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The community withstood the test of time and sieges by desperate inmates trying to retake the prison. The engineers seized a newly constructed federal maximum security prison, banishing the death row inmates into the surrounding wasteland, and then inviting the surrounding survivalist communities to join them in their efforts at building a new society. You step into the shoes of a survivalist group descended from a battalion of Army Engineers, stranded after the Big One deep within the deserts of the American Southwest. Isolated pockets of humanity survive, separated by blasted sands, intolerable heat, and the occasional mutated horror. The nuclear exchange between the superpowers toppled human civilization, turning humans from apex predators into endangered species that has learned little from the collapse.
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Wasteland became The Terminator instead of Red Dawn, set a hundred years after the nuclear holocaust nearly wiped humanity out in 1998. Andre convinced him to pursue a different idea, pitting the remnants of humanity in a desperate fight against a robotic menace, in the desolate post-nuclear deserts in what was once California, Nevada, and Arizona. In fact, Fargo originally wanted to create a story modelled after Red Dawn, with players stepping into the shoes of American guerrillas fighting against the Soviet occupation. Andre, Michael Stackpole, Dan Carver, and Liz Danforth, he set out to create an adventure that traded swords for guns, sorcery for chainsaws, and high fantasy for the post-apocalypse.ĭeveloped over the course of the next two years, Wasteland drew on the nuclear scare of what turned out to be the terminal decade of the Cold War, freely mixing in elements from apocalyptic fiction the creators loved, such as Planet of the Apes (1968 through 1973), the Mad Max series (1979, 1981, and 1985), The Terminator (1984), and Red Dawn (1984).
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Together with veteran tabletop RPG designers Ken St. While the game was followed by two sequels, subtitled The Destiny Knight and Thief of Fate, the success allowed Fargo to try something new. I – The Bard’s Tale, a first person dungeon crawler that built on the ideas pioneered by Sir-Tech’s Wizardry series. It’s hard to imagine video gaming without Fallout, but it’s even harder to imagine Fallout without the original open world, post-apocalyptic game that allowed you to smack children around with crowbars, exterminate entire bloodlines, only to become big damn heroes saving the world from a robotic menace considering humanity to be well past its expiration date.īack in 1986, Brian Fargo’s Interplay struck gold with Tales of the Unknown: Vol.
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