This has emboldened storytellers, she adds, who are no longer as hesitant to play around with the material (so to speak). After all, many modern games take place in free-range settings, where the person with the controller can explore and activate aspects of the scripted story in any order.
Writers and directors are now doing the same, without fear of contributing to the idea that video game stories are doomed to fail. “I remember when I was working on Captain Marvel, there were risks we could not take because we were making the first female-superhero movie. And there were discussions with Marvel at the time about, ‘Well, we don’t want to do that, because we don’t want to imply that all female superheroes are that way—because this is the only female superhero we have right now, and we don’t want people to extrapolate that then all female superheroes are this particular way,’” Robertson-Dworet says. “I remember that was really frustrating because it meant we were chucking aside, in some instances, specificity.”
She believes the proliferation of game adaptations has allowed creatives to shed that same self-consciousness. “The fact that there are now more of these video game adaptations means that we can go into specificity, and take risks, and not do things in the most straightforward way.” For the record, she thinks Marvel has also become less tentative: “I think we’ve seen Marvel now do that more and more with things like Thor and things that push the boundaries of genre, push the boundaries of character, as they’ve simply made more projects. So that’s across the board.”
While The Last of Us drew acclaim for closely recreating aspects of the game’s zombie survival story, Fallout went in the other direction. “A video game like The Last of Us has a very specific story that’s absolutely brilliant, that you can bring to the screen in a fairly straightforward manner,” Robertson-Dworet says. “Fallout, as you guys know, [is an] open-world game. Everyone’s experience of playing the game is going to be different, because you have more agency as the player to pick the order. The narrative events do not follow a particular flow. Therefore, [fellow showrunner Graham Wagner] and I immediately were like, ‘Well, it would make no sense to do an adaptation of just one of the existing Fallout games, because it’s only true to a handful of people.’ It’ll be different from your experience playing the game or your experience.”
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