Fallout creator Tim Cain is a fan of the Amazon Fallout show

“It feels like Fallout”
Amazon Studios

Tim Cain, creator of the original Fallout games before Bethesda took over, is a pretty big fan of Prime Video’s Fallout show, it turns out. In a recent video on Cain’s YouTube channel, he said he’s particularly impressed with how the writers handled Fallout lore and the balance they struck between the serious and the ludicrous.

"It feels like Fallout," Cain said. "That is hard to do, trust me. I know how hard that is to do. It's easy to write post-apocalyptic stuff that doesn't fit in the Fallout mold, and it would have been very easy for them to accidentally go off to be too silly. To have things that are like, 'that's not part of Fallout'. But, they didn't."

Cain pointed to the first person Lucy meets outside Vault 33 as the perfect example of the show’s Fallout-ness. The man is putting sand in a water tank and feeling surprised every time it gives him sand instead of water. Lucy recommends using water instead, and the man – dressed in a ratty shirt and cloth diaper – asks her to marry him, an offer she politely declines.

“That guy looked straight out of Fallout as one of our village characters,” Cain said.

“And that's what I'm talking about 'the feel', that's what gets me in the feels. Many of you probably saw that and never knew that... but that gets me, and made me go 'ooh, that's so Fallouty'. And that's what I wanted.”

Not everyone was quite so pleased with the lore that came out of the Fallout show. Fallout 4 lead writer Emil Pagliarulo said after the series debuted that Fallout 4’s hero Nate had an appearance in the original Fallout, but that appearance made him a war criminal – something Pagliarulo quickly backtracked on after seeing fan reactions.


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Josh Broadwell

JOSH BROADWELL

Joshua Broadwell is a freelance writer with bylines for GameSpot, NPR, Polygon, and more.