The Fallout TV series is adapting the best parts of the games for television audiences. At the helm are showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner -- fans of the games themselves -- who crafted the original story of protagonist Lucy MacLean scouring the irradiated wastelands for her missing father. With plenty of Easter eggs and references to the games and an immersive story that explores the fan-favorite post-apocalyptic scope, Fallout is poised to become another successful video game adaptation.

In an interview with CBR, Robertson-Dworet and Wagner share what elements from the games they wanted to bring into the show. They also explain how they balanced the post-apocalyptic tone with the franchise's signature dark humor.

You have a cornucopia of material from the Fallout games to draw from in writing the TV show. How did you decide what elements you wanted to include in this first season?

Wagner: Painful and also fun! Sometimes you start a show and it's just this big, empty canvas, and you've got to fill it with hours of content. This was the opposite. We only had hours of content. It was difficult!

Robertson-Dworet: As Graham said, there was an overabundance of these riches. Our first instinct was to throw in everything that we loved, but then the problem became "Oh fuck, we have eight hours to fill." A single Fallout game is thousands of hours of gameplay to world-build and everything. We did have to hold off on some of our favorite stuff, which was excruciating.

Wagner: The only way to do it would be to have the Micro Machines guy rattle off everything over eight hours. It's over 25 years of games and literally stories in every filing cabinet, every terminal in the games. We just decided to be patient and bet on, fingers crossed, future seasons of the show.

Robertson-Dworet: Hopefully, [Fallout] fans will bear with us because they want to see their favorite things given due justice rather than fleetingly glance by the things that they love. We hope to get into these things more.

How did you want incorporate Fallout's sense of humor? The games have always been darkly funny.

Robertson-Dworet: That's the magic of Fallout to me. It's one of the greatest video games of all time and one of the things that makes it unique among the pantheon of great games is its sense of humor. Few games are as darkly, weirdly funny and have this incredible blend of action, drama and moral dilemma that Fallout has. That was actually fundamental to Graham and I teaming up. When we teamed up to write Fallout, we had actually never written together before; we were just buds.

When they called me in 2019 and said "We might be getting the rights to Fallout. Would you be interested in creating an adaptation with us?" I was like "Only if I get to do it with Graham, who is this incredible writer and so funny. It will bring the comedy that this particular universe begs for and really needs in order to do it right." That was totally fundamental in our team-up. I think it's very unusual to have a show written by two people who have never written together before as co-showrunners. [Laughs.]

Wagner: Yeah, it's pretty unusual! Mike Judge and Alec Berg [from Silicon Valley] ended up okay.

The Fallout games have explored post-apocalyptic Washington, D.C., Boston and Las Vegas. Why did you set the TV series in Southern California?

Wagner: It was helpful to go back to the origin of the games. The first game takes place in Los Angeles, but so much time has elapsed that there are new layers of lore and canon that have occurred. If you play the games, you know very well that there is no such thing as a status quo, it doesn't last for long. We wanted to be able to allude to the history of the games, but also the stuff that's occurred since then. It felt like the best way to acknowledge the universe and the work done before us, while also being on top of it all.

Created by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, Fallout is now streaming on Prime Video.