Download this Classic Wasteland

Wasteland is a post-apocalyptic role-playing video game first published by Electronic Arts in 1988. The game was designed by Brian Fargo, Michael A. Stackpole, Ken St. Andre and Alan Pavlish, programmed by Pavlish, and produced by David Albert of Interplay Productions.

The game is set in the middle of the 21st century, following a nuclear war during 1998, when Earth has been turned into a "wasteland" where survival is the paramount objective.

The player controls a party of Desert Rangers, a remnant of the U.S. Army based in the Southwestern United States. The party begins with four characters, and through the course of the game can hold as many as seven characters by recruiting certain citizens and creatures of the wasteland to the player's cause. The party is assigned to investigate a series of disturbances in the nearby areas and throughout the game, the player explores the remaining enclaves of human civilization, including a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas.

The game mechanics were based directly on those used in the tabletop role-playing games Tunnels and Trolls and Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes created by Wasteland developers Ken Andre and Michael Stackpole. Characters in Wasteland consequently have various statistics (strength, intelligence and luck among others) that allow them to use different skills and weapons. Experience is gained through battle and through use of skills. The game would generally let players advance with a variety of tactics: to get through a locked gate, a player could use his picklock skill, his climb skill, or his strength attribute; or he could force the gate with a crowbar - or a LAW rocket.

The initial band of Desert Rangers encountered a number of NPCs as the game progressed who could be recruited into the party of up to seven. Unlike those of other computer RPGs of the time, these NPCs might temporarily refuse to give up an item or perform an action if ordered to do so. The game was also noted for its high and unforgiving difficulty level.

Wasteland uses the game engine of The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate. It was one of the first games featuring a persistent world, where changes to the game world were stored and kept. Returning to areas later in the game, one would find them in the state one left them in, instead of being reset to their original state, as was common for games of the time. Since hard drives were still rare in home computers in 1988, this meant the original game disk had to be copied first, as the manual instructed one to do.

One of the other features of this game was the inclusion of a printed collection of paragraphs which the game would instruct the player to read at the appropriate times. These paragraphs described encounters and conversations, contained clues, and added to the overall texture of the game. Because programming space was at a premium, it saved on resources to have most of the game's story printed out in a separate manual rather than store it within the game's code itself. The paragraph books also served as a rudimentary form of copy protection, as someone playing a copied version of the game would miss out on much of the story as well as clues necessary to progress. Additionally, the paragraphs included a completely unrelated story line about a mission to Mars intended to mislead those who read the paragraphs when not instructed to, and a false set of passwords that would trip up cheaters with results that ranged from character sex changes to detonating a bomb.

The game was also known for such combat prose as "Rabbit is reduced to a thin red paste" and "Thug explodes like a blood sausage", which prompted an unofficial PG-13 sticker on the game packaging in the United States.

My System Specs:

- OS: Mac OS X 10.6.8

- CPU: Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz

- RAM: 4 GB

- Video:  ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro

- Disk Space: 8 MB

Universal Binary (Intel+PowerPC) :)