One of the pillars of the modern gaming scene – and, now, a major release in the ongoing streaming wars that have come to dominate Hollywood – Fallout is soon to add another distinction to its growing, 28-year repertoire: a haunted house at Halloween Horror Nights Orlando.

It is, of course, worth taking each of these facets in stride, thereby allowing you to become as immersed as possible in the property’s “wonderfully surreal” world, as Amazon MGM Studios so aptly put it.

What is Fallout, the videogame series?

The massively popular Fallout started up in 1997 as a PC-only title, though its roots date back nearly a full decade earlier, with the original developers’ very first attempt at a post-apocalyptic game, called Wasteland, which they subsequently lost the rights to and were forced to start over with a new, thematically similar project. It wasn’t until Bethesda Softworks acquired the property, however, that it took on a whole new life – Fallout 3, which dropped in 2008 for both computer and consoles, was a watershed moment in gaming that still echoes to this day, delivering a lush open world that contained over 100 hours of content. Since then, the publisher has shepherded the series to further acclaim, releasing New Vegas in 2010 and Fallout 4 in 2015 (along with a whole slew of spinoffs, whose genres range from multiplayer-only to hack-and-slash to, even, pinball, in order to help fill in the multi-year gaps that the mainline installments require to gestate).

The disparate franchise is anthologized in nature, with each chapter following a different protagonist in a different region of the ravaged United States of America; these stories typically begin with the main character emerging from an underground fallout shelter to explore the oftentimes-bizarre post-nuclear world with its many attendant factions, locations, creatures, and, befitting Fallout’s penchant for humor, quirks. This narrative landscape is so eclectic – if not chaotic – not only because of the wildly different development teams that have helmed the series over the decades, each bringing their own particular stamp on the mishmash of material, but also because of a fundamental decision that was originally made back during the property’s very first days: it exists in an alternate timeline that branched off from our own well before the advent of nuclear war.

In this parallel reality, the social, cultural, and aesthetic status quo of the 1950s never ended, meaning that people still talk and dress like the post-World War II era. Furthermore, compounding this alternate scenario is the technological progression of mankind: transistors and, subsequently, microchips, which power our armada of smartphones and the internet that connects them all, were eschewed in favor of nuclear advancement, which has led to fusion-powered vehicles, machinery, and weaponry – meaning that computers in Fallout may be primitive, but soldiers can be deployed to combat in giant mechanized suits of armor. (The general term that sci-fi fans and creators alike have coined for this particular retrofuturistic approach or subgenre is “atompunk.”)

And all of this is even before the Great War breaks out between America and China on October 23, 2077, resulting in the dystopian, dysfunctional world that gamers find themselves plunged into. By the time the series starts up – the original Fallout takes place in 2161, while the latest entry, Fallout 4, is set in 2287 – there has been ample time for mutations, of both the animal and human variety, to occur and for a new hodgepodge social order to shakily settle in.

What is Fallout, the television series?

In yet another interesting twist, all of this inadvertently set the stage for Amazon Prime Video’s television adaptation, which is, actually, not an adaptation at all.

Todd Howard, the executive producer of the videogames, approached Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy, the filmmaking duo behind Westworld, the hugely ambitious HBO show that has some number of parallels with or echoes of Fallout, about mounting a TV production. Amazon MGM Studios, with its nearly bottomless bank account and dire hunger for streaming dominance (not to mention its pre-existent nine-figure development deal with Nolan and Joy), was eager to get involved with the equation, and the three partners settled on a novel premise: Fallout the TV series functions as, essentially, the fifth main entry in the game series, spinning an original-and-fully-canon story that occurs in 2296, the latest point yet in the entire (now-multimedia) timeline. This was not only judged to be the best, most creative angle to take for the new narrative, it was also considered to be the most practical; given that the source material is so largely driven by individual player choice, right down to the appearance and sex of the protagonist, attempting to adapt any specific videogame would be next to impossible.

(It should be noted that fandom actually played a large role in getting the Amazon series mounted, as well: Jonah Nolan was a huge aficionado of the games, having put in over 50 hours with Fallout 3 alone, while Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is well known for his passion for sci-fi overall.)

The result, when combined with a hefty $19 million per episode, is a sprawling, somewhat-discordant season of television that fits in perfectly with the intellectual property’s larger world. It begins the only way it can, following, as the studio itself puts it:

[G]entle denizens of luxury fallout shelters that 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.

All eight chapters of the first season dropped day-and-date on Prime Video, on April 10, 2024 (two days earlier than originally announced), intertwining the stories of three central characters:

• Lucy MacLean, who opts to leave her home of Vault 33 to find her kidnapped father, the fallout shelter’s overseer, out in the nuclear wastelands.
• Maximus, a squire of the Brotherhood of Steel, a quasi-religious order borne out of the ashes of the former American military who strives to track down and preserve pre-Great War technology.
• A pre-war (cowboy) actor who has been mutated by radiation exposure into a ghoul, a somewhat-zombified version of a human; he is now one of the most notorious bounty hunters and gunslingers in the land, known simply as the Ghoul.

Their paths all crisscross as they each come, for their own specific reasons, to look for a defected scientist who has stolen one of the most valuable secrets in the post-apocalyptic world. Upon the conclusion of the finale, the action moves from the greater Los Angeles area, which is largely new Fallout ground, to New Vegas, where the titular videogame occurred 15 years earlier – setting the stage for the second season, which will arrive sometime in December 2025 (Amazon MGM has already gone ahead and picked up a third season, as well, not waiting to see how the next batch of episodes performs).

What is Fallout, the Halloween Horror Nights Orlando haunted house?

This one, unfortunately, we can’t answer with anywhere near as much detail as of yet, but what little info we have thus far is definitely enticing, starting with the fact that the haunted house at this year’s Halloween Horror Nights at both Universal Orlando Resort and Universal Studios Hollywood will adapt the Prime Video series (perhaps ironic, given the show’s fundamental rejection of adapting any previous Fallout release).

Here’s what IGN, which got the exclusive-reveal rights, has to say about the upcoming haunt:

Guests will first enter Vault 33 and follow Lucy LacLean as she tries to escape a bloody massacre while also learning of an “evil hidden secret.” The journey will then take guests outside the vault and into the Wasteland, where they will need to dodge attacks from scavengers, raiders, and, even, mutated cockroaches known as RAD Roaches. Throughout the trek through the Wasteland, guests will visit the Super Duper Mart, encounter the Ghoul, and, even, meet Maximus and his massive T-60 armor.

While not specifically outlined in the article, it’s not inconceivable to see the maze’s facade being the iconic door that leads into the underground bunkers, a mainstay image of Fallout for many, many years now.

It seems only natural that Universal’s designers would highlight the more horror-esque sequences from throughout the first season, some of which IGN has already confirmed but some of which remain mere possibilities: the encounter with the giant mutated gulper, which is known for swallowing its prey whole; the abandoned supermarket that has been transformed into a meat shop by a gang of organ harvesters; the insidious – and oftentimes-grotesque – genetic experiments that have been conducted on the forbidden floor in Vault 4; the somewhat-similar scene in the secretive Vault 31; and, of course, the all-out battle that plays out at LA’s Griffith Observatory, replete with power armor-clad footsoldiers of the Brotherhood of Steel.

This litany should go a long way to addressing the question, which has been percolating through the fan community since the very first days that Fallout was rumored to be HHN-bound, of whether or not the TV series contains enough material to justify its inclusion as a house. (No, the overriding franchise cannot accurately be described as residing in the horror genre – it’s more a satirical action-adventure tale, if anything – but its narrative material contains multitudes.)

And it seems that Universal itself is sensitive to the topic – in the IGN piece, Matthew Flood, Senior Show Director at Universal Orlando Resort, had this to (preemptively) say:

“And you can see and understand what the world is just by what you pass, including the bodies when Lucy first exits the vault. That type of thing is really good for us in Halloween Horror Nights, and… yes, it’s gruesome, which is what our fans want at Halloween Horror Nights. It’s also scary and provides great characters, good monsters, all the mutated creatures, and the ghouls. That’s ripe for the picking when it comes to Halloween Horror Nights.”

But even if there weren’t enough creepy environments or elements to pull from to create a full haunt with, one could still make the argument that Universal has a history of tackling non-inherently-scary subject matter and presenting it in a scary(-enough) fashion – look at 2017’s American Horror Story: Volume 2, for instance, in which even a rather innocuous, older witch playing a musical instrument could pull off an effective jump scare on attendees.

There was one final tidbit that IGN managed to get out of the HHN creators: a “battle moment” that happens in the small, ramshackle town of Filly, in which our three protagonists meet up for the first time – and, of course, clash with one another and the residents alike, resulting in some pretty over-the-top mayhem. (It should be noted that this scene will be exclusive to Orlando’s rendition; Hollywood’s will be a combination of a larger-than-life, fully animatronic suit of T-60 power armor and the monstruously mutated yao guai bear, which would all but seem to confirm another momentous altercation from early on in the Amazon show.)

Fallout’s arrival on the Halloween Horror Nights scene comes in the wake of the 2023 event, in which The Last of Us, another seminal title from modern gaming, was realized as a popular haunted maze; could these two developments signal something of a turnaround between Universal’s Halloween proceedings and videogames writ large, a relationship which previously only yielded mediocre results? (Welcome to Silent Hill, from 2012, and Resident Evil: Escape from Raccoon City, in 2013, were a one-two combo that was almost universally lambasted, essentially scaring the company off from tackling the medium again for the next decade.)

We will have to wait and see on August 29, when Horror Nights returns for its longest-yet run, which ends on November 2.

For even more in-depth historical analysis like this, be sure to check out Horrors Untold, the unofficial, comprehensive guide to HHN Orlando.

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