Wasteland (computer game)

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Wasteland
Wasteland box cover art
Developer(s) Interplay Productions
Publisher(s) Electronic Arts
Distributor(s) Electronic Arts
Designer(s) Michael Stackpole, Alan Pavlish, and Ken St. Andre
Release date(s) 1988
Genre(s) Computer role-playing game
Mode(s) Single player
Platform(s) Commodore 64, Apple II, DOS
Media 5ΒΌ" disk
Input Joystick, Keyboard, Mouse

Wasteland is a post-apocalyptic computer role-playing game first released in 1988. The game was designed by Alan Pavlish, Michael A. Stackpole and Ken St. Andre, programmed by Pavlish, and produced by Brian Fargo for Interplay Productions, and published by Electronic Arts.

Contents

[edit] Overview

The game is set in the middle of the 21st century, following a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Parts of Earth have been turned into a "wasteland" where survival is the paramount objective. Players control a party of Desert Rangers, a Nevada paramilitary group that survived the nuclear holocaust, and are assigned to investigate a series of disturbances in the desert. The party begins with four characters, and through the course of the game can hold as many as seven characters by recruiting certain citizens of the wasteland to the player's cause. Throughout the game the player explores the remaining enclaves of human civilization, including a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas.

[edit] Game description

The party explores a farm in Wasteland (shown here is the Commodore 64 version)
Enlarge
The party explores a farm in Wasteland (shown here is the Commodore 64 version)

The game mechanics were based directly on those used in the role-playing games Tunnels and Trolls and Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes created by St. Andre and Stackpole. Characters in Wasteland consequently have various statistics (strength, intelligence and luck among others) that allow them to use different skills and weapons. Experience is gained through battle. The game would generally let players advance with a variety of tactics: to get through a locked gate, a player could use his Picklock skill, his Climb skill, or his Strength attribute; or he could force the gate with a crowbar - or a LAW rocket.

Wasteland was probably the first RPG in which all the characters in the party were not mere puppets for the player to control. The initial band of Desert Rangers encountered a number of NPCs as the game progressed who could be recruited into the party. Unlike those of other computer RPGs of the time, these NPCs might temporarily refuse to give up an item or perform an action if ordered to do so.

One of the other notable features of this game was the inclusion of a printed collection of paragraphs which the game would instruct the player to read at the appropriate times. These paragraphs described encounters and conversations, contained clues, and added to the overall texture of the game. Such paragraph books were a common feature of computer role-playing games of the period. Because programming space was at a premium, it saved on resources to have most of the game's story printed out in a separate manual rather than store it within the game's code itself. The paragraph books also served as a rudimentary form of copy protection, as someone playing a copied version of the game would miss out on much of the story as well as clues necessary to progress. Additionally, the paragraphs included a dummy story line about a mission to Mars intended to mislead those who read the paragraphs when not instructed to, and a bogus set of passwords that would trip up cheaters with results that ranged from character sex changes to detonating a bomb.

The game was also known for such combat prose as "Rabbit is reduced to a thin red paste" and "Thug explodes like a blood sausage", which prompted what was thought to be an unofficial PG-13 sticker on the game packaging in the United States. In fact, the sticker was a deliberate marketing gimmick intended to fire up the target core age group[citation needed].

[edit] Platforms

Wasteland was first distributed for the Apple II and ported to the Commodore 64 and IBM platforms in 1988 - it is often (and erroneously) listed as being published in 1987, because that year appears on the title screen of the Apple version. Wasteland was rereleased as part of Interplay's 10 Year Anthology: Classic Collection in 1995, and also included in the 1998 Ultimate RPG Archives through Interplay's DragonPlay division. These later bundled releases were missing the original setup program, which allowed the game's maps to be reset, while retaining your original team of rangers. Jeremy Reaban wrote an unofficial (and unsupported) program that emulated this functionality. [1] All of the versions were pretty much identical, though the Commodore 64 boasted the best graphics but had the slowest disk drive speed. The IBM version differed by having an additional skill called "Combat Shooting" which could only be bought when a character was first created. While it is somewhat disputed as to if this skill actually did anything, many players claim that even one level made their characters hit more frequently and thus gave them an advantage in the game[citation needed].

[edit] Legacy

Wasteland was a successful game, and has been included on numerous "best game" and "hall of fame" lists. Computer Gaming World Magazine awarded it the Role-Playing Game of the Year award, and ten years later in 1996, it named Wasteland the #9 computer game of all time.

Wasteland was followed in 1990 by a less-successful intended sequel, Fountain of Dreams, set in post-war Florida. Electronic Arts got cold feet at the last moment, and did not advertise it as a sequel to Wasteland; in fact, none of the creative cast from Wasteland worked on Fountain of Dreams. Interplay has described its game Fallout as the spiritual successor to Wasteland.

Interplay also worked on a game called Mean Time for a while, which was based on the Wasteland "game engine" but was not a continuation of the story. Coding of Mean Time was nearly finished and a beta version was produced, but full production of the game was cancelled when the 8-bit computer game market went into decline.

[edit] External links

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