“Everything Under The Sun”: Fallout Show’s Game Lore & Easter Eggs Explained By Creators

Fallout creators Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet explain the game lore and Easter eggs incorporated into the show. Based on the Bethesda video game franchise, the Prime Video series is set in the same post-apocalyptic world, but features an all-new story following a young Vault Dweller, a Ghoul, and a squire of the Brotherhood of Steel. The Fallout cast includes Ella Purnell, Aaron Moten, Kyle MacLachlan, Moisés Arias, Xelia Mendes-Jones, and Walton Goggins.

During an exclusive interview with Screen Rant ahead of the Fallout release date on April 10, Wagner and Robertson-Dworet explained the game lore and Easter eggs incorporated into the show. The creators discussed their personal experience with the games and their overall approach to adapting its lore. Check out their full comments below:

Robertson-Dworet: Well, we each have very different experiences of coming with it. Graham had come to the games back in ’97 with Fallout 1. But I had seen my husband play the games, and then when I was approached about Jonah in 2019 and his company, Kilter, let me know that they were in the process of getting the rights, I was like, “Well, I got to play these games myself.” So my focus was on three, four, and New Vegas. I want to be careful because Graham is going to get mad at me to say that doesn’t mean they were the preference within the Fallout canon. I think those are the best games. They just are the ones that I mainly played because Graham…

Wagner: My thing is express no preference because I love watching the internet guess and fight each other over, oh, it’s Fallout… It replicates factionalism as portrayed in the games so perfectly that there’s even a cabal of people who are like, “No more fighting.” That that’s the NCR of the fan base. I love it and I just don’t want put our thumb on the scale. But at the same time, yeah, I started playing in ’97. It was my first year of college, so I was living and four guys. And we’d all played, we’re all big arena fans and Daggerfall fans at that point. And yeah, it was described to us as it’s the guys from Arena, but they made an XCOM game, which is not a accurate really way to describe it, but it got us interested for sure. And I think no one lived in that house that year graduated from the University of Alberta. So we were in. We were in from the start. Yeah, we talked about everything under the sun for sure. I mean, it’s been three years of conversations.

Robertson-Dworet: Graham and I started working on this, by the way, during COVID. So there was a lot of time for us to talk about 5 million ideas. We’ve been working on this since 2019.

Wagner: Yeah, we feel like we’ve nodded, homaged the f—k out of this thing without hunkering down and setting something in something that’s in canonical situations, because that gets dicey. And we feel like we’re kind of dancing between the raindrops in terms of not acknowledging any canonical endings. And you’ll let us know how we did on that front, but yeah, we had the time, so hopefully we didn’t f—k it up.

The Fallout Show’s Game Lore & Easter Eggs Explained

The Prime Video series was built by Wagner and Robertson-Dworet on over 25 years of video game lore dating back to the first Fallout game from 1997. Within this world, this lore concerns the creation of Vaults by Vault-Tec, nuclear war, a post-apocalyptic world, and the surviving factions. The Fallout show takes place within the same continuity as the games, with each main character representing a main faction – the Vault Dweller Lucy, Brotherhood of Steel member Maximus, and a Ghoul.

Though the show’s story is entirely new, it is rich with Easter eggs and iconography from the games. The Fallout show begins in Vault 33, one of the many survival shelters built for humans in the face of impending nuclear catastrophe. However, the show’s story still begins very similarly to various Fallout video games, as Lucy leaves Vault 33 to find her father, Hank, who was taken away by a raider gang led by Moldaver. This is an homage to Fallout 3, which centers on the main playable character leaving Vault 101 to find his father who disappeared.

The Fallout show is filled with Easter eggs and references to the original games, including the appearance of Dogmeat. Many major aspects of the Brotherhood of Steel were also adapted, including Power armor and Vertibirds. Vault-Tec plays a major role in the show, but instead of a corporation that merely built the underground fallout shelters throughout the United States, it appears they are involved in a larger conspiracy that initiated the nuclear war itself. Overall, the Fallout show is built on game lore and Easter eggs that make it feel familiar, but still features a new story to keep audiences guessing.