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Fallout creator Tim Cain is a big fan of the TV show

Nukes and crannies.

Promo art for Fallout on Amazon showing Maximus holding a bottle of Nuka Cola. Writing above him reads: "Your Last Refresher"
Image credit: Amazon

Fallout creator Tim Cain has plenty of praise for Amazon's recent TV adaptation.

In a YouTube video posted over the weekend, Cain said how much he liked the show, stating it was surreal to see something he had "worked on really hard" realised in real life.

"They had huge sets with amazing production values on them... Amazing props. The acting was phenomenal. It was just surreal to watch Fallout recreated in real life like that," Cain enthused. However, he said the main reason he liked the show so much was because of the way "everything feels like Fallout".

Trailer for Amazon's Fallout TV series. Watch on YouTube

"It feels like Fallout," he re-emphasised. "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 mould, 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."

The creator praised the show's Fallout 'lore drops', which he said there were "a lot" of. "I've missed stuff! I've watched videos where people try to find all the Easter eggs. I've seen people throw up reddit threads where they notice something where I'm like 'I watched that! I did not see that'."

Cain also praised the show's lack of a narrator. "There was nobody going 'and just to remind you, these vaults were built over 200 years ago...'. You don't need to know that. You can figure it out."

While Cain said this could make the TV show "harder to get into" than the game series, stating those who didn't have any prior Fallout knowledge may have felt a bit of a "bump", he believed the information was easy enough for viewers to piece together.

While he had good things to say about the show's main characters (more on that in a second), he also took a moment to express his delight in some of the supporting cast. When discussing a character Lucy asks directions from early on in the series, Cain said "that guy looked straight out of Fallout as one of our village characters".

"And that's what I'm talking about 'the feel', that's what gets me in the feels," Cain said. "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.

"Everything is not going to be perfect, everything's not going to be like in the games because, guess what, this isn't a game. This is a TV show, but the feel was right and that's what I liked."

As for the three main characters of Lucy, Maximus and The Ghoul, Cain said this trio felt like different ways players could approach a game playthrough. Lucy is "the nice character" who wanted to "go out and do good". She had high ethical standards. Maximus, meanwhile, had "his own goals" which may come across as selfish to some. "He wasn't going out of his way to be a 'bad guy', but he had goals he wanted to achieve and he was going to achieve them."

Cain then dubbed Walton Goggins' Ghoul as "the show's murder hobo", and I think this is probably the way I play: Shoot first, ask questions later (why yes, I have had to restore old saves because I couldn't live with the consequences of my actions before).

Cain also touched on a surprise lore drop within the series, so I am going to pop in an image break and spoiler warning here. If you have not finished the first season of Fallout, and want to keep as much a surprise as possible, please head elsewhere now.

Ella Purnell as Lucy in Amazon's Fallout adaptation. She is wearing a white tank top that is splattered with blood
Image credit: Amazon

Cain addressed the implication that Vault Tec itself dropped the first bomb.

"Yes, Vault Tec did talk about nuking first. If you've ever been in a company, they will have business plans that try to handle different contingencies. But I don't think they nuked first," he said. "Barbara didn't strike me as a stupid woman, would she have sent her daughter to a birthday party on the day Vault Tec was going to nuke?"

Cain went on to state he believes Vault Tec was "planning" on nuking, but he doesn't believe it dropped the first bomb, and the company was also caught off guard by the war. Perhaps, Amazon will explore this theory further in Fallout's second season, which was officially announced to be in the pipeline last week.

For more on the show and its relationship with the games, be sure to check out Rick Lane's feature: What is the essence of Fallout, and does the TV show live up to it?

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