We seem to be in a golden age of video game adaptations of late, and Amazon Studios seems determined to keep that streak going. Hot on the heels of the very first teaser images, Amazon has released a full-length teaser trailer (scored with a customary ’50s love song), giving us a first look at their hugely anticipated Fallout adaptation in motion.
The series, set in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, appears to focus on three protagonists: a plucky, sheltered Vault Dweller, a Brotherhood of Steel initiate, and a centuries-old Ghoul gunslinger, offering a diverse collection of viewpoints on the state of the Wasteland. While it certainly looks the part, details about the plot are thin on the ground, but it has been previously teased as a race between all three of these protagonists for some kind of valuable artifact that threatens to upend the balance of power in the region. Interestingly, Bethesda director Todd Howard serves as an executive producer on the show and has confirmed that it and the games occupy the same continuity, offering intriguing potential for cross-contamination.
While there is a grim irony in an overtly anti-capitalist game series getting adapted by one of the biggest corporations on the planet, if one sets that aside for a moment, it doesn’t look too bad. Little moments of the signature dark humor the series is known for abound in the trailer, like an automated turret flashing “PLEASE REMAIN CALM” as it attempts to shred a protagonist with a burst of machine gun fire.
Fallout has historically been at its best, however, when it manages to balance that humor with social commentary, avoiding either becoming too wacky, as in Fallout 2, or structuring its entire main story around one of the clumsiest allegories ever written by human hands, as in Fallout 4. Remember that New Vegas contains both a cult of ghouls who want to go to the moon and a literal hypercapitalist relic of the Old World who wants to reinstate that system or die trying.
Fortunately, the show seems primarily interested in examining the dynamic of the unbelievably privileged Vault Dwellers with the society they abandoned, billing itself as a story of “the haves and have-nots.” It’s something Bethesda’s games have always staunchly refused to address, and is an interesting take on a universe that’s been around since the ’90s.
Perhaps most interesting, however, is the fact that Los Angeles has actually appeared in a Fallout game before: the very first one, all the way back in 1997. It eventually becomes one of the seats of power for the vast New California Republic—all of the NCR currency you can find in New Vegas is minted in Los Angeles, and as part of the NCR heartland, it’s described as having near-modern amenities like power and functioning cars. The NCR hasn’t been shown or even alluded to in the series’ marketing thus far, and Los Angeles is looking pretty rough, to say the least, which seems to indicate that either the NCR has stopped looking after the region or, more worryingly, that they’ve simply been retconned out of existence by the showrunners for a more authentic post-apocalyptic feel.
Either way, however, the series looks to be a fun romp through a wasteland rife with colorful characters and dark humor—and really, that’s all it needs to be.
