Bethesda teases Fallout TV series from Westworld creators at Amazon

What you need to know

• Amazon Studios announced a Fallout TV series is in the works,
• The show will be executive produced by Westworld showrunners Lisa Joy and Jonah Nolan in conjunction with Bethesda.
• Amazon also released a short teaser on Twitter Thursday.

It was announced Thursday that Amazon Studios has licensed the rights to the franchise for a potential TV series. It's tapped Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, showrunners on the HBO series Westworld, to lead the project under their Kilter Films banner.

Joy and Nolan will executive produce alongside publisher Bethesda, including Bethesda Game Studios director Todd Howard and James Altman, director of publishing operations at Bethesda Softworks.

"Each chapter of this insanely imaginative story has cost us countless hours we could have spent with family and friends," Joy and Nolan said in a statement shared to The Hollywood Reporter. "So we're incredibly excited to partner with Todd Howard and the rest of the brilliant lunatics at Bethesda to bring this massive, subversive, and darkly funny universe to life with Amazon Studios.

"Over the last decade, we looked at many ways to bring Fallout to the screen," Howard said. "But it was clear from the moment I first spoke with Jonah and Lisa a few years ago, that they and the team at Kilter were the ones to do it right.

Bethesda and Amazon released a short teaser on Twitter that coincided with the announcement. It doesn't show much, but does show off that "Please Stand By" screen that fans have grown accustomed to.

An adaptation of the Fallout series has been languishing in Hollywood for decades. Interplay Entertainment, the original creator of Fallout, originally planned to make a film version themselves through film division Interplay Films back in the 1990s. This was before the game was even a franchise.

Interplay Films disbanded before the project could be completed, but a treatment written by Brent V. Friedman, the screenwriter on Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, was released back in 2011.

Howard has said that he's been approached multiple times with movie pitches.

"We've had a couple of in-roads, particularly with Fallout, which is a bit stickier than Elder Scrolls, but everybody's kind of asked and I've taken a number of meetings over the years and nothing quite clicked where I felt, 'Oh, that would be as good as the game,'" he said. "And that may happen. I don't rule it out."