Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

The Good
Nobody doubts the tremendous and widespread influence of Wizardry. Unlike Dragon Warrior, it has a legitimate claim to being the first CRPG. Every time you play a modern first-person RPG like Morrowind or Oblivion, you’re playing a spiritual descendant of Wizardry. Maybe that’s enough to earn Wizardry its place in the Gaming Hall of Fame.

The NES conversion looks much better than the original Apple version of the game, replacing wireframe graphics with colored sprites and textures. The soundtrack loops incessantly, but it’s not too bad as these things go.

The Bad
Playing Wizardry now, it’s hard to believe that anyone was ever impressed with it. I suppose some folks really wanted to play D&D solo, and Wizardry (sort of) delivered. Otherwise, I can only chalk Wizardry’s popularity up to fascination with early home computers. After all, even programming a simple routine in BASIC was exciting back in 1981!

The production values are low by any standard. The NES port improves on the graphics of the original considerably, but it’s still light years behind console contemporaries Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, and Phantasy Star in the chrome department.

The user interface is cumbersome even for an NES port. It’s all text menus, which means it takes a long time to do anything, since you have to scroll through a bunch of lists first. After Final Fantasy let us “plug in” equipment into inventory slots, there’s just no good reason why we should need to go back to this tedious stuff. (It’s best not to even mention the spell system, which is downright inscrutable.)

Speaking of tedious…if you think Dragon Warrior is difficult, then don’t even think about playing Wizardry. This is the most sadistic game I have EVER played. Everything in this game kills you. I spent most of my time in Wizardry being trapped, lost, in the dark, poisoned, paralyzed, or just plain dead. Most of the gold you earn in the early going is spent resurrecting dead characters or equipping new replacement characters. This means you have little money left over for upgrading equipment, which means it’s hard to die with less frequency, which means you keep dying. It’s a bizarre mobius-strip approach to game design.

It wouldn’t be so bad if there was some kind of substance beneath all the layers of unfairness and frustration. Personally, I don’t see it. You’re a party of adventurers going down into a dungeon to explore and fight monsters, period. There is no story, no characters, and for all practical purposes, no locations. It’s just one big multi-story “dungeon,” which is nothing but a giant maze of passageways that all look alike. The only source of entertainment besides fighting is hand-mapping the maze on graph paper. But after the blessed invention of the automap, who in their right mind wants to go back to that kind of “fun”?

Wizardry is to CRPGs what the Velvet Underground is to rock music—everybody in the business claims to have been influenced by it, but nobody pays much attention to it anymore. That‘s probably because every RPG since 1985 surpasses it, in every way that matters. A great historical artifact, to be sure, but not much of a game.

The Bottom Line
Worth playing, but only for educational purposes. Feel free to give it a try for history’s sake—just be sure to wear your rose-tinted glasses.

The Good
It was the first computer game that I ever saw that attempted to graphically render the D&D game. There may have been others out there that I was unaware of, but for me, it was ground-breaking.

Where to start? Character creation like D&D. Random numbers for wisdom, strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence. Pick a class, pick evil good or neutral. Buy armor for the front three guys and go down in the dungeon to kill monsters and gather treasure!

It doesn't get any better than that! (well it does, but it didn't in 1985). So over the course of weeks or months you built your characters up (and sometimes they would change from good to evil - forcing you to start over with a new priest or mage). But eventually you would get to the final showdown with Werdna! ...and he would kill everyone in the party. After several tries though, you could kill him. And that was the coolest thing in the world!

The Bad
Characters changed alignment occasionally when they leveled up, and sometimes you would have to start a new character up in the needed alignment to match the rest of the party.

Another thing I disliked was having to type out the exact text of the spell I needed my mage or priest to cast. In excitement or in the wee hours of the morning, I occasionally misspelled a word, so no spell was cast. A bummer when one of the other characters desperately needed healed, or I needed to cast a massive damaging spell.

The Bottom Line
D&D without the dice or graph paper.

The Good
This is the first computer role playing game I ever purchased. Actually, one of the main reasons I pestered my parents into buying me an Apple II was so I could play this game. It cost me $50 in 1983, which is over $90 today. The disk drives that came with my second-hand Apple weren't up to reading the sensitive Wizardry disks, so I had to get them repaired first.

But all the headache was worth it. I was a big D&D fan, but living up in the sticks, I rarely had anyone nearby to play with. This game was a great solution to this problem. Not only was I amazed by the flashy opening animation, I was enthralled by the gameplay. While the graphics were crude and splotchy by today's standards, they amazed me in 1983! There was a graphic representation of the actual monster I was fighting! Right there in front of me! Of course it was static--it wasn't animated--but I didn't have to remember what it looked like. There it was! I was fighting an orc! A skeleton! A slime! Woo-hoo!

And for the first time, I could actually see the dungeon from the point of view of my characters! The dungeons were rendered as crude line drawings, but in the 1980s, that was state of the art! Not even the staircases were rendered, but that didn't matter. There were the walls in blotchy Apple II "white." How could it get any better?

Though it wasn't strictly D&D, it was close enough for my tastes. Though it was just one dungeon, it was enough to satisfy my desire to role-play.

Wizardry allowed to user to carefully orchestrate his party's attack, just like all early paper role-playing games. And the party could consist of several adventurers of different classes (mages, fighters, clerics, etc.). Where in D&D I had to role all my own dice, the computer now took care of it for me, showing me my virtual "roll" versus the enemy's. While sometimes I groaned over the result, I couldn't argue that it wasn't fair. After all, it displayed my result, right there in front of me.

While I never finished this game, it gave me endless pleasure in role-playing alone or impressing envious friends.

While it was far outdone by later games (notably The Bard's Tale), Wizardry launched the genre and remains one of the most important computer role-playing games in the history of video gaming.

The Bad
Wizardry, like many early home computer games, was pretty unforgiving to the user. The player could only have one active game, and there was no way to prevent your party from getting killed when outmatched in a fight, or to back up and retry a battle. Once your party got killed, they really got killed! And the game was pretty merciless about saving the data to disk. If you pulled out the disk so it couldn't save the information that your party got killed (as I did on many occasions), there was a good chance that your copy of the game would become corrupted. Even though they warned not to remove the disk, I and many other players did, so as not to lose scores of hours of adventuring. The only way to recover the disk was to mail it back to Sir-Tech for repairs.

The Bottom Line
A great landmark computer RPG. Outdone by successors, but unmatched when it came out. Worth a look for any video game aficionado.