For decades, video game adaptations had one job: disappoint everyone. Studios would slap a recognizable title on a film (Super Mario Bros. 1993, Prince of Persia 2010, Uncharted 2022) and hope nostalgia alone would cover the plot holes. It didn’t. What they served up wasn’t the thrill of gameplay; it was like being forced to watch your older cousin hog the controller and then narrate his moves badly.

Audiences groaned, critics rolled their eyes, and gamers went back to arguing about frame rates. But then something shifted. Suddenly, The Last of Us became prestige TV. Fallout turned into a binge-worthy hit. For once, both fans and critics agreed: this wasn’t just “good for a video game adaptation.” It was good, period.

So what changed? Why are we no longer trapped in the cursed realm of bad dialogue and pixel-deep storytelling?

Why early adaptations failed

The fatal flaw of early attempts was simple: they confused brand recognition for storytelling. Studios shoved in-game logos, a few iconic weapons, maybe one Easter egg, and called it a day. The thinking seemed to be, “People loved pressing buttons for hours; surely they’ll love watching a stranger pretend to press buttons.” Spoiler: they did not.

Games are interactive. Films and TV are passive. The bridge between the two is not obvious, and simply transplanting cutscenes onto a screen doesn’t work. Gamers notoriously skip cutscenes, so why on earth did studios think non-gamers would enjoy two hours of them?

What makes games tick

To understand why adaptations often flopped, you need to understand what makes games memorable in the first place. Action-adventure games, in particular, thrive on a combination of agency and immersion. They ask a simple but powerful question: “Who am I in this world?”

Take The Last of Us. You can play for hours and technically never talk to Ellie in the record store. But if you do, that optional little moment becomes one of the most emotionally resonant parts of the game. These aren’t scripted beats in the traditional sense: they’re memories players create through choices.

That’s the problem for adapters: how do you translate player-made experience into audience-viewing experience? On TV, you can’t hand the viewer a controller and say, “Figure it out.” You need a story that works without button-mashing.

And yet, producers continued to make the same mistake: turning interactivity into spectacle. Instead of the intimacy of play, we got extended fight scenes that looked like cosplay conventions with bigger budgets.

The trick: translate interactivity into emotion

Recent scholarship has answers. Dr. Bjarke Liboriussen calls it “remembering gameplay.” Fans watching a show don’t just want plot: they want to be reminded of what it felt like to play. This can be done through clever nods (a failed dialogue persuasion check in Fallout), familiar mechanics woven into scenes, or aesthetics that echo the game.

But the real trick is this: you don’t replace gameplay with spectacle. You replace it with character depth. Show why Joel in The Last of Us can’t stop hitting that soldier. Show why Lucy’s words fail to persuade in Fallout. Give side characters who matter. That’s how you swap player agency for audience engagement.

The last of us: cutting the boss fights, keeping the tears

When HBO announced The Last of Us, everyone braced for disappointment. Another grimdark zombie shoot-'em-up? Great. But then Craig Mazin (of Chernobyl) and Neil Druckmann (the creator of the game itself) made a radical decision not to adapt the gameplay but to adapt the relationships.

For example, in the game’s opening hours, players strangle a guard during an escape sequence. In the show, Joel beats a soldier to death in a moment of PTSD, echoing his daughter’s death. Suddenly, it’s not just “press X to choke.” It’s trauma, loss, and violence all colliding in one punch.

The show also elevated NPCs. In the game, Bill is a cranky gun supplier. In the show, he becomes half of one of the most moving queer love stories on television. Even Joel’s neighbors in a flashback get a backstory, turning a throwaway mention into a gut punch.

Notice what’s happening here: instead of asking, “How do we film this level?” Mazin asked, “Whose story haven’t we told yet?” That’s why the show worked. Less action, more intimacy. Less “game logic,” more human logic. And audiences ate it up.

Fallout: a different kind of playthrough

Amazon’s Fallout took another path: don’t retell the game, but create a new one inside the same sandbox. Instead of Joel and Ellie’s focused character journey, Fallout goes wide: multiple POVs and multiple story arcs, all inside the familiar retro-futuristic wasteland.

The magic here is in the fidelity without fan service overload. The Pip-Boy, power armor, Nuka-Cola machines, all there. But instead of just waving them at the camera, the show integrates mechanics. Lucy fails a Persuasion check mid-dialogue, and anyone who’s played Fallout grins in recognition. For newcomers, it just feels like clever characterization.

It’s also structured like multiple player builds: Lucy as the diplomat, Maximus as the tank, Ghoul as the survival rogue. Watching them is like flipping between different save files. And because the writers didn’t limit themselves to a single “canon path,” the world feels expansive enough to last beyond one season.

Most importantly, Fallout remembered the series’ satirical edge. Vault-Tec monopolies, capitalism run amok, absurd survivalist ideologies, all still intact. It’s not just fun post-apocalyptic cosplay. It’s biting commentary, true to both the games and our current headlines.

Why these two worked

Both shows hit the charts with great reviews and ratings, relying on simple strategies:

  • The Last of Us shrank the action and blew up the intimacy.

  • Fallout expanded the world and baked gameplay mechanics into character arcs.

Both respected the source material without being enslaved to it. Both recognized that “fan service” doesn’t mean recreating gameplay pixel for pixel. It means capturing the spirit of play.

Meanwhile, the old failures (Doom, Uncharted) did the opposite: they filmed brand recognition, not stories. They looked like two-hour cutscenes, and no one sticks around for cutscenes.

The ongoing challenges

Of course, adapting games still isn’t a magic formula. The hurdles remain:

  • Loss of interactivity: you can’t replicate the rush of pulling the trigger yourself.

  • Fan outrage: no matter what, some purists will hate-tweet that you “betrayed the lore.”

  • POV limitations: games immerse you in one character’s skin; TV has to balance multiple angles.

But in those problems lay solutions and answers. Elevate side characters, weave in mechanics as storytelling flourishes, and, crucially, make the show reflect current anxieties. The Last of Us spoke to pandemics and grief. Fallout skewered capitalism. If the adaptation doesn’t resonate with today, no amount of Easter eggs will save it.

Changing the controller

For years, “video game adaptation” was code for “Hollywood doesn’t get it.” But The Last of Us and Fallout proved something crucial: you don’t need to replicate gameplay; you need to replicate what gameplay feels like.

That doesn’t mean filming a joystick. It means telling stories that honor both fans and newcomers. Stories that understand games are more than spectacle: they’re about immersion, choice, identity, and connection. In other words, good adaptations don’t just press “Start.” They switch controllers entirely. And finally, audiences aren’t rage-quitting. They’re pressing “Continue.”