Fallout’s first season took the bold step of jumping a good chunk beyond the events of any game in the beloved post-apocalyptic RPG series so far, to tell its own story. But that didn’t stop fans of one of the more beloved entries in the gaming franchise—the iconic Obsidian spinoff, Fallout: New Vegas—from freaking out that it was being wiped from canon.
This concern comes from a revelation about half way through Fallout’s first season, where protagonists Lucy (Ella Purnell) and Maximus (Aaron Clifton Moten) discover the bombed out ruins of a town called Shady Sands—the capital of what has become the New California Republic, an organized society that has begun to rebuild elements of civilization across the West Coast, after the atomic devastation turned America and the rest of the world into a radioactive wasteland. Shady Sands was referenced in the events of New Vegas, but the show revealed that in its place on the Fallout timeline, Shady Sands was destroyed in 2277 almost two decades before the events of the TV series—despite New Vegas being set a few years later in 2281 and referring to Shady Sands as if it were a still-existent (albeit unvisitable) settlement.
New Vegas’ own director and project lead, Josh Sawyer, is less worried about whatever Amazon has planned for his little corner of the Fallout universe, however. “I understood why there was maybe some confusion or ambiguity,” Sawyer recently told Rock Paper Shotgun about being “inundated with the discourse” when New Vegas fans took to social media to decry the seeming incongruity. “I don’t think I necessarily would have jumped to the conclusions that other people did. But I could see why some people might be aggravated or annoyed.”
The Fallout show will play around even more with the world of New Vegas in its second season, it seems—season one climaxed with Lucy in pursuit of her father, Hank (Twin Peaks icon Kyle McLachlan), after his villainous reveal as an agent of the Vault developers, Vault-Tec, saw him run off to the titular locale in its final scenes. But Sawyer isn’t worried about what Amazon and Bethesda might have envisioned for what New Vegas looks like years after the events of the game. “This might sound weird, but whatever happens with it, I don’t care,” Sawyer concluded. “My attitude towards properties that I work on, and even characters that I create, is that I don’t own any of this stuff. It was never mine. And the thing that I made is what I made.”
“If later on other people working in the space do new things with it and change it, I’ll maybe have opinions on it, but I don’t get attached to things in that way. I don’t feel like it’s healthy for me to be really invested in something I have no control over, frankly.”
We’ll have to wait for whatever Fallout season two has planned for New Vegas—but at least for now fans don’t have to worry about Obsidian’s contribution to the Fallout world being erased entirely.
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