The second season of Fallout - Prime Video's mega-hit based on the popular video game series - has landed.
Set in a post-apocalyptic future where Earth has been ravaged by nuclear war, the first series was a commercial and critical hit, impressing long-time fans and viewers who'd never played before.
Its surprising success had a huge impact on Bethesda Softworks, the developer of its source material, bringing back lapsed players and creating new ones along the way.
Key creatives from the company have told BBC Newsbeat about working with the show's producers, and what the success of the programme means for the future of the games.
The first season of Fallout arrived at a turning point for Hollywood video game adaptations. Often far-removed from their source material, and often just a bit rubbish, they'd gained a reputation as low-quality cash grabs.
Then The Last of Us came along. The 2023 adaptation of the PlayStation blockbuster, released ten years earlier, was a smash hit. It impressed fans of the games, as well as winning over critics and viewers who'd never picked up a controller.
While The Last of Us was wowing audiences, the producers of Fallout were putting the finishing touches to the first season of their adaptation, one which took a different approach to its source material.
Unlike The Last of Us, which guides the player through a linear story experience, the Fallout games drop them into a more freeform world. The branching narratives, full of side quests and incidental characters, offer plenty of material to draw from, but deciding what to bring to the screen is a mammoth task.
Todd Howard, director of developer Bethesda Game Studios, tells Newsbeat he was first approached about a filmed version of the game in 2009. He was agreeable to the idea, he says, but didn't push ahead until meeting executive producer Jonathan Nolan.
One of the people in charge of keeping the TV show authentic was studio design director Emil Pagliarulo, a Bethesda veteran who's been closely involved with the Fallout series since its breakout third instalment, released in 2008.
There was an early decision to keep the TV show 'canon' - that would become a guiding principle. That meant everything that happens in the show happened in the games, or will happen in the games.
For all the thrill of seeing the world you dreamed up realized in another medium, there's a less romantic reason for TV and game studios to get behind adaptations: they boost sales.
As the first season of Fallout was released, prices on most of the games in the series were slashed. It had the desired effect - Fallout 4 topped sales charts nine years after its original release, and Fallout 76 saw a significant increase in active players.
With game-makers becoming more directly involved, the adaptation's impact on future game instalments is evident. Fallout 5 will integrate elements from the series, showcasing a reciprocal relationship between the show and the gaming universe.
