Wasteland - The History of Wasteland

Forbes has an article exploring the history of the Wasteland games.

Like most RPGs of its time, Wasteland was a party-based game but its party members were different from the ones found in other games. In addition to being collections of skills and stats, they appeared to have minds of their own. Party members would sometimes refuse to follow commands given by the player. Behavior like this was an early instance of NPCs evidencing what appeared to the player as artificial intelligence and if you weren't prepared for it, it was a shock the first time it happened. Playing in Wasteland was something like the 1988 version of going to Westworld and being confronted by hosts that weren't doing what you thought they were programmed to do.

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Fallout was intended as a “spiritual successor” to Wasteland but it was a very different game. Wasteland is a tactical RPG where you control a party of Desert Rangers who set out to impose justice and order in a land overwhelmed by post-nuclear chaos. Fallout is a solo RPG where you emerge from a subterranean vault and try to survive in a different post-nuclear world. Fallout was a great game that launched a great series but it wasn’t a proper sequel to Wasteland. So, I waited…