Fallout's makeup department head Michael Harvey slipped a reference into the show thinking "nobody's ever going to catch it." Fans did.
Fallout has been around since 1997, meaning Prime TV’s Fallout series had more than 25 years worth of reference material to draw on. According to Emmy-nominated makeup department head Michael Harvey, director Jonathan Nolan wanted the show to feel authentic to the world fans have loved for decades… but he also wanted to avoid exactly copying the source material.
“Jonah [Jonathan Nolan] explicitly told me, use the game as a reference,” Harvey told PC Gamer. Nolan wanted his team to “lean into the world for what it is, and take the elements from that world,” but also use their own imagination and creativity, Harvey said. “Don’t carbon copy anything,” Nolan told him.
But rules were made to be broken. According to Harvey, an opportunity presented itself during shooting when costume designer Amy Wescott “dressed this [actor] like somebody right out of the game.”
“So I took that character and that likeness and literally made it one of the characters from the game, and I figured, you know what? It was such a [minor] character. Nobody’s ever going to catch it,” he said.
Harvey’s make-up based homage to the games was so subtle even the show’s crew, including Nolan himself—a self-proclaimed Fallout fanatic—didn’t notice it. Eagle-eyed fans, though? They didn’t miss a thing.
“[Nolan] didn’t catch it. The writers didn’t catch it. But boy, Reddit caught it, and they went wild for it. They went nuts over it, and they’re like, ‘We know exactly who that character is. We can tell you what game, what map, and what that person was.'”
The person in question is a wandering arms dealer from Fallout 4 named Cricket who occasionally stops outside Diamond City and Vault 81. Personally I’m not sure if I even remember Cricket from the game, because who remembers a minor character you buy junk from one or twice?
Die-hard Fallout fans, that’s who. In the show the character’s name is Rink, and she’s in a single scene that’s about two minutes long, during which she maybe has ten seconds of total screen time. That was plenty for Reddit’s eagle-eyed Fallout community.
In episode 5, Max and Lucy have teamed up and are about to cross a bridge when they spot two survivors heading across the same bridge in the opposite direction. Lucy and Max attempt to avoid a violent confrontation, but this is Fallout—sometimes no matter how high your speech score is, you just can’t stop the bullets from flying.
If you look below at a few images of Rink from the show compared to Cricket from Fallout 4, you can definitely see that they’re the same person: her wardrobe, her gaunt appearance, the redness under her eyes, right down to the faint scar across her eyebrow.
Cricket from Fallout 4 (Image credit: Bethesda)
Rink from Prime TV’s Fallout series (Image credit: Prime TV)
Cricket from Fallout 4 (Image credit: Bethesda)
Rink from Prime TV’s Fallout series (Image credit: Prime TV)
No doubt. She may be called Rink on the show, but that’s definitely Cricket.
“That was my one little easter egg that I was hoping nobody would catch right away,” Harvey said. “They jumped on that so fast. So, kudos to the level and the depth that these fans will go.”
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