From Vault to Stream: How the Fallout Series is re-igniting a tired RPG

By: Casey Lambert

AZEE Sales & Marketing Director

(Standby for a brand impact)

Grab your pip-boys, throw on your vault suite and grab some Blam-O because Fallout has officially stepped out of the vault of video game lore and onto the wasteland of the small screen.? After years of development, shooting and editing, the long awaited series that follows the video game franchise that Bethesda first introduced to us via CD-ROM in 1997 has hit the Amazon Prime streaming platform and the world is obsessed.

Let’s start with a little backstory.? The Fallout series follows a post-apocalyptic world in which a war between China and the USA ended with 100’s of atomic bombs being dropped on October 12, 2077.? This dystopian lore however, begins to branch from our own reality in the 1950’s and therefor the look of the games and the TV series is much different than our own.? Players visit real-life locals, such as Washington DC, Boston, Los Angeles, and my favorite…Las Vegas

In the Fallout reality, the semiconductor was never invented and therefor computers were never micronized, cell phones were never invented and broadcasting and internet were never a thing.? Add to that the fact that the world was overly fixated on nuclear and atomic things, their past, present and future is MUCH different than ours, including a restructuring of the country in 1969 from 50 states, to 13 commonwealth territories.

In the wake of total annihilation, the US government entrusts the survival of the county to a private company called Vault-Tec.? Vault-Tec sells spots in nuclear fallout shelters all around the country and builds exclusive shelters for high ranking officials and corporate fat cats to wait it out for centuries until the surface is clear.

The biggest major twist is that Vault-Tec is using each individual vault to run social experiments on humans, a sinister commentary on corporate greed and the desire to play god under the mask of “saving humanity”.

So, with a brand that is 27 years old, has 6 full length RPG’s (Role Playing Games), spanning 11 different gaming systems, it’s own comic series and a litany of merch, where could Bethesda have gone any further?

Well, Fallout’s brand was instantly recognizable and trusted by gamers across 3 different generations, but in order to grow that brand further, they needed to appeal to a new audience, and that audience was TV.

The new 8-episode series is perfectly executed for viewers who are familiar with the IP and those who aren’t.? It creates an entirely new story told within the reality that is packed with easter eggs and little things that give long time fans some service.? Watch the series, please, seriously, it is CIN-A-MA!

But what strikes this self proclaimed video game and branding nerd the most is that following the show’s release, downloads of ALL of the Fallout games have exploded like the bombs from China.? According to PlayTracker, player numbers fall Fallout games DOUBLED.? Perhaps the most incredible spike was for players of the 2010 released, Fallout: New Vegas, which is most geographically close to the TV series,? that increased playership and downloads nearly 5600%.

Numbers have yet to be finalized, however when Bethesda first purchased the Fallout brand, they did so for $5.7 million.? At last valuation it was worth $45 million and it could well stand that via the implementation of the series, that the Fallout brand could be worth 10x that or more!

Although many of our brands will never have access to a TV series, there is one massive lesson to be learned as we navigate the wasteland of the modern digital marketing landscape.? When we attempt to reach new audiences with our brand, and we pay homage to our longtime loyalists, growth is as inevitable as the FEV super mutants (Fallout pun)