Video game:Wasteland

Developed by Interplay Productions and published by Electronic Arts in 1988, Wasteland stood out from other role-playing games (RPGs) of the time, which typically contained magical and fantasy elements, by featuring a realistic and gritty portrayal of a post-nuclear war America.

The story begins in 2087, nearly a century after tension between the United States and Russia escalated to the point of nuclear war, leaving few survivors struggling to rebuild civilization. Players command a team of up to seven elite Desert Rangers in the American Southwest who are sent to investigate a series of disturbances and aid the local populace. Four members of this team are provided at the start and players are given the option to customize them by altering their respective names, sexes, nationalities, and skill-sets. The remaining members of the player's party are non-player characters (NPCs) that are found and recruited as the world is explored. Each of these NPC recruits possessed a unique personality and special skills, allowing them to aid players in their travels. However, unlike many other RPGs of the time, the NPC team members in Wasteland do not automatically obey the player's every command. NPCs, like real people, might refuse an order out of principle or sheer stubbornness. At times, they could abandon the party entirely. Not only did this help the game's sense of realism, it increased its difficulty by creating uncertainty and drama.

Wasteland was one of the first games to feature a persistent world where players could return to locations and find them exactly has they left them, instead of finding it reset to its original state. Likewise, NPCs would remember previous actions and comment on them, favorably or otherwise, throughout the game. All actions in the game had real and permanent consequences. The game achieved this by constantly rewriting information on the game's floppy disk. The game even encouraged users to make copies of the master disk to prevent losing the original game data.

To save programming space on the disks, Wasteland incorporated much of the game's story into the printed manual. While exploring, the game occasionally prompted players to turn to a specific page in order to read a piece of the game narrative or for clues on how to proceed. Some of the paragraphs, however, contained misinformation to confuse those who decided to cheat and read through everything at once. In total, the manual included, 162 paragraphs. This also served as a crude form of copy protection by preventing anyone from completing the game without the game manual.

Despite technical limitations, Interplay Productions found a way to create a highly complex world in Wasteland. The game remains one of the most critically acclaimed role-playing games ever made.