With any sort of TV or movie adaptation, fans of the source material are going to be watching to make sure that the new version gets the details right. The best video game movies are generally seen as having gotten the basics down pact. There’s often a feeling that if an adaptation changes too much, it ceases to be the title it was supposed to be adapting. Prime Video’s recently released Fallout series is getting praise from fans for excelling in so many respects, and it turns out the creative team was so on point that some of the finer details aren’t even visible within the show.
Todd Howard, director at Bethesda Game Studios (the studio that currently produces the Fallout games), recently spoke with Kinda Funny Games about the production. During the chat, he discussed the attention to detail that’s present within the series. Interestingly, it seems that the show was so committed to getting things right that the creatives even utilized original game files to design and 3D print props for the series. On top of that, they included details on the set that never made it on camera. Howard explained…
You sit down and they have all the papers, and they have this note that no one will ever see that’s, like, to the Overseer that they had written. You have the stack of papers and you flip it over and they have the power report in the Vault and then, like, the food supply. I’m like, ‘You didn’t even fake the stack of papers!’
Needless to say, this is an attention to detail that probably wasn’t essential, but it’s awesome to hear about anyway. The Fallout game series is known for its distinctive worlds, which are marked by flavor text and additional ancillary content. In the games, you find information that teaches you about the world that has nothing to do with the main game but are only there to make the fictional universe feel more layered and real.
It appears the show did something similar. The stack of papers certainly doesn’t make the world feel more tangible for the audience, as it’s stuff we’ll never even see. However, it’s possible that sort of element made the environment feel more real for the actors while they were filming, which may have enhanced performances and made them even better.
Getting the look on point is certainly going to be key in making the TV adaptation feel like it’s part of the same world as the games. While many Fallout series fans haven’t played the games, for those who have, the details likely matter. The vault jumpsuits, weapons, ghouls and Brotherhood of Steel power armor have to look right. If the show had only done that much, it likely would have looked great. But you can’t help but appreciate that the creative team went the extra mile.
Whatever the reason, and those details would have only helped, the series was a big hit for Prime Video subscribers. With that, Fallout Season 2 has been given the green light already, and we can likely expect that attention to detail will carry over into the new new episodes.