Amazon strikes again. After the planetary triumph of Fallout, the streaming giant fishing another gaming icon to transform it into seriality from the living room: Wolfenstein.
The Machinegames series – which you find on Amazon – will become a television show. And this time, the subtext is not even so thin: “The story of killing Nazis is timeless”.
Such a phrase might seem like a calculated provocation, a quote from B-Movie playing with the pulp hyperbole.
But in reality it is a declaration of intent: Wolfenstein, like franchise, has never been thin, and his transition to television format seems to want to embrace that same aesthetic brutality that made him famous.
Moreover, if Amazon has managed to make a post-apocalyptic story work with atomic satire tones such as Fallout, the idea of bringing on stage an alternative dystopia in which the Nazis won the Second World War has all too potential to stay in the video games menus.
Behind the camera, we find Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, already executive manufacturers of Fallout, and this is the first real signal that Amazon intends to replicate not only a commercial success, but also a precise authorial identity.
Patrick Somerville will lead the project, already known for the Maniac and Station Eleven series, two products that – regardless of their impact on the public – have never compromised with mediocrity. Somerville, they say, he is a fan of Wolfenstein since childhood. 
Wolfenstein has always been a strange franchise. Illegitimate son of the American videogame counterculture, he has gone through deceased deceased by the primordial shooter in forge of extreme ucronie, mixing postcard violence, subversive propaganda and a pulp philosophy that looks more to Tarantino than in Spielberg.
The modern version, which began with The New Order of 2014, has renewed the myth in a tragic and disturbing key, giving the series an unsuspected narrative depth: no longer only shootings in bunkers, but reflections on identity, memory and revenge in a world that has forgotten the pity.
If the Amazon series wants to collect its inheritance, he will have to know how to walk on this ridge without giving in to the grotesque end in himself.