With the superhero genre sort of on the ropes, maybe it’s time for the age of video game adaptations to finally shine. And if the small screen keeps giving us quality shows like “The Last of Us,” perhaps the future of this once-maligned genre looks much more promising. One of those that could keep things thriving is Jonathan Nolan’s (“Westworld”) post-apocalypse show “Fallout,” an Amazon Prime Video project based on the wildly popular satirical video game franchise. The games take place in an alternative universe where Americans who survived a nuclear war mostly hid out in high-tech bomb shelters called vaults. The series focuses on a young vaulter who decides to leave their self-sustaining bunker 200 years after the bombs dropped to navigate the wasteland of Los Angeles, which is filled with an innumerable amount of dangers, some simply unimaginable thanks to various mutations.
In a recent interview, the showrunner admitted at a press event for “Fallout” via T3 that it would be “a fool’s errand” to attempt to appease the rabid video game fanbase. Instead, his aim was to simply focus on making the “best version” of a show they could.
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“I don’t think you really can set out to please the fans of anything,” Nolan explained. “Or please anyone other than yourself. I think you have to come into this trying to make the show that you want to make and trusting that, as fans of the game [ourselves], we would find the pieces that were essential to us… and try to do the best version.”
Below is Amazon’s logline for the bonkers sci-fi series:
Based on one of the greatest video game series of all time, ‘Fallout’ is the story of haves and have-nots in a world in which there’s almost nothing left to have. 200 years after the apocalypse, the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind — and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird, and highly violent universe waiting for them
While some fanbases can often hinder a creative vision, the RPG element of “Fallout” (think “Dungeons & Dragons”) should allow even the die-hards to relax and watch the streaming series without decrying it being one-to-one with the video game series as they’ll be exploring Los Angeles instead of other central locations seen in the games.
Hopefully, Nolan’s anti-pandering-to-fandom will pay off and ultimately please games and the arguably more important viewer watching the series at home. All ten episodes of “Fallout” debuts this April 11 exclusively on Prime.