The Fallout series doesn’t just look right – it feels like it was made by gamers, too

 

 

 

 

I am a few episodes from the end of the series Fallout on Prime Video. It’s funny and gory, at times sentimental and at other times ridiculous. In other words, it’s just like the games, which veer between quiet, tragic moments exploring the vestiges of America, and being chased down a hill by irradiated scorpions because you’ve run out of ammo.

Fallout’s ensemble cast – with Walton Goggins almost-immortal ghoul and Ella Purnell’s wide-eyed vault-dweller the standouts – lets it cleverly compartmentalise the different aspects of the games’ personality. As its director Jonathan Nolan pointed out, when I interviewed him last week alongside Bethesda’s Todd Howard (the director of the games), this is a common device in TV storytelling but rare in games. Grand Theft Auto V does it successfully: each of the three protagonists represented a different part of GTA’s DNA (Trevor the violent chaos, Michael the prestige crime drama, Franklin the Compton realism). But in most games we play one character, and we know them intimately by the end – or we get to shape them, and they become unique to us.

It makes adapting games for the screen hard. But instead of trying to communicate the experience of playing the games, Fallout steps back to make the broken yet oddly optimistic world of Fallout the star, and each of its characters shows a different side of it.

“Even if we had said let’s adapt Fallout 3, whose Fallout 3 are we talking about? Because the way you played that game might have been very different from the way I played that game,” Nolan told me “That’s the beauty of the kind of game [Bethesda] makes … I’m drawn to the kinds of games where you take full advantage of the medium and decide who your character is going to be within that world. Obviously that doesn’t translate to a series directly.”

I was curious: how did Nolan play Fallout 3? “I always play as a boy scout first because I imagine my parents are watching,” he said. “So I make virtuous decisions, and then I go back through and the second time and I try to play it as a total heel. But then I get weirded out and squeamish and end up in the morally compromised middle area. It’s a bit pathetic.”

I can relate. I’m a chaotic good kind of player in most games that allow for it: I’ll make a mess everywhere I go and happily align myself against any character or faction in authority, but I’ll never do anything that would hurt people. I know that games are supposed to be consequence-free places where you can experiment with morality, but I cannot bring myself to play the villain. This contrasts with a lot of players I know, who will immediately set about causing chaos in a game world just to see what will happen. The kind of person who shoots horses in Red Dead Redemption.

“Every time you get a game and you test it, you’re immediately like, what will this game let me do? No matter what we do, every time, we’ll hand a player a weapon, they will shoot the first person they see,” Todd Howard says with a laugh. “It could be their mother. They will shoot whoever it is. And then they’ll be like, oh well, I’ll just reload.”

It must be a nightmare trying to design a choice-based game around players’ random whims, but Howard and Bethesda have decades of experience with that. When I’ve interviewed him over the years, he has often spoken eloquently about how players and systems interact to create emergent stories, and how games can uniquely make you feel as if what you’re doing within them is real and meaningful. TV and film can’t do that. But as the Fallout show proves, if they’re made by people who really get it, they can tell a story of their own that still communicates what it is about the games that people love.

The reason Fallout is good – and this applies to the other successful game-to-screen adaptations in recent years, too – is not that it looks right, that the sets are perfect, or that they’ve nailed the retro-futurist nostalgic aesthetic of the games. It’s that Nolan and writers Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner actually played and understood Fallout, and felt the power of its storytelling for themselves. Instead of trying to awkwardly adapt a game story into a TV script, they’ve written brilliant, extremely high-budget extended fan-fiction of the games. I’m all for this approach. Now that we have a generation of TV and filmmakers who’ve grown up with games and truly understand them, I’m hopeful we’ll see more of it.

GUARDIAN