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.

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.

Is there anyone who's played video games over the last 10 years who hasn't played Skyrim? When it came out in 2011, this must surely have seemed to the outside world like one of the nerdiest games around: potions and spells, axes and swords, dark elves and giants and, of course, dragons. But Skyrim nevertheless became one of the most widely played games ever, a touchstone in the video game world, for players and developers alike. It has been re-released on every console and platform imaginable, to the point where it's become a gaming in-joke. It's still huge on YouTube and TikTok, even with people who were little kids when it came out.

When you've got a discography like Todd Howard's, full of critically acclaimed games in the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, it must be hard to pick a favourite. But there is one game he remembers more fondly than anyone else does: the first he ever worked on. "Terminator: Future Shock," he says. "When [Bethesda] came to Fallout, people were saying, oh, you're doing a post-apocalyptic open world! But we already did that in Terminator. It's an underrated game that not a lot of people played. I think Quake came out right afterwards, that might have had something to do with it, and understandably so … Future Shock was made with eight or 10 people and it did a lot of things that no game had done. I remember it got critiqued at the time, which annoyed me to be honest. But now the things it did are commonplace."

The one that launched a thousand listicles with wonky names like "SkyUI" or "Moonpath to Elsweyr." That had an awkward cameo on a show your parents (and probably their parents) watch. You know, the thing you've been playing since its launch back in 2011 through what, last week? The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim Special Edition is upon us. Bethesda's improbably popular roleplaying opus--it's sold north of 20 million copies to date--has been visually remastered to look like the sort of thing you might buy new in 2016. You can play it on PC, PlayStation 4 or Xbox One as of Oct. 28.