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Wizardry

The Cornell dungeon crawl that Japan took to heart

Classic GamesSource-checked

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was designed by Andrew Greenberg and programmed with Robert Woodhead, two Cornell students, and published for the Apple II by Sir-Tech in September 1981. It sent a party of up to six player-made characters down a ten-level maze, and grew into a series of eight main games that ended with Wizardry 8 in 2001. In Japan it became a phenomenon: its Famicom version was a hit, Robert Woodhead was mobbed by fans in a Japanese computer shop, and Japanese companies kept making Wizardry games after Sir-Tech stopped. A remake built on the original code came out in 2024.

The villain of Wizardry is an evil wizard called Werdna, who rules a maze ten levels deep. Asked in 1983 where Werdna came from, the game’s designer, Andrew Greenberg, had a short answer: “That’s me; it’s Andrew spelled backwards.” Wizardry was a student project from Cornell University that became one of the best-selling programs of the early 1980s. It gave the player a whole party of adventurers to build and lose, and a dungeon that players had to map for themselves, square by square. In America it was one of the games that defined the computer role-playing game. In Japan it became something closer to a national pastime, and Japanese companies were still making Wizardry games long after its American publisher had stopped.

Fast facts

  • Full title: Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.
  • Designers: Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead, of Cornell University.
  • Publisher: Sir-Tech Software of Ogdensburg, New York.
  • First release: September 1981, for the 48K Apple II, at $49.95.
  • Language: Apple Pascal, about 14,000 lines.
  • Series: eight main games, from Wizardry (1981) to Wizardry 8 (2001), and many more made in Japan.
  • Relations: the Western RPG of which it was an early landmark, and the JRPG, which grew partly out of it.

A bored student and a PLATO terminal

Greenberg told Family Computing in 1983 that he started Wizardry as an undergraduate at Cornell, during the reading period before exams, when he was so bored that a friend said, “Why don’t you put Dungeons and Dragons on your computer?” He tried, then decided that Dungeons & Dragons was “unsuited for a computer” and began to experiment with something less rigid. Soon his room was full of friends play-testing the prototype, “day and night”, for months.

Cornell was a PLATO site, part of the networked teaching system on which some of the first computer role-playing games had been written, and COMPUTE! described Greenberg as the manager of its PLATO facility. Woodhead later said that there were “dungeon games on PLATO in the same vein as Wizardry”. The historian Jimmy Maher points to Oubliette, a PLATO game that had already used a first-person view of the dungeon, while finding the contents of Wizardry’s dungeon “completely original”. Wizardry’s party of player-made characters is its own.

Sir-Tech

Woodhead reached the game by way of a novelty business. Computer Gaming World’s 1992 history of Sir-Tech tells how his mother, Janice, ran the business with Fred Sirotek, Jr., and asked her son, a Cornell computer science student, to write a program that would show whether a rail shipment of sand was worth sending. Sirotek bought a $7,000 Apple for the job. Woodhead then wrote a mailing-list program, and took it and the Apple to the Trenton Computer Show, driven there by Sirotek’s son Norman, who agreed to go because Atlantic City was nearby. Seeing the crowd round Woodhead’s stand, Norman saw a business. The Siroteks started Sir-Tech, which began with Woodhead’s space game Galactic Attack.

Then Woodhead showed the Siroteks the role-playing game written by his fellow student Greenberg. The two polished it together under the title Dungeons of Despair. According to Family Computing, Greenberg designed and programmed the prototype and Woodhead wrote the program code of the released game; COMPUTE! also credited Woodhead with “most of the actual coding”. The first version was written in BASIC, which proved too slow, so the game was rewritten in Pascal, Computer Gaming World’s reviewer explained in 1982, and held back until a run-time system was available that let it run on Apples without the Pascal language system. Greenberg said Pascal was the only way to fit the game, about 14,000 lines of code, into a 48K computer: assembly language would have needed “five or six times as many code lines”.

Into the maze

Wizardry came out in September 1981, in a plastic bag with a photocopied manual, and cost $49.95. Players began in a castle town. At the training grounds they made characters: humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes or hobbits, of good, neutral or evil alignment, as fighters, mages, priests or thieves. A character who earned enough experience could change to one of the elite classes, bishop, lord, samurai or ninja, at the cost of all that experience and some years of age. Up to six characters formed a party in the tavern, bought weapons at Boltac’s Trading Post and went down the stairs.

Below the castle lay the maze, ten levels deep, each a grid of about 20 squares by 20, shown as corridors drawn in outline in a small window in the corner of the screen. There was no map on screen. “Mapping is essential to survival in the game,” wrote Mark Marlow in his Computer Gaming World review, and “one of the most challenging tasks is to complete an accurate map of all ten levels”, because the designers had put tricks in to make mapping hard. Spells had names such as MILWA and LOMILWA, for light, and DUMAPIC, which told a lost party how far it was from the stairs; combined with MALOR, the teleport spell, it let an experienced party move around the maze in relative safety. Monsters were shown as a single picture. “We’re not telling people a story,” Greenberg said. “They’re telling their own story.”

Players grew attached to their characters. Greenberg said that “many players send in disks to Sir-tech and ask the company to retrieve dead characters”, which Pascal made easy to do.

A hit

By 30 June 1982, nine months after release, Wizardry had sold 24,000 copies, according to a Computer Gaming World list compiled from publishers’ figures; Ultima had sold 20,000. Sir-Tech’s own history, told to the same magazine in 1992, put the first year’s sales at 100,000. Either way it kept selling: in 1983 Family Computing called it “one of the best-selling computer programs of any kind”. In 1992 Computer Gaming World found Sir-Tech selling “millions of dollars” of games a year, with a past “totally dependent on the Wizardry series”.

The first three games were called scenarios. Characters who finished one could be carried into the next: Knight of Diamonds (1982) and Legacy of Llylgamyn (1983), which Greenberg called “a major breakthrough” because it showed several menus at once, like the windows on Apple’s Lisa.

The later series

Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna (1987), designed by Roe Adams, turned the series upside down. The player was Werdna, waking on a stone bier without his amulet, and had to fight up and out of the dungeon against more than 500 real Wizardry characters, taken from the disks players had sent to Sir-Tech. It was an “expert” game, and it let players save inside the dungeon for the first time. Computer Gaming World reported that year that the series was now being written on a Japanese MS-DOS computer, so that new games could come out on every format at once, “even in Japan”.

Wizardry V: Heart of the Maelstrom followed in 1988, Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge in 1990 and David Bradley’s Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant in 1992. Sir-Tech shipped 37,000 copies of Crusaders over the first weekend that it had finished boxes. The last American game, Wizardry 8, spent years in development. No major publisher would take it, and it reached the shops at the end of 2001 as an exclusive of the retailer Electronics Boutique, made by Sir-Tech Canada. Computer Gaming World’s reviewer said it “emerges from the ashes of what once was Sir-tech Canada”, and the magazine made it its role-playing game of the year, recalling a time when Wizardry, Ultima and Might and Magic had been “PC gaming’s grand triumvirate”.

Wizardry in Japan

In Japan the series found a bigger audience than at home. Roe Adams visited Japan in 1985 and reported in Computer Gaming World that “Both Wizardry and Ultima have huge followings in Japan”. Japanese computer magazines covered Richard Garriott, as Lord British, the way American tabloids covered television stars, and when Woodhead introduced himself in a computer shop, people ran outside to shout that he was there. “He was practically mobbed by autograph seekers,” Adams wrote.

A version for Nintendo’s Famicom was, in Nintendo Power’s words in 1992, “a megahit in Japan”, and a Super Famicom version was promised. A version for the NES reached America in 1990 through the publisher Nexoft. Japanese designers learned from Wizardry when they built their own role-playing games. Edge wrote that Dragon Quest blended “the quasi-medieval worlds and stark D&D mechanics of Ultima, Wizardry” and Henk Rogers’s The Black Onyx, and one of the artists who made the first Final Fantasy told Retro Gamer that Dragon Quest had combined Ultima and Wizardry with manga culture.

Japanese companies went on making their own Wizardry games, including Wizardry Nemesis and the Wizardry Llylgamyn Saga collection for the Sega Saturn. The taste lasted: in 2010 Takeshi Kajii, the Sony producer who proposed Demon’s Souls to From Software, told Edge, “I’ve always loved the dark fantasy genre, from Wizardry right through to King’s Field.”

After Sir-Tech

The name now belongs to a Japanese company. In October 2020 Drecom announced that it had acquired the copyrights and trademarks of the Wizardry series. It licensed the name to Digital Eclipse, which rebuilt Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord on top of the original Apple II code, with new graphics, and released it as an early-access game in September 2023. The full release, for PC and consoles, followed in May 2024.

Andrew Greenberg died in August 2024, aged 67. After leaving games at the end of the 1980s he had become a lawyer specialising in intellectual property.

Sources

  • Mark Marlow, “Wizardry: The Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord”, review, Computer Gaming World vol. 2 no. 3 (issue 4), May–June 1982: Apple II 48K, $49.95, Sir-Tech of Ogdensburg; 14,000 lines and 2½ man-years; BASIC, Pascal and the run-time system; races, alignments, classes and elite classes; the tavern and Boltac’s; ten levels of about 20 by 20; spells; mapping.
  • “List of Top Sellers (as of 30 June 1982)”, Computer Gaming World vol. 2 no. 5 (issue 6), September–October 1982: Wizardry (September 1981), 24,000; Ultima, 20,000.
  • Nick Sullivan, “The Wizard of Wizardry”, interview with Andrew Greenberg, Family Computing vol. 1 no. 2, October 1983, pp. 41–42: party of up to six; the three scenarios and carrying characters between them; Greenberg’s prototype and Woodhead’s code; the reading period and the play-testing; Werdna; Legacy of Llylgamyn’s windows; telling their own story; Pascal and 14,000 lines; dead characters sent in on disk; Roe Adams and The Return of Werdna.
  • COMPUTE! issue 123, November 1990, pp. 64–72, history of fantasy role-playing games: Greenberg as manager of the PLATO facility at Cornell; Woodhead doing most of the coding.
  • Johnny L. Wilson, company report on Sir-Tech, Computer Gaming World issue 101, December 1992, pp. 192–194 and later pages: the Siroteks, Janice Woodhead’s novelty business, the rail-rate program and the $7,000 Apple; the Trenton Computer Show; Galactic Attack; Greenberg’s game and Dungeons of Despair; plastic bags and photocopied manuals; the 100,000 figure; “millions of dollars” and “totally dependent on the Wizardry series”; David Bradley and 37,000 copies of Crusaders of the Dark Savant.
  • Roe R. Adams III, column, Computer Gaming World issue 23, September 1985, pp. 20–21: Wizardry and Ultima in Japan; Woodhead mobbed in a computer shop.
  • Computer Gaming World issue 40, October 1987: Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna (Werdna’s escape, over 500 player characters, expert level, saving in the dungeon); the series developed on a Japanese MS-DOS computer.
  • Computer Play, November 1988: Sir-Tech “releasing” Wizardry V: Heart of the Maelstrom. Amiga World vol. 6 no. 12, December 1990, p. 152: Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge.
  • 576 Kbyte issue 128, December 2001: Wizardry 8 on the cover.
  • Nintendo Power issue 14, July 1990, p. 90: Wizardry for the NES from Nexoft. Issue 40, September 1992, p. 123: the Famicom version “a megahit in Japan” and the Super Famicom version.
  • Arcadian Del Sol, review of Wizardry 8, Computer Gaming World issue 212, March 2002, p. 86: Sir-tech Canada, no mainstream publisher, the Electronics Boutique exclusive.
  • Computer Gaming World issue 213, April 2002, pp. 76–77, Premier Awards: Wizardry 8 role-playing game of the year; the years without a publisher; the “grand triumvirate”.
  • Edge issue 216, July 2010, p. 12: Takeshi Kajii on Wizardry and Demon’s Souls.
  • Edge issue 217, August 2010, “The story of Dragon Quest”: Ultima, Wizardry and The Black Onyx.
  • Retro Gamer issue 108, November 2012, “Final Fantasy: the complete history”: Dragon Quest combining Ultima and Wizardry with manga culture.
  • Jack Yarwood, “The Making of Wizardry”, Time Extension (web, secondary): Woodhead on the dungeon games of PLATO. https://www.timeextension.com/features/the-making-of-wizardry-the-landmark-rpg-that-inspired-dragon-quest-and-final-fantasy
  • Jimmy Maher, “The Wizardry Phenomenon”, The Digital Antiquarian, March 2012 (web, secondary): Oubliette and the first-person view. https://www.filfre.net/2012/03/the-wizardry-phenomenon/
  • Sega Retro, entries for Wizardry Nemesis and Wizardry Llylgamyn Saga (web, database). https://segaretro.org/Wizardry_Nemesis
  • “Drecom acquires Wizardry copyright and trademark rights”, Gematsu, 29 October 2020 (web, secondary). https://www.gematsu.com/2020/10/drecom-acquires-wizardry-copyright-and-trademark-rights-new-title-to-be-developed
  • Digital Eclipse, “Digital Eclipse and Drecom Partner on Wizardry”, 2 October 2023 (web): the licence, the original code and the September 2023 early access. https://www.digitaleclipse.com/media/wizardrypartners
  • “Digital Eclipse’s Remake of ‘Wizardry’ Dungeon Crawls Onto Switch In May”, Nintendo Life, April 2024 (web, secondary). https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2024/04/digital-eclipses-remake-of-wizardry-dungeon-crawls-onto-switch-in-may
  • Ted Litchfield, “Andrew C. Greenberg, co-creator of the influential Wizardry series of RPGs, has died”, PC Gamer, 31 August 2024 (web, secondary). https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/andrew-greenberg-co-creator-of-the-influential-wizardry-series-of-rpgs-has-died/

See also

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