Pushing Buttons: The Fallout series doesn’t just look right – it feels like it was made by gamers, too

In this week’s newsletter: Great game adaptations are increasingly high-budget fan-fiction, thanks to a generation of writers who actually understand games

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I am a few episodes from the end of the series Fallout on Prime Video. It’s funny and gory, at times sentimental and at other times ridiculous. In other words, it’s just like the games, which veer between quiet, tragic moments exploring the vestiges of America, and being chased down a hill by irradiated scorpions because you’ve run out of ammo.

Fallout’s ensemble cast – with Walton Goggins almost-immortal ghoul and Ella Purnell’s wide-eyed vault-dweller the standouts – lets it cleverly compartmentalise the different aspects of the games’ personality. As its director Jonathan Nolan pointed out, when I interviewed him last week alongside Bethesda’s Todd Howard (the director of the games), this is a common device in TV storytelling but rare in games. Grand Theft Auto V does it successfully: each of the three protagonists represented a different part of GTA’s DNA (Trevor the violent chaos, Michael the prestige crime drama, Franklin the Compton realism). But in most games we play one character, and we know them intimately by the end – or we get to shape them, and they become unique to us.