The Last of us, Arcano, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Halo, Cuperhead…For several years now, video game adaptations have been a delight for streaming video services. Running out of ideas, wanting to reach a new audience or looking for content: the reasons are many, but Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO, Paramount+ and others usually win in the end.
This Thursday, April 11 starting at 03:00 (in preview on Twitch, then on Prime Video), it’s the saga’s turn fall from Bethesda to do their show. After having seen the first four episodes of the series, a first observation: players will reach familiar ground, as the production has made an effort to remain faithful to the visual and philosophical universe of the game. Newcomers will not be excluded.
A series inspired by the saga, it is not a copy and paste
The series features Lucy (Ella Purnell), who grew up in Vault 33 with her father (Kyle McLachlan) and younger brother. All is well in a post-apocalyptic world where the rich found refuge, 200 years earlier, in vast fallout shelters after a Cold War that dragged on and ended in a nuclear explosion. A cocoon of peace made of laws and rules to respect and that will be broken when the heroine encounters the outside world for the first time to find her kidnapped father.
Because on the surface, the irradiated populations try to survive in the Wasteland, vast devastated American lands, where the law of the fittest reigns in the face of a hostile nature. The naive Lucy will cross paths with the Ghoul (Walton Goggins), returned from the dead, and an armored soldier in charge of protecting the population.
It is this mixture of devastated world, survival, atmosphere of the 40s and 50s mixed with technological advances, humans, mutants and robots, that comes to life on the screen.
“I was obsessed with the game, obsessed with its universe,” says series producer and director Jonathan Nolan (Western world) to GameRadar after discovering Fallout 3 in 2008. “Its ambition, its mythology and the sophistication of its world, its gravity. And what seduced me was its strangeness, its satirical aspect and the impossible-to-describe tone of the whole. We don’t rarely see things like that done.”
A universe also for beginners
Christopher’s younger brotherOppenheimer, Interstellar, The Dark Knight) perfectly transcribed his perception of the game universe down to the smallest detail. The emblematic yellow and blue suits, the cathode ray televisions, the music and mentality of the time, the propaganda posters…: the fall of the game is not scratched with the change of media. The kitsch and retro side of the shelters contrasts with the violence of the surface.
fall the series does not It does not follow the plot of one of the games in the franchise, although fans will find several references to different episodes. Its creators chose a completely different time frame, in 2296, nine years after the saga. Perhaps this is the good idea so as not to alienate players and avoid newbies with references they don’t have. And this also allows for the addition of new characters, new events or creatures, and even a new setting (Los Angeles, barely recognizable and never mentioned, but identifiable).
Video games, Hollywood’s new goose that lays the golden eggs
After cinema and movies (Pokémon Detective, Super Mario Bros, Sonic, Uncharted, Tomb Raider…), the small screen in turn takes over video games to reinforce its proposals. For a long time it was rude to delve into consoles and PCs as this was seen as a sign of a lack of creativity and movies were long in this picture.
Long before The last of us is a great success, the video game industry has, however, seen streaming video productions and giants knock on its door, eager to gain the rights to pixelated ATMs with a huge community of players, with profiles that, in Ultimately, they look quite similar to those of a good number of Netflix subscribers and others.
But where The last of us Following in the footsteps of the first game, filling some narrative holes, but sometimes without surprises, the other adaptations usually take parallel paths. From both the game and the book series, The Wizard He avoided some pitfalls this way, but he couldn’t avoid the comparison, Henry Cavill with Geralt of Rivia in the first place.
At your side, Arcanaadapted from the universe of League of LegendsHe surprised everyone by creating a story from scratch where characters from the game appear. Cyberpunk: Vanguard Runners EITHER aura He also relied on a known setting (the city of Night City for the first, the Spartan State for the second) to set up a known setting, but built another frame there.
As Neil Druckmann, creator of The last of us the game, Todd Howard, the producer of fall, is one of the series’ producers and was involved in every stage of production. This made it possible to ensure that the markers, not only visual, but also Bethesda’s trademarks (the humor, the merciless fights, the spurts of blood…) were well preserved, but without thinking about that for the fans.
Capitalize on success in a strong community
Because everyone’s objective is, above all, to build a potential for success in communities that will find it as an extension of a universe already known and appreciated, without depriving itself of attracting a newer audience. “I don’t think we’ll create a movie or a series for the fans,” Nolan says. “I think you can do it as a fan.” But be careful, the fans are also the most intractable.
If being a fan requires that directors respect the codes of a universe to better transcribe it and earn the respect of the players, the creators of the games also have an interest: a successful series is attracted and new potential players who “would never have gotten their hands on in the title without it. This is what Sony understood very well when releasing a new version of the first. The Last of Us renamed for the occasion Leftbecause its sequel had been called The last of us Part II. This A remake has also been offered, just three years after its arrival on PS5, just to be ready… for season 2 of the series. Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon either God of WarThe next expected adaptations should follow the same path from PS5 to TV.
“Video games are a medium for storytelling and, currently, the most important when you take into account the numbers, the number of players and the size of the industry,” Nolan told reporters at CanneSeries. For him, it will even become “the main source of inspiration” in Hollywood in the coming years.
It must be said that the world of video games has something to offer ideas to a Hollywood industry in search of renewal. The video game market is estimated to reach $254 billion in 2022 and forecasts place it at around $925 billion in 2032, according to market data specialist Spherical Insights.
Source: BFM TV
