Fallout Is the Biggest Hit in Months. The Secret to Its Success? It Started With a Lousy Story. (2024)

There’s a moment in the new hit Amazon Prime Video seriesFalloutwhere the sunny protagonist, having emerged from her underground commune into a postapocalyptic hellscape, tries to convince a bloodthirsty mutant to follow the Golden Rule, to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

I expected the mutant—or Ghoul, to be more precise—to shoot back some nihilistic platitude in return, maybe a slang-ified version of a Thomas Hobbes quote. Instead, we get a perfect line: “Yeah, well, the wasteland’s got its own golden rule,” he replies. “‘Thou shalt get sidetracked by bullsh*t every goddamn time.’”

That rejoinder distills what makesFallout, both the video game series and its television adaptation, so great.After all, gettingsidetracked by bullsh*t is whatFallouthas always been about. The games—there are six full titles, currently published by Bethesda Softworks—feature sprawling, sandbox-style environments that prioritize freedom and immersion. Some players spend scores of hours wandering the wasteland without ever touching the main storylines, which are honestly pretty mediocre. The protagonists are bland player proxies, the plots are structured like choose-your-own-adventure books, and the characters mostly stand around and dispense exposition.

But players don’t playFalloutfor the stories; they play it for theworld.The aesthetic is “retro-futurist,” i.e., whatever Beaver Cleaver imagined the future would look like. Players tromp through the tattered remains of 1950s Boston, D.C., and Las Vegas, their streets adorned with faded war posters and ads for “Nuka-Cola,” while pop standards crackle over the radio. You might happen upon a band of neo-Romans, or a maid robot dusting around the skeletons of its owners. There’s a village built in the husk of an aircraft carrier, and another one in the crater of an unexploded bomb, which the citizens worship as a god. In one quest, a violinist asks you to find the last remaining Stradivarius.

That expansive world turned out to be perfect for TV. InFallout, Amazon gained the franchise equivalent of a turnkey home: fully furnished with recognizable IP, well-developed lore, and a fridge stocked with Nuka-Cola. Best of all, it was free of freeloading characters and plotlines. It didn’t have to, say, figure out how to make theMaster Chiefmore three-dimensional, orLara Croftless of a sex object. All the show needed to do was take its ready-made wasteland, drop a few characters into it, and let them get sidetracked by bullsh*t.

The bullsh*t in question ranges from a vivisection-obsessed robot to a ravenous axolotl the size of a hippo. The plot follows a naïve do-gooder (played by Ella Purnell), an armor-clad crusader (Aaron Moten), and a zombified bounty hunter (Walton Goggins). Fortunately, these people aren’t bland player stand-ins. They start with clear ideas of who they are, but the wasteland eats away at their self-perceptions until neither they, nor we, really know what they’re capable of. When two characters, after episodes of posturing, end up ripping each other’s fingers off, one of them muses: “That right there … is the closest thing we’ve had to an honest exchange so far.”

The show is thrifty with those moments, and they drop like ball bearings amid the video game-y hijinks. But even then, the show shines in the random encounters:the underwear-clad mud farmer who proposes marriage at first sight. The chicken-diddling charlatan who chews the scenery for a few lines before vanishing into the desert. The kind of delightfully idiosyncratic NPCs (or “non-player characters,” for the non-gamers out there) that you would find in the games.

Falloutisn’t the only adaptation that benefits from the forgettable story of its source material.League of Legends,a hit multiplayer strategy game,is replete with characters and context, but has a mere token plotline; its Netflix adaptation,Arcane,manages to cultivate an exciting and nuanced story from this narrative substrate. Likewise, 2023’sdrew on50 years of canonfor a fantasy romp that wasmore fun than it should have been. Of course, the king of setting-over-story is Super Mario, who has dominated the medium since before the fall of the Iron Curtain. His film story, last year’sThe Super Mario Bros. Movie, only marginally improved on the usual tale of war crimes against turtles. But at least it made for a good time at the movies.

Historically, game films have tended to suck because gamestoriestend to suck. This is a hard truth that all gamers whose Mountain Dew–fueled hearts have been crushed by the clunker adaptations ofUncharted,Assassin’s Creed, Resident Evil, and scores of other beloved franchises will recognize. In fact, game stories are often “bad” by design. Their narratives are bound by the demands of the medium, which has to get players invested while also facilitating hours of mechanical gameplay. Game protagonists usually serve as player stand-ins, and thus tend to be neutral and bland. Games are exciting because they make you feel like you’re living in a movie; thus, cliches become assets, not liabilities. As a game,Resident Evilmade us go, “Holy sh*t! This is just like a zombie movie.” As amovie, it made us go, “Ugh, this is just another schlocky zombie movie.”

There are exceptions to this rule, of course. The beloved gameThe Last of Ushad a TV-ready story with a setting that wasn’t too expensive to film, and HBO successfully turned that into a critical and commercial smash that won over both viewers and Emmy voters. ButThe Last of Uswas truly an exception in several ways, hailed by many as the first actually good mainstream video game adaptation. It remains to be seen whether other games that are celebrated for their narratives—God of War,Red Dead Redemption 2,BioShock—would make as smooth a transition over to the big screen.

I remain convinced that the way forward for film and TV adaptations of video games is to follow theFalloutmodel. Game makers don’t need to fundamentally change what makes games so immersive and special just to have a shot at licensing out the IP to a streaming company. All we need isa game that’s fun to hang out with, checks its story at the door, and is full of enough glorious bullsh*t to sidetrack us every goddamn time.