Wasteland
The game mechanics are directly based on the tabletop role-playing games Tunnels and Trolls and Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes, developed by Wasteland developers Ken St. Andre and Michael Stackpole. Characters in Wasteland therefore have different statistics (including strength, intelligence and luck) that allow them to use different abilities and weapons. Experience is gained in combat and through the use of skills. The game usually lets players advance using different tactics: To get through a locked gate, a player can use his/her picklock ability, climbing ability, or strength attribute; or he/she can break down the gate with a crowbar - or a LAW missile. The initial group of Desert Rangers encountered a number of NPCs throughout the game that could be recruited into the party of up to seven. Unlike other computer role-playing games of the time, these NPCs could temporarily refuse to give up an item or perform an action when asked to do so. The game was also known for its high and unforgiving difficulty and for combat prose such as "reduced to a thin red pulp" and "explodes like a blood sausage," which led to an unofficial PG-13 sticker on the game's packaging in the United States. Wasteland was one of the first games to feature a persistent world, where changes to the game world were saved and preserved. When you returned to areas later in the game, you would find them in the state you left them in, rather than them being reset to their original state as was common in games of the time. Since hard disks were still rare in home computers in 1988, the original game disk had to be copied first, as described in the manual.
Story
In 2087, a remnant of the U.S. Army, the Desert Rangers, finds itself in the southwestern United States after the 1998 global nuclear war. A team of Desert Rangers is assigned to investigate a series of riots in the surrounding areas and, over the course of the game, explores the remaining enclaves of human civilization, including a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas. The player's party starts with four characters and can grow up to seven as the game progresses, recruiting certain citizens and creatures of the wasteland to the player's cause. As the game progresses, the player's party discovers evidence of a larger threat that threatens to wipe out what is left of human kind in the game region, and eventually the entire world. The threat, a pre-war AI computer, operates from a surviving military facility, Base Cochise, where he builds armies of killer machines and cybernetically altered humans with which he attacks settlements. His goal is to replace the current "flawed" population with genetically pure specimens. With the help of a pre-war android named Max, the player restores the necessary technology and weapons to fight the computer in his base and stop it by putting the base's nuclear reactor in a critical state.