Wasteland

Wasteland is a 1988 role-playing game made by Interplay and published by Electronic Arts. After a nuclear war, a group called the Desert Rangers keeps a kind of order in the deserts of the American Southwest. You create a squad of four rangers and travel the wasteland, recruiting others along the way, fighting raiders, mutants and machines.

It used skills rather than only classes, so a ranger who could pick locks or climb opened routes another could not. The world remembered what you did to it. To save memory, much of its text was printed in a book that came with the game, and the game told you which numbered paragraph to read.

It is the origin of the post-apocalyptic role-playing game on computers, and its world is still remarkably reactive for its age. Its squad of rangers, with their individual skills, is the ancestor of every squad in this family.

Its interface is from the 1980s and its pace is slow. A remastered version was released in 2020, which is the easiest way to play it today.

Electronic Arts held the Wasteland rights, so when Interplay made its next post-apocalyptic game, it made Fallout instead, which led to Fallout Tactics. Wasteland's squad of four rangers is the oldest form of the squad Fallout Tactics put at its centre.