“Fallout” on Prime Video: do you need to know the video game before watching the series?

The video game “Fallout” is finally available this week on Amazon’s streaming platform. But is it necessary to know the universe before starting the series?

Prime Video subscribers can finally discover one of the most anticipated series of the year 2024. This Thursday, April 11, Fallout is released on the Amazon platform. This 8-episode series adapts the universe of the video game license from Black Isle Studios, which was released in 1997 on PC. Since then, several other episodes have seen the light of day, some by Bethesda Softworks studios, and have enjoyed great success within the gaming community. The last one, Fallout 76, was released in 2018. This means that the series is awaited by fans.

But don’t panic if you’re not familiar with the Fallout universe: we saw the first episode without having played the games before, and the series remains completely accessible, even if you’re a newbie. And for good reason, the plot takes place in the post-apocalyptic universe and has retained its singular tone (and its characteristic black humor) to follow the adventures of new characters, so much so that the exhibition allows you to perfectly understand the issues. Conversely, those who are familiar with video games will be able to have fun spotting the winks and references.

Let us remember, however, that the original video game takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, two hundred years after a nuclear war. Two worlds oppose each other, the inhabitants of the Vault, who took refuge in bunkers, forced to return to the surface, in what we now call the “wastelands”, a particularly hostile irradiated world.

Prime Video subscribers follow the journey of three characters in particular: Lucy, an idealistic inhabitant of the Vault, returns to the surface to save her father; Maximus, a soldier in the militaristic faction of the Brotherhood of Steel, seeks to bring order; and the enigmatic Ghoul, a mysterious and ambiguous bounty hunter who has survived 200 years in this post-nuclear world.

The series Fallout brings together well-known faces from the small and big screen, such as Ella Purnell (Yellowjackets), Walton Goggins (The Bastard Eight), Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks and Aaron Moten (Emancipation). The series is partly produced. by Jonathan Nolan, creator of Westworld, and created by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner. All eight episodes are available in full on Prime Video.