There’s one thing all videogame adaptations in film and TV have in common: they stink. Or at least, that’s how it felt for a long time—personally, I stopped adding the caveat ‘good for a videogame adaptation’ after I watched the Fallout show and learned these things didn’t have to be somewhere between middling and godawful. But what do Fallout’s designers and developers think of the show?
We know series co-creator Tim Cain loved it thanks to his YouTube channel, and more recently, New Vegas director Josh Sawyer said in an interview with The 41st Precinct that he enjoyed both seasons, watching them as they came out—and Sawyer specifically had some love for the show’s interpretation of his game’s factions and setting.
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“I think it’s an amazing adaptation, honestly,” he said in the interview. “I know that the bar is not always very high for TV or film adaptations of videogames, but I think it’s one of the best that I’ve seen, certainly.” While there are things he might have done differently, he dismissed those as personal nitpicks: “Any writer is gonna look at something and be like ‘meh, I don’t know if I’d do that.'”
As far as the show’s take on New Vegas itself is concerned, Sawyer said he loved Justin Theroux’s take on the character and wasn’t “too bent out of shape” about changes that were made to suit the script, like the Dinky the Dinosaur landmark being turned to face a different direction than it is in the game (that might sound like an extremely small detail if you haven’t played New Vegas, but trust me, people have opinions on this stuff).
“I get why people get upset about that, but also the scene wouldn’t work at all [if Dinky’s orientation matched the game],” he laughed in the video. “Maybe people will say I’m a traitor to Fallout now, or something. But I don’t know, I thought it was a good representation of a lot of the iconic stuff.”
That lines up with what Sawyer has said in previous interviews, where he noted he thought of himself as “a guest” working on Fallout rather than someone who’d need a say in how it’s represented in a TV show a decade and a half later.
