Fallout’s Forgotten Ancestor

The idea of a crowdfunded sequel to Wasteland seems to have IGN quite intrigued considering the amount of coverage they’re dedicating it, and they have now dedicated a short article to try and explain why the prospect of it is quite good indeed. Here’s a snip:

Wasteland had no levels and no checkpoints, and you soon learned that every little thing you did was being recorded to the disk as you went along. In fact, your very first task upon booting was to make copies of all four ‘sides’ of the disk so that you didn’t permanently overwrite the originals. It felt like a strange thing to have to do, but we were used to having to do peculiar acts to work around technical limitations in those days.

On that note, the paltry memory of my Commodore 64 (64kb!)meant that the game could barely store any text, and for the sake of a meaningful narrative, Wasteland prompted the player to turn to a specific paragraph of the physical book included in the rather lavish gatefold packaging. (To avoid spoiling things for you, much of the text was a complete red herring, and nothing to do with the game whatsoever.)

As is so often the case, though, all this misty-eyed nostalgia comes at a price. Trying to play the original game now would be step too far into the past for many players, with mechanics, visuals and audio intolerably primitive by today’s standards. As someone with unwavering respect for Wasteland’s place in gaming history, it’s painful to see how unkind time has been to it. Even the rosiest of tinted spectacles can’t save it. You had to be there, man.

But the prospect of an all-new Wasteland game? That’s a different matter entirely, especially given Brian Fargo’s desire to ensure that a new version would stay true to the spirt of the top-down original. Much like Nintendo continues to make extremely good new top-down Zelda games, there’s absolutely no reason for modern players to feel put off by the determination to stick to tried-and-trusted methods from the past.