Brian Fargo talks about Wasteland and the Fallout series at Kotaku:

Uncovering the Fallout Series' True Origins

The Fallout Anthology is out today, a collection of every game in the greatly loved post-apocalyptic series so far (that's 1997's Fallout, Fallout 2 from 1998, Fallout Tactics from 2001, 2008's Fallout 3, and New Vegas from 2010) that comes in an actual nuke-shaped container, which strikes me as deeply ironic given what the Fallout games have to say about nuclear war. But one crucial game is missing from that collection: Wasteland, a 1988 game for the home computers of the time. Its creator Brian Fargo would go on to make the first two games in the Fallout series with legendary studio Black Isle Studios. (He would also finally make Wasteland 2 in 2014, after a hugely successful crowdfunding campaign. A PS4 and Xbox One version is coming this month.)

Wasteland is the Fallout series' true origins. And not just spiritually: Fallout literally exists because Fargo could not get the rights to the Wasteland name from EA, who originally published it, so he had to come up with something else. As a consequence, perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of Fallout's iconic things, people, places and plotlines originated in Wasteland.

"I think that people have forgotten, or don't know, how much Fallout was actually [the original] Wasteland 2," Fargo tells me. "My charter was like, OK, I can't get the rights to Wasteland 2 from Electronic Arts. I'm never going to pry it from their cold, dead fingers anytime soon. So, what can we do that hits on the open-world nature of it, the sense of a persistent world? Because that's what made Wasteland very revolutionary: this whole concept that you could solve things by using skills and stats on the environment, that you could talk, sneak or shoot your way out of a problem.

"There's a lot of stuff that was literally lifted straight from Wasteland into Fallouts 1 and 2, and even today. I wanted to specifically reference as much as possible without being sued by Electronic Arts. It's like if there was a movie with Han Solo in it before Star Wars." [...]