Wizardry

Wizardry is a series of computer role-playing games, developed by Sir-Tech, that were popular in the 1980s. Originally made for the Apple II, they were later ported to other platforms. The latest game in the series, Wizardry 8, is available only for Windows. more...

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History

Wizardry began as a simple dungeon crawl by Andrew C. Greenberg and Robert Woodhead. It was written when they were students at Cornell University and then published by Sir-Tech. The first four games in the series were written in Apple Pascal, an implementation of UCSD Pascal, and was ported to many different platforms by writing UCSD Pascal implementations for the target machines.

David W. Bradley took over the series after the fourth installment, adding a new level of plot and complexity. Woodhead went on to found the North American anime import company Animeigo, and Greenberg to become an intellectual property lawyer and contributor to the Squeak open source project. Greenberg also wrote another game series, Star Saga.

The earliest installments of Wizardry were quite successful, as they were the first graphically-rich incarnations of Dungeons & Dragons-type gameplay for home computers. The release of the first version coincided with the height of D&D's popularity in North America. A crucial component of the commercial sales success was the copy-protection scheme.

Series

Ultimately the initial game became a series:

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (1981); Wizardry II: The Knight of Diamonds (1982); Wizardry III: Legacy of Llylgamyn (1983); Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna (1986); Wizardry V: Heart of the Maelstrom (1988); Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge (1990); Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant (1992) (Remade as Wizardry Gold in 1996); Wizardry Nemesis (1996); Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land (2001); Wizardry 8 (2001);

The first three games are a trilogy, with similar settings, plots, and gameplay mechanics. Bane of the Cosmic Forge, Crusaders of the Dark Savant, and Wizardry 8 formed a second trilogy, with settings and gameplay mechanics that differed greatly from the first trilogy.

The fourth game, The Return of Werdna, was a significant departure from the rest of the series. In it, the player controlled Werdna, the evil wizard slain in the first game, and summoned groups of monsters to aid him as he fought his way up from the bottom of his prison. Rather than monsters, the player faced typical adventuring parties, some of which were pulled from actual user disks sent to Sir-Tech for recovery. Further, the player had only a limited number of keystrokes to use to complete the game. It is generally considered one of the most challenging CRPGs of all time.

Read more at Wikipedia.org