Television remakes of popular video games are becoming increasingly common, but how the stories are told varies greatly from show to show. Some series are faithful recreations of the video games, like HBO’s The Last of Us, while others are completely original, like Paramount+’s Knuckles and Halo, or Peacock’s Twisted Metal. But there’s another type of remake that stands out: shows that don’t directly remake the games, but tell new stories within the existing canon.
Shows like Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Fallout, and of course Pokémon exist within the predefined parameters of the video games they are based on, but what differs is that they develop new characters, stories, and settings, which can introduce new perspectives or flesh out certain aspects that the video games don’t allow for.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners contains a great example of this. The show covers a variety of topics, but one of the main themes of the story is cyberpsychosis, a disease that drives people insane when they over-extend their bodies. The disease has been featured and explored in video games as well, but Edgerunners goes deeper.
Suddenly, NPCs suffering from cyberpsychosis aren’t just mindless killers like you’d imagine. As revealed in Edgerunners, they start to lose their sense of reality, relive past traumas, and talk to loved ones who aren’t nearby. This level of firsthand knowledge wouldn’t have been possible without the show.
Amazon Prime Video’s Fallout is another example of a TV show carving out its own path within the game’s canon. The show isn’t trying to retell a story we’ve already played out, nor is it ignoring already-established lore. Instead, the Prime Video adaptation is set after the events of Fallout 4 and focuses primarily on areas of the world that have rarely been explored.
The Fallout video games have a long history of telling stories across the United States, mostly set in the American West. The series follows suit, beginning the story in a vault somewhere in Southern California. However, the way Fallout is adapted is a little different than Cyberpunk. The games told of life before the bombs fell, but not to the same extent as the series. The show’s original story is better in that it focuses on the paranoia and denial that many felt before and after the nuclear incident that started it all. In doing so, it allowed viewers to empathize with the various characters and further understand the impact of the impending catastrophe.
Edgerunners and Fallout aren’t the first shows to take this approach – in fact, Pokémon has been doing so since the series first debuted in 1997. Like both shows, Pokémon is set in the same universe as the games.
Pokémon shows are heavily influenced by the latest mainline games currently on sale, for example, 2023’s “Pokémon Horizons: The Series” is based on the Pokémon Scarlet and Violet video games, and 2019’s “Pokémon Journeys: The Series” is based on the Pokémon Sword and Shield games.
In the Sword and Shield games, Leon is the final gym leader the player faces off against, and throughout the game, the player is constantly told what an amazing gym leader he is, but doesn’t find this out until the very end of the game.
However, in the animated series Pokémon Journeys, viewers get to see multiple examples of why Leon is one of the best trainers. In typical anime style, viewers get to see Leon defeat various foes that seemed unstoppable up until that point, something that couldn’t be done in the video game version because it would have taken too much attention away from the main story.
These shows don’t directly recreate or re-imagine the original games, so both gamers and non-gamers are left guessing as to what’s going to happen next. Fallout fans may already know that Vault-Tec is an evil corporation, but no one knows what the fate of the people who inhabit Vault 33/32, as seen in the show, will be. And that’s without even mentioning the new and very strange Vaults that may be coming in the future.
But that’s not the case with a show like The Last of Us. Fans of the game already knew how it ended when the series first aired. It’s hard not to compare the show to the game, but if you’re a fan, HBO’s iteration certainly has and will continue to have benefits. It can expand on characters and side stories that the game just can’t. And yet it’s still retelling an iconic story that many have already experienced.
But there are virtually endless directions a show that tells a new story in an existing world can go — and given the recent success of this type of show, it wouldn’t be all that surprising to see more of these types of adaptations in the future.
