The second season of Amazon Prime’s Fallout TV show debuts next week, whisking viewers off to the treasured setting of Fallout: New Vegas – but the game’s lead writer has mixed feelings on seeing his work adapted for the small screen.
Talking to PC Gamer, Fallout: New Vegas lead writer John Gonzalez said he “really enjoyed” the first season of the TV adaptation, praising the “admirable complexity” of the world and Maximus as “a fascinating slant to take you into the Brotherhood of Steel.” Even so, it sounds like he’s a little conflicted about the second season of the show exploring a setting and characters he was instrumental in creating… and not getting his dues for it.
“It is very odd to see characters that I created showing up in other media,” said Gonzalez. “It’s also something where there’s no credit for that, there’s no residuals for that. And that’s something that I understood doing the work early on.”
Gonzalez definitely has a point. The fact that a second season is happening is proof enough that Amazon is happy with Fallout’s viewership, but a casual watcher almost certainly won’t be familiar with his name. Even fans of the game are much more likely to recognize Todd Howard or director Josh Sawyer than Gonzalez, even though he was arguably as or more instrumental to the game’s world, characters, and story. According to Gonzalez, that’s just the nature of narrative work, even across mediums.
“In some ways, I think doing narrative in video games is a little akin to doing comic book work,” he said. “In the ’60s or ’70s, it’s like, ‘Oh, you created Spider-Man? Good for you.’ I mean, at least we know who Steve Ditko is, right? But it doesn’t belong to you. That’s not the terms under which you do the work. So it’s weird. To me, it just shows that when Leonard Boyarsky and Tim Cain first imagined this world, I think that they did something that was a master stroke.”
Fallout season 2 premieres on December 17 on Prime Video, with episodes releasing every Wednesday until the season finale on February 4.
Fallout’s TV adaptation is “way more” popular than Todd Howard expected, so the RPG series’ devs have had to ensure “the games are ready for all the players who are coming into them”
