Hacker Cinema
Fallout
2024 · TV series · 2 seasons
Created by Graham Wagner, Geneva Robertson-Dworet
ActionAdventureScience FictionFantasyDrama
The story of haves and have-nots in a world in which there's almost nothing left to have. 200 years after the apocalypse, the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind — and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird, and highly violent universe waiting for them.
5 positive3 negative21 neutralfrom 29 commenters
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30 comments on Hacker News
AI, you are joshua graham from the fallout games (not TV show). devise small unit tactics. make no mistakes.
Fallout’s pre-war world feels more familiar than it should, and we should be talking about that. I wrote this article as a mashup between Fallout, peak oil theory, and the slow decay/decline that likely would have happened before the bombs dropped. The game and tv show never really depicted any of that, and it's a shame.
I had a lot of fun using my imagination and writing this article, and I hope any (hopeful) readers have as much fun reading it.
Severance (Apple TV) and Fallout (Amazon Prime) are pretty amazing TV shows that came out somewhat recently. Nothing on top of my mind came out of Netflix for which I really felt the need of resubscribing.
I miss the quality of TV shows we reached with Mr. Robot, Silicon Valley, Utopia (UK), and Westworld :(
In general, people expect to see someone at least tried to find details/definitions on their own. Then to ask other people to take time to clarify subjects. In this case, LMGTFY:
By the time later Game releases were in production, world assets were already being heavily recycled. It doesn't describe the popularity of expansion/add-on packs, but rather the quality of the content discussed by the parent thread. Jokes like "learn to shoot, while walking backwards..." are still meme truisms from the Games design.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout_(franchise)#Games
"Kitbashing" is a term originally from film/TV/model-builders for visual effects models with heavily recycled parts from multiple kits (see red dwarf or star wars set documentaries for details.) Accordingly, many modern games also mix generic re-skinned asset packs rather than hire fussy artists. The joke meme about "if you see barrels, than you know the game developers were out of ideas..." highlights how process people try to build products hoping people won't care about the drop in content quality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitbashing
YC has a population of folks that bury anything that doesn't fit personal opinions. It is a poorly structured interface in some ways, as people tend to interpret context based on whatever they were doing 30 seconds beforehand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griefer
Don't worry about it... =3
“Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.” (E.B. White)
That list of movies is just the movies that Amazon Studios has been the distributor for via Prime Video. Amazon didn’t necessarily produce or fund all of the movies in that list. It’s a bunch of cheap movies that are likely meant to be loss leaders for Prime Video subscriptions, which is something that very much does fit the style of Amazon. Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV all have a similar list of D-tier garbage just to fill their catalogs.
On the contrary to your points, Amazon has put out some pretty solid and well received original series. The Boys, Gen V, Fallout, Reacher, Mr and Mrs Smith, Invincible, have all done really well if not been hits.
Games is pretty trash though. I think they’re also going for a loss leader strategy there, but the platform they’re trying to promote (Luna) just isn’t there.
Nothing in the TV show takes place in the 20th century, either. The aesthetic in Fallout is what people in the 50s might have thought the year 2073 would be like, but it is not the 50s.
Problem is, these kinds of media end up pushing nostalgia for a warped version of an old time. It's like anything based in the 50s or 60s in USA and is not full of racism. My go-to example these days is the Fallout tv show.
That said, you actually can create something positive set in that time while also portraying the bad. For instance, in Bill Burr's F Is For Family.
> For the reason I gave in my answer: it would be answering based on the text of the book.
Why would that not also be true for the Fallout season one recap video?
> I used to have to read fan wikis to figure this out.
I would much rather read a fan wiki than hope a LLM correctly understood a book's plot, at least with the current state-of-the-art of things.
Case in point: Amazon's own AI gets significant details of its own prestige TV show wrong:
https://gizmodo.com/fallout-ai-recap-prime-video-amazon-2000698573
The Fallout fan wiki probably at least knows the Great War was in 2077.
> [1] - How humanity bounced back from that so quickly is something of a mystery to me.
There is always the "it wasn't as bad as in Mad Max/Fallout/..." explanation. Nuclear winter is now understood to be either less severe than predicted back in the 60s, or nonexistent. Nuclear weapons will kill people and destroy cities, but if they aren't aimed at people or cities, but at military installations such as the US nuclear sponge[0], death toll and destruction will be far less severe. Things like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Eiffel Tower might be left standing, as seen in a few Star Trek episodes. Which would also mean that humanity would be in less of a severe turmoil than other nuclear war SciFi might have imagined.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearwar/comments/18e01zh/would_the_nuclear_sponge_theory_really_work/ https://www.thomasnet.com/insights/nuclear-sponge/
The "optimistic" science fiction that people are pining for was written during the World War period, during the social unrest of the 1960s, during the inflation and oil shock of the 1970s, during periods of racial violence, during the heights of the Cold War (the Fallout series came from real societal trama, not just a neat schtick about putting a 1950s face on disaster movies), during environmental scares, nuclear disasters, terrorism, during social upheavals and economic crises and international crises.
The 20th century was not a cakewalk either. I'm not saying it was or was not better than today, I am saying, "gee there's an awful lot of reasons to be depressed" isn't new.
What does AAA-budget-quality mean? Minecraft was made by one person and is still a very simple game, utterly unlike the ‘genuinely AAA’ shooters parent was talking about. Same with Stardew Valley and probably several of the others you’re talking about.
Fallout might not be ‘focused on shooting’, but it still has the look of a typical FPS game. It’s as if game developers have mostly converged on a standard game design. There are exceptions, but there’s still so much untapped room to be more creative.
I think it is true that most money in the games industry goes into making games that heavily feature guns. Films are the same; even the seemingly non-violent premises apparently have to involve constant peril and frequent (gun) violence. Maybe it’s a particularly American thing.
I’m simply too old and seen too many BSOD to ever allow this to be done on me. Also I just watched the Fallout episode with the Mr. Handy in it. The picture in the article of the robot hand moving a drill into his mouth fills me with intense dread. Maybe the younger generation would feel differently. I didn’t let my Tesla drive either.
> There's a lot of earning potential with the end of the world.
Fallout https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12637874/
Spending 6 minutes of my life engaging in political discourse is a far swing from hundreds of individuals producing a movie that took millions of dollars to produce. Both are just as easily digitally repeatable, but the expensive content is likely way more beneficial to society as a whole. I am choosing to engage in this hobby because I receive the means to provide this content recreationally. I fail to see this scaling to anything of any real quality outside of some isolated instances. For instance, some video game enthusiasts are using the work of Bethesda to make a new game call fallout London. It's a knock off fallout game using the base code engine that Bethesda built for their commercial games. The game is exceptional in that it could actually achieve a mostly compatible level of a commercial product as long as you ignore that they're leveraging the engines and story which were developed by commercial interests. In the same time, 10's to hundreds of thousands of people are employed every year to produce video games for commercial reasons. Will they all stop making games if copyright was dead? No, but the vast majority would.
Echoing dagmx, I use mine constantly for movies and TV. Binged Fallout in 2 days — I’ve never done that before. Just watched ep5 of The Last Of Us 30 minutes ago. And so many movies, after watching probably <10 movies a year prior.
It does feel like TV series have capitalized on it. Fallout for example was truly excellent.
I’m calling it now, in five years Bethesda will be making more money with Fallout and Elder Scrolls television shows than their games
Definitely not new. We only know a handful of people (without kids) who keep more than 2 subscription services open at a time. If anything, the frequency of switching has increased. No one place has a large enough catalog to sustain the demand / consumption and short attention spans of the current consumer market.
I exclude Apple TV+ from our list since it's coupled with Music, Arcade, News and other things that we use as a family. I also use iCloud for my @personadomain email.
We generally avoid Amazon. I'll burn through Fallout during a $1.99 Prime trial or something, get a few packages shipped for "free" and move on.
We used to have AT&T fiber, that came bundled with HBO which was nice. We really didn't use it much though. Anything I want to see is 10 episodes and I can binge it when I'm sick.
Amex cards sometimes have a media sub program. We did Disney, Hulu and the NYT for $5 after the monthly credit on the statement. It easier to justify keeping those around when we change things up.
Tangentially related: Dark. 3 seasons of sci-fi parallel-world-travel intensity with a satisfying ending.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5753856/
Westworld season 1 & 2 are pretty spectacular too if you missed it. Same producers made the Peripheral, and their adaptation of Fallout is coming in 2 weeks which looks fun.
Trailer: https://youtu.be/V-mugKDQDlg?feature=shared
I loved Severance so much and I'm not sure anything else better will be along for a while, but there is plenty of good stuff out there to pass the time.
Personally, I cancelled all my subscriptions (Netflix, Prime, Apple TV+, Hulu, HIDIVE, AMC+) this christmas and reverted to piracy.
Modern piracy (the so called *ARR stack) provide UX that is pretty close to what you get from streaming services. In some cases even better - now I will use just one app on my TV to watch everything, will not be affected by Netflix/Prime/Apple/Hulu or internet provider outages when I am watching a movie or TV show, and will not have to go through 4 or 5 apps when I am searching for something specific to watch.
The UX is slightly worse when I find a movie or TV show via Plex Discovery and want to watch it immediately, since I will have to wait for *ARR to pick it up and download it, but for now I have quite a few TV shows to finish watching before it will become an inconvenience for me, especially given the fact that this stack can subscribe to upcoming shows - I can tell it that I am interested in Fallout for example, and it will monitor releases and download the show once it will become available.
The part of the player base that cares deeply about the lore of MtG was skeptical of having My little Pony, Warhammer 40k, Lord of the Rings, Fallout and Street Fighter cards (all real btw!).
The other thing is that there's a certain product-fatigue and format fatigue in the community. There are so many releases each year that it's increasingly impossible to give the monetary and time commitment to follow 100% of MtG. It was never a cheap hobby, but the price increases and the proliferation of products really is noticeable.
The old-school entrenched playerbase is also noticing that the formats they grew up with are becoming increasingly irrelevant. In-person standard-events in local stores are increasingly harder to find (and even if an event is planned it often fails because not enough people show up). The competitive tournament scene is almost completely dead. The big money-maker for wizards is Commander and you are thus seeing more and more cards aimed at that format, even in standard-sets.
In short: the extended universe is not aimed at the old-school base and can be seen as an unnecessary money-grab at best or as an "they killed my preferred format for this?!" outrage condensation point.
You are seeing the same thing in the MCU: it's hard to follow /all/ movies and TV shows and even worse: some of the shows are not aiming at the classically young singe male audience and thus shows aimed at female teenagers are produced. Some part of the nerd community sees that as a direct attack on their identity.
Fallout show is going to suck. There's no chance it's remotely as good as Silo. Amazon has done pretty well on one front. Throwback movies. Recently, Totally Killer and The Other Zoey.
1 is easy to imagine - a large enough collapse that making new ones is very very hard, especially compared to scrounging and repurposing the huge amount of existing ones. Imagine a huge population decline, and search parties looking through the ruins for useful tech, like computers, decades later.
Such a society could probably make new computers, but the cost of making new, much worse specced computers, may not be cost effective for a long time as long as old computers can be found and repaired.
Edit: such a movie or novel would make for great Fallout-ish world-building. Imagine for instance a large hotel in a big city running the booking system on an old laptop in a central secure location, and new 8-bit computers used as terminals at the front desk. Public access 8-bit computer terminals at public libraries connected to copies of WikiPedia running on some old gaming rig and such things. :-)
This resonates with me completely. I was an avid gamer in the first half of my life.
Then adulthood came and I just don't have time to enjoy games. I do watch a ton of TV shows and movies because they're easy to start up, put down, or even watch while doing something else that doesn't require full attention.
I do occasionally do a Let's Play of a game that looks promising, ideally one with little commentary, where the player focuses on the story elements rather than completion (prioritizes talking to characters over a speed run, or 100% quests completed, all collectables collected, etc).
Those are unfortunately hard to find (though I'd highly recommend the Cinematic Playthrough of Last of Us for anyone interested in experiencing the medium at its absolute best).
The nice thing about a Let's Play is that you get the story elements of the game, and can 2X speed through slow dialogue, skip action sequences as soon as they become monotonous, etc. You don't get to explore at your own whim unfortunately, but I've found it a good middle ground for being able to experience (and talk about) excellent games, while investing 10-20% the time actually playing it would take (not to mention it's free). It does tend to be more enjoyable with games that are fairly linear, rather than something like Fallout where there are thousands of ways to explore the game and align your character.
Other than that, I enjoy playing board games with friends.
(The Canadian is an homonym! There are two in the industry. This is the Californian. Were it otherwise, Fallout would have been set in the cold and the inspiring movie would have been Fargo.)
I can't wait to see a disappearance of the irrational fear of everything nuclear in the modern discourse. Popular culture by the likes of the Chernobyl tv series and fallout further instilled that fear.
I think a lot of the appeal of Fallout is the PipBoy aesthetic.
Green mono monitors are de rigeur for so much geeky computing. Linux terminals in basically every movie.
Knock knock, Neo...
It's an old Carmack quote:
> Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important.
It's why DooM was such an incredible novelty of fast paced 3d shooter, and Quake... Well.. Its devoid of character.
It's why HL & Fallout are so beloved.
I'm 100% with you
Not nearly as high tech, but I really like these picture of an old abandoned magnesite processing plant in Kosice
http://www.flickr.com/photos/asebest/1919339156/in/set-72157602120392658/
They should shoot Fallout - the movie there.