Wasteland

Wasteland is probably the most influential post-apocalyptic RPG ever made, and its trace is still visible today. A party of Desert Rangers heads out into the ravaged American Southwest after a nuclear war to investigate strange signals and incidents, and quickly discovers that something far more organized than mere bandit gangs lies behind the collapse of the settlements. The world is harsh, ironic, and doesn't wait for the player to understand it. The base party is made up of rangers, joined along the way by other characters, though not every one of them is reliable.

The game is remarkable for how little it insists on a single solution. Locked doors can be picked, blown up, or bypassed entirely another way; you can talk to people in the settlements, bribe them, or shoot them, and the game generally takes that into account somehow. Skills like climbing, repair, medicine, or persuasion are used directly on objects and situations, party members can be recruited and lost, and the consequences of decisions get written permanently into the world, so a settlement once destroyed stays destroyed even after reloading a save. Longer descriptions are read in the accompanying booklet, which at the time also served as copy protection while letting the game tell far more than would fit on screen. Unusual approaches are also rewarded with experience, so ingenuity pays off just as much as good aim.

Turn-based combat is simple, but tense thanks to an arsenal ranging from knives to heavy machine guns and thanks to the noticeable vulnerability of characters. The presentation is austere for its time; atmosphere is carried by text and a black humor unafraid to be unpleasant. At the time the game was very successful and became a reference point for the whole genre; when Fallout was made a decade later, it openly acknowledged its debt to it. Today Wasteland demands a willingness to read and to make peace with an archaic interface, but its freedom of approach remains exceptional. It's no accident that the series returned to it years later in the form of new sequels built again on its rules and tone.