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So, I’m intending this to be my last blog entry inspired by Wasteland 2. We’ll see if I keep to that, but like Carter J. Burke told Ripley in Aliens: “That’s the plan.”
You may or may not have noticed that Zombie Ranch has never given any fixed timeline for what year the Great Plague began. It’s not too far in the future from our own world, but so far I prefer to leave it deliberately vague. After all, according to Back to the Future Part II, next year is supposed to be the year we have flying cars and hoverboards. Awkward.
I briefly mentioned in my last blog how Wasteland 2 presents a sort of “stopped clock” vision of a world-as-we-know-it that ended in the late 1980s. This sounds perfectly reasonable considering the idea of a worldwide nuclear apocalypse, but for one niggling detail: the background material makes it clear that the missiles started flying in 1998.
You will not see any real-world technology from 1998 in the game. In fact, at least one bit of flavor text references a certain famous real-world theater and declares that the very last movie that premiered there before the bombs fell was Ghostbusters 2. Assuming you’re too lazy to click that IMDB link, that film was released in 1989. To take that at face value means that no more movies were released, or at least released to that theater, for nine years before civilization officially ended. Again, awkward.
So why not just declare the apocalypse happened in 1989? Well, to keep continuity with the original Wasteland, the apocalypse has to happen in 1998. That’s what was stated, and since this is the same world, that’s what’s set in stone. The problem being, of course, that 1998 was a speculative future during the 1988 release of Wasteland, but is over a decade in the past for us now in 2014. We know that a lot of interesting things happened between 1989 and 1998, but somewhere along the line the call was made by the development team to just pretend the real-world breakthroughs and events of those nine years never happened, but preserve the fictional stuff like killer robots, power armor and man-portable energy weapons. Meanwhile despite the presence of super advanced artificial intelligence, flavor text on a recovered hard drive oohs and ahhs over its massive 20 Megabyte capacity.
Now you might say that this is small potatoes when you shine a light on Fallout, which preserves a pseudo-1950s aesthetic even though the apocalypse didn’t occur in that setting until the year 2077. Even the most cutting edge technology firms whose ruins you root through have tiny computer monitors with text-based monochrome screens, and if that seems jarring now, wait until the real year 2077 rolls around. I mean, assuming anyone can still play the game at that point.
I know what the point of the timelines is. Dates have a grounding effect on us, and it’s a rare post-apocalyptic game that doesn’t have you running across old journals and logs that would look odd if they didn’t have dated entries. The nuclear apocalypse also is such a powerful concept of sudden collapse that you kind of want that “The Day Of…” specified. Maybe even down to the precise moment, to homage the chilling images of frozen time from Hiroshima. The literal “stopped clock”.
But there are those drawbacks to fixing a point in time, where your audience may just have to end up ignoring that detail to prevent them from being taken out of the setting instead of drawn into it. Sort of like how you can do what you want with a fictional location, but once you start playing with a real-world location you’re going to run into possible discrepancies between what you need for your story and what people who actually live there know as fact. I’ve risked that already. I’ve blogged about it. So why am I still gun shy of announcing a Date of Doom, if I’m okay with stuff like Santone and Fort Huachuca? Well, for one thing I could argue that there are relatively fewer people who live in a certain locale than there are people who live through a specific year.
For another, I’d say that the zombie apocalypse and the nuclear one are different breeds. The nuclear apocalypse always seems to want that year, that day, that moment where everything changed in a flash. The zombie apocalypse is a more nebulous thing, a gradual avalanche. It doesn’t matter so much the exact time when things changed, just that they changed. Either it’s a “now” or “tomorrow” scenario where the people involved are trying to survive as it happens, or there’s the trope of someone waking from a coma or returning from some sort of isolation to find the dead are a-walkin’.
Or there’s this story, where it all went down about twenty or so years in the past. That’s important, but the specific year? Not so much. Not too far from now, but not too soon, either. It gives us some flexibility, both in terms of real-world details and speculative, fictional ones, and I’ll never have to worry about someone poking me and asking something like, “Hey, it’s 2023, where’s the AAVDROs?” I still have a timeline, it’s just in terms of “this happened at z-minus-two years, and this happened at z-plus-six years”, with z remaining a variable. It’s not something that would work for all stories, but I still think for this one the best way to win the dating game for now is not to play.