Photo: Courtesy of Prime Video
Amazon Prime Video has a new hit on its hands with its adaptation of the classic RPG, Fallout. My husband and I just started watching this show, and it is absolutely fantastic.
I started playing the Fallout game series with Fallout 3. You play as an intrepid vault dweller after a world-shattering nuclear attack who enters into the above-ground “wasteland” to search for your father (and the meaning of life, of course). I’ve spent hundreds of hours roaming this blasted landscape, trying to avoid patches of killer radiation, radroaches bigger than dogs, vicious mutants, and crazed raiders who have lost all of their humanity. It was spooky to explore destroyed national monuments like the Lincoln Memorial and the White House.
Fallout 4 took me to the remains of Boston, where hard-to-kill mirelurks haunted Salem and scrappy residents had set up a make-shift community in the remains of Fenway Park. Sadly, there was no Arlington in the game (my hometown), but it was great fun to explore the Boston wasteland and gun-down ghouls as I navigated the various postwar factions that always seem to be at each other’s throats in the game series.
It was a world that I knew very well, as it was one of the only RPGs that I actually finished completely and played through multiple times. The intricate lore and the tone-setting music pulled from American classics from the 30s through the 50s went a huge way toward making the games so immersive for me. Even now, if I hear “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire,” by the Ink Spots, I’m instantly brought back to the wasteland.
You’d think that the things that make a great video game immersive and fun to play (complex moral choices, replayable story lines, great music and writing) would also make for good movies or TV shows. But we all know that the media landscape is littered with bad video game adaptations. In fact, Entertainment Weekly has a list of the 20 worst video game adaptations (Jake Gyllenhaal, who was no one’s idea of the Prince of Persia, was a particular bad adaptation in my mind).
Recently, though, studios have been getting these game adaptations right. I loved the Last of Us (even though I had never played the game). And now, Amazon’s Fallout season 1 has completely hooked me, even though I have played the game many times. In both adaptations, the filmmakers appear to have embraced the feel and lore of the games, but they have come up with compelling characters (played by fantastic actors) and storylines that can stand on their own.
Fallout is gory in a cartoony and over-the-top way, just as the games are, but it is also funny, satirical, and just plain entertaining. The characters have immediately grabbed me in the complexity, and I can’t wait to finish the season.
I’m midway through the season, but it has me well and thoroughly hooked, and I can’t wait to explore this new wasteland on TV.