This episode was written and produced by Ashley Hamer and Casey Emmerling.

Behind Fallout’s apocalyptic sci-fi and retro nostalgia is a masterclass in sound design. In this episode, we explore how the audio teams behind both the video games and the TV series built Fallout’s signature sonic identity, from Pip Boy clicks to weapon blasts to mutant roars. Along the way, we uncover how the show’s creators honored the classic game sounds while reimagining them for a bigger, more cinematic experience. Featuring Mark Lampert, Sue Cahill, Daniel Colman, Steve Bucino, and Keith Rogers.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Wesley Slover - Blue Victories
Wesley Slover - Help from a Stranger
Golden Age Radio - Remember Your Past
Roy Edwin Williams - Joyride
Niklas Gabrielsson with Martin Landström & His Orchestra - Myself and I
Niklas Gabrielsson with Martin Landström & His Orchestra - My Gal
Elvin Vanguard - Shakin’ Comets
Roy Edwin Williams - 56 Special
Jon Funefelt - Triplet King
Martin Landstrom - Wicked Man
Roy Edwin Williams - Pardon My Gun
Martin Landström - The Nightingale is Singing
pär - My Sweet Ding-Didely-Dey

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View Transcript ▶︎

[radio crackles in]

A quick heads up: This episode is about a video game and TV show that features scary monsters and sci-fi violence. While the episode has clean language, there are sounds in it that might be too much for little ears.

[radio crackles off]

[20K Sonic Logo]

[music in: Wesley Slover - Blue Victories]

Before Twenty Thousand Hertz or my sound agency Defacto Sound existed, I worked as a Senior Sound Designer and Mixer for the Discovery Channel and all of the networks under its umbrella. Back then, Discovery was based in the Washington DC area. DC is an amazing city, and one very cool bonus of living there was that it was also the setting of my favorite game at the time, Fallout 3. I could literally navigate the National Mall because I knew it so well from playing Fallout. And it turned out, the publisher of Fallout, Bethesda Softworks, was also based in the DC area.

[music out]

A few years went by, and I eventually left Discovery to start Defacto Sound. But I never stopped loving Fallout. And one day, I worked up the courage to email the Audio Director at Bethesda Softworks, Mark Lampert. I sheepishly explained that I’m a sound designer myself, and asked if he wanted to meet up.

Mark: I think it was just an email that it started with.

That's Mark, who was the Audio Director on Fallout 3, 4, and 76 and is now a Principal Sound Designer at Bethesda.

[music in: Wesley Slover - Help from a Stranger]

Mark: It was just, "Hey, I'm Dallas, I do this, you know, I live in the area, work at this studio over here. We should meet for lunch sometime." That's kind of what I remember. It was a completely friendly, not asking for anything, "We're two people who should know one another.”

Dallas: Yeah on my side, what was interesting is I was like an uber fan of Fallout at this point, so I'm glad I played it cool.

So we met up, and Mark gave me a tour of Bethesda Game Studios. At one point, he walked me into a screening room… basically a small theater they used for team reviews.

Dallas: And that is where I remember you saying, you mix 5.1 by chance?" And I was like, "Oh yeah, I do a lot of Discovery work and everything that we do, for the most part, is 5.1 " And you're like, "I have this trailer for this other game, Fallout New Vegas. Would you be interested in doing that?"

Dallas: And I remember internally exploding with that, like—no… I'm excited, just as excited now telling it. There was no agenda other than to meet an audio hero who's working on one of the greatest games that I've ever experienced in my life. And by the end of our first meeting, you asked if I wanted to mix the first Fallout New Vegas gameplay trailer.

Dallas: And it was the biggest whiplash in my career, but externally I was like, "Play it cool, play it cool, play it cool." And I was just like, "Hmm, yeah, um, I bet I could do that." And I put everything I could into that thing.

[music out]

Here's the trailer that I mixed and sound designed. On screen, the player is taking on mutant creatures, robots, rocket launchers, explosive lasers and all kinds of other fun stuff.

[clip: Fallout New Vegas trailer]

Mark: I didn't realize that was such a pivotal hangout.

Dallas: Oh, it was huge. I just wanted to meet somebody that I respected. And then I walk out the door with a trailer that turned into, gosh, 30 more projects for many other Fallout DLCs and some Fallout 4, some Elder Scrolls, all of the other studios around the world like Dishonored, and Evil Within, and Wolfenstein. It just like kept going from that point. So It was a huge pivotal moment.

[music in: Golden Age Radio - Remember Your Past]

But, this episode isn’t about the trailers. It’s about the sonic world of Fallout… from the earliest games through the prestige television series on Amazon. So, for anyone who’s not familiar with the franchise, let me paint the picture.

Fallout takes place in an alternate version of the United States, where history split from ours after World War II. Instead of moving into the digital age like our world, society kept its 1950s culture, design, and values… but powered everything with nuclear energy. Then in 2077, a massive nuclear war wiped out civilization. Some people survived in underground vaults, while others struggled on the surface.

Fallout 3, the game I started with, picks up two hundred years later in the year 2277. It’s a world that’s frozen in this uncanny version of what people in the 1950s thought the future would look like. You play as a Vault dweller emerging from your underground shelter into the ruined wasteland of America. From there, you complete quests, and scavenge for gear, all while facing mutants, raiders, and robots. The Fallout games layer real vintage music with a mix of quirky retro nostalgia, sci-fi horror, and big action.

The original Fallout game came out in 1997. Since then, the series has expanded with multiple sequels and spin-offs, and sold over 55 million copies worldwide. In 2024, Fallout was adapted into a major TV series, which pulled in more than a hundred million viewers, and got 17 Emmy nominations. ‘ [music out]

But let’s go back to when Mark Lampert first got the job of Fallout 3. Back then, he was already a huge fan of the series.

[music in: Roy Edwin Williams - Joyride]

Mark: I played the original Fallout 1 and 2 back at university. And then I worked at a studio in Austin, Texas for about two and a half years. That studio closed down, we were all laid off.

Mark: And it was very quick. It was like in a week and a half, I found the job posting for Bethesda Game Studios looking for their first in-house audio person. And I said, "I've played all those games." And so it was an easy phone interview. ‘Cause I'd already played it, I had opinions of what I liked, what I didn't like. I could speak to all those kind of things.

Mark: And then flew up there and interviewed, and it was within like two weeks or something, I was there. Because I said yes to something and showed up right place, right time, and all of a sudden all this amazing work is coming my way, a lot of which I really was not ready for, or even really qualified for. But I was there, I'm gonna do it, and I'm gonna figure it out, and I don't care how many versions it takes.

[music out]

Sound is essential to the world building in Fallout. While other futuristic games might have spaceships and teleportation devices, Fallout is very analog. The computers use CRT screens, the wearable devices are big and bulky, and the environments are all very industrial.

Mark: Take the Vault, for example. There are these massive hydraulic doors all over the place. I didn't want to make them sci-fi. I didn't want them to sound sleek or synthetic or just over designed. it should sound like what it is doing. It is two big pieces of metal. They're incredibly heavy, so there's some sort of hydraulic assist.

[Vault Door Open]

Mark: And maybe there's a pressure release when it reaches the extent of its travel, or it fully closes. [Vault Door Close]

Mark: Do I have any recordings of my own that involve anything like that? I'll use that first. If I don't have that, I'll go to sound libraries, and I'm going to pick little pieces and rearrange them, and mash them into something new, and just get the sound of that door. [Vault Door Open/Close]

Compared to their peers in television and film, video game sound designers have very little control over how often a sound will be heard... and they have to keep that in mind when designing these sounds.

Mark: Players are going to do this a lot. We don't know how much it's going to happen. It's up to the player. The player has total freedom.

[vault door repeated] They could come in and out of some facility and open the same door over and over and over again.

Mark: Or pick up some crucial item [pistol up] and drop it [pistol down] hundreds of times [pistol up, pistol down repeated] If that's likely to happen, I want something to sound just very plain.

Mark: I don't want to constantly be showing off, "Hey, look at all this cool stuff that sound's doing." We want to support the game. The player does not need to fall in love with the sound of each and every footstep.

But just because it's not drawing your attention, that doesn't mean it's not a lot of work. In Fallout 3, there are about two hundred and fifty individual footstep sounds. [sfx examples throughout]

These vary based on whether you're walking, running, landing or sneaking on wood... grass... gravel... broken concrete... solid concrete... hollow metal... solid metal... and the list goes on. [sfx examples up, then out]

Mark: It's strangely a lot of work for something unbelievably mundane. You hear it so much. And it is really worth spending a lot of time on. Because if there is anything standout about any of the individual samples that make up those footsteps of [sfx: dirt walking] walking on dirt in default leather boots.

Mark: If there's like the tiniest squeak of a shoe in one of those, [shoe squeak] you're going to hear it eventually. [repeat steps with squeak] You're going to get to hear this weird rhythm, or this weird musicality that you don't want. And you go in, and you shave off that rough edge, or you find another sample that'll work better.

When you break down the sounds in this game... [Fallout 76 gameplay sneaks in]

Mark: You have this massive bed of the everyday, the familiar, very believable... [Fallout 76 gameplay up, then under]

Mark: And then, punctuated in little spots around that, here and there, are those really special moments, or the really special device… [F3: Alien Epoxy] or weapon… [F3: Alien Blaster] or suit of armor… [F3: Power Armor] or a chain reaction that the player causes. [F3: Death Ray Fire]

Mark: Then I think it's time to start playing with synthesizers, otherworldly stuff, really twist and mangle stuff so that those things can stand out when they matter. [F3: Tranq Lane Door Appear]

In the game, the way you control things in your environment is with a device called the Pip Boy. It's a bulky, wearable computer that straps to your character's wrist. For the player, it acts as your menu screen, where you can see your stats, check the map, and track your progress. There's no touchscreen. To use the device, your character turns knobs and pushes buttons... each of which required a sound.

Mark: The source of the Pip Boy’s sound itself was nothing but fun, because you look around the room, wherever you're sitting, wherever you're listening to this from, and you can find plenty of devices that make a click [Pip Boy Tuner] or a pop [Pip Boy Scroll] or, a little chirp [Pip Boy Highlight] And all of that stuff is great raw material to create some sort of fantasy device with. [Pipboy Mode + LIght Off + Holotape Stop]

Mark: And a lot of it is like an old gaming PC tower that I had. So a lot of the hard drive ticks [Pip Boy 1] that you hear, the little “reading a hard drive” platter… [Pip Boy 2] that's just, you know, an old 7200 RPM hard drive booting up…

[original PC boot up recording]

Mark: And it was used again and again and again.

[Pipboy Hum + static & ticks]

Mark: Every time you flip from one page to another in the Pip Boy, [Pip Boy 3] I'm firing off a little sputter of those hard drive tick sounds, [Pip Boy 4] as if it's reading something inside. [Pip Boy 5] The goal is always to make it very mechanical, very analog. Like this thing probably gets hot when it's been on and sitting on your forearm for a while.

[Pipboy Hum out]

Another important piece of technology in Fallout is the power armor. It's a mechanized combat suit, almost like a bulkier version of what Iron Man wears. It's pretty rare, but when you find it, you become nearly invincible.

In Fallout 3, putting on the suit was instantaneous. [Fallout 3 Suit Sounds]

But in later games, it became more of a process.

Mark: We wanted it to be like this vehicle you’d get into. That was a tremendous amount of work by the team to figure out not just, “How does this thing open up?” But, “When the player gets into it, how does it completely change the experience? How does your view change? On the sound side, how does your sound change?”

Mark: You can play the game while you're in the suit of armor… [inside suit sounds]

Mark: And you hear it a lot from the outside, because you can always pop the camera out in our games into third person. [outside suit sounds]

Mark: And then, again, that sort of hydraulic release

[Fallout 4 - Power Armor Open]

Mark: …when he would get into the suit as it closes around him. [Fallout 4 - Power Armor On]

Mark: Pulling the fusion core, or jamming a new one in. [Fallout 4 - Fusion Core Insert]

Mark: You know, those became big moments for people in the game, ‘cause you could run this thing out of power, or have it be damaged and have to leave it somewhere… [F4 - Depleted fusion core] go find another fusion core, and then find your way back to it. And then re-energize it and get back in… [F4 - Fusion Core Insert] and you're back on the rails again.

In Fallout, you mostly wander the wasteland alone. But sometimes, you'll encounter a non-player character, or NPC who can join you for a while. And by far, the most popular NPC is a German Shepherd named Dogmeat.

[Dogmeat bark + music in: Niklas Gabrielsson with Martin Landström & His Orchestra - Myself and I]

Dogmeat has appeared in every main game in the series, and players love him. Fallout designer Chris Taylor once said quote, "We never expected that Dogmeat would become such a popular character. I always intended that the various NPCs that joined up with the player would come to a violent end. I was shocked when I heard of all the work people went through to keep Dogmeat alive to the end."

Mark: The sound of Dogmeat, as much as possible, we got from the real source, which was one of the designers' dog, a German Shepherd named River. [Dogmeat yowl]

Mark: Awesome dog, and we got to go follow River around. Joel would be like, "Hey, we're going to go take River out to this park, do you want to come along with your recording gear and we'll try to get some stuff?” [Dogmeat pant]

Mark: Dogs do not necessarily behave, and follow your commands, and sit, and face the microphone… [Dogmeat whine] stop making other sounds… [Dogmeat whine]

Mark: But nevertheless, so we’d throw the frisbee… [Dogmeat pant]

Mark: And later on, did more recording sessions where Joel would bring the dog to work, and bring him some, like, raw rib meat. [Dogmeat Eating]

Mark: So, the dog eating or attacking, a lot of that stuff is River just settling down to lunch.

[music out with Dogmeat attacking]

[music in: Niklas Gabrielsson with Martin Landström & His Orchestra - My Gal]

Since the time Mark joined Fallout back in the mid aughts, this franchise has gotten bigger and bigger. And like The Last of Us and Halo, it eventually made the leap to prestige television. But how do you translate the sound of a game, with all of its constraints, to the sound of a television series?

Daniel: And he's just practically eating the microphone, making all these throat gurgly sounds, and it adds this great comedy level to it.

That's coming up, after the break.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in: Niklas Gabrielsson with Martin Landström & His Orchestra - My Gal]

In 2020, Amazon bought the rights to turn Fallout into a live-action series. And from the beginning, the creative team wanted to make sure they captured the unique sonic palette of the game.

Sue: Fallout takes place in the future, yet it's really stuck in the 50s in a lot of ways.

That's Sue Cahill, the Supervising Sound Editor of the Fallout television series.

Sue: So the overall sound was not in the sci-fi digital world. It was in the analog mechanical world.

I interviewed Sue and the Fallout sound team on the same mix stage where they mixed the show, at the NBC Universal Lot in Los Angeles.

Sue: You have all those iconic sounds that are from the game, right? That all the gamers know. Like, everyone knows the sound of the vault. [F3 Vault Open]

Sue: And the Pipboy... [Pipboy Sounds]

Sue: And Mister Handy...

Mister Handy is a cheerful, floating robot. [Mr. Handy Line]
Mr. Handy: Attention everyone. It’s time to cut the cake!

Sue: So, we were able to use those as our foundation. And then, we were able to build it out from there.

[music out]

One of the key creatives behind the Fallout show is Executive Producer Jonathan Nolan, known by his collaborators as Jonah. He also directed the first three episodes. Here’s the Sound Designer of the Fallout series, Daniel Colman.

Daniel: Jonah's prompt on working with the sound of the show was that anything that existed from the game, we were to at least reference what the sound was in the game, whether we could use that or not, and whether it fit within the context of the show.

Daniel: They gave us videos to watch, so there was like 10-hour videos of gameplay to watch.

[clip: Fallout 76 robot fight]

Daniel: And then Bethesda sent over a sort of sampling library of stuff from the various different games. So for everything that we could, we would have pieces that we could use if they would work.

Daniel: But since video game sounds are usually tiny little short snippets, most of them couldn't actually be used in the show, but they worked as a great reference. So I could listen to that and go, "Okay, I know what they're going for, now I'm going to start building it." And in some places, where I could, I would steal little pieces of it.

Daniel: So, like, in episode one, there's the big vault door opening sequence. So I listened to all the different vault doors from the various different games, and took a little starting sound that triggered my ear from Vault 111 from Fallout 4…

[Vault 111 door]

Daniel: And then as it gets to the end of the opening, there's this great ronk from Vault 76…

[Vault 76 door]

Daniel: So for a gamer, it's going to trigger, "Oh, I know that sound!" even though it's a tiny little piece of the actual game sound.

Here's a clip of the vault sequence from the show.

[clip: Fallout episode 1]

Daniel: The only thing that is probably about 90 percent from the game is the Pip Boy.

[Pip Boy from TV show]

Daniel: There's stuff that the Pipboy’s doing in our show that it doesn't do in the game, so we had to create things that sound like the Pipboy.

[unique Pip Boy show function]

Daniel: But for the most part, the Pip Boy is all authentic sounds from the game.

[another familiar Pip Boy show moment]

[music in: Elvin Vanguard - Shakin’ Comets]

To keep track of what sound came from where, the team developed a color-coded system.

Steve: We had three codes. So one color was from the game, authentic.

That's Sound Effects Re-Recording mixer Steve Bucino.

Steve: Another color was stuff that Daniel designed. And another color was stuff that they had in their offline, like what came from picture editorial.

An offline edit is an early, rough cut with placeholder sound effects that get swapped out by the sound team later.

Steve: Many, many times I was asked, "Now, is any of that actually from the game?" And I could just quickly identify and demonstrate what's from the game, and then what we have added.

Despite this reverence for the sound of the games, the TV show's sound team and the video games' sound team never actually met each other. So I told the TV show crew about my history with Mark from the Fallout games, and how he'd be paired with them on this podcast.

Dallas: I want to have him on the show, too. I wrote him earlier today, and he was like, “I would love to do this.” He was like, “Maybe I should watch the show now.” And I'm just like, “You have not watched”—I was like, “You spent so long, and you haven't seen it?!” So I've asked him to, actually, if he can give me reactions to it…

Daniel: “You got that gun sound wrong!”

[music out]

For the television sound team, the goal was to take those short, distilled sounds that Mark and his colleagues made for the games and build them into huge, cinematic moments.

For example, one classic Fallout creature is called a Yao Guai. It's basically a mutated black bear. Here's how Mark approached this character in the Fallout 3 game.

Mark: I have to admit, I did not really bend over backward to make something too exotic for the one you hear in the game. [F3 Yao Guai 1]

Mark: To me, the Yao Guai is so close to a bear. It has the profile of a bear, it is immediately recognizable as a bear. So I didn't stray too far from that. [F3 Yao Guai 2]

Mark: I stayed pretty close to sound effects library stuff. [F3 Yao Guai 3]

Mark: I could bet there's probably some vocalizations from me in there to fill in where it was needed. [F3 Yao Guai 4]

Mark: Because I would do that a lot too. [F3 Yao Guai 5]

Mark: There's nothing like the human voice. There's no instrument you can't imitate, and therefore the same is true for creatures, too. [F3 Yao Guai 6]

Mark: Otherwise, it was largely just based on bear recordings or other similarly-sized creatures. [F3 Yao Guai 7]

Another classic Fallout creature is the Gulper, which is like a monstrous salamander.

Mark: This thing basically lives in the swamp, and therefore is shiny and wet, and just sticky and oily looking. [F76 Gulper 1]

Mark: So, that's my bread and butter as a sound designer. "Great. Go straight for the mac and cheese, right?" [F76 Gulper 2]

Mark: Next time you stir mac and cheese, think about that. Just put your ear close to the pot. [Mac & Cheese SFX]

Mark: That is gore made to order right there. [Mac & Cheese SFX]

And just like he had done with the Yao Guai, Mark also incorporated vocal sounds into the Gulper. [F76 Gulper 5]

Mark: Again, that's probably something I would have done myself. ‘Cause again, sometimes it's easier just to grab the mic and put the mic halfway into your throat and make awful sounds. [F76 Gulper 6]

Mark: You throw it in and you go, "Yeah! Let's not mess with genius. That works." [F76 Gulper 7]

Both of these creatures appear in the TV show. And as it happens, they ended up being Daniel's audition for the role of sound designer.

[music in: Roy Edwin Williams - 56 Special]

Daniel: So on a Friday, while I was working on some other project, the two post producers came with the Yao Guai scene and the Gulper scene. They wanted to show me these two creatures and see what I could do with it.

Daniel: And we talked about the problems they were having. Specifically with the Yao Guai, it has to be so many different things, where this is a bear. And it's sick, because it's been exposed to radiation. But it's this mutated monster, so it's got to be scary. But this is a comedy, so it's sort of goofy. But we need to play Maximus and Titus' view, you know, everything in the show is done from perspective. So we needed to feel their fear, this incredibly huge creature.

Daniel: So there were all these problems and everything that they had worked out filled one of those niches, but they couldn't get something that was actually doing all of these things.

[music out]

So Daniel holed up all weekend, trying to check all of those emotional boxes through the sound design.

Daniel: And when they came back on Monday morning, I presented them with five completely different versions of each of these creatures.

Daniel: For the Yao Guai, I had one version that was more realistic, all built off various different bear sounds. [Daniel - Yao Guai Realistic]

Daniel: And I had one that was more struggling, with the idea that it's sick, and so it would have to struggle through everything, and then roar. [Daniel - Yao Guai Sick]

Daniel: And I did one version that had more of a comedic flair to it. [Daniel - Yao Guai Comedic]

Daniel: And I had one that was a completely ridiculous, huge monster with no bear sounds whatsoever. [Daniel - Yao Guai Monstrous]

Daniel: And I did one that mixed and matched a whole bunch of different ideas together. [Daniel - Yao Guai Mixed]

Daniel: And you know, these were two post producers. So it's not like they could listen to it and go, "Yeah, that's the sound of a Yao Guai." But that's not what they were looking for. What they were looking for was a sound designer who was very flexible and could take direction and go in whatever different vector that Jonah wanted. They really wanted a collaborator on this, and so that's how I got hired as a sound designer on it.

And when the show came out, here's what the Yao Guai sounded like.

[clip: Fallout - Yau Guai Roar 1]

[clip: Fallout - Yao Guai Roar 2]

As for the Gulper, that slimy salamander creature...

Daniel: This was much more of a amorphous idea, because they weren't really working on this yet. So they didn't really tell me any of the backstory of it. It was just, “Here you go, design this creature."

At the time, the effects for the Gulper weren't very far along yet.

Daniel: And what I was working with was mostly the large puppet that they used in production that eventually got completely replaced by CGI. And so I, just like the Yao Guai, I took it in a whole bunch of different ways knowing that what they were looking for was this ability to go in a lot of different directions.

[Daniel's Gulper Version]

Daniel: And then we had a long break before we came back to do episode three, and I went off to work on another project.

In the meantime, they brought in Sound Designer Joseph Fraioli to work on a few elements, including the Gulper.

Daniel: And he came up with this just disgusting, burpy, gurgling, flatulent creature.

[Joseph Fraioli's Gulper]

Daniel: So then when I came to actually start working on 3 when they locked the picture, now I had five versions that I created, the version that Joe created, the version from the video game, and I took all of these and put it together, and created a creature.

[Gulper Before Jonah]

Daniel: And we mixed that, and everybody was happy, and it was great.

[music in: Jon Funefelt - Triplet King]

Later on, the visuals were finalized. And with the Gulper...

Daniel: The visual effects added a lot more character in the face than we originally had. And we go back to the dub stage, and we watch that down with the final visual effects…

A dub stage is a state of the art theater where the sound mix is finalized. Basically, it's meant to replicate what an audience would hear in a theater. Now, dub stages aren't typically used for recording, but in this case...

Daniel: Jonah's like, "You know what? It's not really working for me anymore.

[music vinyl wind down signaling “oh no!”]

Daniel: I've got an idea.”

[music vinyl wind back up]

Daniel: So he asks for a microphone to be put up on the stage. And he does one pass through all three scenes, and he's just, practically eating the microphone, making all these throat gurgly sounds. [imitate sounds]

After the session, they tried mixing that voice in as-is... but it felt too human for this massive creature.

Daniel: I went back to my edit room and I took Jonah's voice and I pitched it way down… [gurgle pitched down]

Daniel: And I added a lot of resonance to it. [gulp with resonance]

Daniel: And added his layer on top of all of these other layers that I had already put together. And it added this great character.

[music under]

[first clip of Gulper]

Daniel: You can really tell when the Gulper is chasing Thaddeus up the embankment and going, "rah rah rah rah…” [second clip of Gulper]

Daniel: That's Jonah in there. And it adds this great comedy level to it.

In my interview with Mark, I told him how Johnathan recorded vocal sounds for the Gulper… just like he had done when he originally sound designed the creature for the games.

Dallas: So a very similar approach, but straight from the director in the mix room.

Mark: Yeah.

Dallas: …which is so cool.

Mark: That’s awesome. Really. I mean, like sometimes it's the shortest path is the answer.

But it wasn't just the creatures that required creative sound design... it was also the characters.

In the scene where we first see the Yao Guai, a knight named Titus and his squire Maximus are investigating a cave. Titus is all decked out in power armor, and speaking through a microphone inside the suit.

Sue: The treatment of the Knight's voice was really important to the character.

Again, that's Supervising Sound Editor Sue Cahill.

Sue: We had a few different plug-ins we used to make it sound like the voice was coming out of a speaker, out of a big metal suit.

Titus: Go see if the target’s in there.

Sue: But we had to treat each line individually based on the actor's performance. So it wasn't just one setting for the knight's voice. It was all individually crafted.

Titus: See anything?

Sue: And we could really use that to help the comedy. So in the scene, for instance, with the Yao Guai, we're playing the voice as this like big booming, menacing voice, and Maximus is really threatened by it.

Titus: You earn the suit through acts of bravery. This is an act of bravery.

Sue: And then you have the reveal when he takes off the helmet, and he's just a guy in a suit with a high voice.

Titus: Oh. Where were you? Huh? There’s always something. This wasteland sucks!

[music in: Martin Landstrom - Wicked Man]

Keith: I always think about the first time I ever mixed that scene.

That's Dialogue and Music Re-Recording Mixer Keith Rogers. Early on, Keith was working with temporary dialogue in that scene. Temp dialogue serves as a placeholder until the ADR phase, which is when the actor can rerecord their lines cleanly in a vocal booth.

Keith: The temp was really great. I don't know if that was Jonah or not. I think it was. But um, great comedic timing and all that.

Later on, Keith got the actual ADR lines from the actor who plays the knight, Michael Rapaport.

Keith: I remember the first time when I was going through the tracks and I did it, and his voice came out in his squeaky high voice…

Titus: Where were you? Huh?

Keith: It made me laugh like was one of the first things that I really laughed at on the show. And you just didn't want to ruin that spontaneity of like the first time viewing it. It worked.

[music out]

While Fallout has plenty of comedic moments, it also has a lot of really intense action. And one of the biggest sonic challenges was the gun sounds.

Daniel: There's a couple of really cool guns in the game, like the Junk Jet, which is sort of a wind-up mortar system where you can throw anything into and it'll fire back. [Junk Jet from game]

Daniel: We use it at the end of episode 1. [Junk Jet from show]

Daniel: Aside from that, most of the game sounds of guns are either laser guns, [F4 laser gun] which we don't have in the show, at least yet, I don't know what's coming up, or they're just normal gun sounds. [normal gun sound]

One of the main characters in the show is a scarred-up bounty hunter known as the Ghoul. Now, The Ghoul's signature weapon is a heavy revolver that shoots explosive rounds. And for the big shootout in episode 2, it was crucial to get that sound right.

[music in: Roy Edwin Williams - Pardon My Gun]

Daniel: When we first spotted the show, there was no specific direction for the Ghoul’s gun. So we followed what the game was like and used, I think it was a sawed-off shotgun sound

[F3 Sawed Shotgun]

Daniel: Which worked perfectly fine. But when it came time to really do the mix, after they finished editing and locked the cut, Jonah had this idea that we could make it more interesting by having sort of a three-beat thing, where it would fire a cartridge out, the cartridge would impact, and then it would explode.

[Original 3 beat sound]

Daniel: And that works really well on the first shot. And it works really well on the second shot, and it works really, really well on the two slo-mo shots. But it really doesn't work anywhere else. There's also shots where camera's right with the Ghoul, and he's just firing rapid fire, “bam, bam, bam.” And there's no time to do these three beats.

[music out]

Daniel: So I worked on this sequence, and tried to get it to work the best I could. And when we got done with the day, it was fine, but nobody was really satisfied, ‘cause it really wasn't doing what Jonah asked for. But we knew we were coming back in when we got the final visual effects months later, so we'd have another crack at this.

Again, during the break, Joseph Fraioli came in to work on a few sounds, including the Ghoul's gun.

Daniel: And he threw a whole bunch of different ideas at Jonah, and finally came up with what is absolutely the ultimate homemade gun sound which is the potato cannon. [sfx potato cannon firing]

Daniel: …which has this great low end thump to it, where you can really feel that cartridge going out, and he added a couple of details to it.

Daniel: There's like a metal ring to it [sfx: metallic ring] and there's a little thunder as it shoots out which is really cool. [sfx: thunder]

Daniel: But it made this iconic sound that is very far away from anything that exists in the game.

Here's the final sound in the show: [final revolver sound]

[music resumes]

Daniel: And what was great about this was that it sort of opened us up because when you're told, "Stay close to this game sound. Stay close to what they've already done and just veer when you need to," it's really great to know, "Okay, we can experiment. We can go to extremes. We just have to keep in mind the idea of the game."

Daniel: So it's the, "Post-Apocalyptic, these people are putting together guns with spare parts." And it led to other gun sounds later in the show, where we could really stray far away from the game sounds, and yet make them still feel like they're part of the game.

[music out with a few gun sounds from the show]

[music in: Martin Landström - The Nightingale is Singing]

From an audio standpoint, the Fallout games are some of my absolute favorites. And with the Fallout show, the creative sound team managed to craft something that feels deeply rooted in those sounds, but also original, epic, and cinematic.

Mark: That's something the Fallout live action series did so well, was to, every time they use a little piece of the game, that's a little throughline for players who are going to instantly feel and recognize that familiarity, almost like a scent memory. You know, you smell something that reminds you of childhood. And for that split second, you're there, in that memory. And sound does that really easily.

There's a reason that sound is wired so deeply into our memories, and the feelings that go with those memories.

Daniel: It's the fundamental part of storytelling. Our existence as a civilization, the fundamental is the stories we tell. And that didn't start with visual things, it started with people talking. It started with painting pictures in sound.

Daniel: And whether that's the emotion that you feel listening to music, or to the sound of a loved one talking, we get much more emotional content and sense of ourselves through sound than we ever do through visual media. And that sounds almost like sacrilege, in that we are, in essence, working in a visual media and adding sound to it. But I think the sound is what is fundamental to it.

[music out]

[music in: pär - My Sweet Ding-Didely-Dey]

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of my sound agency, Defacto Sound, which is still going strong 15 years after that first meeting with Mark. To learn more, follow Defacto Sound on Instagram or visit defacto Sound dot com.

Other Voices: This episode was written and produced by Ashley Hamer, and Casey Emmerling, with help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Brandon Pratt and Joel Boyter.

Thanks to our guests, Mark Lampert, Sue Cahill, Daniel Colman, Steve Bucino, and Keith Rogers. And a huge thanks to NBC Universal StudioPost for all of their help in making this episode happen.

Subscribe to my Youtube channel for video exclusives, including my on-location recordings with all kinds of fascinating sonic experts. You can also find my short videos on Instagram and TikTok. All three accounts are under Dallas Taylor dot mp3.

Finally, if you'd like to support the show directly so we can keep telling these incredible sound stories, then sign up for our premium feed at twenty k dot org slash plus. All of these links are in the show notes.

I'm Dallas Taylor. Thanks for listening.

[music out]