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''Wasteland'' is a Post-apocalyptic Computer Role-playing Game first released in 1988 . The game was developed by Michael Stackpole and Ken St. Andre , programmed by Alan Pavlish , with additional design by Bruce Schlickbernd and produced by Brian Fargo for Interplay Productions , and published by Electronic Arts . OVERVIEW The game is set in 2087 , following a Nuclear War between the United States and the Soviet Union . Earth has been turned into a 'wasteland' where survival is the paramount objective. Players control a party of "Desert Rangers", a Nevada paramilitary group that survived the nuclear holocaust, and are assigned to investigate a series of disturbances in the Desert . The party begins with four characters, and through the course of the game can hold as many as seven characters by recruiting certain citizens of the wasteland to the player's cause. Throughout the game the player explores the remaining enclaves of human civilization, including a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas. GAME DESCRIPTION Characters in ''Wasteland'' have various statistics (. Wasteland was probably the first RPG in which all the characters in the party were not mere puppets for the player to control. The initial band of Desert Rangers encountered a number of NPCs as the game progressed who could be recruited into the party. Unlike those of other computer RPGs of the time, these NPCs would refuse to give up their most treasured items if ordered to do so, and could be irritated to the point of attacking the Rangers. One of the other notable features of this game was the inclusion of a printed collection of paragraphs which the game would instruct the player to read at the appropriate times. These paragraphs described encounters, conversations, contained clues, and added to the overall texture of the game. Such paragraph books were a common feature of computer Role Playing Games of the period. Because programming 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 store it within the game's code itself. The paragraph books also served as a rudimentary form of Copy Protection , as someone playing a copied version of the game would miss out on much of the story as well as clues necessary to progress. Additionally, the paragraphs included a dummy story line about a mission to mars intended to mislead those that read the paragraphs when not instructed to, and a bogus set of passwords that would trip up cheaters with results that ranged from character sex changes to detonating a nuke. The game was also known for such combat prose as "Rabbit is reduced to a thin red paste" and "Thug explodes like a blood sausage", which prompted what was thought to be an unofficial PG-13 sticker on the game packaging in the United States . In fact, the sticker was a deliberate marketing gimmick intended to fire up the target core age group. PLATFORMS ''Wasteland'' was first distributed for the '' in 1995 , and also included in the 1998 '' Ultimate RPG Archives '' through Interplay's DragonPlay division. These later bundled releases were missing the original setup program, which allowed the game's maps to be reset, while retaining your original team of rangers. Jeremy Reaban wrote an unofficial (and unsupported) program that emulated this functionality. {Link without Title} LEGACY ''Wasteland'' was a successful game, and has been included on numerous "best game" and "hall of fame" lists. Computer Gaming World Magazine awarded it the Role-Playing Game of the Year award, and ten years later in 1996, it named Wasteland the #9 computer game of all time. ''Wasteland'' was followed in 1990 by a less-successful intended sequel, '' Fountain Of Dreams '', set in post-war Florida . Electronic Arts got cold feet at the last moment, and did not advertise it as a sequel to Wasteland, and in fact, none of the creative cast from ''Wasteland'' worked on ''Fountain of Dreams''. Interplay has described its game '' Fallout '' as the spiritual successor to ''Wasteland''. Interplay also worked on a game called '' Meantime '' for a while, which was based on the Wasteland sourcecode but was not a continuation of the story. Coding of Meantime was nearly finished and a beta version was produced, but full production of the game was cancelled when the 8bit computer game market went into decline. EXTERNAL LINKS
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