The second season of Fallout - Prime Video's mega-hit based on the popular video game series - has landed. Set in a post-apocalyptic future where Earth has been ravaged by nuclear war, the first series was a commercial and critical hit, impressing long-time fans and viewers who'd never played before. Its surprising success had a huge impact on Bethesda Softworks, the developer of its source material, bringing back lapsed players and creating new ones along the way. Key creatives from the company have told BBC Newsbeat about working with the show's producers, and what the success of the programme means for the future of the games. The first season of Fallout arrived at a turning point for Hollywood video game adaptations.

Amazon has pulled a video recap made with artificial intelligence (AI) from its hit TV show Fallout after users said it got several facts wrong about the series. The firm said in November it was testing the first-of-its-kind tool in the US to help viewers catch up on some of its shows on streaming service Prime Video - including Fallout, its adaptation of the popular video game franchise. But it has since disappeared from the site after users highlighted mistakes in its video summarising the events of Fallout season one - including claiming one scene was set more than 100 years earlier than it was. The BBC has approached Amazon for comment. The move to apparently press pause on its AI-powered recaps was first reported by tech publication The Verge .

The question isn't whether the AI bubble will burst - but what the fallout will be Will the bubble ravage the economy when it bursts? What will it leave of value once it pops? The California Gold Rush left an outsized imprint on America. Some 300,000 people flocked there from 1848 to 1855, from as far away as the Ottoman Empire. Prospectors massacred Indigenous people to take the gold from their lands in the Sierra Nevada mountains. And they boosted the economies of nearby states and faraway countries from whence they bought their supplies.

The Steam Summer Sale is in full swing, and there are deals to be had everywhere you look. But most of them--especially the more popular and more recent games--only have modest discounts at best. I've picked out some of my favorites that have the biggest savings. In no particular order, here are the best Steam Summer Sale deals on the games I personally love and think everyone should check out. Fallout is all the rage at the moment thanks to the Amazon series, but sadly it's been years since the last mainline game--and it'll be years more before a new one comes out.

Amazon's Fallout TV series is pretty good, yeah? Not only is it some darn great television in its own right, this high-budget, high-profile show might just be the most faithful adaptation of a video game ever put to screens big or small. It's so good that the Fallout video games, the most recent of which is almost seven years old, have been shooting back up the charts. But if you're new to the crumbling, irradiated world of Fallout, you might feel a little lost when the credits roll on the last episode. What's this New Vegas place hinted at in the post-credits scene? Why did the pre-war flashbacks look like Marty McFly's 1955, but have nuclear-powered robots? How did people invent Iron Man-style power armor if they can't make a computer smaller than a bread box?

In the first few days of its release, Fallout – the Prime Video adaptation of the post-apocalyptic video game franchise – has become a hit with global audiences, shooting to the top of the UK chart and ranking among Prime's top three most-watched titles ever. On Friday, just a week after the show debuted in more than 240 countries and territories, Amazon announced it had renewed it for a second season. "The bar was high for lovers of this iconic video game and so far we seem to have exceeded their expectations, while bringing in millions of new fans to the franchise," the streamer said. The success of the show, which is set 200 years after a nuclear armageddon and stars Ella Purnell, Kyle MacLachlan and Aaron Moten, demonstrates the extent to which video game adaptations have improved in recent years and finally pierced the mainstream. A slew of commercial and critical hits, including last year's HBO series The Last of Us – which won eight Emmys – and The Super Mario Bros Movie – which made 1.36bn ( 1.094bn) in the global box office – has led to market experts comparing them to Marvel adaptations, which have long been big moneymakers for studios.

I am a few episodes from the end of the series Fallout on Prime Video. In other words, it's just like the games, which veer between quiet, tragic moments exploring the vestiges of America, and being chased down a hill by irradiated scorpions because you've run out of ammo. Fallout's ensemble cast – with Walton Goggins' almost-immortal ghoul and Ella Purnell's wide-eyed vault-dweller the standouts – lets it cleverly compartmentalise the different aspects of the games' personality. As its director Jonathan Nolan pointed out, when I interviewed him last week alongside Bethesda's Todd Howard (the director of the games), this is a common device in TV storytelling but rare in games. Grand Theft Auto V does it successfully: each of the three protagonists represented a different part of GTA's DNA (Trevor the violent chaos, Michael the prestige crime drama, Franklin the Compton realism). But in most games we play one character, and we know them intimately by the end – or we get to shape them, and they become unique to us.

There's a moment in the new hit Amazon Prime Video series Fallout where the sunny protagonist, having emerged from her underground commune into a postapocalyptic hellscape, tries to convince a bloodthirsty mutant to follow the Golden Rule, to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I expected the mutant--or Ghoul, to be more precise--to shoot back some nihilistic platitude in return, maybe a slang-ified version of a Thomas Hobbes quote. Instead, we get a perfect line: "Yeah, well, the wasteland's got its own golden rule," he replies. "'Thou shalt get sidetracked by bullshit every goddamn time.'" That rejoinder distills what makes Fallout, both the video game series and its television adaptation, so great. After all, getting sidetracked by bullshit is what Fallout has always been about.

If you had asked director Jonathan Nolan what his favourite film of the year was in the late 00s, more often than not he would have given you the name of a video game instead. "Having grown up with the entire history of the medium – I started playing Pong with my brother Chris many, many years ago – that was when games started to take on this level of audacity in their storytelling, their tone, the things they were doing," he says. "That's what I felt with [2008's] Fallout 3: the audacity. Nolan, who has just finished directing the first series of Amazon Prime's Fallout TV show, is sitting next to Todd Howard, the video-game director who led development on Fallout 3 and 4, talking to me a few hours before the premiere of the first two episodes. It is evident within minutes that Nolan understands games almost as well as Todd does. He says he's drawn to games where your options are open, you decide who you want to be and your decisions have an effect on the world around you: in other words, a game like Todd Howard's. The two come across like old friends, easy in each other's company, and enthusiastic about each other's work. "I talked to a lot of people about doing a Fallout movie or TV show and I kept saying no to everybody," Howard says. "I loved the work that Jonah had done in movies and in TV, and in a couple interviews he did, he mentioned his love of games ... I said to somebody, he's perfect.

For more than a decade, blockbuster comic book adaptations reliably clobbered all competition at the box office. Disney and HBO Max built their streaming strategies around intellectual property from Marvel and DC Comics. The studios turned this pulpy source material into a profusion of interconnected films and series that consistently drove ticket sales and subscriptions--until they didn't. Lately, serious superhero fatigue seems to have set in. Comic book movies regularly tank these days, and not just the ones based on second-string characters like Blue Beetle and Madame Web.