Welcome to the wasteland: all the news on Amazon’s Fallout TV series

So I’ve decided, after watching Ella Purnell traipse humorously about the wasteland, that I want in on this Fallout thing, too. So where does an aspiring Wastelander, one who has little experience with the series, start? The answer to that is usually “at the beginning,” but I’m gonna focus on Fallout 3 through Fallout 76 because they’re the most popular games, and critically, I have a Game Pass subscription I haven’t used in a while. I spent an hour with each game (not counting the tutorials) to get a feel for which games had the smoothest onboarding experience and most interesting story and initial area.

Fallout 3 is the game I was most familiar with. Initially, I thought I was going to be annoyed with the game’s opening sequence about growing up in Vault 101, but surprisingly, I enjoyed it. I liked talking with my fellow Vault dwellers, hitting on my friend Amata, and realizing way too late that Wordle is just a more complex version of the computer-hacking mini-game.

For production designer Howard Cummings, Fallout wasn’t just the name of his most recent project — it also became a verb. As he was working on Amazon’s live-action adaptation of the game series, Cummings and his team used the word Fallout as a shorthand to describe the particular retrofuturistic, post-apocalyptic style the franchise is known for. “Everything had to be Fallout-ed,” he tells The Verge. “For locations, I’d say: ‘How do I Fallout this grocery store?’”

Initially, though, that wasn’t the plan. Going into the project, Cummings — who previously worked on shows like Westworld and Lovecraft Country — didn’t know all that much about the games and thought he might have to update the visual style to make it “slicker.” That changed once he did some research. After watching YouTube videos of fans building their own vaults and Pip-Boys and scouring wikis for every detail he could find, Cummings says he became enchanted by the franchise’s mix of playful and dark. “The script was actually so well-written to the game that we decided that we should absolutely do it like the game,” he explains. “Nobody ever told me to do that, which was kind of great. I did it because I really liked it.”

Just a week after the show first premiered, Amazon has confirmed that there’s more of its live-action Fallout series on the way. As of now there are no details available other than the fact that the show has been renewed for season 2.

While there are no specific numbers about how well the show has done on Prime Video, Amazon says that “in its first four days, the high-octane fueled series has become a hit with its global audience, ranking among the service’s top three most-watched titles ever and the most-watched season globally since Rings of Power.” The aforementioned Lord of the Rings show premiered back in 2022.

The new Amazon adaptation of Fallout is excellent, nailing the goofy yet grim vibe of the series, all while telling a new story. It’s so good, in fact, that after the eight episodes were over, I was left with a strong urge to head back into the wasteland. But where to start? An open-world RPG like Fallout 4 felt like too much of a commitment (even with a next-gen update on the way), so I turned to something simpler: the mobile strategy game Fallout Shelter. And now I can’t seem to stop.

Now, to be clear, Fallout Shelter isn’t a new game. It launched in 2015, and while it started as a mobile release, it’s been subsequently ported to PC and consoles. It’s a bit like a city-builder, just one that takes place mostly underground. You’re the Overseer — a kind of postapocalyptic mayor figure — tasked with not only managing a vault but also expanding it. You’ll have to keep track of the happiness of residents, while ensuring a steady supply of food, water, and electricity. You’ll dig underground to add new dwellings and facilities and fend off attacks from raiders and radroaches. Eventually, you can build things like a radio studio to lure new residents from the surface and go out on quests that play out like very simple dungeon-crawling RPGs.

Bethesda has smartly guessed that with the arrival of the new Fallout series from Amazon, folks are going get curious about all the Fallout games. In addition to making Fallout 3 and Fallout 76 available on Amazon Luna and updating Fallout Shelter to include a bunch of characters from the show, Bethesda has announced that Fallout 4 will get a next-gen update.

Fallout 4 will get performance and quality mode settings on the PS5 and Xbox Series X / S, while PC players get wide and ultra-widescreen support, along with quest updates and Steam Deck verification. The Epic Games Store is also adding the game to its storefront. There’s a new Enclave questline coming with the update, complete with new weapons and armor. Best yet, it’s all free. Check out the details here.

It’s hard to say what, precisely, makes a design timeless. Some classic gadgets are simply beautiful, while others remain functional years after they come out. The list of truly timeless products in tech is small, but there’s one name that looms large: RobCo Industries’ Pip-Boy. Sure, it’s relatively simple, and some of its features only work if you’re stuck underground. But when a design hasn’t changed for 200 years, you know it’s doing something right.

For those who have been living under an irradiated rock, a Pip-Boy is a wrist-worn computer that — despite originally being meant for the pre-war world and, later, life inside of a Vault-Tec vault — has become an indispensable tool for survival out in the wasteland. It’s large and rugged, though not particularly heavy or uncomfortable, and is outfitted with plenty of satisfyingly chunky dials and buttons. From an aesthetic perspective, it’s surprisingly versatile, pairing with everything from a Vault-Tec jumpsuit to raider armor. You never really have to worry about when and where it’s okay to wear one.

Fallout is a mixture of contradictions. In one moment, the games are dark and gruesome; in the next, silly and playful. So when it came time to adapt the series into a streaming show on Amazon, nailing that eclectic tone was key. “I think it’s very fundamental to what Fallout is,” says series co-creator and showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet, “this mix of weird comedy and drama and violence and really compelling moral dilemmas.”

Unlike other video game adaptations like The Last of Us, Amazon’s Fallout isn’t a direct translation of an existing story. Instead, it takes place in its own corner of the universe. It’s set in Los Angeles, more than two centuries after the nuclear detonation that rendered America a wasteland, which gave the creators some freedom for approaching the challenge of Fallout’s varied tones. Inspired by Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the story is shown through three main characters with very different perspectives.

Fallout’s TV adaptation is coming to Prime Video a day early. The new series will now make its debut on Wednesday, April 10th, 2024, at 9PM ET / 6PM PT, rather than on April 11th.

Walton Goggins, who plays nuclear wasteland survivor The Ghoul, made the announcement on Monday, saying the early premiere comes as a “thank-you” to fans. All eight episodes will appear on the platform at the same time, so you might have to restrain yourself from watching them all in one go.

It’s still too early to say if Amazon’s live-action take on Fallout will be any good. But the first few trailers at least make one thing clear: the show seems like it’s nailing the distinct vibe of the games.

The newly released second trailer follows a lot of the same beats as the first, tracking a Vault Dweller named Lucy (Ella Purnell) heading out into the Wasteland only to discover how dangerous things have become two centuries after the apocalypse. The show looks gritty and violent, as you’d expect from a post-apocalyptic series, but also balances that out with a goofy sense of humor and playfully retrofuturistic style. Case in point: a Mister Orderly bot that simply wants to harvest Lucy’s organs. No big deal.

War never changes — and neither do the vibes in Fallout. After a bit of teasing, Amazon just released the first teaser trailer for its live-action adaption of Fallout, and it starts out a lot like the games: a vault dweller leaves the comfort of their home to explore the dangerous postapocalyptic wasteland outside. And boy, are things dangerous.

This time around, the vault dweller is named Lucy (Yellowjackets’ Ella Purnell), and she experiences a lot of the series’ key moments in the short trailer. That means horribly mutated animals, slapped-together cities, the militant Brotherhood of Steel, vault uprisings, some Wild West shootouts, and a very good dog who is also a killer. And of course, there are the classic tunes — in this case, it’s Nat King Cole’s “I Don’t Want To See Tomorrow.” The show is set 200 years after the apocalypse; the trailer actually ends with the nuclear explosion that changes the world for good.

Amazon has yet to release a public trailer for its highly anticipated Fallout series, but at least we now know when it’ll arrive on our TV screens. The streaming giant has revealed that Fallout — a live-action adaptation of Bethesda’s popular RPG video game franchise — will premiere on April 12th, 2024, exclusively via Prime Video.

The announcement was made on October 23rd, otherwise known to Fallout fans as “Fallout Day” — the in-game date that marks the beginning of the Great War that turns the world into an irradiated nuclear wasteland. Bethesda’s executive producer and game director Todd Howard is an executive producer on the series, which stars Ella Purnell (Yellowjackets), Walton Goggins (The Hateful Eight), Aaron Moten (Emancipation), Moisés Arias (The King of Staten Island), Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks), and Sarita Choudhury (Homeland).

Amazon and Bethesda have started to share itty bitty teases of the upcoming Fallout TV series for Prime Video. We still don’t know when the show based on the post-apocalyptic RPG series is coming out, but the hints give us just a glimpse of what to expect it’s eventually released.

The Prime Video Twitter account shared an intriguing image from the show in a tweet on Tuesday. Three people are standing in front of a vault door that opens to somewhere that’s very brightly lit, and a silhouette of someone is standing in the vault opening. Mysteriously, there’s also a pair of legs on the floor that are nearly out of sight — perhaps a casualty of some kind of skirmish.

Amazon’s TV series based on the Fallout video games is moving into production this year. Deadline and Variety report that Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel) and Graham Wagner (Silicon Valley) will be showrunners on the project; the official Fallout Twitter account retweeted Deadline’s story by way of confirmation.

The Prime Video show will be executive-produced by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, creators of Westworld. Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard and Bethesda Softworks’ James Altman are also on board as executive producers. Nolan will direct the first episode, according to Deadline and Variety.