'Fallout' & 'TLOU' Show There's No Right Way To Make a Video Game Adaptation

Video game adaptations feel like a new frontier for the entertainment industry right now. In the past years, some of the greatest works on television adapted famous gaming franchises, like Fallout on Prime Video, The Last of Us on HBO, and Arcane on Netflix. In theaters, a similar thing is happening, considering the success of flicks like The Super Mario Movie and Five Nights at Freddy's, and expectations are high for Borderlands in the upcoming summer. What is interesting about how video games make it to screens is that the adaptations are usually very different from one another, highlighting the fact that there is no blueprint or formula on the subject. So what's the secret to a good adaptation? And where have the unsuccessful ones gone wrong? Jonathan Nolan might have an answer for that.

‘Fallout’s Jonathan Nolan Believes the Video Game Medium Is Unique

There are many things that make video games such a compelling medium. What first comes to mind is the fact that the player is the protagonist, regardless of the type of game. When they have a compelling story, then the experience gets even better for whoever is holding the controller. For example, who hasn't played The Last of Us - Part II and not felt every hit in that ending? This makes translating this experience to a movie or TV series a nearly impossible task, and yet, somehow, it has been done successfully multiple times already.

During a Fallout FYC event moderated by Christopher Nolan and attended by Collider's own Therese Lacson, series co-creator Jonathan Nolan weighed in on this debate. Fallout has been among Prime Video's most-watched series since it came out and has been hailed as one of the best works of the genre, so it must have done something right. What's interesting about it is that the plot is actually the furthest in the franchise's timeline we have ever been, so, technically, the whole show is uncharted territory. A lot could have gone wrong, but one of the best things about it is how it actually feels like the games. For Jonathan Nolan, all this comes from understanding video games as their own thing: "Video games are just another form of storytelling, and they encompass everything — science fiction, there's genre stuff, there's non-genre stuff."

In dealing with such a broad scope, Nolan mentions how, in fact, bringing a video game to theaters or TV is actually about stripping it of its best qualities: "What I think about with Fallout is it's an open-world role-playing game. None of those things translate to the screen." Yet when Lee Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury) lights up Los Angeles in the season finale, yours truly immediately thought about going to the city and checking it out as if he were playing the games. So what's the secret to evoking such feelings? "For us, it was about finding a video game that had a personality, a tone, and a point of view, that would survive translation," says Nolan. And it's in doing this that Fallout excels. The dark humor, the morals, and even some of the action are among the game's best qualities. They are all what gives this world texture, the characters relatable, and the experience so immersive. And this has worked with other adaptations, too.

So What Makes a Good Video Game Adaptation?

Comparing different media is inevitable. Everyone always does it when arguing about why they like this or dislike that, but it isn't necessarily a fair point. A video game, a book, and comics are completely different things. With novels like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, "you have to try to get something from one medium to another, and you really can't change anything," says Jonathan Nolan. And, having worked on his brother's The Dark Knight trilogy, he feels like adapting comics is also tricky: "I watched the way that you adapted Batman from comic books to film, and I think the underlying idea was to treat it with respect, not to try to ape the exact framing of the comic books."

The Dark Knight is a great example, because it is anchored in the comics, but tells an original story. Video games, in turn, demand this to be done when adapting them, because, again, the playing experience is completely stripped away. So, according to what Nolan says, the secret is actually to pinpoint what it is that makes a game special, and apply it to the story. Another adaptation that perfectly gets this is The Last of Us. Game creator Neil Druckmann is closely involved in production, and this may have helped showrunner Craig Mazin to nail the tone of the story. The series has major deviations from the games, like the Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett) episode and the Kansas City arc. Those are so well written, a newcomer may even be surprised to learn they are not in the games. The games' debate about humanity's flawed nature, the essence of The Last of Us, is all there, so there is absolutely no need to tell the story exactly like the games do.

Animation offers the tempting possibility of adapting anything verbatim because of how it can express what can't be expressed in live-action, but the same principle stands. Arcane is among the best video game adaptations because of this. League of Legends has a lot of lore, but the games are about fighting online, which isn't translatable. So, it drew on that lore and the overall tone of the games to tell an original story. Coupled with gorgeous animation, it couldn't go wrong. The Super Mario Movie does it the same way, which justifies the movie's success, even if it pulls Bowser from the Mushroom Kingdom to Brooklyn. So it's always about keeping the essence of a game intact, no matter what the story does.

What Makes a Bad Video Game Adaptation?

Video games are a relatively new medium, but adapting them into movies is an idea that has been around for a while - and only recently started being done right. Most of the earliest adaptations tried to preserve the typical gaming aspects for experience's sake, like first-person point-of-view, but that is simply untranslatable."It's not really in the grammar of film," says Jonathan Nolan, and he is correct. In movies, though, this happens through narrative, not necessarily just camera perspective.

Rampage, for example, lost all of its fun when it was adapted into a movie, because it was simply meant to be a vehicle for Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson to display his action chops with total protagonism. He is awesome, of course, but, apart from a giant gorilla, the movie kept nothing of what made the game special. The same thing happened with a much-anticipated and terrible adaptation, Uncharted. It may tick some boxes regarding what the game is about, but there is no soul. While the game draws on classic adventure flicks like Indiana Jones to create its own layered world, the movie bet on Tom Holland's star power, with a little Mark Wahlberg on the side, to reproduce some key action sequences in the games and give an impression of excitement, but the essence of the games was nowhere to be seen.

Those two were about studios wanting to make easy money off fans using nostalgia and famous brands as bait, not about telling stories. Focusing on the financial return is the only thing that can't happen when adapting a video game, because, as most of us know, usually money and art don't walk hand-in-hand. So there isn't a formula or a cheat code for adapting a video game and getting it all right. It's not about "translating" a story or an experience-based trait, but rather about "retelling" it in a way that preserves the essence and shows respect. Bring new things and add to a franchise, yes, but do it in a way that makes sense with the original games. Otherwise, it will just be an irrelevant cash-grab attempt.