Updated and expanded November 3, 2015. Original text by Rus McLaughlin. Updates by Rowan Kaiser.
The lesson taught by Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" is simple: you can't go home again. Once you've left the safety of your quiet, underground home, the things seen and done in the outside world change everything. Most of all, they change you.
Imagine, then, being forced from the only home you've ever known and staggering out into the red sunlight of a world burned by nuclear fire. Inside the vault, you were surrounded by the happy images of an optimistic society. That's all long gone. Humanity's final war reduced civilization to a wasteland of isolated outposts, bloodthirsty raiders and horrific mutation, and this is your home now. Basic survival is your priority. Food. Water. Shelter. Weapons. You must make your way through this changed Earth, learning as you go and maybe, hopefully, changing things a little for the better.
But war? War never changes.
Brian Fargo was an unapologetic RPG fan. He founded Interplay Productions in 1984, and the following year blew away the gaming industry with a Dungeons and Dragons-inspired role playing adventure, published by three-year-old Electronic Arts. Tales of the Unknown, Volume I: The Bard's Tale instantly put Interplay on the map as a major player.
...an RPG that broke rules, starting with the non-fantasy setting.
Two years later, none of their follow-ups projects approached the potential they'd shown in their first release. Fargo, however, had ideas for a post-apocalyptic RPG, possibly something modeled after Russia-invades-America flick Red Dawn. Even better, he knew a programmer who'd developed several impressive new coding tricks. Alan Pavlish only had two credits on his resume - one a mere VIC-20 port of Galaxian - but Fargo was sold on what Pavlish had to offer, and soon brought the creators of two highly respected pen-and-paper RPGs on board. Michael A. Stackpole's Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes was largely regarded as an unsung gem, and Ken St. Andre's enduring Tunnels & Trolls, the second modern RPG ever published, advanced the old D&D gaming mechanics. That made them perfect casting for what Fargo had in mind: an RPG that broke rules, starting with the non-fantasy setting. That neither Stackpole nor St. Andre had ever worked on a video game before didn't seem pertinent.
St. Andre started by jettisoning Red Dawn -- too boring, he felt -- and substituting an Arizona Rangers vs. Terminators vibe... Arizona, because he lived there and knew the geography. He and Stackpole then started mapping out levels in pencil, on graph paper, just like they were used to. It fell to programmers Chris Christensen and Bill Dugan to translate the paperwork into something the Apple II could understand. That took weeks. Dugan and Christensen weren't paid by the hour, but per finished map.
Together with Pavlish's scripts -- both binary and text -- everything came together in 1987, and Wasteland arrived in 1988. Partly out of concern, partly as a marketing ploy, publisher EA stuck a completely unofficial "PG-13" sticker on the box.
Players took control of a party of Desert Rangers patrolling the Southwestern deserts of the 21st Century, years after a U.S./Soviet nuclear exchange. That and the menu-based encounters were nothing special, but everything else was. The wasteland was an early non-linear, persistent environment. Any changes made during any encounter - whether social or violent - remained intact instead of resetting the moment the Rangers moved on. Suddenly, players had a real effect on the world they gamed in.
Every problem had multiple solutions.
And gamers had options for what kind of footprint they left. Every problem had multiple solutions, whether it was locked door (equally susceptible to lockpicks and rocket fire) or a hostile robot. NPCs could hire onto the team, and they could refuse orders they didn't like... or even decide to leave if your leadership failed to inspire confidence. Saving progress meant rewriting the game's 5-1/4" floppy disks, so players were directed to copy the originals first; copy-protection came down to a clue-filled booklet players were supposed to read only when and as directed. Red herrings abounded for those who skipped ahead.
Taking a page from their previous work, St. Andre and Stackpole threw out the standard RPG class system and put the focus on leveling up skills. Puzzles were solved. Darkly comic twists occasionally went really dark, with payoffs that hit like a sledgehammer. Mutated animals were reduced to a thin red paste, thugs were exploded like a blood sausage. Smart Rangers learned to pay attention to their Geiger counter. The sprawling plot took the action into irradiated Los Vegas and invited Rangers to laser the Scorpitron robot before it wiped out the whole team. It was 20+ hours of RPG heaven, set in post-apocalyptic hell, and quickly became the genre's standard-bearer. Wasteland raked in money and accolades in equal numbers, and decades later still lands on all-time Best Game lists.
