The Demolition Squad

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

After the bombs fell, the Desert Rangers emerged as a post-war organization dedicated to maintaining order and protecting survivors in the southwestern U.S. The Demolition Squad, a unit within the Rangers, was formed from those who had the skills to handle explosives and dangerous missions. They were not a pre-war military unit; they were wastelanders who banded together when civilization collapsed. In the years that followed, the squad became something between outlaws and reluctant saviors. They bartered with warlords, negotiated with desperate settlements, and made choices that no military briefing had prepared them for—whether to spare a village, to hand over a weapon, to let a child go or keep them. The Wasteland did not care about their medals. It only cared whether they could still walk, still shoot, and still decide. The legacy of the Demolition Squad echoes through the franchise. In Wasteland 2, a new recruit is sent into the American West to find and neutralize a nuclear threat, carrying the weight of what the original squad left unfinished. In Wasteland 3, a squad of Rangers from Arizona is assembled for a mission into Colorado Springs, Colorado, where a nuclear device looms over a city that has already lost everything else. The thread is the same: small groups of people trying to keep the world from ending a second time, armed with little more than their skills and their conscience.

In Their Own Story

The dust had a taste. Copper and ash, coating the back of the throat no matter how often you rinsed. The Captain crouched behind the rusted hull of a delivery truck, watching the settlement's gate through cracked binoculars. Three guards. Two of them drinking. The third scanning the road with a rifle that probably had one working bolt. "We go in quiet or we don't go in," she said, not turning around. Behind her, the squad shifted—boots on gravel, the soft creak of a shotgun being cycled. No one argued. They never did. Not anymore. Not since the base, not since the sky turned the color of a bruise and the radio went silent forever. They were demolition specialists. They knew how to make things stop existing. What they had learned, the hard way, was that sometimes the harder job was deciding what was worth saving. The gate guard raised his rifle. The Captain lowered her binoculars. "Alright," she said. "Loud."

Reader's Guide

The Demolition Squad is the player's unit in Wasteland (1988). You play as the squad leader, a former US Army demolition expert, guiding your companions through a shattered Los Angeles and beyond. Your role is to complete the mission to destroy the nuclear depot while navigating a world where every faction—warlords, scavengers, surviving military outposts—has its own agenda. Squad members each bring distinct combat and skill profiles; you allocate experience and equipment, and your choices in dialogue and morality shape which settlements trust you and which turn hostile. In Wasteland 2, the Demolition Squad is referenced as the original generation. You play as a Wastelander, a survivor from that era, sent into the American West. Your squad is new, but the lore carries the weight of what the first squad endured. Combat is turn-based, and your companion roster and dialogue choices drive branching outcomes across multiple factions. In Wasteland 3, you lead a fresh squad into Denver, Colorado. The Demolition Squad is now history—legend, really—but the game's structure is the same: a small group, a nuclear threat, and a web of choices where no two playthroughs resolve identically. Companion relationships, faction alignment, and skill builds all gate different endings and side-mission outcomes. Across all three entries, the core loop is: explore a hostile settlement, talk your way in or fight your way through, make a moral call, and live with the consequences in the next act.

Did You Know?

• The original Wasteland (1988) was one of the earliest post-apocalyptic RPGs, predating the Fallout series, which was later developed by a team with ties to the same studio lineage.
• There was a gap of roughly 26 years between Wasteland (1988) and Wasteland 2 (2014), making it one of the longest-running dormant franchises in gaming before its revival.
• inXile Entertainment, the developer of Wasteland 2 and 3, was founded by Brian Fargo, who was also a key creative force behind the original 1988 game.
• The games use a turn-based combat system, a deliberate contrast to the real-time action that became common in RPGs during the same era.

Gallery