We currently live in the era of good videogame adaptations, I know, it’s weird. There’s Arcane, Cyberpunk Edgerunners, or Jack Black’s magnum opus, A Minecraft Movie. All of which don’t just bring awareness of the games they’re based on, but also encourage people to discover more of these worlds by actually playing them, although I’d warn against normies taking on League of Legends.
The Fallout TV show is a prime example of this. Murmurs of this adaptation began in early 2022, as actors like Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins officially joined the cast, but there wasn’t a ton of hype surrounding the upcoming series, at least not until its first trailer dropped.
But even then, I was pretty apprehensive about it. I’d been scorned by adaptations before—see Resident Evil: Retribution—and I hadn’t been utterly obsessed by a Fallout game for a while. That quickly changed after I watched the show and immediately got an itch to go lie in an irradiated pool of water, in Fallout 76 I might add.
Fallout 76 hit an all-time player count record on Steam of just under 60,000 after the TV show aired, but despite all the flurry of new or returning players, there wasn’t a ton of tie-ins with the show. I always thought this was a missed opportunity, and it looks like it’s one that the Fallout 76 devs aren’t going to repeat.
“The show is very effective storytelling—very Fallout—being made by folks that are big fans of the game and the series, and so are we,” creative director Jon Rush says in an interview with Variety. “The two go together really well. So folks see the show and want more of that same kind of story, and they’re going to come into 76, they’re going to come into Fallout 4, or come into Fallout 3.
Lining things up with the seasonal releases of the show, it’s stuff that we talk about all the time, and we do have plans for things here and there. I’m not going to go into detail on any of those now, but the two teams do talk to one another.”
But creating cool crossovers isn’t as easy as it sounds. Yes, there are a ton of possibilities for things like cosmetics and companions, but you still have to be mindful of where in the timeline both the show and 76 land.
“I think a distinct trait of the Fallout 76 game is that we’re the furthest back in time,” Rush says. “And it’s kind of funny, because the show’s the furthest into the future. So there’s a lot of room where we don’t necessarily need to overlap. There are some things that we could overlap the stories that could exist, but we largely try to keep those pretty simple.”
Fallout 76 is set in the year 2102, and the TV show is set in 2296, 194 years apart. That’s a long time, way too long for characters like Lucy or Maximus to make an appearance in the game. But not too long for Walton Goggins’ The Ghoul to turn up, he’s been around since the bombs dropped in 2077.
There’s also just been a massive ghoul update in Fallout 76, which gave players the ability to lose the nose and go all-in on the radiation lifestyle. Alongside this came a new encampment of ghouls up by the Hillside Cavern, maybe we could find Goggins’ character while completing quests up there? Plus, I want to see how he would interact with Parthenia and Asher—that would be funny.
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