Wasteland

Wasteland from 1988 by Interplay is rightly considered the spiritual predecessor of the Fallout series and one of the most influential post-apocalyptic RPGs ever made. The player commands a squad of Desert Rangers crossing a parched America destroyed by nuclear war, resolving moral dilemmas, building a reputation with individual factions, and facing mutants, robots, and desperate survivors fighting over the last remaining resources. On the Commodore 64 the game used a top-down map view and tactical, turn-based combat, complemented by the iconic system of numbered paragraphs from the included book — at key moments the game would refer the player to a specific number in the manual, which at the time got around the machine's memory limitations while also serving as copy protection.

Wasteland stood out for its nonlinear design: the world can be explored in different orders, decisions have permanent consequences, and the game remembers destroyed or resolved locations even after reloading a saved position. Character skills ranged from firearms through piloting and repairing equipment to unconventional fields like trap demolition or talking to animals, encouraging genuinely varied approaches to solving individual tasks. The atmosphere was rounded out by spare but functional graphics and a dark, raw tone that was unusual for RPGs of the time and set the game apart from more fairy-tale-like fantasy titles.

Contemporary critics praised the game for its ambition and originality, even though the controls and the extensive text passages in the book could be demanding and less accessible for some players. Wasteland fundamentally shaped the genre's direction toward morally ambiguous, open worlds with lasting consequences for decisions, and its legacy is still visible today not only in Fallout but in many other modern RPGs. Today the game is mainly a historical curiosity, but its system of choice and consequence still feels surprisingly modern and timeless.

Why play it: For anyone interested in the roots of Fallout and morally ambiguous open worlds, Wasteland offers a system of choice and consequence that still feels surprisingly modern years later, even though the controls remain demanding.