Bethesda Softworks director Todd Howard had to stop Amazon Prime Video’s Fallout TV series from using plot points earmarked for Fallout 5.
In a new interview with Den Of Geek, Howard, who is also an executive producer on the Amazon series, claimed he had to step in and help shape the storyline. “Well, there were some things where I said, ‘Don’t do this because we are going to do that in Fallout 5’,” he said, before going on to say Amazon were creating an original story within the current Fallout universe.
“It wasn’t the translation of an existing story. It was, what would the next thing be,” he said. “It just happens to be a TV show,” he added.
Executive producer Johnathon Nolan added that despite having to avoid certain storylines, pulling from an established world meant that creators had “all of the benefit of the beautiful storytelling that Todd has contributed to, but we also get to tell an original story within that world. As writers and filmmakers, it’s just a dream come true.”
Last year, Howard confirmed that everything that happens in Amazon Prime Video’s Fallout is “canon” to the Fallout universe.
In an interview earlier this year, Nolan compared Amazon Prime Video’s take on Fallout to the currently-unreleased Fallout 5. “Our series sits in relation to the games as the games sit in relation to each other. It’s almost like we’re Fallout 5,” he said to Total Film. “I don’t want to sound presumptuous, but it’s just a non-interactive version of it, right?”
Speaking to Den Of Geek, Nolan rolled back his comments. “I think it would be very presumptuous for someone to assume that we’d reach the calibre of the games,” he said, while showrunner Graham Wagner added: “I think we made Fallout 6.”
Amazon Prime Video’s series is set in the year 2296, 219 years after a nuclear war decimated the earth and nine years after the events of Fallout 4.
An official synopsis reads: “The story follows a community of people living in luxury fallout shelters who are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind—and they’re shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird, and highly violent universe waiting for them.”
Bethesda has confirmed that a sequel to 2015’s Fallout 4 is in the works, but production won’t start until the studio has shipped The Elder Scrolls 6. The television adaptation of Fallout is set for release April 12.
In other news, Former CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment and PlayStation worldwide Shawn Layden has spoken about the importance of platform-exclusive games.