Prime Video's 10/10 Video Game Show Deserves Kudos For Respecting Gamers & Casuals

Published Sep 21, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT

Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock.

Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil reboot has just stormed into theaters as the highest-rated video game movie of all time, and it’s further proof that the video game adaptation curse has been lifted. Back in the days of the FPS-styled Doom movie and the bonzo Bob Hoskins Super Mario Bros. movie, it seemed as though any attempt to adapt a video game for the screen was futile. Timothy Olyphant’s Hitman movie, Mark Wahlberg’s Max Payne movie, Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider movies — all noble but failed endeavors.

But in the past few years, Sonic the Hedgehog has become the best family film franchise at the multiplex, Arcane has brought the dystopia of League of Legends to the streaming-waves of Netflix, and shows like Prime Video’s Fallout and HBO’s The Last of Us have proven that critically acclaimed prestige television and video game adaptations don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

There’s a big difference between those two shows. Whereas The Last of Us has a single, linear narrative that the TV show could adapt directly (with shot-for-shot editing and verbatim dialogue in some cases), Fallout is a much more flexible gaming franchise. The Last of Us games keep you on straight rails — they’re basically an interactive movie — but the Fallout games are sprawling RPGs with hundreds of decisions for individual players to make for themselves. The way a Fallout story plays out, and what happens to the characters, all depends on a given player’s choices.

So, while every gamer had the exact same experience of The Last of Us, every gamer’s Fallout experience is completely different. Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy had the unenviable task of taking the faceless protagonists and open-ended narratives of those games and somehow collating them into a single, cohesive, linear TV drama. And, somehow, they pulled it off.

Fallout Is Accessible To Gamers & Non-Gamers Alike

Nolan and Joy coalesced all the different Fallout experiences by cutting between a handful of different perspective characters, all belonging to a different faction of this curious post-apocalyptic world. Through The Ghoul’s eyes, we see the lawless wasteland. Through Lucy’s eyes, we see a sheltered kid raised in the Vaults discovering the irradiated outside world. Through Maximus’ eyes, we see the endless struggle between robo-armored soldiers and mutant monstrosities. It’s been a smashing success, both critically and commercially, which is partly because it’s just as accessible to gamers as it is to non-gamers.

A lot of video game adaptations pick one camp, either alienating casual audiences with deep cuts from the games (e.g. Five Nights at Freddy’s) or infuriating gamers by disrespecting the fundamentals of the source material. Paramount+’s Halo series abandoned the source material altogether — it was as if someone saw the cover art of a Halo game and turned in their best approximation of what the game itself might look like — while The Last of Us season 2 made some baffling changes to the game (spoiling all the best twists upfront, for one).

But Fallout, much like Arcane, appeals to both. If you’re a long-time Fallout fan, you’ll find plenty of Easter eggs and references winking at the franchise’s history. But if you’ve never played a Fallout game before, you’ll still get swept up in this bonkers post-apocalyptic saga and the messy lives of these survivors.

The same goes for Cregger’s Resident Evil movie. It’s true to the spirit of the games, and it has plenty of Easter eggs for eagle-eyed gamers to pick up on — typewriters, green herbs, indestructible padlocks, etc. — but it’s a refreshingly intimate, standalone, character-focused story with no ties to the larger Resident Evil lore or the previous movies and games. If you’ve never played a Resident Evil game before, you can still enjoy this movie. And if you’ve never played a Fallout game before, you can still enjoy Amazon’s TV adaptation.

Fallout

8/10