I liked Atomfall quite a lot, especially after I stopped trying to play it like British Fallout and treated it as a linear survival-shooter instead. It was also the most successful game launch in Rebellion’s history, which is not nothing given that the company has been around for more than 30 years.
Even so, I was surprised to learn, as I did when I read this Deadline report, that it’s being adapted into a TV series.
Details are scant at this point, but the show is being developed in a partnership between Rebellion and British TV production company Two Brothers, best known for award-winning series The Missing and Fleabag. The report says Two Brothers founders Harry and Jack Williams will write the series.
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“Atomfall has such a distinctive British tone and setting, and it’s been a real joy developing it alongside the Rebellion team—especially as two brothers working alongside two brothers (Rebellion founders Jason and Chris Kingsley),” the brothers said. “There’s something very exciting about expanding this strange, unsettling story for television.”
That’s certainly true, and I do think Atomfall as a setting has the potential for far more interesting stories than those of big-budget blockbuster games beloved by legions of fans who love nothing more than to argue about the minutiae of canonic lore. (You know what I’m talking about.)
In Atomfall, by comparison, you can do pretty much whatever you want. It’s got sci fi, folk horror, action, comedy, conspiracy—and because it’s British, you can cram in pretty much whatever else you want and people will just say, “oh, it’s so cultured and sophisticated. Just like Masterpiece Theatre!”
And frankly, that pretty much is what I want from Atomfall on my TV: One of those distinctly British murder mystery shows set in the quaint English countryside where a retired librarian teams up with an amusingly-crass-for-her-age tea shop owner to solve crimes, except instead of trying to figure out why the per-capita murder rate is so goddamn high in their village of like 300 people, they’re unravelling the dark secrets of Windscale and the quarantine. I don’t really watch much TV, but you better believe I’d tune in for that.
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