Bringing Fallout’s gritty retrofuturism into the real world

For production designer Howard Cummings, Fallout wasn’t just the name of his most recent project — it also became a verb. As he was working on Amazon’s live-action adaptation of the game series, Cummings and his team used the word Fallout as a shorthand to describe the particular retrofuturistic, post-apocalyptic style the franchise is known for. “Everything had to be Fallout-ed,” he tells The Verge. “For locations, I’d say: ‘How do I Fallout this grocery store?’”

Initially, though, that wasn’t the plan.