Summary

• Amazon Prime's Fallout attracted over 65 million viewers in 2 weeks, only surpassed by The Rings of Power.
• The series is set in the year 2296, 219 years after the bombs dropped, showcasing a barren wasteland.
• Real locations like Namibia, Nevada, New Jersey, and Utah were used for filming, adding authenticity.

Amazon Prime’s Fallout was a resounding success. The first adaptation of the beloಌved video game franchise during the first two weeks of availability, a feat only eclips🀅ed on the platform by The Rings of Power, which came out back in 2022 and is still the most successful Amazon Prime launch.

Fallout boasts an original story in the universe created by Tim Cain back in the 1990s and expanded by Bethesda Game Studios more recently. The post-apocalyptic wasteland is, in true Fallout fashion, the true protagonist of the series. It's achieved using an impressive number of real locations. Follow us as we take a journey through the reality behind the wasteland.

When Does The Fallout Show Take Place?

Viewers follow the journey of Lucy McClean, Cooper Howard, and Maximus as they get tangled in a web that seems to span the entire wasteland. Amazon’s adaptation unfolds during the year 2296, almost on the verge of th🥀e 24th century⛄. It takes place 219 years after the bombs dropped, and the setting is exactly as you’d expect from any Fallout medium: appropriately barren.

The retro, mainly 50s aesthetic remains and is illꦅustrated well in the beginning episodes of the series, as well as the scenes inside the vaults. The surface retains touches of that aesthetic but is quite sparse, especially when compared to the barren wide shots that were shown throughout the eight-episode series.

So what we’re seeing most of the time is the aesthetic that the Fallout series popularized: desert wastelands with the remnants of what was once a civilization not too different from ours. It often feels like a museum of an alternate version of our world, if the museum h💫ad been blown up to pieces, with its exhibits spread throughout the United States of America༺.

A setting like this one seems to require a vast amount of CGI work bu t, although it is present in a lot of the show, the production team didn’t rely on it for most of the locations. The majority of the outside areas you see throughout the city are real places, albeit ranging from slightly modified to nearly unrecognizable.

Where Does The Fallout Show Take Place?

Namibia, Nevada, New Jersey, and Utah were the main locations where the Fꦇallout show was filmed. A lot of the most iconic sites you’ll remember either exist almost 1-to-1 in rﷺeal life, or they’re slight modifications of their Earthly counterparts.

As an example, , Lucy McClean can be seen walking by a massive shipwreck in the middle of the desert. Thi🐟s image is of a real shipwreck in a real desert. It was the Eduard Bohlen, a German ship that met its fate, like many others, on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast.

, Howard Cummings, the show’s production designer, highlighted the philosophy that made it work so well while filming on location. When reaching what was to be their stage, Howard would ask “how do I Fallout this?”

What Parts Take Place In New York City, Nyack, Staten Island?

A lot of the Fallout show was filmed in the state of New York. Despite how much of a metropolis it is, New York City is still considered a part of the Rust Belt states. Those are the areas of the United States of America where the manufacturing industry reigned supreme until the second half of the XXth century, when it declined until being almost entirely abandoned. This left a lot of factories and manufacturing buildings abandoned, a perfect Fallout setting.

Another match found in New York City was the Brooklyn Arm🍎y Terminal, which made for an entirely believable Enclave base in the show✱. We see Wilzig run away from it, a rare moment in which we see his head still attached to his body. Even the real collection of buildings looks eerily dystopian.

Nyack, a small village located in Rockland County, brought to life one of the most recognizable Easter eggs we saw in the show: Red Rocket. The station where the protagonist meets Dogmeat in Fallout 4 was a decorated version of a r🌄eal gas station in the village, one which looks unique enough to have been used in other big productions, like John Wick.

Staten Island is featured multiple times throughout the show, but its most memorable location is the Super Duper Mart, an iconic site from both Fallout 3 and 4. Much like the Red Rocket station, it is a real place that was decorated to better fit the post-apocalyptic aesthetic. It is actually an abandoned Shoprite o꧙n Hylan Boulevard.

What Did The Fallout Show Film In Utah?

The Brotherhood of Steel’s base is an expansive airfield seemingly in the middle of nowhere, with the horizon s🍎howing little other than an endless desert. The real location is the Wendover Airfield in Utah, another perfect match for Fallout.

The Airfield was used as a bombing and gunnery range during World War 2 and, having been built in the 1930s, had the needed flavor to fit the setting of the show. A lot of the buildings shown in the series are actually a part of the base and represent a piece of American history closely linked to the atomic bombs.

Could there be a better fit than this?

What Part Of Fallout Was In Namibia?

In the same interview with TheGamer’s Rhiannon Bevan, Howard Cummings gave us quite a bit of information about how Fallout ended up in a place such as Namibia. The production designer has been working with Jonathan Nolan, Fallout’s director, for years now. The two of them worked together on🅷 Westworld, a very successful HBO show.

While talking to Bevan, Cummings says that Jonathan Nolan had been wanting to film in an abandoned mining town in Namibia for years. Kolmanskop is likely one of the most Fallout-looking places you’ll ever see in real life. As Cummings himself put it: “It says apocalypse when you just look at it.”

The buildings are half-buried in sand, and some of them were blown up back in 💫the first half of the XXth century to render them useless. You probably couldn’t have made a more believable wasteland set for Fallout if you tried.

The scenes with the snake oil salesman, for example, were filmed inside actual Kolmanskop buildings. Most of the outside shots that show deserted landscapes, most notably the one with the sunken ship, were film♈ed in other areas of the Namib Desert.

According to Howard Cummings, no one had filmed before in the areas of Kolmanskop we see in Fallout, despite Mad Max: Fury Road having also been shot in the same desert. 🌞, “the only things there are hyenas.” We’d consider that a better option than radroaches.