So I experienced an enormous swell of excitement on March 5th, when Brian Fargo wrote me asking Not sure if you have been paying attention to all the wasteland news but would you like to work with us on a sequel?
I had to work out some things, including checking that the Storybricks team was okay with this. Thankfully, they were. They knew I’d worked on the original Wasteland computer game, released back in 1988, and were supportive of the whole idea.
With my issues addressed, I was very pleased to tell Brian Yes Yes Yes and Yes.
WASTELAND
I wasn’t a big part of the original project, but Highpool was one of the areas I wrote that appears early in the game. People still make sour faces when I grin evilly and say I was responsible for the tragedy with the kid and the rabid dog. I did other bits elsewhere in the game too, but that’s the piece I hear the most feedback about.
Still, the remarks aren’t always kind! I recall a forum comment I read just a year or two ago, saying something like “What kind of sick mind thinks up a situation where you have to kill a kid’s dog? And the kid too?”
dog, mad dog, rabies, fighting, anger*ahem* Wasteland is a post-apocalyptic world set in our near future. An animal infected with full-blown rabies can’t be saved in our world, today. With limited medical supplies and a trashed infrastructure, how in hell do you imagine you could possibly do anything but put a rabid dog out of its misery?
You never had to kill the kid, either. He’d throw himself at you, yes, but you’re playing a squad of big strong mega-weaponed Rangers! Grownups! Walk away. It’s not like you were chickenshit for backing down from some evil-hearted final boss bent on scourging the world and all you loved within it. It was a little boy.
True, if you passed through the area again, the kid would scream and yell and accuse you of terrible things — forever. But why would the boy forget the bad strangers who killed his beloved dog? He’d only asked you to help him.
You were never allowed to forget either.
EMOTIONAL CONTENT
That isn’t something that happened in video games of the time. I didn’t know that — the scenario I created was the kind of thing I’d've written for a bit of fiction, or a tabletop game. I play with emotions, and I still delight in knowing a little story I wrote can make strong men and women cry. The rabid dog’s tale was simply cause and effect, a touch of the unexpected (for the time), and the power of unforeseen consequences.
I remember that I had to argue to keep that event the way I wrote it. I think it was Alan Pavlish who said “But you have to give them a way to save the dog!” I explained the medical reasons why I felt that was unacceptable, how effective it would be to keep it this way, and he finally said okie-dokie. And that’s how the story was eventually programmed.
That was just little tiny bit of storyline in a larger game that had many memorable moments. The whole team’s joint efforts resulted in something amazing, with impact that still resonates. And even if it did get me called “a sick mind” decades later, people tell me they still remember the dog, decades later.
