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. The feeling was mutual. It turned out he was a huge fan of Fallout, says Todd.
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.
Emil admits there was some back-and-forth between the TV and gaming sides, especially earlier on. It's difficult because TV's an entirely different medium, he says.
For all the thrill of seeing world you dreamed up realised in another medium, there's a less romantic reason for TV and game studios to get behind adaptations. As the first season of Fallout was released, prices on most of the games in the series were slashed, appealing to curious new players, and content updates and upgrades aimed at enticing lapsed players were also launched. It had the desired effect - Fallout 4, the most recent big title, topped sales charts nine years after its original release.
But one of the most significant bumps came to Fallout 76, an online multiplayer spin-off launched in 2018. Bethesda's spent time since addressing those complaints, and managed to attract a healthy number of regular players. When the first season of Fallout dropped, those numbers skyrocketed to an all-time high.
With game-makers becoming more directly involved in adaptation work, fans often wonder what impact it has on future game instalments. The big question for fans awaiting Fallout 5 - which is likely to still be years away from release - is whether the TV show will have an impact on the game.
