Wasteland is a role-playing video game developed by Interplay Productions and published by Electronic Arts in 1988. The first installment of the Wasteland series, it is set in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic America destroyed by a nuclear holocaust generations before. Developers originally made the game for the Apple II and it was ported to the Commodore 64 and MS-DOS. It was re-released for Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux in 2013 via Steam and GOG.com, and in 2014 via Desura. A remastered version titled Wasteland Remastered was released on February 25, 2020, in honor of the original game's 30th anniversary.
Critically acclaimed and commercially successful, Wasteland was intended to be followed by two separate sequels in the 1990s, but Electronic Arts dropped claims of Fountain of Dreams being a sequel and Interplay's Meantime was canceled. The game's general setting and concept became the basis for Interplay's 1997 role-playing video game Fallout and the Fallout series. Decades later, inXile Entertainment, founded by the game's director Brian Fargo, released two proper sequels: Wasteland 2 (2014) and Wasteland 3 (2020).
Wastelands game mechanics are based on those used in tabletop role-playing games, such as Tunnels and Trolls and Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes created by Wasteland designers Ken St. Andre and Michael Stackpole. Characters in Wasteland have seven attributesstrength, intelligence, luck, speed, agility, dexterity, and charismathat allow the characters to use different skills and weapons. Experience is gained through combat and skill usage to level up, or promote, characters. The player's party begins with four members and can grow to as many as seven by recruiting citizens and wasteland creatures. Unlike other computer role-playing games of the time, these non-player characters might at times refuse to follow the player's commands, such as when the player orders the character to give up an item or perform an action. The game is noted for its high and unforgiving difficulty level.