Fallout is a show (which was originally a game) set in anywhere between 2077 to 2297. Its premise is based around a post-nuclear war America, ranging from coast to coast from the commonwealth of Massachusetts to Vegas. It is a commentary on the dangers of war and technology, and this message is very well communicated in the TV adaptation by Amazon, which takes the source material and adapts it perfectly.
The world of game adaptation has been subpar at best; as an example, Halo (2022)’s production was projected to take 200 million in total, while not being well received by long time fans of the game, therefore throwing away the money and trust of said fans. In comparison, Fallout was very well received by fans and new viewers, so much so it was renewed for another season almost immediately.
The show centers around three characters: Lucy, Maximus, and ‘The Ghoul’. Lucy is a vault dweller, (a vault being a bunker supposed to protect paying customers of ‘Vault-tec’.) Maximus is a scribe for the faction of The ‘Brotherhood of Steel’, which in the games, is motivated by the need to preserve pre-nuclear war technology and put an end to technologies that would cause an issue to the wasteland, but in the show, they want a monopoly over the wasteland. Last but not least, The Ghoul is a cowboy bounty hunter, who used to be an advertiser for Vault-tec, but he was kept alive through the hundreds of years between the setting of the show and the war by the nuclear radiation, which turned him into a husk of what he used to be.
All three have different motivations: Lucy is trying to find her father, who went missing from the vault (possibly a nod to Fallout 3’s protagonist.), Maximus is trying to aid the Brotherhood of Steel in finding a power source that is possibly infinite, and The Ghoul only wants more money.
One of the things the fans were entertained by is the accuracy of the power armor, one of the reappearing things in the fallout universe, a symbol of power and strength, mainly used by the previously mentioned brotherhood of steel, and the enclave, which was last canonically mentioned and present in Fallout 3.
Overall, Fallout was a success in the eyes of Amazon and fans alike, bringing up the rates of people playing the games, and further cementing the influence of the series in gaming and television history. Overall, I rate it a 4 out of 5. It was great because it used the source material perfectly, but left some things out that would make it much more wonderful.
