Wasteland Interview
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To kick off the first part of our Fallout Revisited feature, we fired several questions over to Ken St. Andre, one of the original level designers for 1988's Wasteland. Here's what he told us:GB: How did you get involved with Wasteland?
Ken: Brian Fargo visited me in Phoenix and described a post World War III game that Interplay wanted to do using some new coding techniques that Alan Pavlish had developed. He asked me if I could come up with such a game, maybe modeled along the lines of the movie "Red Dawn"? I told him I thought I could.
GB: What was your role during the game's development?
Ken: I developed the initial game storyline. I started with something like Red Dawn in the cornfields of Idaho, but decided after a while that was too boring, and so developed another idea that I thought would be more fun. It was Arizona Rangers versus Terminators in the deserts of New Nevada--based on having most of the adventures in the wastelands of Arizona and nearby states--I chose Arizona because I live here and know the geography very well, and the desert sometimes seems like a post-nuclear wasteland already.
GB: Why after a nuclear holocaust?
Ken: We wanted a good wild science fiction setting using current firearms technology.
GB: What inspired you during the development of Wasteland?
Ken: Mad Max. Terminator. Daffy Duck.
GB: What was your favorite contribution to Wasteland? What was your greatest challenge?
Ken: The whole thing is my story. Others added notable parts of the adventure, but the basic story is mine. Most of Las Vegas and Quartz are all my invention. I created the Scorpitron robot.
