I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire: At Play in the Post-Apocalypse
From The Classical
When it was released in 1988 for the Commodore 64, Apple II and IBM PC, Interplay’s Wasteland did not boast revolutionary gameplay, a totally novel setting or cutting edge graphics. As in The Bard’s Tale – released in 1985, also by Interplay – a party of adventurers sets off into a world defined by collection, exploration and encounters with enemies presented in sparingly animated GIFs. Its post-apocalyptic setting was cobbled together from films like The Road Warrior, The Terminator and Escape from New York and it depicted an ash-strewn world full of leather-clad bikers, mutated scum, killer robots and crazed addicts. What a visitor to it could see of that world was rudimentary: just a top-down view of a landscape divided into square tiles with your avatar, a simple figure in lime green shirt and kelly green pants, always at the center.
