The game is considered to be the spiritual successor to the 1987 role-playing video game Wasteland. It is not an official sequel, although it was initially developed as one, because Interplay did not have the rights to Wasteland at that point. It was also intended to use Steve Jackson Games' GURPS system, but that deal fell through due to the excessive amounts of violence and gore included in the game, forcing Black Isle to change the already implemented GURPS system to the internally developed SPECIAL system.