Postapocalyptic TV With a Nostalgic Twist

The first Fallout game was released in 1997. I was (and am) an avid gamer, and when I played the inaugural entry in what would become a decades-long series, I saw immediately that it was different from almost anything else I’d encountered on the market. Its subtitle labeled it “a post nuclear role playing game,” but this was not the typical, fast-paced, “Radioactive Rambo” shoot-’em-up with an indestructible protagonist roaming a ravaged world to a pulsing electronic soundtrack.

Instead, during the opening credits, the Ink Spots crooned their 1940 hit “Maybe” as a dark screen gave way to the flickering of a black-and-white television. The camera pulled back to reveal the tranquil, empty skyline of a ruined city as narrator Ron Perlman calmly explained how the world as we knew it had blown itself up while fighting over resources. But your family had escaped this destruction by heading into one of many underground vaults built by the cheerful folks at the Vault-Tec Corporation, allowing you and many other humans to live beneath the surface for decades. Now your vault was about to kick you out into the wasteland on an important mission, and your character—at the start of the adventure, a delicate rookie with few skills—would have to figure out what the hell was going on in what was left of the planet.

Fallout, unlike many simpler games, didn’t merely reward you for racking up kills and taking stuff from other people. Much as in other role-playing games, the player has to assume an identity and choose a set of attributes and character traits that dictate how you move through its world. Your decisions came with trade-offs: If you chose to be a dumb hulk, you’d struggle with in-game conversations. If you chose to be more skilled with a computer than with a knife, your abilities could come in handy in a lab—but not so much during a fight. The postapocalyptic landscape was not only populated by monsters and other threats; it was filled with oddball characters (some of them creepy, others very endearing), and often unsettling mysteries. (Why does the local food vendor seem to have a steady supply of tasty and nourishing “iguana bits” when you don’t see many iguanas? And why is this doctor in a makeshift hospital also shipping meat to … Oh no.)

Choices mattered in Fallout, and they mattered in each of its subsequent installments, set in different American locations such as Las Vegas, Washington, D.C., and Boston. You could help bring order to a lawless town, or you could join up with the gangs running it. You could negotiate in good faith, or you could steal what you needed. You could try to reason with people, or you could sneak a grenade into their pants (no, really). Fallout was addictive, not because you were playing an arcade game, but because you had to stay alive while discovering new things, dealing with new friends and enemies, and making difficult decisions that could haunt you later in the game.

As someone who (along with millions of other players) has explored every installment in the series, I had my doubts about whether a television show, which Amazon first announced in 2020, could fully capture the game’s quirky weirdness. I’m happy to report that the Fallout show—out today—is dark and thought-provoking, but also often hilarious. The adaptation centers on a young woman named Lucy who was raised in Vault 33, a community modeled on a stereotypical midwestern town. (The Vaults are all identical steel warrens, but each has its own peculiarities.) Lucy, having never lived anywhere but her subterranean hometown of “33,” is nice to a fault. She doesn’t even swear: She peppers her speech with the occasional “okie dokey!” and never uses an expletive stronger than “fudge.”

Lucy embodies the ethos of the Fallout world, a retro-futuristic, atompunk pastiche of 1950s America. In the alternate history of the Fallout games, the stress of constant wars for resources pushed the United States, in the late 20th century, back toward the warm Baby Boomer heaven of stay-at-home moms in aprons and high heels, big cars, and mindless jingoism. All of this nostalgia was wrapped in an insipid consumer culture, and serviced by a small group of paternalistic corporations whose many products still litter the destroyed landscape.

[Read: How close are we to nuclear war?]

This fascination with the past is essential to the feel of both the games and the series: Fallout’s creator and producer, Tim Cain, explained many of the game’s Cold War references in a 2023 video. I asked Brian Fargo, the executive producer of the first two Fallout games, why the design team embraced the era of fedoras and TV dinners. (Imagine Don Draper and the ad executives from the first season of Mad Men showing up in the 21st century and giving the world a total Eisenhower-era makeover.) Fargo, who’s now the studio head at inXile Entertainment, told me that “the contrast between violence and innocence is always striking when done well, and looking back, the ’50s seem like the epitome of innocence.”

Indeed, the games and the series, both of which rely on vintage tunes from artists such as Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole, are shot through with this melancholy. Much like another great series based on a game, The Last of Us, a terrible sense of loss permeates Fallout, but it never slides into pathos. The Fallout games were made more for adults than children: They are filled with sly humor, pop-culture references, and difficult moral choices that have no real bearing on “winning” the game. You could play as a jerk or a hero and still finish the main quest—but you’d also learn that every decision you made along the way had potentially karmic consequences.

The series embraces the same ambiguity and produces the same hand-over-the-mouth shock that comes from laughing and being aghast at the same time. Fargo told me that this, too, was intentional even as far back as Wasteland, a groundbreaking 1988 game that he created, in which the player wrestled with similar moral quandaries. “This was an aspect we wanted to lean in more with [the first] Fallout and that would paint a darker game.” Most games let you be the good guy, he said, and “people by and large want to be a hero, but you can’t truly be a hero … unless we offer you the chance to be evil.”

The horror of nuclear war is everywhere in the games, as it is in the series. (The scenes of the destruction of Los Angeles in the first episode are brief but unnerving.) Fargo and I are about the same age, and we grew up surrounded by the constant presence of nuclear war both in our lives and in popular culture. It’s a perfect device for science fiction, as Fargo notes, because it’s one of the easiest ways to imagine how to “reset society.” Fargo said he was “enamored with The Road Warrior and watched it dozens of times”—but the film that had “a profound chilling effect” on him, and the one that convinced him of “the true horror of such an event,” was the BBC movie Threads.

I’ve taught courses on nuclear weapons, and this made sense to me. Threads, which follows two families from the first weeks of an international crisis to 13 years after the eventual war that destroys the world, is intensely more terrifying than, say, the American TV movie The Day After. This existential fear suffuses the Fallout games and the series, but both of them balance the horror with knowing humor and a kind of sly, anti-establishment snark. (A game whose foundational mythology includes America’s patriotic annexation of Canada is already raising an eyebrow at you and daring you not to smile.)

Even small things lighten the tone; although Amazon’s adaptation stands easily on its own, veterans of the games will appreciate how the series replicates the Fallout world with loving detail. I sometimes found myself trying to catch the show making mistakes or taking visual shortcuts in its reproduction of game lore such as “Sugar Bombs” cereal (a shout-out to the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, according to Cain) or “Super-Duper Marts,” but couldn’t.

Fallout is a “mystery box” series, and I’ve written recently that I now really dislike these types of  shows because they tend to dodge having to actually explain the mystery in the box. Fallout, however, avoids this coyness by following through on each of its plot threads. If you’re a casual viewer, the plot will make perfect sense; if you’re a devotee of the games, the reveals will not break faith with anything you’ve learned over the years (including about those bastards at Vault-Tec, but I can say no more).

Either way, you don’t need to have played the games, or lived through the Cold War, to appreciate Fallout as a television experience. When the final scene teased the location of what looks to be Season 2, the gamer in me cheered—I know exactly where they’re going. The television viewer in me rejoiced, as well. Another season? Okie dokey!