Wasteland · Apple II / C64 / MS-DOS · Electronic Arts / Interplay · 1988 · Paragraph booklet plus manual pages
Most of Wasteland's story was not in the game. It was printed in a booklet, and the game told you which numbered paragraph to read — including paragraphs that were deliberate lies planted to catch cheats.
Wasteland shipped with a printed collection of numbered paragraphs. At the appropriate moment the game would instruct the player to read paragraph 47, or 112, and the booklet would supply the encounter, the conversation, or the clue. This is where a substantial portion of the game's writing actually lives — not on the disk, but on paper in the box. The universal assumption at the time was that this was copy protection, and it functioned as such: anyone playing a pirated copy would be missing story content and, critically, clues needed to progress. But according to the game's own creators, that was not the primary motivation. Disk space was simply at a premium, and it was cheaper in resources to print the prose than to store it. Copy protection was a happy side effect of a storage constraint. The developers then had fun with it. Because a reader could obviously just sit down and read the entire booklet from cover to cover, the paragraphs include an entire fabricated storyline about a mission to Mars — pure fiction, planted to mislead anyone reading out of sequence — along with a set of bogus passwords that punish cheaters with consequences ranging from having a character's sex changed to detonating a bomb.
A manual containing deliberate fiction designed to entrap the reader
The paragraph book is a perfect illustration of how thoroughly hardware limitations shaped the texture of 1980s games. Text is cheap to print and expensive to store when your medium is a floppy disk, so the economically rational move is to put the words on paper and keep the disk for things that must be interactive. The result reads, thirty-five years later, as a bold design choice about the relationship between a game and its physical object. It was, in fact, an accountant's decision.
What makes it interesting is that the constraint produced something genuinely good. Reading paragraph 112 aloud from a booklet, at the table, while the game waits, is a fundamentally different experience from watching text scroll on screen — it is closer to tabletop role-playing, which is precisely the tradition Wasteland came from. The limitation pushed the game toward its own roots.
The fake Mars storyline is the detail that elevates the whole apparatus. The designers understood perfectly well that the booklet's weakness was that it could simply be read — nothing stops a player from working through every paragraph in order and spoiling the game for themselves, or from using it to shortcut puzzles. So they salted it. Anyone reading out of sequence encounters an elaborate, entirely fictional narrative that goes nowhere, and anyone tempted by the passwords printed within finds that using them can blow up their party.
This is copy protection as practical joke, and it is very much of its era — a period in which developers regarded pirates and cheats not merely as a commercial problem but as adversaries worth outwitting in person. The paragraph book does not simply withhold information from the dishonest. It actively lies to them.