Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have long been upfront about the influence of video games in their HBO adaptation of the 1973 Michael Crichton film, Westworld. “[Video games are] a new form of storytelling, and you’ve seen film and TV struggle to kind of take on … grammatical ideas from gaming,” Nolan told Indiewire back in 2016.
Nolan (brother of Christopher) and partner/spouse Joy have decided to go directly to the source for their next project. For Amazon, they are developing a series based on Fallout, a post-apocalyptic, alternate-reality role-playing game set in a post-WWII America called “The Wasteland.” The game originated in 1997, and since then there have been three sequels, four spin-offs, and two “non-canonical” games that share connective tissue with the Fallout Universe.
Fans call the general aesthetic of Fallout “atompunk,” which is loosely defined as a science fiction-ish spin on mid-century modern styles. The official Fallout Twitter account teased a short clip.
This is not, of course, the first television show based on a video game. Who could forget Q*bert on Saturday Supercade in 1983?
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