Fallout Producer Confirms The Show Is Canonical To The Game Series

Hard to believe that the Fallout franchise is about to turn 30 in a couple of years and it's finally being adapted into a live-action series for Prime Video premiering in April. In the upcoming series, it follows the story told in the games pretty well with nuclear war breaking out across Earth in the year 2077. In this world though, everything from clothes to the preferred types of entertainment, to even the style of vehicles adhere to a 1940s aesthetic.

Fans have been unsure of when the show takes place within the franchises' lore, but that has been clarified: this will be set 219 years after the war, taking place in the year 2296. That's nine years after the events of Fallout 4. Talking to Vanity Fair, game-maker and executive producer Todd Howard explains not only is the show pulling from the game's source material, but it's actually all canon.

"We view what's happening in the show as canon," Howard said. "That's what's great when someone else looks at your work and then translates it in some fashion." He also mentioned that the showrunners and writers added things to the lore that made him envious. "I sort of looked at it like, 'Ah, why didn’t we do that'’"

He added that they were smart in how they made the story accessible, but still very much felt like the games. "We had a lot of conversations over the style of humor, the level of violence, the style of violence. "Look, Fallout can be very dramatic, and dark, and postapocalyptic, but you need to weave in a little bit of a wink…. I think they threaded that needle really well on the TV show."

Howard continued with how he wanted to make the show and make it its own thing without retreading a story he already got to tell with the games. "I did not want to do an interpretation of an existing story we did. That was the other thing—a lot of pitches were, you know, 'This is the movie of Fallout 3…' I was like, 'Yeah, we told that story.' I don't have a lot of interest seeing those translated. I was interested in someone telling a unique Fallout story. Treat it like a game. It gives the creators of the series their own playground to play in."

Fallout stars Ella Purnell (Yellowjackets), Walton Goggins (The Righteous Gemstones), Aaron Moten (Emancipation), Moisés Arias (The King of Staten Island), Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks), Sarita Choudhury (Homeland), Michael Emerson (Person of Interest), Leslie Uggams (Deadpool), Frances Turner (The Boys), Dave Register (Heightened), Zach Cherry (Severance), Johnny Pemberton (Ant-Man), Rodrigo Luzzi (Dead Ringers), Annabel O'Hagan (Law & Order: SVU), and Xelia Mendes-Jones (The Wheel of Time).