There’s one recent trend that’s proving to be advantageous to Prime Video’s Fallout show, as game adaptations have finally found their footing in the industry. Compared to the disastrous attempts of not-so-long ago, adapting games nowadays feels like a concept that’s on an upward spiral thanks to the existence of numerous shows, including HBO’s The Last of Us and Peacock’s Twisted Metal.
Fortunately, it seems as if creator Jonah Nolan has been closely observing industry trends and audience behavior, as he knows how much the IP he’s adapting means to the gaming community and understands the task that he has chosen to take on.
Players Spend a Lot of Time in Games Like Fallout, so Naturally, They Get Invested
As the Fallout show is just a few days away from being released, Jonah Nolan was recently asked about how he feels when he observes that “the bar” for adapting games to television series has gone higher than anyone could’ve imagined.
For the longest time, the biggest issue that game-to-movie adaptations were facing was that gamers spend hours upon hours playing their favorite games, which is a level of immersion that a film can’t hope to achieve in a limited one-to two-hour runtime.
This is where television adaptations come in, allowing for more time and space for the story to develop and grow with the help of the episodic format.
“When people have spent 50 to 100 hours in a world, their level of investment is very different,” stated Jonah Nolan, knowing that gaming universes like Fallout have always been immersive, with a major reason being the amount of time players spend in them. Nolan admitted that there was a time “in the late 2000s” when storytelling in games was actually much more “provocative and exciting” than in films, calling it “more punk rock.”
Condensing these long but excellent stories into a relatively short motion picture doesn’t seem to make much sense these days, so TV feels like a more fitting medium.
Shows Like The Last of Us Prove That Game-To-TV Adaptations Work Better
“When somebody makes something as good as The Last of Us, it makes it easier,” said Jonah Nolan, “because suddenly everyone understands what’s possible,” as the HBO series proved that game-to-TV adaptations work a lot better than their film counterparts.
The Fallout show creator pointed out that the aforementioned “bar” was “nonexistent” in the television space when he met with Bethesda director Todd Howard, due to the technical challenges that come with adapting games to another medium.
It requires a delicate balance to translate a gaming story into a TV series, and if anyone can pull it off, it’s Nolan.
Are you looking forward to Prime Video’s Fallout, or do you think it won’t do justice to the source material? Let us know in the comments!
