Electronic Arts "Wasteland" post-apocalyptic role playing game

My memory is so full of good times with video games when I was growing up and one of those memories is Electronic Arts epic post-apocalyptic role playing game “Wasteland”.  “Wasteland” literally came out of nowhere to rob me blind of many, many daytime and night time hours of my eighteen year old life during my first year in college away from home. 

It was February or March of 1988, sometime about a third of the way through my second semester; I remember getting out of class for the day at Hinds Junior College in Raymond, Mississippi and wanting to just get out and go for a long drive in the warming Mississippi spring weather.   Cruising around Jackson in my black and gold ’79 Pontiac Trans Am with the T-tops off and listening to the Kenwood aftermarket stereo system I eventually found myself at Northpark Mall by afternoon’s end and after eating an early dinner at the food court I wandered aimlessly around the mall hitting my usual haunts …

Bookstore.

Toy Store.

Arcade.

Music store.

Electronics Boutique.

Oh, back in those days EB wasn’t wall to wall with console games, no, EB was wall to wall with computer games and computer accessories.  In fact, I don’t even remember there being any console video games at EB back in those days … no, it was just computer gaming software for the IBM (PC), Apple and Commodore personal computer systems and back then while the IBM had more games available for it the Apple games seemed to have the best graphics (something that decades later I still wonder about).  As soon as I walked in EB there was a standup cardboard display greeting me for “Wasteland.”

Now, back in the day my chosen gaming rig and personal computer was my trusty Apple IIC (two-cee) that I’d gotten about seven years prior and it had been my best friend all through school.  It was almost like a laptop computer … it was the size of a contemporary laptop, had a built-in floppy drive (5.25”) and a small monochrome (green) monitor.  When hooked up with a Commodore color monitor that I’d gotten for Christmas the previous year and I had a screaming game machine (at that time) that would run anything I could throw at it (as long as whatever I threw at it said “APPLE II+ family compatible”).  Like I said, the IBM (PC) (later just identified as “DOS”) had the most games available for it and sometimes the PC had games that I really wanted to play that were not offered in Apple versions so as I grabbed up the “Wasteland” software folder my eyes scanned the words I was looking for … looking for that sticker which said that it was Apple compatible … and it was!

Holy smoke on a Belgian waffle!

Whatever this game was … and it looked (expletive expletive expletive) awesome … it would run on my Apple IIC! 

I turned the shrink wrapped software jacket over in my hands, my eyes roaming that amazing cover art and then scanning the preview screen shots on the back all the while reading what I could be getting into.  My mind raced … “Wasteland” … “Electronic Arts” … from the same people who had brought me such wonderful previous RPGs like “The Bard’s Tale” series.

It was some kind of post-apocalyptic role playing game for the Apple computer … and it was like “Bard’s Tale” … sort of … only with radiation and mutants and guns and rocket launchers!  I have to tell you, in the spring of 1988 post-apocalyptic stuff was still tightening the lugnuts of my imagination and here was the first real post-apocalyptic computer game that I’d ever played … okay, maybe not.  There had been SSI’s “Road War 2000” about two years ago but it hadn’t looked anything like … this.

This was … cool!

This was ... TSR's "Gamma World" on a computer game ... if TSR had ever made "Gamma World" into a computer game.

It was one of those moments in your life when you know that something really cool is about to happen.  There were some science fiction games for the Apple back then but none of those games were role playing games.  As far as role playing games went I’d pretty much been relegated to Origin’s “Ultima” series of dungeon crawling monster slaying sequel adventures and SSI’s “Questron” which was a fun play.  It amazes me that with the threat of global thermonuclear war looming all the time between America and Russia that fantasy RPGs were all the rage on computers.  There’s only so much fantasy and magic that I could take and by the spring of 1988 I had pretty much had all of the spell casting and sword swinging and dragon slaying that I could take and “Wasteland” seemed like just the kind of doomsday stroll I was looking for.

Oh … this was going to be good!

I paid for my copy of “Wasteland” and drove home to my apartment in Raymond, MS and … good memories.  The game came with two, double sided five and a quarter inch floppy disks, a game manual, and a book of paragraphs to read at certain points in the game.

"Wasteland", like most games in that era, had to be copied to a blank disk in order to play because since there were no hard drives and since "Wasteland" was one of the first persistent environment type games (meaning if you killed everyone in a location when you left and came back everyone in that location was still dead ...) so data was actively being written to the floppy disks as you played the game.  Heaven help you if you ever played off of one of your "master" disks ...

I don’t know how many total hours that I played “Wasteland” but it was a good chunk of my eighteen year old life that semester.  Some of the things that I remember about that game, now 28 years later, I’ll share with you.

The game ran on two, double sided five and a quarter inch floppy disks.

You had to copy the original disks and play from the copies.  There was a notch on the disks that you put a piece of tape over to protect the disk so that the disk could not be changed or written to.

Before you played the game you had to take four blank disks and painstakingly run a utility program that copied the two original disks, front and back to the four backup disks.  There were no hard drives back then so everything was run in memory.  During game play you would be asked to swap out disks as you played.  If you didn’t save often and you lost power then you lost everything you had played for.

I started out with four characters … Jessie, Waylon, Sarah and Deena.  I kept the names simple because you were limited to a certain amount of letters for each name and I really wasn’t in the habit of naming my characters stuff like “Johnny the Mutant Slayer” or anything that silly and ridiculous.

I remember leaving the Ranger Center … fresh recruits heading out into the “Wasteland” for the first time.  I had been told that something … strange … was happening to the north west and that there were a few settlements to the west so off I went exploring.

Every now and then the game would tell you to read some text out of a handout.  This would add ambience to the gaming experience.  Why this text couldn’t be included in the game itself I didn’t understand but perhaps it was a limitation of the programming ability back then.

I remember fighting mutant animals at some agriculture center which had a giant rusting satellite dish (why an agriculture center needed a giant satellite dish was something I thought about … maybe it was some kind of satellite communication center that later was turned into an agriculture center after the bombs fell and things like satellite dishes became pretty much useless).  I remember there being an underground warren where I had to go kill killer bunnies and stuff.  I eventually stopped shooting them and just switched to my character’s combat knives and got up close and personal to save ammo.

I remember a section of railroad with a couple of train cars and some tents … I think some nomads lived there and you could trade with them.  The train cars never went anywhere.

I remember some motel that I had to go to the courtyard.  There was a pool and just for fun I put my character through the pool.  He started swimming and got experience for doing it so I swam around for a while and got some free experience.

Squeezings!  Which was what all the drunks kept asking for … I guess “snake squeezings” was slang for liquor and booze.

I fought a hobo and his big dog … and won.

Shifting sands.

I remember finding a jeep outside a city but not being able to do anything with it.  There were no other vehicles around so I thought that was weird.  Later I rescued a guy and he fixed the jeep and drove us … somewhere … to another location.  I thought that was weird and neat.

I remember fighting robots in a sewer and three of my characters getting killed because that firefight was never-ending and burned through almost all of my ammo.  I used up grenades, anti-tank rockets and burned entire magazines at a time through my weapons.

I buried those three dead characters in the spot on the map just to the right of the Ranger Center.  Every time I went back to the Ranger Center I thought about my three dead team mates.  Few games did that way back then.  

Few games do today.

I made three new characters.  The survivor of the first group became their mentor.

I remember some outlaws or bandits or criminals had kidnapped the mayor’s daughter and I had to assault their hideout in the town.  Somehow I managed to get on the roof of the hideout and use ropes to go through a skylight.  There was a long running gunfight with the outlaws and I eventually killed their leader.  The mayor’s daughter was tied to a chair and rigged with explosives.  I disarmed the explosives and we all got out of there to return the mayor’s daughter to him.  That was intense.  I even had to get up and walk around for a few minutes outside after that fight because up until that point in time that was the most epic RPG computer game fight I’d ever played through.  I tried to copy the game disk so I could go back in and do the fight again but that didn’t work.

I remember there was a village that the only way you could get to it was by going way north and then following a trail due south.  If you tried to get to the village from the south you got radiation poisoning.

I remember my first Proton Ax!  I found it in some room on a golf course in Vegas, I think.  It was so much better than what I’d been using against the robots.  Proton ax!  FTW!

Fighting death machines in the golf course in Vegas.  When I first went to Las Vegas all I seemed to run into were death machines.

Drools!

Night Screamers … sitting there holding that toy doll … just freaky.

Giant iguanas!

I remember not being able to open a locked door so I used a “mangler” on it which was either a type of grenade or a type of anti-tank rocket and I blew the door up and was able to get the loot inside.

There was a military base where you could learn new skills.  I think you learned how to fly a helicopter there as well in some kind of simulator then took the helicopter to do the final attack on the final boss / base.

I think I built an android as a team member …

Pseudo-chitin armor!  To this day I still remember how cool finding “pseudo-chitin armor” was and how after finding it my characters didn’t get hurt as bad as often.

Laser guns!

A man portable meson cannon!

Power armor!

A rampant AI intent on using automated death machines to pacify the Wasteland of all organic life!

The final assault on the AI base kind of reminded me of what it might have been like assaulting SKYNET in the “Terminator” movie … and this was three years before “Terminator 2” ever hit theaters.

One of the things that I remember most about “Wasteland” was that I played it while listening to Tangerine Dream’s “Phaedra” album.  To this day when I listen to “Phaedra” I can close my eyes and still get glimpses of the imagined “Wasteland” … so ingrained in my golden memories is the association between that Tangerine Dream album and that Electronic Arts computer game that I can’t help having fond memories when I think of one or the other.

"Phaedra" was the perfect soundtrack to "Wasteland" ... from the title track to "Sequent C", the last track on Side B, which was playing at the time that I buried three quarters of my team members.

“Wasteland”, while it dominated my free time in the spring of 1988, was a non-stop love affair with everything that was cool in the post-apocalypse setting.  I was fortunate enough to own and play this game when it came out and I have many fond memories of it.  Almost ten years later I got to play the spiritual successor to “Wasteland” …“Fallout” and oh what a difference that nearly decade long wait had made in graphics and play-ability. 

I don’t think I got any of the “Wasteland” references in “Fallout” other than the reference to the Desert Rangers.  I understood at the time that “Fallout” wasn’t a real sequel to “Wasteland” but playing “Fallout” I reminisced about “Wasteland” and thought about how far we’d come as computer gamers in so short a time.

I’ve been a big fan of the ongoing “Fallout” series (some more than others).  Now, twenty-eight years later, almost to the day, I’ve gone back and purchased “Wasteland” off of the GOG website and I’m revisiting the “Wasteland” again.  It’s a funny kind of deja-vu.

The graphics are beyond ancient … but seeing them again reminds me that at one time this was the best that it got in computer gaming.  I admit it’s going to be hard for me to go back and play this game because the interface … the graphics … the sound … it’s hard to go way back to 1988 when you’ve got an X-Box 360 and an Intel Core i3 laptop sitting on your desk running game software that, if you took either one back to 1978 and showed kids back then what the future would hold their collective heads would have exploded.

Growing up with an Atari console in the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, using an Apple IIC for gaming in the early to late ‘80’s, moving to a Nintendo in 1988, going to a PC in 1989, going back to Apple with their Macintosh SE in 1990 and then going all PC in 1992 … yeah, I’ve seen it all and I’ve been there for some of the really great games that have come along and made history and set up ripples in gaming that have been felt even down to this very day.

“Wasteland” was one of those games and this Friday night, after work, I’m going to get a pizza, fill up my Aladdin 52 ounce Mega Mug with syrupy sweet tea, maybe a shot glass or two of my own brand of “snake squeezings” (Jack Daniels Ole No. 9), put Tangerine Dream’s “Phaedra” on my iPod playing in the background, cut down the lights and fire up my new GOG copy of “Wasteland” tweaked to run on a contemporary machine … and I’m going to just sit there and be 18 years old again, back in my first year of college, walking the “Wasteland” and being a heavily armed tourist revisiting all the old haunts I remember with guns blazing reducing some mutants to thin red paste.

A new fancy: "East of West"

I was at Bombshell Comics in Hattiesburg the other day, seeing if a new "Prophet" had come in and I got invited to peruse a new offering ... "East of West".  It's a post apocalyptic western that mixes "Call of Cthulhu", "The Outlaw Josey Wales" and "Bladerunner" all together in a delightful blend.

In other words, it's my kind of weird and I have pretty high standards for weird.

It's an alternate America.  Sometime during the American Civil War a comet hit North America forever changing the world.  America is divided into high tech versions of the Union, the Confederacy, Texas, a nation of Freedmen (ex-slaves), the Endless Nations (all the Indian tribes joined together) and an outcast of China which has established a new Chinese empire on the west coast.

All are divided into their areas and at the center point where all of their territories meet is the impact crater of the comet.

Basically the story involves the end times, a group called "The Chosen" which is a cult trying to bring about the end of the world and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  Only, it's the three Horsemen because when Pestilence, Famine and Conquest awaken they find that Death has already awakened and been working for some time without them.  In fact, Death has found his soul mate, fallen in love, had a child and had his wife and child stolen from him.

This has tended to make Death a little pissed off.

Death finds that not only has he been betrayed, but that his wife and child are both alive.

His son has been kidnapped and is being groomed to be the "Beast of the Apocalypse" in an isolation facility where the child is being programmed by "The Chosen" as the ultimate weapon and conqueror of the world, a living means to the end of the world.

Death itself is a pretty neat character.  He's dressed all in white, from head to toe, long white hair, white albino skin and he carries traditional, albeit, high-tech western style weaponry.  

He reminds me a lot of Michael Moorcock's "Elric" if "Elric" had been cast to play the title role in "The Outlaw Josey Wales."  Death has some great lines in the comic, one of my favorite being his retort to one of the major power brokers in the storyline when he tells him "I beg to fucking differ." which itself made me chuckle out loud.  Not since "Firefly" and Captain Malcolm Reynolds have I liked a character as much as I've started liking this personification of Death.

This is what weird science fiction westerns should be about / like.

Death is a bad ass and stares down entire armies.  He wades through legions with six guns blazing, riding a mechanical robot horse that has a head that fires a devastating beam that reminds me of the hyperwave gun on the Space Battleship Yamato.  In other words, he's well equipped to deal his trade.

Death is travelling with two companions, "Crow" and "Wolf", both extremely powerful witches from the Endless Nations ... 

Crow is something not human, a female in shape only that can turn into a cloud of black crows that tear the eyes out of her enemies and tear them apart.  Wolf is an Indian who turns into a pack of white wolves that, well, pretty much tear his enemies apart.  Death, therefore, goes into battle aided by lots of snarling white wolves and a black cloud of killer crows.  It's magic, it fits, and when it happens it's effective.

And then there's the Cthulhu-like horror

There's mystical and mythical and just plain Lovecraftian-type plots going on.  Stories within stories, arcs within arcs.  Not since reading "Jonah Hex" as a child or the late '70's / early '80's of "Heavy Metal" magazine have I found something that catches my fancy like this story does (well, this and "Prophet").

So, it's good to be a kid again.

I don't read many comics but when I do, they're good ones.

I have high standards for weird and "East of West", so far, fulfills all of those standards and exceeds expectations.  If your tastes in weird run close to mine, give it a try.  "East of West" may make you a lot of not unhappy.

Prophet!

It's not often that I collect a series of comic books and usually when I do it's a short-run series like Miller and Darrow's "Hard Boiled" or something like Delgado's "Hieroglyph" or Steve White and Dan Abnett's "Hypersonic" but every once in a while, thank you life, there comes another series which I adore.  Luckily I found this one about two years back but didn't start collecting it until this month (which meant that I had to catch up).  

Prophet is the story of John Prophet, a modified / vat grown super soldier (think Captain America) who wakes up from stasis / hybernation on Earth so far in the future that nothing is recognizable to him.  Time, alien races and cosmic events have forever altered the planet, even the galaxy.  John Prophet is not alone, he is one of many John Prophets, some altered genetically for different environments or situations and each as a mission.

The Empire of Man is returning, rising in power, and hell is to be paid.

I can't tell you very much about this other than if you like classic 1970's style Angus McKee, Richard Corben, Moebius and Moreno artwork like that once found in the pages of "Metal Hurlant" ("Heavy Metal" to us Americans) then Prophet is for you.  Just flipping through the pages and looking at the artwork takes me back in time to when art ... comic art ... was hand drawn and not done on computers.  It's crude, brutal and wonderful, not glossy, sedate and precise.  I've ranted about art, especially sci-fi art, and how in it moving into the digital age it has lost a lot of what made it so great.  There's no soul, no emotion anymore in sci-fi art and it shows.  The same can be said of modern sci-fi comic books.  Everything is so clean, antiseptic, mundane and predictable.

Not so with Prophet.

Prophet is the telling of an epic story, tens of thousands of years, with characters that have started in another age of comics (the 1990s) and off and on appeared in several series then had their selves thrown into a reboot in the far future, a future so wonderfully bizarre that you wish that someone would make a movie of it.

Carnivorous aliens, symbiotes, parasites, adaptive membranes, interspecies sex, living rock people, living metal robots, crystal sentients, sapient fungus ... Prophet has something for everyone and a surprise for all.  The artwork is amazing in scope and depth, it's like looking at Darrow's work on "Hard Boiled" ... every time you go back and look at it you see something you missed.

John Prophet is an interesting character but so far I'm drawn more to Diehard, a cyborg shell that is over 10,000 years old.   A man from the 1990's, his body was replaced after his death and his cyborg form lives on.  Several stories tell of Diehard's past, some of when he was still a man, others when he was living on some planet with some adoptive race and had a family.  The fact that Diehard is replacing parts of himself with organic parts taken from dead John Prophet clones is intriguing.  At one point he has a human heart beating in his chest cavity (something he hasn't had for thousands of years) and later he can speak again due to adding one of the clone's vocal cords to his design.  You would think that if a machine was operating just fine without a human heart (and for thousands of years) why would it need to install one now?  Also, why does it need vocal cords to communicate which it could just have a speaker to project an artificial voice.

I may find this out yet.

If you want to pick up on Prophet, you can do so now quickly and cheaply.  There are 45 issues of Prophet dating back to the early '90's but the current restart didn't happen until issue 21.  There are 45 issues now meaning that you need to start at issue 21 and catch up.  That means that you have 24 issues to grab.  This isn't hard since on Amazon there are three trade paperbacks which capture issues 21 to 38 leaving you only with 39 to 45.  I bought the trade paperbacks (about 10 bux each) and then found the other back issues at my local hobby shop for face price.

If you like weird sci-fi, were once a fan of the old Heavy Metal magazine and like stuff like Delgado's "Hieroglyph" then you'll dig Prophet.  Each issue is a page turning treat that leaves you waiting impatiently for next month and the next issue.

"Doomsday +1" - '70's post apocalyptic goodness from Charlton Comics

"Doomsday +1" was a post apocalyptic science fiction comic series published by the small, Derby, Connecticut-based publisher Charlton Comics.  The series ran for twelve issues with the first six issues running from July 1975 to May 1976 while the second six issues were simply reprints of the first six issues labeled 7 to 12. The reprints ran from June 1978 to May 1979.

The cover of issue one is wrong ... the astronauts did not arrive back in
New York and this art was clearly a homage / play to the
highly successful "Planet of the Apes" franchise.

"Doomsday +1" is probably best known as the first original, color-comics series by artist John Byrne who would eventually become a major industry figure.  The series was created by writer Joe Gill with John Byrne doing the penciling and inking while George Wildman served as the editor. 

Byrne, serving as letterer, used the pseudonym "Byrne Robotics" while working on issues #4-6 (later reprinted as issues #10-12). The credits for issue #5 show the artwork as "Art: Byrne Robotics with technical assistance from Patterson-75", a pseudonym then for Bruce Patterson who provided some degree of inking.  Byrne drew the covers of issues #2-6, with the cover of issue #1 variously credited to Byrne and to Tom Sutton. Issues #7 and #11 featured re-colored reprints of Byrne covers, while issues #8-10 and #12 featured "new" covers created by blowing up panels of interior artwork from the stories.

 

The stories ran from 22 to 23 pages with most issues also containing a two-page text backup — either a story featuring the main characters or a non-fiction featurette. The backup story in issue #5 consisted of two comic pages, drawn by Steve Ditko, of "real world" paranormal vignettes.  These stories were, by and large, nothing more than filler.

Synopsis:  "Doomsday +1" features some of my favorite genres; atomic holocaust, survival, astronauts returning to a devastated Earth and a good dose of science fiction / science fantasy thrown in.  "Doomsday +1" occurs in the near future (then the late '70's / early '80's) in which a South American despot named Rykos, facing a military coup de tat, launches his sole two atomic missiles on the world.  The atomic missiles are targeted on New York City in the United States and Moscow in the U.S.S.R. Both cities are destroyed.  The two superpowers, each believing the other has launched a first strike, launch their own atomic arsenals at each other in retaliation. The truth becomes known and American president Cole along with Russian premier Mikhail realize their errors but it is too late; the fully automated nuclear-missile systems of each country can not be countermanded or turned off.

The world is doomed to atomic holocaust.

Only hours before the apocalypse begins, a Saturn VI rocket bearing three astronauts launches from Cape Kennedy in Florida.  Onboard the Apollo style command module are three astronauts: Captain Boyd Ellis, United States Air Force; his fiancée, Jill Malden; and Japanese physicist Ikei Yashida.  All three astronauts witness the atomic holocaust from the safety of orbit.  Weeks later, after the post-apocalyptic radiation has subsided to safe levels, their space capsule lands upon a melting Greenland ice field.  Seeking shelter, the three astronauts make it across the ice field and encounter a wooly mammoth, frozen alive for thousands of years and now thawed due to the atomic exchange.  They are saved by an equally ancient Goth named "Kuno" who joins the party but is the man lost in time among all the high technology that the astronauts depend on to survive.

Crossing over into Canada using a sail boat / yacht, they are attacked by a robot operated fighter jet.  Arriving at a Royal Canadian Air Force base, they make the base their home only to discover that a crazed Russian scientist / cyborg has them in his sights.  The Russian cyborg sends hundreds of robot paratrooper infantry to attack the RCAF base and the astronauts.  

Boyd Ellis uses a RCAF jet fighter to strafe the robots from the air while Jill, Ikei and Kuno make ground attacks using laser rifles (backpack mounted power packs) and an atomic powered tank (with a flamethrower cannon).  Boyd Ellis must land his jet when he is low on supplies and he is captured by the robots and taken to Russia to be interrogated by the Russian Cyborg.  Jill, Ikei and Kuno all board a RCAF supersonic transport, travel to Russia and with the help of Boyd, defeat the crazed cyborg and escape back to Canada.  The cyborg threatens revenge but Boyd tells him that if he tries anything that Boyd and the others will return and nuke the cyborg thus offering mutual assured destruction.

Back at the base, Boyd and Jill realize that they have grown apart and may not be the couple that they once planned to be.  Jill seems taken with Kuno now and Ikei, long jealous of Jill, is ready to move in on the vacant spot that she is leaving in Boyd's life.

The first two books in the series (detailed above) are probably the best in the way of story telling.  Later issues tended to get a little bit silly.  Plots included meeting robot guardians from a highly advanced galactic civilization who are here to pass judgment on humans for their folly (and let the astronauts teach them the error of their ways).  The astronauts deal with an underwater city being attacked by ancient aquatic enemies, visitors from a future utopia and of course, a group of other American survivors who want to do away with Boyd and Kuno and keep the women for their own needs and pleasures.

Overall, "Doomsday +1" pleases on a base level that, as a child, I found hard to ignore.  This series pandered to all of my post apocalyptic day dreams and my original copies of this short-lived series are very dog eared, especially issue #2 with the epic air and land fight against the Russian robot death machines.  The art is okay (Charlton was never known for its fantastic art quality) but the story, at least the first two or three issues) goes far in supporting what the art can't convey.

And it's John Byrne whose art is iconic and it's early John Byrne so that counts for something as well.

TSR's "GAMMA WORLD" - Post Apocalypse Role Playing Game

Growing up in the 1970's was an interesting time ... it was fun mixed with gloom.  The ever present spectre of America and Russia nuking each other back into the Stone Age was a fear that was driven home constantly.  Disaster movies, end of the world movies and a host of other media came at us like a tidal wave but instead of scaring me half to death it only fascinated me.  As I grew up, the post apocalypse scenario became the stuff of day dreams for me, not nightmares.  Somewhere during that time I started to become a loner ... movies like Charlton Heston's "The Omega Man" weren't scary to me ... they were a dream come true if they had been reality and I'd been "The Omega Man."

My early desire for science fiction began with the much celebrated "Planet of the Apes" franchise ... I was a kid and lived through seeing all of the movies on TV, followed by watching the TV series and the animated series.  That was the first of my taste of post apocalypse sci-fi and I craved more.  The more I got a taste of it, the more post apocalyptic science fiction really took hold of my imagination.  Books like "Damnation Alley", "War of the Worlds" and "The Time Machine" only fueled my love of a devastated future and the brave struggles that would be needed to overcome the folly of man.

It was late 1977 when science fiction really just came out of nowhere and seized my imagination.  I was 8 years old, "Star Wars" didn't make it to Hattiesburg, MS until the Fall of 1977 but I finally got to see, on the big screen, what everyone else was raving about.  After months of being teased by pictures and articles in magazines and the occasional rare commercial for that movie, "Star Wars" finally arrived like a tidal wave and it lit a fire in my brain, an out of control science fiction fire that continues to burn hot and bright even today.  

Science fiction had me by the soul and I was hooked and one of the greatest outlets for my imagination in my single digit years was science fiction role playing games and out of those sci-fi role playing games I think that TSR was the main provider of my entertainment for the most years.  From third grade to ninth grade, 1977 to 1983, I was a devout game player.

My first introduction to role playing games was TSR's classic "Dungeons and Dragons", the basic edition boxed set which my best friend bought and we played in the Fall of 1977, probably around the time that "Star Wars" hit the silver screen locally.

This was the first time that I'd ever played a role playing game before and even though my interest was piqued in role playing games that same interest let me know real quick that fantasy (i.e. elves, dwarves, dragons, magic, etc.) just wasn't where my heart lay.  

Everyone back then was playing D&D, from elementary kids to college students but my heart just wasn't into fantasy or sorcery.  A lot of people my age were big into Tolkien but the closest I ever got to Tolkien was the Rankin / Bass animated musical "The Hobbit" and even that couldn't turn my interest in fantasy.  Even Ralph Bakshi's animated "The Lord of the Rings" didn't grab me so while other kids were trying to come to grips with Tolkien's works, the "D&D" craze and then "Star Wars" I was lucky in one respect ... my heart was set on science fiction.

Of this I was sure.

Science fiction.

Just science fiction and TSR answered the desire for both science fiction and role playing with their 1978 post apocalyptic opus ... "Gamma World".

I first saw "Gamma World" advertised in "Boy's Life" magazine, yes, the Boy Scout magazine but then like I said, role playing games, especially "D&D" were really gaining in popularity during this time.  I mean, when Sears put a "D&D" boxed set in their Wishbook catalog and when "Gamma World" (with the illustration shown above) appears on "Boy's Life" then you were dealing with a game, nay, a phenomenon that would make history in its wake.

"Gamma World."

Science fiction role playing set in a post apocalyptic far future.

 

Robots and mutated animals and Mark V blasters!  Oh my!

"Gamma World" was the product of James M. Ward and Gary Jaquet and was a boxed set, like the "D&D" basic set.  I bought my first edition "Gamma World" boxed set at "Bookland" in the Cloverleaf Mall.  It cost me $10, was shrink wrapped, and displayed proudly in a cardboard display stand near the front of the store.  I rode my 10 speed bike home from the Mall with my pocket ten dollars lighter and the "Gamma World" boxed set in my backpack.

For your money you got a nicely illustrated cardboard box (bookshelf type edition) with a colored front and a black and white back.  Early editions had no rear illustration or description of the game / box contents so a simple sheet was put with the box and then shrink wrapped to the outside / back box bottom.

 

Inside the box was a nicely illustated black and white (two color) 57 page rulebook ...

  

 A map of the devastated North American continent ...

I never drew on my map ... I guess I didn't want to ruin it.  Instead, I would put hex paper over an area, trace the outline of any major areas and then fill in the hex paper with the details.  I also guess that is why my original first edition GW map is still pristine even today.

The boxed set came with dice like I'd never seen before.  Mind you, like I said before, my "games" were limited to the offerings from the likes of Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers.  These new games, where you had to use your imagination and you had to make your own maps (game boards) and there were dice in the shape of stuff you learned in math class ... all of this was new and cool and awesome!

"Gamma World" came with six polyhedron dice; a four sided die (d4), a six sided die (d6), an eight sided die (d8), a ten sided die (d10), a twelve sided die (d12) and a twenty sided die (d20).  The dice were different than any dice I'd ever owned as a kid before.

The dice were molded in white plastic, at least the dice that came with my game were.

The game also came with an unbranded, paper wrapped white crayon.  I had no idea what the crayon was for ...  A friend once told me the crayon was for marking on the map but that didn't make sense.  Another friend said it was for coloring in the numbers on the dice so they would be easier to read ... that didn't make much sense either since it was a white crayon and the dice were white.  To this day I still don't know what the damn white crayon was for ...  I just took a Pilot Razorpoint ink pen and used that to fill in the numbers on the dice.  That lasted for a few weeks of constant play and then you had to highlight the numbers again.

Gameplay for GW was heavily based off of the "D&D" game mechanics with stuff like hit points, six attributes ranging from 3 to 18, saving throws, armor class and hit dice.  Combat took the weapon class of whatever you were using, cross referenced that to the armor class of your target and gave you a number to roll equal to or higher in order to succeed in combat.  I liked this because it made it hard for someone with a wooden spear to hurt someone in power armor, all of which just made sense.

"Gamma World" took place on Earth.  A century after a final, cataclysmic global war almost wiped all of life on Earth out the survivors, mutants, humans, animals and plants, all vie for dominion.  Knocked literally almost back to the Stone Age, rites of passage for tribals include journeys or pilgrimages to the ancient ruins where the tribals would face all sorts of dangers ... malfunctioning robots, complex security systems, killer plants, mutants, mutated animals, and even radiation.  If you made it back alive with an artifact or some other proof that you'd been to the ruins ... if ... then you became a member of the tribe.

If you were lucky enough to find an artifact then you had to spend time to figure out how to use that artifact.  Artifacts came in three levels of complexity ... something like a grenade was simple, figuring out how a control panel in an automated factory that built robots was very complex.  Sometimes you figured it out, sometimes you broke it trying to figure it out and sometimes you hurt or killed yourself (or someone else) trying to figure it out.  Figuring an artifact out required time spent and die rolls to be made.  The charts shown below became a familar page to reference to in the rule book.

"Gamma World" grabbed my imagination ... if I was going to role play some character in a primative background that would be swinging a sword and fighting for their life then I'd rather be doing it in a sci-fi post apocalypse seting than in some dungeon.  I preferred mental mutations to magic, any day and robots and carniverous plants to elves and dwarves.

Our GW games were drawn out on sheets of notebook paper clipped into Mead 3 ring binders, our campaigns were sketched out in spiral bound notebooks and our maps were sketched out on sheets of graph paper and hex paper.  Several of our characters were long term characters used over a period of years ... one was a Sleeth that had a sawed off double barrel shotgun.  This character was active so long that when Lou Zochi introduced his 30 sided die that the Sleeth character got to use that to roll to-hit instead of a 20 sided die.  The double barrel sawed off shotgun, as I care to remember, was a favorite weapon of our impressionable youth no doubt brought on by our recent viewing of Mel Gibson's titular character in the movie "Mad Max."

Other fond memories I have of this game include finding a Pure Strain Human in suspended animation in a fallout shelter and reviving them.  That PSH helped our characters understand all the technology that we'd later find.  We also found a non-functioning android in the same shelter and the PSH programmed it to aid us as well ... kind of like "The Questor Tapes".

The first edition of "Gamma World" was the best ... each subsequent edition not only added more useless and needless things to the original edition but each new addition also watered down the vast, rich story included in the original edition and even sometimes made a parody of it.  Over the years less attention of the game was paid to the struggle and more emphasis was spent on who could design the whackiest mutant creature of all.  GW went from being something that was interesting and fun to being something that was a caricature of itself.  The first edition GW game had the richest history, the best equipment, the best monsters, mutations, and robots.  Other editions gutted the rich context of the first generation, all trying to outdo it ... and none succeeded.  

None.  

I own just about every edition of GW that's been made but it's still the first edition that I hold in high regard, the later editions not so much if at all.

So many hours of my youth were spent thumbing through the GW rule book, inventing new artifacts and weapons, drawing out characters and equipment.   I haven't played GW in a long, long time.  The last time I played GW was probably 8th grade, make it 1983 or so.  I miss it in the way that you miss things that have passed into memory and GW still holds a special place in my study, the original boxed set that I bought all those many years ago sits on the shelf next to my "D&D" basic set.

I guess, in a way, my boxed sets of old TSR RPGs have become artifacts in and of their selves.  Ironic ... but maybe fitting as well.