The reaction to the Fallout show has been almost universally positive, and even those of us who have a few complaints about it still really enjoyed it.
But Prime TV's Fallout adaptation has raised a few questions among fans and Fallout lore enthusiasts, particularly when it comes to one important historic location: Shady Sands. Spoilers for the Fallout show follow. In the Fallout games, Shady Sands is one of the largest cities in California and the first capital of the New California Republic, but when we see it in the Fallout show it's just a big crater.
The city and its population of 30,000 residents is simply gone, which is quite a blow to the NCR—and Fallout fans. A bit more troubling is that the nuking of Shady Sands happened roughly 20 years earlier than the present timeline of the show, and a blackboard in a Vault classroom shows the year 2277 under the words «The Fall of Shady Sands»—right next to a drawing of a mushroom cloud.
If that's the nuke's date, that predates the events of Fallout: New Vegas, which led some fans to presume the show's creators had retconned New Vegas from Fallout history.
This theory has already been debunked a couple of times, first, at great length, by me, and then by someone in a much more convincing capacity: the lead designer and writer of Fallout 3 and 4.