Atomfall, the British survival game from Rebellion that took home the Best British Game award at this year’s BAFTA Game Awards is now making the jump onto television. Rebellion has teamed up with Two Brothers Pictures, the same production studio behind Fleabag, The Assassin, Baptiste, and Liar, to develop a TV series adaptation, with Emmy and Golden Globe-winning writer-producers Harry and Jack Williams attached to write the shows drama.
The partnership is being developed as a co-production between Two Brothers and Rebellion, with Jason and Chris Kingsley, the brothers who co-founded Rebellion, serving as executive producers on the show. Alex Mercer, known for his work on Doctor Who, will also be helping to produce the show.
For anyone unfamiliar with the game, Atomfall is set five years after the Windscale nuclear disaster in Northern England. Inside the disaster zone life has deteriorated into something far stranger than the outside world, which is assumed in the games story to be carrying on as any other day. The player wakes up inside of the Quarantine Zone with no memories of how they got there, but searching for a way out. Of course, due to this being a post-apocalyptic world, you can’t easily just “get out” of the Quarantine Zone, and the player finds themselves entangled in-between competing factions. Atomfall draws on the legacy of classic British sci-fi, folk horror, and the 1957 Windscale nuclear disaster for the setting and plotlines of where the game takes you.
“Atomfall has such a distinctive British tone and setting, and it’s been a real joy developing it alongside the Rebellion team – especially as two brothers working alongside two brothers (Jason Kingsley CBE and Chris Kingsley CBE – co-founders of Rebellion). There’s something very exciting about expanding this strange, unsettling story for television.” – Harry and Jack Williams
The timing for this show adaptation is honestly a bit shocking. Atomfall only launched a year ago and already reached over 3.7 million players, making it one of the bigger indie success stories in recent memory. I remember when the game first came out I never knew anything about it, but out of nowhere it felt like it was all over my steam store. Rebellion also has momentum in the screen space more broadly than just Atomfall, as Duncan Jones’ film adaptation for Rogue Trooper, was just recently teased by Rebellion.
Atomfall as a TV series marks a major push into television for the studio, but as of right now no network, streaming home, or release window has been confirmed yet. The series is just now being announced so it may be a few years until we see more information. It will be interesting to see how the folk horror and nuclear paranoia that runs through the game feels when adapted to the slow-burn tension of television.
