Fallout TV Show Is a Terrible Idea—Unless It's a Comedy

wired.co.uk:

Ever since Cats of Zero Wing delivered the oddly worded threat “all your base are belong to us” some 30 years ago, the writing in video games has been received with varying levels of enthusiasm. Often, it’s denounced as stilted, hackneyed and just plain nonsensical. At the same time, it has become a much loved, instantly recognizable genre unto itself. While the earliest iconically bad dialog mostly derived from poor translations—like Magneto in the 1992 X-Men arcade game introducing himself as "Magneto, master of magnet!" and shouting "Welcome … to die!"— a lot of it has been terrible all on its own: Peter Dinklage, for example, tried to take a subtle approach to the lines he was fed in Destiny and sounded unmistakably like he’d been drugged.

Infamously, Hollywood has spent billions of dollars trying to adapt game franchises into movies and TV shows, yet decades since a goggling Dennis Hopper horrified children across the world with his turn as Nintendo's Bowser, it still hasn't succeeded. The latest show about to embark on this quest? Fallout. News broke earlier this month that Amazon is working on an adaptation of Bethesda’s game franchise, and on paper a post-apocalyptic, retro-futuristic wasteland—a bombed out version Don Draper's Manhattan, with robot butlers—sounds like a prestige TV slam dunk. But here’s the problem: The game’s creator has done more to advance the idea that video game writing is awful than any other modern studio. From furious orphans in Fallout, to lusty Argonian maids in The Elder Scrolls, characters frequently engage in what players, who catalog the moments on YouTube, call “Bethesda dialog.” Endless examples abound. Fallout 4 alone had 111,000 recorded lines and now some unlucky screenwriters