The Fallout TV series returns to Prime Video today, and it’s fair to say that everyone was pleasantly surprised by how good the first season was. By portraying Fallout’s retro-futuristic, post-apocalyptic US through three different characters, it managed to capture different aspects of the game player’s experience, too. There was vault-dweller Lucy, trying to do the right thing and finding that the wasteland made that very difficult; Max, the Brotherhood of Steel rookie, who starts to question his cult’s authority and causes a lot of havoc in robotic power armour; and the Ghoul, Walton Goggins’s breakout character, who has long since lost any sense of morality out in the irradiated wilderness.
The show’s first season ended with a revelation about who helped cause the nuclear war that trapped a group of people in underground vaults for a couple of centuries. It also left plenty of questions open for the second season – and, this time, expectations are higher. Even being “not terrible” was a win for a video game adaptation until quite recently. How are the Fallout TV show’s creators feeling now that the first season has been a success?
“We’ll take ‘not terrible’ – let’s get that on a poster,” says Jonah Nolan, the director who co-created the series with Geneva Robertson-Dworet. I’m speaking to them alongside Bethesda’s Todd Howard, director of the most recent Fallout video games. I last met with Nolan and Howard in 2024, before the first season premiered. Howard had been holding out a long time to make a Fallout adaptation, waiting for someone who seemed to really understand the series. Nolan, a lifelong player, was that person. Howard was poised with a red pen when he received the first script, but was relieved to find it was “fabulous”.
“Going into the first season everyone’s like, ‘Just get it right’,” says Howard. “We’re over the moon with the reception to the show, so this time people are coming in with more excitement and different expectations.”
The second season is set in New Vegas, the site of 2010’s Fallout: New Vegas, which had the best writing and characters of any game in the series, even if it was a bit broken. The post-nuclear Strip was a kind of decaying criminal paradise full of warring factions and down-and-out inhabitants having as good a time as they can, given the bleak circumstances. It was shot in the real-world Nevada desert, and all over California. “It’s more of a desert vibe, a Mohave vibe, that’s so essential to that game,” says Nolan. “That dusty, blasted-out Route 66 vibe of the game is so much fun to bring into the show.”
In the show, a long time has passed since the events of the New Vegas game by the time Lucy and the Ghoul arrive in the city, but Howard says that it does reference the player’s journey. “When you’re doing a location that gamers know so well … honouring everyone’s journey through that game was a trick,” he says. “Time has moved on. What is New Vegas like now?… if you’re a fan of that game there’s so much to love in season two, visually and also with the factions and what’s going on with them.”
The Fallout TV series has a tactile feel – its creators ensured real props and sets were built, echoing the cobbled-together nature of the settlements in the games, where everyone is building stuff out of trash and every town is shoved together from whatever anyone can find. “As a sci-fi fan, so many shows I watch, I’m aware that they’re all standing in front of a blue screen,” says Robertson-Dworet. “The whole point of an adaptation, especially of a video game, is to feel like it’s real … of course, we still augment with VFX but, wherever possible, actors are actually standing in front of locations I loved seeing in the game.”
In fact, pretty much everything you see on-screen is real, even the infamously terrifying irradiated monsters, the Deathclaws. They were scary even as blobs of pixels in the original 90s Fallout games. In the show, they’re puppets, and apparently pretty frightening up close. “It was the closest look I’d ever gotten at a Deathclaw. In Fallout 4, whenever I saw one, it would instantly kill me,” laughs Nolan. “It was quite peculiar being able to stand there and stare at it.”
“Even the radscorpion puppet was amazingly scary,” adds Robertson-Dworet. “It was so big – the mama scorp, that is. The little ones were fine, they were like overgrown lobsters, but it was genuinely very scary when the puppeteer was charging the big one at me.”
The Fallout series works because it’s made by talented film-makers who are also players and with the help of the people who created the actual games. Howard is replaying Red Dead Redemption 2 at the moment and resuming a long-dormant obsession with EA’s college (American) football games; Nolan has spent the summer playing Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom with his entire family; Robertson-Dworet is still working on scripts for the show, so she’s playing a lot of New Vegas (as is her husband).
(Not everyone involved with the show is a gamer, though. In an interview with PC Gamer, Goggins the Ghoul said he had never played a Fallout game and had no intention of doing so. “No, I haven’t sat down to play the games. And I won’t. I won’t,” he said. “I won’t play the games. I’m not interested.” It’s OK, Walton, nobody is judging your gamer cred.)
The second season is coming out weekly rather than in one binge-able batch of episodes, so we will all be experiencing it differently from last season – including Howard, Nolan and Robertson-Dworet, who will now be looking out for people’s reactions every week.
“It has more depth, it’s bigger, it’s funnier, it has a lot of surprises,” says Howard. “I’m looking forward to seeing what people think.”
What to play
Swedish developer Simogo made some of the most interesting iPhone and iPad games of the 2010s, from the unforgettable puzzle game Device 6 to the eerie Year Walk. It recently released a compilation of these games, an attempt to preserve them before they are either removed from mobile storefronts or become unplayable thanks to iOS updates.
Available on: Nintendo Switch/Switch 2, PC
Estimated playtime: 5-plus hours
What to read
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The Game awards took place last week, a typically brisk affair at just under four hours. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won nine awards, including Game of the Year, kicking off a predictable online discussion about whether it is even that good. See the full list of winners here, a rundown of the most notable trailers and announcements here, and look out for the Guardian’s games of the year list on Friday.
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Lara Croft is back for two new Tomb Raider games, starring the self-assured version of the tank-topped action heroine from the 1990s. The first game, Catalyst, is a new adventure set in northern India, out 2027; next year we’ll see Legacy of Atlantis, a ground-up remake of the very first Tomb Raider game.
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Good news for our young and sprightly readers: the Quickshot II, the legendary joystick beloved of many Amiga and C64 players, is making a comeback in January. It will work with anything with a USB slot, including all the recent modern reissues of Amiga, Commodore and Spectrum home computers.
What to click
Question Block
Reader Laura asks:
“We love games we can play as a pair, whether they are designed as single-player (eg Blue Prince) or multiplayer (eg For the King, Gloomhaven, Sunderfolk). Puzzle games and turn-based games seem to work particularly well. Do you have any suggestions for something to try next?”
We’ve answered a few variations of this question before, but as it’s Christmas, I suspect that plenty of people will be looking for something to play while cosied up on the sofa – so here are some fresh recommendations for local multiplayer and pad-passing games. If you like a challenge, Absolum is a punishing but stylish fusion of beat-em-up and adventure game. Powerwash Simulator 2 lets you soothingly scrub down filthy objects together. For nominally single-player games, narrative games often make good pad-passers; Lost Records: Bloom and Rage and Dispatch are two of the year’s best. You might want to try trading attempts at Baby Steps, the year’s most infuriating game. And my partner enjoyed taking turns at Ball x Pit, the fiendishly compelling game where you defeat demonic hordes with magic ping-pong balls.
If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on [email protected].
