a press score of 94% and a public score of 88% on Rotten Tomatoes. A real success, which has also allowed games to experience a real revival of vitality as they are currently breaking popularity records on Steam. The Fallout series is therefore a total hit for Amazon and Bethesda. But this success could never have seen the light of day without that of the series The Last of Us released last year, as Jonathan Nolan explained.

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The Last of Us revelation

Last year, spectators around the world were able to discover the first season of the series The Last of Us, an adaptation of the eponymous game, which was a complete hit. This HBO success, by proving that a video game adaptation could be cinematic and mature, opened the way to a whole bunch of projects according to Jonathan Nolan, who explained to The Hollywood Reporter that the Fallout series could have never existed before The Last of Us.

The first time we had lunch with Todd (Howard), the bar was not very high, it was even non-existent, especially for television. You would have had someone wanting to adapt a first-person game and a studio would have said, “So the show will be from a first person point of view“. No it's a question about the grammar of the game, that's not how you adapt it. It's always nice to be the first. But when someone does something so good than The Last of Us, it becomes easier, because suddenly everyone understands what is possible.

For Jonathan Nolan, the first difficulty concerning video game adaptations was therefore to make the distinction between video game grammar and audiovisual grammar understood, and therefore to justify the whole point of the adaptation work. With The Last of Us, HBO and Naughty Dog paved the way for Fallout, and potentially other ambitious video game adaptations. We obviously hope to discover new productions of the same caliber in the years to come.