"This might sound weird, but whatever happens with it, I don’t care," Sawyer said. "My attitude towards properties that I work on, and even characters that I create, is that I don’t own any of this stuff. It was never mine. And the thing that I made is what I made."

Sawyer acknowledged that he might have opinions on changes or new additions to the world of Fallout, but said he doesn't "get attached to things in that way" because he doesn't think it's healthy to be overly invested in something he can't control.

"There are things that I might watch and say, ‘I don’t think I would have taken this that way’, and then there are other things that I think are really cool," he said. "But it’s not my space, it was never my thing. I was a guest working in it. So I try to keep a level of distance between myself and the setting."

Sawyer isn't one of the original minds behind Fallout, but he does have a deep connection to it. Prior to serving as game director on New Vegas, he was project lead on Van Buren, the codename for the isometric RPG that was meant to be Fallout 3 before publisher Interplay went under, taking the game with it. Working on a Fallout game "was a dream of mine," Sawyer said. "Losing that hurt."

He eventually got another shot at the series with Fallout: New Vegas, which Obsidian turned around in just 18 months. That meant the studio didn't have any real time to fiddle around with the underlying technology, and Sawyer said the game was initially criticized for playing too much like Fallout 3. But by using the technology as it was, the team "had the luxury of focusing on conversations and quests, and really making those as robust and dynamic as we could," and that's what stuck: New Vegas carries an "overwhelmingly positive" rating across nearly 160,000 user reviews on Steam and is now widely regarded as the best of the Bethesda-era games.

"There was a lot of effort put into making sure you can twist and turn through the different factions and resolve those things how you want," Sawyer said.

"The initial impact where people said the gameplay feels very close to Fallout 3 is totally fair. But then as time stretches on, and people play them side by side, the fact that we had so much of our time to focus on the content, I think that’s what people were excited about."

That excitement clearly remains: New Vegas, and every other Fallout game, have seen a significant player surge on Steam since the Fallout series launched. And while the debate over whether Bethesda was trying to quietly retcon New Vegas out of existence occasionally veered into silliness, it also reflected how seriously fans take this stuff: It's maybe not entirely healthy, as Sawyer said, but it's genuine.

The Fallout series on Amazon is a hit, and a second season has already been confirmed. More recently, the showrunners hinted, not too subtly, that the city of New Vegas will feature prominently in season two—but perhaps not the New Vegas that gamers are expecting.

The full interview with Sawyer covers a range of topics beyond New Vegas, including burnout—something he recently said has replaced crunch as "the primary hazard of the game industry"—the Pillars of Eternity game, and the brilliant sleeper hit Pentiment. It's a good read—check out the whole thing at RPS.  And if you haven't played New Vegas and are curious what you're missing, be sure to have a look at our guide to getting the most out of it today. 

"We put together all sorts of skeleton outfits," she said, including on location in the Namib Desert. What the skeletons were wearing depended on, among other things, how long they were supposed to have been decaying, and what led to their skeletonification.

The effects of time on Fallout's post-apocalyptic USA don't always feel consistent to me, but it's complicated—bombs, radiation, inconsistent upkeep, and videogame conventions all factor into the deterioration levels of Wasteland stuff. For their part, Westcott says the show's costume department did "a ton of research" to figure out how and how much to age each garment. 

When designing Lucy's wedding dress, for instance, they considered how many generations had used it before her, and what specifically would happen to it after being worn so many times. "You're pulling it on, so you get, maybe, oil from your fingers [in particular places]," Westcott said. "So it was all about traveling through real situations."

Out in the Wasteland, they wondered what would happen to textiles that were left in a box for a century or two, or worn out in the sun. 

"If they found an old warehouse that made jeans, OK, so they're gonna look new, but maybe they were in here for so long that it's like, what do they look like, and then what would these people do with them?" said Westcott. "So it was this sort of knock on effect of, what would you find, what would it look like, and then what would you do with it?"

The costumers did take some artistic license: I'm not convinced that The Ghoul's cowboy costume could really have survived 200 years of rugged use in the Wasteland, for instance, but it's a fun detail. I didn't actually notice that he was still wearing his pre-bombs costume until it was pointed out to me, and that was the idea.

"I pitched that idea early on to [the producers] that we could use his cowboy costume as The Ghoul, and just age it to such a degree that people wouldn't recognize it at first glance," said Westcott. "You wouldn't see that it was the same guy unless you were really, really, really looking. And that was all about our textile department just aging it so much, to such a degree—they're an insanely talented group of people."

The distressing required "a lot of trial and error," Westcott says, because, for example, a certain technique might accidentally change the color of a fabric.

During our chat, Westcott also revealed to me one secret to making utility jumpsuits look good: Italian four-way-stretch fabric. I also recently spoke to Fallout's production designer about the fabrication of the show's wearable power armor, which turned out remarkably faithful even though Bethesda never told them they had to stick to the games.

The Fallout series on Amazon is a hit, but not everyone is entirely happy with it. I am of course talking about lore nerds who take issue with the game's handling of New Vegas. Todd Howard himself shot down fan theories that Bethesda was attempting to use the show to retcon Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas from official existence, but as Chris Livingston noted in his own deep-dive debunkification of those theories, there were still questions left unanswered.

And seriously, this is where the spoilers begin.

The Fallout series ends with a shot of the city of New Vegas in a dire state: No neon lights or flashing signs, debris in the streets, and broken gates at the walls. It's a startling contrast to the bright, lively city that appeared in Fallout: New Vegas. So if New Vegas isn't being retconned, then what happened?

Chris' theory, simply put, is that shit happened, and apparently that's pretty much the case.

"All we really want the audience to know is that things have happened, so that there isn't an expectation that we pick the show up in season two, following one of the myriad canon endings that depend on your choices when you play [Fallout: New Vegas]," showrunner Graham Wagner said in an interview with GQ (via Eurogamer).

"We really wanted to imply, guys, the world has progressed, and the idea that the wasteland stays as it is decade-to-decade is preposterous to us. It’s just a place [of] constant tragedy, events, horrors—here's a constant churn of trauma. We're definitely implying more has occurred."

That's an interesting perspective, because while I would never think to contradict the people actually making the Fallout show, I feel like to a large extent the opposite is true. More than 100 years separate the events of Fallout and Fallout 4 (Fallout 76 is set even earlier than the first Fallout game) and yet nothing meaningful has changed: The world remains a shattered, irradiated mess, with "civilization" reduced to small pockets of survivors struggling to eke out an existence amidst the twin horrors of mutants and fascism. I'm not a committed follower of the lore so that's an admittedly casual perspective, but really, what has changed? A century after the first time we stepped outside the vault, everything still sucks and shows no sign of changing.

But that may be an overly broad perspective. Ron Perlman said "war never changes" and perhaps that's applicable here too. The world remains a hot mess because we choose to make it so, but it's the actions we take within those choices that matter on a day-to-day basis. Which is not the most optimistic attitude to have, but one seemingly held, or at least recognized, by Wagner and fellow showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet.

"I think it would have been a mistake to go from the retro-futuristic America to another America that has been fully civilised and the NCR is doing everything great," Wagner said in response to a question about the controversial decision to nuke Shady Sands. "We love Deadwood. I think if there was a fourth season of Deadwood, there'd be insurance companies, there'd be traffic, and it wouldn't be a Western anymore. We wanted to live in that first season of Deadwood space, of like, 'What's going to happen? Where is everything?'

"It really was our belief, also, that though there are the events of the games, it's not frozen after that. History is not static. It keeps going, and entropy is a constant. Which is a less flashy way of saying 'war never changes'."

"It seems inevitably the message of the Fallout games is that we will veer towards destruction of some kind, and our best efforts to restart civilization may be doomed," Robertson-Dworet said.

Ruined or not, it sure sounds like the second season of Fallout will focus at least some of its attention on New Vegas. "The idea that more stuff has happened, and that we're not leaving worlds as we left them, was sort of the philosophy of approaching the first season being set in Los Angeles," Wagner said. 

"We do hope to continue that, and create story on top of story... That's been the entire exercise from the jump, right? 25 years of games, how do you do something on top of it, like a teetering Jenga tower. But that was always the goal. So we are hoping to do that again in another area that is strongly implied by the finale of the first season."

In case that wasn't quite pointed enough, referring to the closing shot of New Vegas at the end of the final episode, he added, "It sure would be strange if we went off to New York City after that."

Amazon confirmed last week that a second season of Fallout is on the way. Hopefully then we'll finally discover what "things" really happened to the jewel of the post-nuclear desert.

That really doesn't seem to be stopping anyone but Purnell though—the internet is thirsty for The Ghoul. If you've been following the show, your social feeds, like mine, have likely been inundated with Ghoul posts, fanart, and relentless fancam edits. 

Let's not kid ourselves. If we set aside his face for a second, The Ghoul is the prototypical hot guy of modern television: a bad man with a sad backstory who's really good at what he does, even if (especially if?) what he does is remorselessly torture people. Folks love a competent bad man. As far as ghouls of Fallout go, The Ghoul's actually pretty intact, facially, enough so that I feel like other ghouls could nearly mistake him for a regular old smoothskin. Maybe blood splatter is moisturizing. Let's all just admit that's a conventionally attractive ghoul. 

I was reticent to go all fandom on main, but I knew this was coming well before the show aired because this is not the first ghoul that Fallout fans have caught a bad case of rads for. If you happen to be new to the series, please allow me to tell you that this is something of a tradition.

There's no doubt in my mind that The Ghoul was intentionally cast in the mold of a different irradiated fella: Fallout 4's own sad bad boy Hancock, who was also much beloved by fans. Hancock makes his intro in Fallout 4 when you arrive in the crime and vigilante-ridden settlement Goodneighbor. His first act? He stabs a guy in front of you. But the guy was trying to extort you for protection money, so who's the real villain here? Hancock immediately establishes himself as a smooth talker—charismatic and flirtatious with a personal moral compass that demands keeping the peace with occasional violence. He's got a real king of the pirates vibe, despite the landlocked neighborhood.

He has a sad backstory of his own, as is prescribed for maximum internet thirst, in which he and other ghouls were booted out of one of the east coast wasteland's main settlements, Diamond City, due to prejudice against ghouls. After a lot of run-ins with raiders and a fair share of chem benders, conveniently-named John washes up at Boston's Old State House in front of a set of clothes inspired by ol' founding fathers John Hancock and decides to roll with the professional cosplay life, adopt the moniker, and declare himself mayor of Goodneighbor, "by the people for the people," including ghouls. 

He was a hit, and it was no mistake that everyone took to Hancock like moths either. Though I imagine some will own up to being ghoul-lovers even earlier in the series, Fallout 4 was the first time that Bethesda had fleshed out a companion romance system in one of its flagship RPGs. You know the kind: Collect your crew of misfits, do their personal quests, get the tragic backstory and a sidequest to help them solve it, and then the kissing. Fallout 4's companion romances didn't hit quite like the BioWare RPGs that I suspect inspired them, but it did manage to attract exactly the audience it was angling for (Sit down, Garrus-enjoyers, I know you still win the inhuman loving olympics). Hancock has his own rather devoted crew producing fan works to this day.

If Hancock set the mold in 2015, The Ghoul's gone and broken it: Hancock hails from the "I can fix him" era of fandom love for bad dudes, but as of 2024 it feels like we've collectively arrived in our "I won't fix him" era of just admitting that irredeemable evil is hot sometimes. Although we've gotten so much of Cooper's humanizing pre-war backstory and his offer to team up with Lucy at the end of season one, so perhaps the inclination for redemption is no more securely buried than The Ghoul himself was. Maybe you can fix him, sweetheart.

With all this love for the TV show, it's no surprise that people are flocking back to Fallout 4 for their own wasteland adventures. We may not think of it as the best of the series, but Fallout 4 is the best to play today, in our opinion. In case you needed any more convincing, there's the smoochable ghoul for your consideration.

"I still love the moment that Lucy comes out of the vault," Howard says in a new Q&A video. "I think that captures so much. It's an earned moment, and visually a really, really beautiful one."

Rolling back the massive vault door and walking out into the sunlight has been an essential part of the Fallout experience going all the way back to the very first game—it's as iconic as Ron Perlman saying "war never changes" (although Walton Goggins got to say it for the show.) But for Howard it's an element of storytelling that goes beyond just the Fallout series: It's a "step out moment" that's become a staple of Bethesda RPGs.

"We always have that 'step out' moment into the world, so to say," Howard said in 2021 while talking about the then-unreleased Starfield. "The technology has changed. We've all changed. So our expectations when loading up a game, like, 'Okay, I'm going to step out and there's going to be this moment.' Us being able to do that and have it feel new every generation, every game, is something that is really special about what we do."

My favorite of Bethesda's step-outs is exiting the sewers at the start of Oblivion: It happened to be nighttime when I first made my escape in that game, and the darkness and quiet made for a genuinely breathtaking moment—I really felt like I was busting out and slipping off into the darkness. Fallout 3 is a close second because it was the first time I'd experienced the Fallout world from that perspective, and my eyes adjusting to the blinding light to slowly take in the devastated landscape made for a hell of a start.

Howard said his priority for the Amazon series is that it was "authentic" and "true to the world of Fallout" without repeating stories that have already been told, because to him it represents "a new entry" in the series—which is another good reason for getting that big moment into the show.

"So just like we approach a game, where we're gonna tell a new story, put in a new location, the show does that. It's exciting for us that people who maybe want a new experience, now they can in a new way, and people that never have, they get the opportunity."

"There's a lot of post-apocalyptic entertainment, but there's nothing like the world of Fallout," Howard said. "It can be very dramatic, it can be suspenseful, it can be scary, it has action. It also has some comedy, it has a certain type of violence. Weaving those things together is really really tricky and I think they've done an incredible job of it."

The Fallout series on Amazon is the latest game-to-television translation that's become a major hit: It ranked among the top three most-watched shows on Prime Video, and almost immediately after it debuted, a second season was confirmed.

It didn't end up feeling that way, mainly because the storytelling is good enough that the videogame references aren't the show's raison d'être. On further reflection, though, I also decided that those YouTube skits can be pretty funny when they're done well, so why not go all-in on gags if you're making a show based on a series known for goofy videogame conventions?

I'm so used to videogame logic, some of the Fallout show's gags didn't even register to me as gags until they were pointed out, so we put our heads together to identify the most videogamey moments from across the show's eight episodes. I've listed what we came up with below. 

Spoilers ahead, obviously—we include moments from every episode. I'm sure we missed a few good ones, too, so drop them in the comments if you think of any.

● Lucy introduces herself by describing her Repair, Science, and Speech skills

● It cuts away when the main character is about to have sex 

● The first house Lucy wanders into in the Wasteland contains a family of skeletons at the dinner table in classic Bethesda environmental storytelling style

● Knight Titus does what we all do the first time we encounter a high level enemy while wearing power armor: go "oh fuck oh fuck" and run away

● Lucy casually walks up to a Wastelander with her gun pointed at him

● The Ghoul is clearly using VATS to target body parts (Wilzig's foot) and cycle/pre-target multiple enemies in Filly shootout (also obviously has the Bloody Mess perk)...

● ...And then Maximus gets his power armor stuck on the level geometry

● Ma June gives Lucy a quest and adds a marker to her Pip-Boy map

● In Vault 33, Woody complains that he "must have put… 10 posters up" after losing the election—hanging 10 posters feels like exactly the type of quest you'd get

● Chet and Norm find bloody yet highly legible graffiti scrawled on the wall in front of a Vault 31 door: "We know what's in there." Classic videogame graffiti.

● Lucy learns about the history of Vault 4 by accessing a shocking video log on a terminal

● A Vault 4 blackboard gives out only extremely pertinent information in huge letters

● Thaddeus' injury is completely healed by drinking what's essentially a health potion (albeit one with a single very pronounced side effect)

● Norm does the Fallout hacking minigame to access the Inter-Vault Messaging system

● The show's climax is a "defend the generator while it powers up" encounter

● The Ghoul once again seems to use VATS to target the power armor's weak point

● A really long cutscene of speeches (flashback) by the villains answers (almost) all your questions

● No matter what choices you make while watching it ends the same way 😜

Well, there's a reason. Vault 33's main sartorial advantage was of course having a team of expert costumers on hand to custom make their outfits, but those retro sci-fi tailors also had a secret weapon: hard-to-get Italian fabric.

In the games, Vault suits do sometimes cling to muscles, but Fallout show costume designer Amy Westcott, whose other credits include Black Swan, Nightcrawler, and The Wrestler, wanted to avoid "shiny, spandex, sort of superheroes stuff."

"We were dealing with real people with real bodies," Westcott said in a recent interview with PC Gamer. "So it was a lot about what could look universally flattering in a way that wasn't skin tight, you know, and wouldn't make everybody feel terrible and self conscious, but had a cool [look]. It's almost like we followed a bit of an aviation suit, you know, where you zip it up and use that. So it was tight, but it wasn't within an inch of its life kind of tight."

To achieve the fit, Westcott sought out a "matte fabric that had a four way stretch." After making multiple prototype vault suits with different fabrics, Fallout's costume department landed on a niche Italian product from a company called Mectex, which Westcott also relied on for 2013 sci-fi movie After Earth. Importing small batch fabric from Italy added complications to the department's task, but Mectex made "hands down" the best fabric for the job, said Westcott.

I suggested that cosplayers might be disappointed to know that looking as good as a citizen of Vault 33 requires sending a custom fabric order to northern Italy—and then hand-dying that fabric to match Fallout's particular blue—but Westcott suggested that hobbyists might not have to go that far to get a good result if they don't plan to shoot a TV show in the outfit.

"I think if you're not wearing it for 12 to 15 hours, [another four-way stretch fabric] could go back to its shape," said Westcott. "But when you're wearing it for that long, it can really take a beating because you stretch it when you're moving, and then a lot of things bag. So after hours of working with it—the big challenge was finding the fabric that would go back to its initial shape."

One of the Fallout show's more impressive feats is how it reproduces so much fundamentally goofy retro sci-fi stuff from the games in a way that manages to be both faithful and plausible-looking—or, at least, cooler-looking than you'd expect. The Italian-fabric Vault suits are one example, and last week, Fallout production designer Howard Cummings told me all about another: the wearable suits of power armor fabricated for the show.

LaKeith Stanfield, known for his work in Get Out, Sorry to Bother You, Uncut Gems, Knives Out, and Judas and the Black Messiah—for which he earned an Academy Award nomination—is in talks to star in the film, according to the report. Film and television production company Di Bonaventura Pictures, best known for the Transformers and GI Joe films, is signed to produce.

Max Payne—the game, not the film, which despite watching some trailers and clips remains a big blank spot on my memory—has some weird stuff going on, but El Paso, Elsewhere dives much, much deeper into those waters. From the Steam page:

Hunt werewolves, fallen angels, and other damned creatures in a vivid slow motion love letter to action classics. Fight your way through a reality-shifting motel, floor by bloody floor. Save the victims of Draculae, lord of the vampires. Destroy the villain you loved—even if it means dying yourself.

Initial reaction? That could be very cool. I'm envisioning something like Daniel Baldwin's character from John Carpenter's Vampires on a redemption arc through Control's Oldest House, which is almost certainly not what it's going to be. Whatever's cooking, that's a hell of a setup. 

Here's the El Paso, Elsewhere story trailer from 2023.

Strange as it is, El Paso, Elsewhere was very well received: It was nominated for Best Indie Game at the 13th New York Game Awards and Outstanding Achievement for an Independent Game at DICE, and holds a "very positive" use rating on Steam. 

PC Gamer contributor Dominic Tarason likewise gushed about the game, calling it "one of the boldest, freshest games" of 2023.

"It is a modern gothic love story, with gut-wrenchingly good writing and voice acting carrying a script that would be overwrought in any other context," he wrote. "It is a heartfelt and personal dive into the world of bad breakups and cycles of abuse, accompanied by a huge high-energy soundtrack (80+ songs, all bangers) including an entire bespoke horror-themed hip-hop album.

"This mashup feels like a disaster in the making, like injecting the most philosophically resonant moments of Disco Elysium into a classic Quake deathmatch then bunny-hopping and rocket-jumping your way to self-realization. It sounds like a joke. It absolutely should not work. But it does."

Commenting on the announcement of the El Paso, Elsewhere film, director and Strange Scaffold founder Xalavier Nelson Jr (also a past PC Gamer contributor) said, "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH"

The map appears behind the TV weatherman we see on the show, and it's clearly not a map of the United States as they are in our timeline. It's actually the version Fallout: New Vegas lead designer and project coordinator Josh Sawyer drew for his home-grown Fallout TTRPG, and he replied to a tweet pointing out the map's appearance on the show saying, "[me looking at this 20 years later] what fuckin dipshit drew this up".

What makes this map different is that it illustrates a USA where the states have coalesced into 13 super-states with names like Gulf, Plains, and Eastern. (Texas is just called Texas, though it has incorporated Arkansas.) This tracks with the American flag seen in the games, which only has 13 stars on it.

A second season of Fallout has been confirmed, and we've put together a list of things we'd like to see from its continuation. Mostly it's just Norm. Give us more Norm and we'll be happy. 

"They didn't say, 'You have to do the game,'" said Cummings in an interview with PC Gamer this week. "They never said that. They said, 'Show us what you think it should be.'"

Cummings didn't know much about the Fallout games when he started working on the show, but after reading the script and researching the series, he says he "just loved it" and decided, "We have to try to recreate it as best we can." Knowing the power armor would be his biggest task, it was the first thing he and prop masters Michael Jortner and Peter Gelfman started work on. That was a slight problem.

"It was so early on, Bethesda didn't know what we were doing quite yet, so they weren't sharing assets with me," said Cummings. When they later showed Todd Howard and other producers what they'd been working on, the response was, "Oh, you're doing the game," he recalled. 

Working with Bethesda was the opposite of some other production experiences he's had, where the source material's owner insisted on approving each and every detail. "I started turning to them, instead of the other way around," said Cummings, because he knew fans were "going to analyze the heck out of" the show.

It's probably a good thing Bethesda wasn't breathing down his neck, because it sounds like the power armor was a hard enough project without any extra red tape. Generally, prop designers will put someone in a green or blue suit and stick pieces of sci-fi armor to them to create a reference for CG artists, says Cummings, but in this case, executive producer Jonathan Nolan "really felt it had to be a functioning suit."

The power armor was initially modeled by concept artist Thang Le, and the designs were sent to a company called Legacy Effects, which has produced many famous sets of screen armor, including Iron Man suits for the Marvel films. 

At least four full power armor suits were produced, Cummings recalls, though not all of them were wearable. A "clam shell suit" was made for the scene in which Maximus climbs in and it closes around him. We're seeing a practical effect when the suit opens, but it couldn't actually be closed with a person inside—at least not without crushing them—so that bit is CG. Another suit was made not to be worn, but to be used as a "doll" that they smashed into things.

Other suits, however, could be worn by stunt performers and actors. The wearers could even puppet the hands, although only well enough to pick something up for a moment—anything that needed to be carried had to be affixed to the suit. This might explain why we only see power armor users holding guns a few times in season one.

Part of the reason Cummings wanted to produce the suits early was to give the performers time to get used to them. 

"The stunt guys have to rehearse in it, and it will look like shit if they don't have time to rehearse in it," he recalls saying while seeking a signature for the (presumably quite large) check to fund the armor's fabrication. "And the stunt guy, named [Adam] Shippey, he could break dance in it." 

Some of the suits we see are obviously animated, like when Maximus uses his Iron Man-like hand thrusters—a power armor feature invented for the show—during the Filly fight in episode two. But there was real stunt work there, too. For the bit where Maximus makes his entrance by descending from a wall of shipping crates, they hired actual jetpack pilot Jamie Stanley to perform the maneuver. He couldn't actually wear a full power armor suit while jetpacking, but he did wear pieces of it as reference points for animators. 

Besides the thrusters, the show adds an opening faceplate to the power armor, which is used a couple times to reveal the identity of the suit's wearer. Otherwise, it's the same stupid, clunky diving-suit-thing we see in the games. Adaptations are sometimes criticized for being too literal, but I can't imagine the power armor looking any other way.