Game 90: The Wizard's Castle (1980)

  

The Wizard's Castle

United States

Independently developed; published as code in the July 1980 Recreational Computing

Date Started: 24 February 2013
Date Ended: 24 February 2013

Total Hours: 3

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2/5)

Final Rating: 19

Ranking at Time of Posting: 61/247 (25%)

Wizard's Castle is similar to Dunjonquest in that when I originally blogged about it in 2010, I didn't quite give it the attention that it deserved. I wrote about it as part of my "backtracking" series--a group of games that I covered very quickly in the spring of 2010, after I realized that Wikipedia's list wasn't comprehensive and I'd missed a bunch of games. Because of that, I didn't give the game an official number, didn't try to win it, and didn't bother to rank it in my GIMLET sheet. I'm returning to it now to make these corrections.

Wizard's Castle is a landmark game in its own way. It's often called a "roguelike," but it's not, really. (And it doesn't appear on Wikipedia's list of them.) Instead, it's the progenitor of a small line of games that include Amulet of Yendor (1985), Leygref's Castle (1986), Mission: Mainframe (1987), and Bones: The Game of the Haunted Mansion (1991). The games are "roguelike" in their permadeath and bare-bones graphics, but little else. The key feature of the Wizard's Castle variants is the organization of the multi-leveled dungeon into discrete rooms, in which the player finds treasure, items, special encounters, or enemies. (And only one of these possibilities in each room.) There are a fixed and equal number of rooms per square level, with no corridors between them, and enemies do not pursue you from room to room.

The original game doesn't even keep a map on the screen. You have to keep checking where you are with the (M)ap command. At initial levels, the command helpfully lists the encounters you'll find in each of the level's 64 rooms, so it's relatively easy to avoid encounters with monsters. On higher levels, you see question marks in place of those annotations, and you need a flare or lamp to see the contents of the rooms adjacent to you.

A Wizard's Castle level, arranged into 64 rooms. The letters represent various encounters. "G" is gold; "P" is a magic pool; "C" is a chest; and "M" is a monster.

An analogous screenshot from Leygref's Castle (1986)

And from Mission Mainframe (1987)

The quest of Wizard's Castle has to do with the retrieval of the Orb of Zot (also called the Orb of Power) from the depths of a dungeon in the Kingdom of N'Dic. The player can choose between an elf, dwarf, man, or hobbit PC, each of which has certain default starting attributes, supplemented at the player's discretion from a pool of 8 points. You then allocate 60 gold pieces to a choice of armor, weapons, and flares before heading into the dungeon.

The dungeon has 8 levels with 64 rooms per level, most with some encounter or object. The levels wrap, so if you go east from the eighth column, you end up in the first column, and if you drop into a sinkhole on the eighth level, you end up on the first level. The game supports a fairly limited selection of commands: Movement, drinking from pools, viewing the map, lightning a flare or lamp, opening chests or books, gazing into orbs, and teleporting with a runestaff.

I don't suppose it was possible to find a game developer in the 1970s who just hated Lord of the Rings.

Combat is a very rote affair which only gives you options to attack, retreat, bribe, or (for characters with intelligence above 15) cast one of three spells: web, fireball, and death. Spells deplete your attributes, though, and the "death" spell runs a high risk of killing the player. There are no "hit points" in the game; instead, monsters directly damage your attributes (most often strength), and you die if any of them fall to 0.

A quick combat with a kobold.

Killing monsters does not result in any experience or level increases, but you still have to do it because one of the creatures in the dungeon carries the "runestaff," an artifact that allows you to teleport. You need the runestaff to teleport into the room containing the Orb of Zot, which is disguised on the map as a "warp" room. Since warp rooms normally teleport you randomly throughout the dungeon, it's a bit annoying to have to test each one if it contains the Orb. If you find a crystal ball, gazing into it has a chance of showing you the correct location of the Orb, but it can also deplete your strength.

Gold plays a strong role throughout the game because you occasionally encounter vendors who will sell you weapon and armor upgrades, flares, and potions that increase your attributes (18 is the maximum for any of them). You also find artifacts that prevent various bad conditions, like blindness or a book stuck to your hands by super glue, from ruining your adventure.

Although death is relatively frequent and random...

...the game is winnable with just a little patience. Because of the randomization of the dungeon, it's entirely possible to find the runestaff and the square containing the Orb of Zot among the first levels, with only a handful of combats in between the outset and victory. But even without such luck, if you maneuver carefully on the first levels, making intelligent use of magic pools, finding treasures and chests, and using your gold to increase your attributes, you can have a strong character in just a few minutes, then begin systematically taking on monsters and testing warp locations for the Orb. A character with 18 strength and dexterity is very hard to beat, even by the game's tougher monsters.

The first step on the road to winning.

Once you have the runestaff, you can start avoiding monsters and just systematically test "W" locations until one of them sends you only one square away instead of entire levels away. That's the location of the Orb of Zot. There are a lot of levels and squares to test, so you can try to take a chance on gazing into crystal orbs to find the location. There's only a chance that they're correct, and the orbs can sap your strength, but perhaps it's better than taking the time to work through every level.

This time, fortunately, it was accurate.

 
Once you have a bead on the Orb, you can use the runestaff to teleport there and acquire it.
 

Why am I even including screen shots? I should just print the text.

 
After I found the Orb and got back to the entrance, it took me a while to figure out that the way to exit is to go (N)orth from this square rather than (U)p. Since going north from the top row usually wraps you to the bottom row, it was a little counter-intuitive, and I nearly used (Q)uit instead, which would have been a monitor-smasher.

Winning took me about 7 tries and about 2 hours. The game manual stresses its replayability, since the dungeon is randomized every time. I can't say it wasn't a fun diversion. The "flares" addition gives it a nice edge, and there's real tension--especially after you find the runestaff or the Orb--as you slowly creep along, trying to find your way to the next goal without encountering too many nasty foes. The game throws little atmospheric notes at you--"You hear a faint rustling noise!"; "You smell a minotaur frying!"; "You hear a scream!"--as you move along.

In a GIMLET, I'd give it:

• 1 for the game world. There isn't much there.
• 3 for character creation and development. It's surprisingly rewarding to use a variety of tactics to get your attributes to the maximum.
• 0 for NPC interaction. There aren't any.
• 2 for encounters and foes. The enemies aren't anything special; they're just distinguished by name. But the various books, orbs, chests, treasures, and such do provide "encounters," and while you can't role-play them, they are tactical in nature.
• 2 for magic and combat. There aren't many options in combat, and to me the disadvantages of spells outweigh the advantages. But there is a sort of meta-tactical dynamic to the game as you plot your route through the various combats and encounters. Rather than take on two monsters at once, for instance, you might want to hit a monster, then a chest, then use the accumulated gold to buy a strength upgrade, then take the second monster.
• 2 for equipment. There are various pieces and special items, and keeping enough gold to buy a backup weapon or armor if a dragon destroys one is part of the tactics of the game.
• 3 for economy. You need gold to replace destroyed weapons, buy flares, and buy attribute upgrades. There aren't many huge hauls in the game, so like everything else, plotting a method to accumulate gold with minimum risk is part of the strategy.
• 1 for the quest. There's not much to it.
• 1 for graphics, sound, and interface. There aren't any graphics and sound, and while the keyboard commands are intuitive enough, having to constantly call up the map was a little annoying.
• 4 for the gameplay. It's brief, brisk, challenging but not too challenging, and replayable.

The final score of 19 is perfectly respectable for the 1970s. The lineage of Wizard's Castle came to an end 20 years ago, and it's hard to detect its influence on other CRPGs, so it was worth investigating this small, stunted branch on the CRPG family tree.

The original Recreational Computing instructions.

The story of Wizard Castle's development is interesting, and is covered by Matt Barton in a 2007 article at Armchair Arcade. Briefly, the author, Joseph Power, had been inspired by a 1970s mainframe game called HOBBIT and wanted to program his own. [Later edit: As this comment notes, and the Armchair Arcade also covers, the ur-example of this type of "grid" game seems to be an all-text, mainframe-based Star Trek that dates back to at least 1971.] Lacking a computer on which to do it, he got permission from the owner of an East Lansing, Michigan store, New Dimensions in Computing, to write the program on their Exidy Sorcerer (a short-lived PC from 1978) when there wasn't a customer using it. Consideration for the store's kindness led to the designation of the kingdom as N'DIC.

Some of the game's code. It took 340 lines (numbered up to 3,390) and fit in 16KB of memory.

The program proved so popular with teenaged customers that the store sold several of the machines based on it. After an aborted attempt to have the game published commercially through the software division of Kilobaud magazine, Powers eventually published the source code in the July/August 1980 issue of Recreational Computing. From there, it was ported to a host of other platforms, including the DOS version I played. Barton's article also includes an interview the a programmer going by the handle "Derelict" who created a Windows version with better graphics but the same basic gameplay.

Unfortunately, Joseph Power joins a selection of other programmers from the same era who didn't stay in the CRPG game beyond their original creations. I suspect they didn't find it financially viable. They were unfortunate enough to have gotten into the game while personal computing was a rare hobby, and they missed--by inches--the era in which ownership of microcomputers would explode and game developing could be a lucrative enterprise.

Because my ill-formed "DOS Only" rule when I began my blog, my first posting was on Akalabeth. With this posting on Wizard's Castle, I have caught up on all the commercially-released RPGs, for any platform, that preceded it. (At least, all the ones that I can identify.) It's been an interesting tour, and perhaps it's better that I made it with a few years of blogging and game-playing experience, rather than right at the outset of my blog, when I didn't have the same sense of history. I'll still try to pick up some additional games from the early 1980s that I missed on my first pass, but for now we'll return to the "present" with Keef the Thief.

*****

Further reading: Check out my my posts on two games that "adapted" The Wizard's Castle: The Yendor's Castle (1986) and Leygref's Castle (1986).