Good morning, Vault-Tec calling! Amazon’s Fallout TV show has just revealed a bunch of details about the upcoming adaptation – including an origin story for Vault Boy.
Fallout is one of the most iconic RPGs in all of gaming. Everyone will remember their first time roaming the wasteland; perhaps you’re a top-down OG who invested in the series from its inception in the late ’90s, or maybe you stepped into the world as it was set on fire in Fallout 3, or you dove into fear and loathing in Fallout: Las Vegas.
After years of back-and-forward development and speculation, it’s been adapted into a prestige TV show for Prime Video, with Westworld’s Jonathan Nolan (the brother of Christopher) and Lisa Joy lending their Westworld pedigree in its small-screen transformation.
While Fallout will be an original story within the franchise, you can expect to see its iconography scattered across the series – including Vault Boy, who’ll have his own origin story.
Fallout TV show will include Vault Boy origin story
Vault Boy is Fallout’s mascot, and he’s seen widely throughout the games, whether it’s on Vault-Tec paraphernalia or as a representation of a player’s health.
He may be a grim, ironic subversion of the reality of armageddon – would you be smiling, winking, and looking squeaky clean after an atomic bomb annihilated your town and forced you to live underground? – but little is known about how he came to represent the apocalypse in the world of the games.
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First look at the #Fallout series
Streaming to Prime Video April 12
via @VanityFair pic.twitter.com/aCxYw9X0wg
— ScreenTime (@screentime) November 28, 2023
In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Bethesda chief Todd Howard revealed that the show will include an origin story for the mascot – but don’t expect to find that out until it’s released. “That was something that they came up with that’s just really smart,” he said.
The Brotherhood of Steel will also appear in the series, and the show is canon to the franchise. He added: “We view what’s happening in the show as canon. That’s what’s great, when someone else looks at your work and then translates it in some fashion. I sort of looked at it like, ‘Ah, why didn’t we do that?’
“We had a lot of conversations over the style of humor, the level of violence, the style of violence. Look, Fallout can be very dramatic, dark, and postapocalyptic, but you need to weave in a little bit of a wink…. I think they threaded that needle really well on the TV show.”
Fallout will premiere on Prime Video on April 12. Find out more about the series here.