There are few game series that stand as tall as “Fallout.” You’ve likely heard about the franchise due to its recent TV adaptation streaming on Amazon. With the second season coming out on Dec. 17, it’s worth taking a look at how these two takes on the post-apocalyptic wasteland differ.
“Fallout,” as a franchise, is about surviving nuclear devastation. In the fictitious world of “Fallout,” a nuclear war wrecked the United States, and the games take place in the ensuing atomic fallout. There is an emphasis on exploring both the nuclear wasteland and vaults developed before the war, which experimented on their occupants.
The show follows Lucy (Ella Purnell) venturing to the atomic wasteland in search of her father. On her journey, her can-do attitude is tested, and her path overlaps with those of a squire, Maximus (Aaron Moten), and a ghoul bounty hunter (Walton Goggins). The second season continues as her search for her father leads her to an iconic location in the franchise: New Vegas.
Since the original 1997 “Fallout,” made by Interplay Entertainment, was released, there have been 10 more games, five of which are mainline games. The franchise has changed greatly over time, especially when it was acquired by Bethesda, and they released “Fallout 3” in 2007. It switched to a first-person perspective in an open world instead of an isometric view.
The throughline for any game in the franchise is the setting of the wasteland. The wasteland isn’t barren; it’s full of radioactive monsters and people trying to rebuild civilization. The most fun you can have playing any of the games is finding the stories littered throughout the world. Whether it’s reading old audio logs from centuries prior or discovering a cult dedicated to creating supermutants, the world of “Fallout” is a delight to sink your teeth into.
The fan favorite game is 2010’s “Fallout: New Vegas.” “New Vegas” was developed by Obsidian Entertainment, a sort of successor to Interplay which retained a lot of its staff. Even before its TV adaptation, “Fallout” has a history of passing between creative hands.
“Fallout: New Vegas” starts with your character being shot in the head and abandoned in a shallow grave, only to be rescued by a robot cowboy and given a Rorschach test to determine your character’s personality.
From there, the world is yours to explore. You’re most likely going to want to track down the guy who shot your character in the head, a man in a checkered suit voiced by Matthew Perry, but how you go about that is entirely up to you.
As you traverse the irradiated desert, you come across factions and people trying to survive in the wasteland. The two largest factions are about to have a large battle at Hoover Dam, and your character plays a key role in how the conflict is resolved.
There is no clear right side to join, and you don’t even have to pick one; there’s a third independent option for players who aren’t satisfied with either faction.
One of the factions you can join is the New California Republic, a group emulating the U.S. government in an effort to rebuild civilization. They have their own currency and offer jobs for the player to go out on to explore the world. The only problem is that their money is worthless in New Vegas. If you want to buy anything with it, you have to do it in NCR territory; otherwise, it’s useless. Only once the whole world flies the NCR flag will all of their jobs be done.
The other faction is Caesar’s Legion, a group emulating the Roman Empire. The Legion is a dictatorship, and those who question the authority of Caesar are punished and sometimes even crucified. They conquer and force those they conquer to assimilate into their way of life to establish order. You might think they are supposed to be the bad guys of “New Vegas,” but it wasn’t the Roman Empire that put the world into a nuclear fallout; it was the American government that the NCR is trying to recreate.
Then there is the New Vegas Strip, ruled over by Mr. House, a pre-war capitalist face on a screen who controls an army of robots. He wants both factions to fail and has his own schemes for how the new world should operate because the house always wins.
These are the biggest examples, but there are countless moments where the game forces players to rationalize their choices. You aren’t just watching the conflict unfold; you’re an active participant in which society gets to triumph for better or worse. It makes you question what you value in a society, and that’s what makes it so compelling.
How does this nuance translate to a TV show? If the most interesting thing about “New Vegas” is the choices you make in your specific playthrough, how will they hope to capture that in the second season of the Amazon series?
While the TV series does a phenomenal job at capturing the ‘60s retro-futurism aesthetic of the games, it tramples a lot of what the game offers up. In the series, there aren’t many cities in the wasteland. The games hint at a largely populated city called Shady Sands; the show destroys it without ever exploring it. We never learn about the people who lived there or what their stories were; it’s just blown up for the sake of showing the audience that the world of “Fallout” is cruel.
Despite the show playing with ideas of making good choices in a post-apocalyptic world, the games frequently push the player into situations where it’s impossible to make everyone happy.
There are so many subtle elements in the games that are impossible to capture in a TV show. Interacting with non-playable characters and getting to know them during your playthrough of a game makes you feel like you had a tangible impact on their story. Your choices matter. If you choose to help one faction, another will shun you at best, or send death squads at worst.
Still, I can’t help but feel excited to see how the television series adapts this beloved part of a world that fans have been coming back to for 15 years, adding their own content and debating online about what choices to make.
As it stands now, most people will never play “Fallout: New Vegas” and get the experience of exploring a broken world of people trying their best to rebuild it. The show is far more accessible and has a significantly lower barrier to entry. If you wanted to play “Fallout: New Vegas,” you would need to first download a handful of mods to get the game running on a modern computer; and no, it doesn’t run on a MacBook.
The games have always offered fairly formulaic protagonists that the show does take some inspiration from. But, for crying out loud, one of the show’s three main protagonists is an ageless ghoul bounty hunter! When the show does swing for something, it puts its whole heart into it.
In the end, I think that the “Fallout: New Vegas” game and TV adaptation complement each other. People who will only watch the show are in for a real treat with this next season. (I mentioned that there are robot cowboys, right?) And for people who aren’t satisfied with the show, there is a decade-and-a-half-old community of people waiting to fill in the cracks. No matter what faction the showrunners decide will prevail at the Battle of Hoover Dam, New Vegas will always belong to the fans.
