Much as it may displease purists, it is no coincidence that two of the most radical, daring, visually striking and high-quality series of recent times are based on video games. The Last of Us Last year, it confirmed the narrative solidity that some of the best-written games boast, this year Fallout (Amazon Prime Video) perfectly exemplifies the appeal of some of the best interactive worlds, ready to be exploited by screenwriters eager for good foreign settings in which to set their plots once the comic book well seems to run dry.
With a superb production design that makes good on the maxim of fleeing from the digital and betting on conventional special effects when it comes to achieving visual packaging, the atmosphere of the game is finished off with that bucolic music from the fifties that was already present in the game, amalgamating a collage which, despite being ambitious and eclectic, doesn’t stop it from working like a Swiss watch. The performances (special mention to Ella Purnell and Walton Goggins), the main plot, the not-too-serious tone… everything works, everything seems balanced in the series produced by Todd Howard (developer of the video game) and Jonathan Nolan (director of the first three episodes). The visual identity deserves a separate point: it is so refined and so overwhelming that it makes the viewer not believe that it was cheaper than, for example, THE PROBLEM OF THE THREE BODIES.
The series is great, yes, and yet there is one thing more important than the series itself. And that is that when books, comics or biographies are adapted to audiovisual media, it is almost unanimously done respecting the history on which they are based. That is precisely what I did. The Last of Usfaithfully reproducing the characters, the conflicts between them, and even tracing plans from the original game.
Fallouthowever, inaugurates another type of adaptive form for live action. Following in the footsteps of animated productions such as Arcane either Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Fallout It doesn’t carry over a specific story from a specific game, but rather uses the game’s atmosphere as a setting to plant new characters and new plots. It doesn’t adapt a work, but its world. And it’s the best option, because the stories of the games Fallout are not its strong point, while its setting is unbeatable. Let’s not kid ourselves: it is not difficult to imagine the scriptwriters rubbing their hands together when entering the writing room to see how to play (never better said) with a world in which the game developers have been working for more than 25 years; a crazy setting in which cowboys, mutants, templars, nuclear armor, killer robots, cannibal thieves, giant insects, radioactive zombies, aliens —in some secondary missions— and practically anything that has occurred to any science fiction writer.ulp the last century.
Faithfulness to history makes it watchable The Last of Us It looks more like playing The Last of Us What to see Fallout It looks like playing Fallout. Which doesn’t make one better than the other, but it shows that this double way of adapting the two halves that make up a video game, story and world, to series or films (technically we would talk about embedded narrative and emergent narrative, but it’s not a question of giving a class on video game hermeneutics), guarantees that in the coming years we will have many stories, characters or scenarios to feed the transmedia ecosystem in which popular culture is immersed. Because, as they say in the series, war never changes. But adaptations, as it seems, do.
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