Todd Howard says a Fallout TV show has been in talks for 16 years, and its producers are "sweating every pixel"

Fallout TV show
(Image credit: Amazon / Kilter Films)

Todd Howard says that a Fallout TV show has been in talks for 16 years and that its producers are so focused on accuracy that they're "sweating every pixel."

On April 5, Fallout TV show distributor Prime Video shared a brief behind-the-scenes look at its upcoming series. In it, we see a glimpse into several aspects of the show as well as get some comments from familiar faces - such as Bethesda's Todd Howard, who is an executive producer on the project, and a small cameo from Xbox boss Phil Spencer. 

During the short video, Howard provides a bit more context for the Fallout adaptation and reveals that there's been talk of a TV show based on the game for the last 16 years. "People have wanted to make a Fallout show ever since we did Fallout 3. I took a lot of meetings and had conversations, and I was always, sort of 'well, it's not really quite clicking for me,'" the developer explains. 

What managed to get the ball rolling was for Howard to meet producer and screenwriter Jonathan Nolan - who is also an executive producer on the Fallout TV series. "Todd and I had been fans of each other's work for many, many years," Nolan says in the video. Explaining how the two came together, Howard adds: "He and I hit it off first phone conversation it was very clear he had played the games and and loved them and had a vision for what it could be on the screen."

"We were really, really patient and once we found that it was very clear to us this is the right way to bring Fallout to the screen," Howard continues. The developer then says that the team approached the TV series "just like we approach a game" and praised the TV show's producers for making the production so detailed: "In games, we say 'try to sweat every pixel', they're sweating every pixel on the show."

Elsewhere, Howard has also said he stopped some Fallout 5 ideas appearing in the TV show and that everything in it is canon

Hope Bellingham
News Writer

After studying Film Studies and Creative Writing at university, I was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at Player Two PR where I helped to release a number of indie titles. I then got even luckier when I became a Trainee News Writer at GamesRadar+ before being promoted to a fully-fledged News Writer after a year and a half of training.  My expertise lies in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, cozy indies, and The Last of Us, but especially in the Kingdom Hearts series. I'm also known to write about the odd Korean drama for the Entertainment team every now and then.