Amazon's Fallout TV Show Gives Vault Boy an Origin Story

The upcoming Fallout TV series will shine a light on the origin of the Vault Boy. The Fallout series is one of gaming's greatest RPG franchises. It perfectly immerses players into a satirical post-apocalyptic wasteland, showing what would come of some of America's greatest cities if the succumbed to an atom bomb. The franchise started out as a top-down RPG, but when Bethesda took over, it made it a first/third-person shooter with an emphasis on choice and characters. For years, fans have hoped to see Fallout adapted into a film or show, but the ideas was rejected for a long time due to the fact gaming adaptations have a history of not being done right and it didn't make sense to directly adapt a game's story to Bethesda.

However, Amazon will be releasing a Fallout TV series next year that will expand that world in new ways. The show will be canonical to the games, but it won't directly adapt any of them. Instead, it's a new story in that universe. Part of that new story includes revealing details about imagery, events, and ideas that we are already aware of. As reported by Vanity Fair, Fallout will even give us the origin story of the Vault Boy. The Vault Boy is one of the most iconic pieces of imagery in gaming, as his signature cartoon-y look, big white smile, and bulging thumb is a sharp contrast to the horrors that await within the game itself.

"We had a lot of conversations over the style of humor, the level of violence, the style of violence," says Todd Howard, creative director of the Fallout games and executive producer on the show. "Look, Fallout can be very dramatic, and dark, and postapocalyptic, but you need to weave in a little bit of a wink…. I think they threaded that needle really well on the TV show."

For years, it was believed that the Vault Boy's thumbs-up was actually a reference to the belief that if your thumb covers the mushroom cloud after a nuclear explosion, you're far enough away from the blast. However, this was disputed by Brian Fargo, founder of Interplay (developer of the original Fallout games). The developer noted that Vault Boy simply has a "positive attitude". Whether the show will make sense of any of this remains to be seen, but it sounds like there's more than meets the eye with the Vault Boy.

Fallout TV Series Release Date

The Fallout TV series is slated to release on April 12th. Amazon tends to release episodes on a weekly basis, unlike some other streamers, so you probably shouldn't expect to binge watch them all day one. It hasn't been confirmed how many episodes there will be in the first season, but we can probably expect around 6 – 10, as is the standard for a lot of these big budget prestige shows for streaming services.