Is Prime Video’s ‘Fallout’ TV show canon to the games?

Fallout is finally set to make the jump from consoles and computer screens to a streaming service, watched primarily on consoles and computer screens. Ron Perlman was right: War never changes.

With a quarter century of history in the rearview, fans of the apocalyptic video game series are understandably concerned about the franchise’s ongoing legacy. Will this fresh new take on their beloved game treat what came before with reverence, adoration, and respect? Will Prime’s Fallout slot snugly into the events of the Fallout series of games?

The short answer is “yes.” The long answer is “yes, and that’s insane.”

The bonkers implications of Fallout as canon

According to Bethesda bossman Todd Howard, the studio considers the events of Amazon’s Fallout series a part of the official history of the franchise. Cool. Cool beans. 

Calling the show canonical sounds simple enough, right? Take all of the Fallout games, subtract the ones that Bethesda doesn’t consider canonical (Fallout Tactics, Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, canceled projects like Fallout Extreme and those false-start Fallout 3 attempts from the 2000s) and there you have it: A self-contained, pre-built universe with set rules and established characters to build around.

Except – and here’s the thing – the Fallout games, even the canon ones, are bananas. Going beyond the post-nuclear monstrosities which, honestly, just look like they’ll make for darned fine television, the franchise brings so much weirdness to Prime Video with it. The mysterious, whooshing, disappearing blue police call box from Fallout 2? That’s part of the canon. So is the fact that aliens show up semi-regularly and have a freezer full of samurai. Fallout: New Vegas features the remains of a man in a brown fedora in a fridge, thrown from the blast radius of a nuclear detonation, so Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull could arguably be considered part of this universe – a blessedly shorter version of it, anyway.

Fallout 4 features a Boston bar that’s a carbon copy of the bar from Cheers, complete with skeletal versions of everybody who knew everybody else’s name, opening up connections to the entire Tommy Westphall multiverse. Ada, a Protectron robot in the same game, can be brought to the wasteland’s multiple school locations, where she might ask, “if you don’t eat your meat, how can you have any pudding?” Is Pink Floyd canon? How much is that going to cost? Between Fawkes’s “Wake up! Time to die!” dialogue from Fallout 3 and the Synth/Institute storyline that becomes the focus of Fallout 4, to say nothing of the dozen or so other visual references to Blade Runner throughout the series, does Prime’s Fallout include Ridley Scott’s neo noir masterpiece in its timeline? And if so, doesn’t that make Alien a part of Fallout, too? And by extension, Predator, Soldier, and Firefly?

And what’s more, we’ll calm down now. Sorry. Got a little excited there. Fallout hits Prime Video April 12, 2024.