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| And yet somehow I started playing without making a scenario disk. |
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord
United States
Sir-tech Software (developer and publisher)
Date Started: 19 February 2010
At last: a multi-character game! First released in 1981, Wizardry would seem to be the precursor to all first-person multi-character games, like Bard's Tale and Might and Magic. I couldn't find an original manual for Wizardry, but this site gives a basic breakdown of the plot: Lord Trebor, the "mad overlord" of the title, has become obsessed with a powerful amulet that he briefly possessed, only to have it stolen by the evil wizard Werdna (one guess where those names came from). Werdna has fled to the depths of the dungeons beneath Trebor's castle. Trebor's heroes have managed to secure the first four levels of the dungeons but no one can survive below that; the first four levels, seeded with monsters and laced with traps, are the "proving grounds" of the title: a place where would-be heroes can demonstrate their worth to venture deeper into the dungeon and recover the amulet.
I spent a little time tonight making a party of six characters:
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| Yes, I know I could stand to be a little more clever with character names. |
But this is as far as I got before sleep beckoned. When I return to the game, I may keep these characters or start over. I'm not sure I did it right.
Thanks to everyone who has followed my new blog during its first week. I will probably not post for a few days, as over the weekend I will be playing games of a different sort: I am going to the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in New York City. Come next week, though, I'm back in the dungeons.
Yes please keep posting, it's like I'm reliving my youth through you... Your project is riveting to me.
ReplyDeleteI still remember the first times I ventured in the Wizardry 1 labyrinth, got to cast spells, collect loot... I couldn't believe my eyes.
And then, there was The Knight of Diamonds (Wizardry 2), Revenge of the Enchantress (Ultima 2), etc...
Looking forward to your next posts!
--
Cedric
Thanks for the encouragement. I still feel like a bit of an archaeologist, digging through fossils of games. (Okay, that's a mixed metaphor. Sue me.) I wonder what the first game will be that I enjoy--truly enjoy--on its own terms.
ReplyDeleteThis blog is excellent. Although these are still a tad old for me (I only started playing CRPGs in 91), I can't wait for when you get to newer old CRPGs :)
ReplyDeleteWoah, just found this comment from myself from... 12 years ago. Nice.
DeleteAnd I probably still haven't gotten to "newer old CRPGs."
DeleteMy first RPG was in '96 or '97 or '98 with Pokemon Red (as a young 'un), when I didn't know what an RPG was. I was always fascinated in detailed adventure games, of both the Japanese and Western persuasion, as I think I thought about them. Dragon Warrior Monsters followed, and that was one of my favourite games ever. I'd have to say my first CRPG was Neverwinter Nights, which was brilliant, although I lost my saved game in section 2 and never played the main campaign. Online dungeon crawling was excellent. I think I played Final Fantasy VI around the same time and Final Fantasy X, both brilliant.
ReplyDeleteSo I never played any of these old CRPGs, and your blog is an excellent view into them.
Ah, this is more like it. I like having a party, and I enjoy mapping things out (thanks for the tip about using excel). Though I'm pretty sure I'm doing things the hard way not rerolling for max stats and having no elite characters in my party. It also seems pretty lame that whenever I level up I lose more stats than I gain, what gives?!? Also I need to find a way to fix my framerate, I couldnt tell what anyone said in ultima1, and I can never see what I loot from chests here in wiz1.
ReplyDeleteDOSBOX right? You need to fiddle with the number of cycles it is emulating. http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Performance#CPU_Cycles_.28speed_up.2Fslow_down.29
DeleteYeah I tried to fiddle with ctrl-f11 in ultima1 but it just made the sound reaaalllly weird and never seemed to slow the game down enough. I couldnt fix it in <10 seconds so I gave up, at some point when it gets more annoing I'll have to spend >10 seconds on it and hopefully ill be able to read the output finally!
DeleteThis game changed my life & Ultima III turned it upside down. Found your blog by accident looking for BT1 info. I will spend the next year reading every post & comment AND reliving my childhood through your blog. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteWelcome! Don't burn yourself out; the postings will always be here.
DeleteMatt Barton, the writer of Dungeons & Dektops, has a youtube show called Matt Chat. In one episode he talks about Wizardry;
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEFh4pPIEEc
One of those games I always wondered about, but there never were an amiga release of this one. The game isn't even available on GOG, so I guess it's abandonware ohoy.
ReplyDeleteThere IS a C64 version. From the lemon64 site, it looks like you get slightly nicer colours, but I imagine the in-game gameplay and wireframe looks will be almost identical
Haha, this is crazy. Spent countless hours with this game as a teenager. I remember there was a simple cheat where you could roll odd characters, add them to your party at the Tavern, take their money, then kick them out of the party.
ReplyDeleteI assumed Wizardry was an Apple/IBM thing and wasn't aware that a Commodore 64 version of this even existed. So consequently I never got my hands on Wizardry until I bought the NES cartridge around 1990. I had a really good time with it.
ReplyDeleteI didn't like the NES much. People who hang out on sites like this are not the demographic that Nintendo cares about. But they did do suprisingly good ports of both Wizardry and Bard's Tale.
Being written in Apple Pascal probably had something to do with the difficulty in porting it :)
DeleteStrange though it may seem, this game has its own anime show. I just stumbled upon it on youtube. The so called Wizardry 1 OVA stays somewhat true to the game. I'm not sure about the legal state of this video on youtube so I'm not posting the link.
ReplyDeleteFunnily enough, Canageek stumbled across the OVA this morning as I was starting to read this post. We also considered sharing a link, but we agree with your copyright concerns.
DeleteThat said, if you do want to watch it, searching "Wizardry 1 OVA" will find you it.
Hi there! I've been enjoying your blog for a couple of weeks now. I've made it all the way up to Ultima V so far. I'm feeling inspired, and I thought you would like to know about it. I am going to follow your list, but have a few changes. I'm not going to play any roguelikes or text based games (I just don't like em, I've tried), but I will be playing console rpgs. I plan on using whatever the internet deems the best version as well. I tried several of the earlier games and cannot get into them, so I'm starting here with Wizardry. According to the internets, the Japanese super famicom version is the best. I'm starting there with an English patch. Thanks for the inspiration!
ReplyDeleteGlad to help you along. As you play games that I've covered, please pop in and talk about your experiences!
DeleteWell, I seem to have shot myself in the foot. I decided to give Rogue one last chance... and now I can't stop playing it. So I think I'll start from the beginning of the list after all. I'll post more when I get somewhere.
DeleteFun fact that probably doesn't have anything with naming of Wizardry characters:
ReplyDeleteIf you swap 'e' and 'r' in Werdna you will get "Wredna", and that's feminine adjective for "mean" in Polish language.
From the OP "only to have it stolen by the evil wizard Werdna (one guess where those names came from)"
ReplyDeleteWizardy co-creator Andrew Greenberg's first name spelled backwards :-)
Wizardry's other co-creator Robert Woodhead talks about it in this podcast interview in 2018.
https://retronauts.com/topic/robert-woodhead
I thought this was pretty funny. I played around with reversing the spelling of people's names for awhile, and concluded that most people's names reversed suck as monster names and Andrew is kind of rare in that regard.
This was my first RPG. I would go over to my friend's house in the mid 80's and we'd play on her Apple II. I really loved it, but she didn't want to risk her characters on lower levels.
ReplyDeleteA few years later I bought this game on the NES and I managed to beat it. It's extremely fun, and I have very good memories of this game. I wouldn't mind playing more Wizardry games.
For ancient dungeon crawlers I found a cool site to add some background noise:
ReplyDeletehttps://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/dungeonRPGSoundscapeGenerator.php
You can edit the endless sounds to your liking and it will add some immersion to your ancient gaming.
I know you do not like commercial ads but I got some soundtracks of some games at GOG that I add to the dungeons sounds so have an in game soundtrack and dungeon sound playing at the same time, rather than just beeps and such.
Alright, time to reveal what made me think of the blog again, and restart my effort to catch up. After years and years of having it in my Watch Later (I think about 5?) I finally watched "Wizardry 1 [OVA] ウィザードリィ Toshiya Shinohara 1991"
ReplyDeleteThat is right, there is a 1991 anime based on Wizardry 1. I knew it was huge in Japan, but I don't think most people here will know there was an anime OVA based on it. After finally watching it, it is...fine? It isn't *good* but it's plot makes sense, and the animation, while very 80s, works. I'd say it is mindless fun that plays on tropes and reminds me a lot of the current JRPG inspired isekai shows and manga out there.
Anyway, if anyone wants to check it out and see how many references to the game they can spot, the link is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOTHNoODYmY
I'm sure one of you people that knows everything about Wizardry forwards and backwards would get more out of it then I did.
Welcome back and have fun catching up!
DeleteThis is a couple of months late--I'm that far behind in comments--but I would also welcome you back except that I think you've already disappeared again.
DeleteSomeone pointed me to that movie in another entry, and I watched about 20 minutes of it. I was impressed at how well they stuck to the outlines of the original came, including the elevator and the idea of the first few levels as the "proving grounds." I wouldn't have thought there was enough plot to literally adapt Wizardry in animation form, but they proved me wrong.
Cool; I thought you just refused to watch it due to it being *very* 80s anime.
DeleteI'm still around (Well, I'm about 4 entries behind), I've juts had less to say now that you are done nethack and not playing a D&D game.
Feels appropriate to note here the announcement that Andrew Greenburg died a few days ago.
ReplyDeleteI've just now noticed an interesting side-effect of luck on character creation. Considering Hobbit (luck 15) and Dwarf (luck 6) races, on average Hobbits seem to get a lot more free point bonuses.
ReplyDelete