Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

aka: Dungeons of Despair, MacWizardry, Paladin, Sorcellerie: Le Donjon du Suzerain Heretique, Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord!
Moby ID: 1209
Apple II Specs
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Description official descriptions

The Mad Overlord Trebor was once only power-mad, but went off the deep end after he acquired a magical amulet of immense power, only to have it stolen from him by his nemesis, the evil archmage Werdna. Werdna, not quite sure how to use the amulet properly, accidentally causes an earthquake which creates a ten-level dungeon beneath Trebor's castle. To avoid looking silly, Werdna declares the dungeon to be the new lair for him and his monster hordes. Trebor, not to be outdone, declares the labyrinth his new Proving Grounds where adventurers must prove themselves for membership in his elite honor guard, and incidentally retrieve his amulet in the process.

The first Wizardry was one of the original dungeon-crawling role-playing games, and stands along with Ultima and Might & Magic as one of the defining staples of the genre.

The player generates and controls a party of up to six different adventurers, choosing from five races (humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes and hobbits), three alignments (good, neutral and evil), and four basic classes (fighter, priest, mage and thief). These can later evolve into elite classes (bishop: priest with mage spells; samurai: fighter with mage spells; lord: fighter with priest spells, and ninja: fighter with thief abilities) if they meet the necessary level requirements. After outfitting the party with basic weapons and armor, the player sends it into a 3D vector maze-like dungeon to fight monsters in turn-based combat and find treasure.

Spellings

  • ウィザードリィ 狂王の試練場 - Japanese spelling

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Screenshots

Promos

Credits (Apple II version)

5 People

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Illustrations
Playtesting

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 59% (based on 5 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.6 out of 5 (based on 108 ratings with 5 reviews)

Landmark RPG in computer gaming

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.

Apple II · by Frecklefoot (188) · 2007

One of the *great* original dungeon-crawlers!

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.

PC Booter · by ex_navynuke! (42) · 2005

Classic, influential, and utterly obsolete.

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.

NES · by PCGamer77 (3158) · 2008

[ View all 5 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Why a dragon on the cover? Scribblemacher (195) Sep 6, 2012
how to use flopper and activate a scenario disk unit Aug 3, 2007

Trivia

Andrew Greenberg, Inc. vs Sir-tech Software, Inc.

Back in 1979 Andrew Greenberg, Inc. created the name, concept and plot for a computer fantasy role-playing game "Dungeons of Despair", released two years later by Sir-tech Software, Inc. as "Wizardry". Both corporations entered into an agreement granting Siro-tec the right to manufacture and market Wizardry, related products and any subsequent versions of the game in exchange of a payment of license royalty fee and a percentage of gross sales revenues. However, after success of the first Wizardry game release, Sir-Tech stopped sending royalty payments and accounting statements to Andrew Greenberg, Inc.

In 1992 Andrew Greenberg, Inc. sued Sir-tech Software, Inc for not paying royality fee, breach of contract, trade secret misappropriation and tortious interference, starting a long term (3 decades) lawsuit, resolved after Sir-tech bankruptcy.

Bugs

There is a famous bug in Wizardry that gives players a large number of experience points if you type an item number that's not on the numbered list when having your party's bishop identify them. When the PC version finally arrived years after the Apple II release, the programmers intentionally left the bug in to be "fair" to PC players.

The NES version of the game features a bug involving the Armor Class statistic. While the characters can change their armor class by equipping different items and the character screen reflects it, the statistic is not used in combat calculations.

Code

Wizardry is written in Pascal. Several instances of code appear sprinkled throughout the diskette (they probably mastered it on a diskette they had not fully erased). For example:

```

BEGIN MoveLeft(S^.Dat a,Info,1+Ord(S^.Data[0])); Exit(GetStr) END; blk:=KN DIV 256+SoffSet; offset:=2(KN MOD 256); C:=CheckCache(dHead,dTail,blk); (strOffsets^[strTree^[lastTree].iindexOffset+[lastTree].startIndex]); Info:='ERR*' END;

PROCEDURE PlotStr; VAR S:Str255; BEGIN

FOR i:=0 TO numInParty-1 DO

BEGIN

BigAdd(totGold,Party[i].Gold); Party[i].Gold:=noGold; END;

Party[N].Gold:=totGold END;

```

Development

According to Andrew Greenberg, the prototype Wizardry was created because of a challenge Greenberg accepted at college to create a computerized version of D&D. He later teamed up with Robert Woodhead to improve the game for commercial release.

Extras

The PC version of Wizardry came out three years after the original Apple version, and those three years gave wisdom to Sir-Tech. Users of the original PC version were treated to the following (extensive!) materials:

  • Player's Guide (manual)
  • Playing Wizardry On Your IBM PC & PCjr (PC-specific guide)
  • Instructions and Briefing Materials (an overview of the story)
  • A notice on backing up your master disk to a scenario disk
  • A note from the authors asking that the user not use "cheat programs"
  • Tips on Keeping Your Computer Healthy
  • Map Plotting Aid

Notes:

  1. The "map plotting aid" was a small pad of graph paper--with the first page printed as a partial map of level 1 to get you started!
  2. The Tips on Keeping Your Computer Healthy were presumably added to help keep generic PC support calls to a minimum. (Back in 1984, there weren't many places to turn to for tech support.)
  3. The special note from Andrew and Robert was not to politely ask the user not to copy the software illegally, but instead asked that the user not use cheat codes to ruin the playing experience!

The Tips on Computer Care and the Note to Users are reproduced below for historical significance:

Tips on Keeping Your Computer Healthy

We hope you are getting a byte or two out of your computer each day. Here are a few tips on prolonging the life of your software.

Clean Your Disk Drives

Cleaning your disk drives takes only a few minutes and makes them work better. Clean your drives every second week.

Get Your Drives Tuned

A majority of disk problems are caused by misaligned disk drives. Your most valued software could be damaged. So protect your investment—get your drives aligned and speed adjusted at least twice a year at your dealer.

Protect Your Computer’s Power

Computers like a steady power supply. However, large appliances or equipment send spikes down a power line. These power spikes cause memory glitches and can alter software if you were writing to the disk when a transient happened. A surge suppressor such as a Blitz Bug will prevent power surges. At $25 to $50, they are a good investment.

Follow these tips and you will probably never have a problem with your software. Our experience has been that at least 97% of reported software problems are caused by unmaintained computers. Your dealer is in business to support you. If you have any questions, go see him, he will be happy to help you.

<hr />

Dear Wizardry Purchaser:

Thank you for acquiring the most widely acclaimed game program for the micro-computer. It’s popularity is attested to by Wizardry’s long term standing as the number one program of its class. Among the reasons for Wizardry’s great standing is its exceptional long term playing value.

It has come to our attention that some software vendors are marketing so-called “cheat programs”. These products allow you to create characters of arbitrary strength and ability.

While it may seem appealing to use these products, we urge you not to succumb to the temptation. It took more than four years of careful adjustment to properly balance Wizardry. These products tend to interfere with this subtle balance and may substantially reduce your playing pleasure. It would be akin to playing chess with additional queens, or poker with all cards wild.

It has also come to our attention that some of these programs are unreliable and may even destroy the data. While we repair or replace inoperative disks free within 30 days of purchase, or for a nominal fee of $5.00 anytime thereafter, we will not do so for disks damaged by a cheat program.

With kind regards and our best wishes for many, many hours of fun and pleasure.

Yours truly,

(signatures of Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead)

Innovations

Wizardry is generally credited as the first computer RPG to feature parties of multiple characters instead of a lone hero/adventurer.

PC version

The PC version of Wizardry went through several revisions from 1984 to 1987, incrementally fixing bugs and increasing compatiblity with PC clone hardware. Around 1988, Sirtech release a compilation package with several Wizardrys, and the entire graphics subsystem was redone to have redrawn PC-specific graphics (the first PC version used roughly-converted graphics from the original Apple version).

References

The names of the two major characters are actually the names of the game's two creator's spelled backwards, Andrew "Werdna" Greenberg and Robert "Trebor" Woodhead.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • March 1988 (Issue #45) – Introduced into the Hall of Fame
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) - #16 in the “150 Best Games of All Time” list
  • GameSpy
    • 2001 – #21 Top Game of All Time

Information also contributed by Adam Baratz; jef leyda, PCGamer77, Trixter and Ye Olde Infocomme Shoppe

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Alan Chan.

Commodore 128 added by Trypticon. PC Booter added by Trixter. NES added by PCGamer77. Game Boy Color added by Ƒreddƴ. Apple II added by KnockStump. Macintosh added by be34269. Commodore 64, PC-98, FM-7, PC-88 added by Terok Nor. WonderSwan Color added by Игги Друге. Sharp X1, MSX added by Unicorn Lynx.

Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, Kabushi, Pseudo_Intellectual, formercontrib, Donatello, Patrick Bregger, Karsa Orlong.

Game added March 28, 2000. Last modified March 26, 2024.