The 25 year journey of Wasteland 2. Wasteland 2. Skip to Content. Brian Fargo on creating the sequel to the ground zero of post-apocalypse games. Written by Rich Wordsworth. If you started gaming after , you might not know just how much you owe to the original American, post-nuclear Wasteland. Gamers in their teens, twenties and even thirties will remember throwing dice on New Vegas' tumbledown Strip, pilfering munitions from Fallout 3's burned out White House, the jingling slot machines and distant gunshots of Fallout 2's New Reno - maybe even running with the caravan traders in Fallout's Hub.
But for all their adventures in world-saving and mutant-slaying, those players were born after the bombs fell. While the post-apocalypse has given us modern gems from Rage to The Last Of Us , it'd all be so much static without the quasi-text adventure that was Interplay's Wasteland.
A quarter century later, Wasteland 2 is finally nearing the end of its Beta test. Its post-nuclear American Southwest is no less full of raiders, murderers and cut-throat opportunists. Its deserts are no less barren, its mutants no less gruesome. Twenty-five years on, we're still grimly fascinated by what the world might look like scorched of humanity - and how we might carve out an existence in it.
There is no denying the chord that strikes. The original Wasteland for PC, Apple II and Commadore 64 set the tone for post-apocalypse games when it released, putting players in command of a group of former US Army troops called the Desert Rangers fighting to reclaim and defend a post-war America. But after losing the rights to the franchise, Interplay would go on to make the first two celebrated Fallout games in and Wasteland was left buried in the sand, until Fargo finally wrestled the rights to the franchise back years later.
But even with the rights in hand, when the time came to make a sequel publishers just didn't seem interested. Either there was no market, or their ideas of what a modern Wasteland would look like were so divorced from those of Fargo and his team to be hardly worth countenancing. Wasteland 2 looked doomed to exist either as cash-in on an old name, or not at all.
