Also might go without saying, and they probably aren’t the best place to start, but there are a ton of CRPGs before Wasteland. Interplay was making the Bard’s Tale series which Wasteland shares a lot with. Wizardry, Ultima, and Might and Magic were all huge franchises that started in the 80s but were getting regular new games up until the late 90s and were huge influences on all of the games on that list. Early 90s games like Darklands and the Gold Box DnD and Buck Rogers games were also massive influences on basically everyone working in this space as well.
A good place to look into those super old games that are probably more worth watching or reading about tham playing is https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com , a blog of someone who’s been playing through every crpg ever released in chronological order and is now into the 90s, and Scorpia, one the first big video game critics, she specialized in CRPGs and reviewed them for much of the 80s and 90s and was very influential in her own right, even getting in game jabs and shoutouts in some of the series she was reviewing.
