1988 video game

Wasteland is a role-playing video game developed by Interplay Productions and published by initially Electronic Arts in March 1988. Characters in Wasteland have seven attributes–strength, intelligence, luck, speed, agility, dexterity, and charisma–that allow the characters to use different skills and weapons. Experience is gained through combat and skill usage to level up, or promote, characters. The player's party begins with four members and can grow to as many as seven by recruiting citizens and wasteland creatures. Unlike other computer role-playing games of the time, these non-player characters might at times refuse to follow the player's commands, such as when the player orders the character to give up an item or perform an action. The game is noted for its high and unforgiving difficulty level. The prose appearing in the game's combat screens, such as phrases saying an enemy is "reduced to a thin red paste" and "explodes like a blood sausage", prompted an unofficial PG-13 sticker on the game packaging in the U.S.

Wasteland was one of the first games featuring a persistent world, where changes to the game's open world were stored and kept. Returning to an area later in the game, the player would find it in the state the player left it, rather than being reset, as was common for games of the time. Since hard drives were still rare in home computers in 1988, this meant the original game disk had to be copied first.

Another feature of the game was the inclusion of a printed collection of paragraphs that the player would read at the appropriate times. These paragraphs described encounters, conversations and contained clues. Because disk 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 stored within the game's code itself. The paragraph books also served as a rudimentary form of copy protection; someone playing a copied version of the game would miss out on story elements and clues necessary to progress. The paragraphs included an unrelated story line about a mission to Mars intended to mislead those who read the paragraphs when not instructed to, and a false set of passwords that would trip up cheaters.

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