With New ‘Fallout’ TV Show Released, New Fans Are Buying Games By The Millions

After its release on April 10, the Prime Video show Fallout, based on the role-playing video game franchise of the same name, won praise from the series’ fans and critics. Over ten days later, the official X account for the franchise posted that their latest game, Fallout 76, had received over one million downloads within a day after the show’s release.

In a follow-up post, the account stated that the franchise had over five million total downloads in a day as well. Many fans and the official Xbox account congratulated the development teams involved in the franchise for this accomplishment, with many commenting that they were among the new wave of fans who came from the Prime Video series.

Created by Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, the new show depicts the aftermath of “the Great War of 2077,” a fictitious nuclear war that led to the United States becoming an apocalyptic desert. The episodes follow “vault dwellers” who leave the safety of the underground 200 years after the battles and survive in a destroyed wasteland that used to be Los Angeles.

The show stars Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, Kyle MacLachlan and Moisés Arias, among others whose stories in the show connect towards the end of the season. The series was mainly filmed in the U.S., with a ghost town in Namibia, Kolmanskop, where the show’s wasteland scenes were located. The “Skeleton Coast” of the country’s border with the Atlantic Ocean gave a view of various shipwrecks that the show does not hide.

The video game series started with 1997’s Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game, created by game developers Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky, who were inspired by Interplay Studio’s 1988 computer game, Wasteland. The franchise has branched out to nine main series games with several spin-offs, with the most recent game, Fallout 76, releasing in 2018.

Tim Howard, the current director of Fallout publisher Bethesda, stated that a new main series game, Fallout 5, will begin development after the studio completes the sixth entry of The Elder Scrolls series. With the success of the new show, however, some fans have begun speculating that the studio may be adjusting its schedule for the new game’s release to further ride this recent wave of popularity.