Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

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Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord
Part of the series: Wizardry
Wizardry-1-logo.gif
Studio Sir-Tech software
Publisher Sir-Tech software
Senior Developer Andrew C. Greenberg
Robert J. Woodhead
Erstveröffent-
lichung		 United StatesUnited States September 1981
platform Apple II , Commodore 64 , Commodore 128 , DOS , FM-7 , Game Boy Color , Mac OS , MSX , PC-88 , PC-98 , NES , PC Booter , PC Engine , Sharp X1 , Super Famicom
genre Computer role playing game
Subject Wizardry
Game mode Single player
control keyboard
medium Floppy disk , cartridge , CD-ROM
language English

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is a computer role-playing game released in 1981 and the first game in the Wizardry series. It was developed by Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead for the Apple II . It was released for Apple in 1981 and ported to numerous other platforms over the years. Wizardry was one of the first Dungeons & Dragons ( D&D ) inspired role-playing games for computers and the first of those games to feature color graphics. It was also the first real group-based computer role-playing game. The game is the beginning of a trilogy with the two successors Wizardry 2: The Knight of Diamonds and Wizardry 3: Legacy of Llylgamyn . To play these, the player must own and have completed Proving Grounds .

Action and gameplay

Due to the history of the development, the plot was initially very rudimentary and limited to an intro text with a short thematic description of the task and the final narrative after the victory over the final boss. By expanding into a series with a consistent game world, the game plot was subsequently integrated into a larger framework.

Trebor, a knight and the appointed regent (English overlord ) of the kingdom of Llylgamyn, wants to expand his power with the help of a magical amulet. He briefly manages to get the amulet into his hand. But his archenemy, the magician Werdna, also wants to own it. Werdna manages to break into Trebor's castle and steal the amulet. To get to safety from the vengeance Trebors, Werdna created one over ten underground levels extending under the city Llylgamyn dungeon . He summoned numerous creatures and monsters to keep intruders away from his refuge and his research area on the lowest level, where he tried to fathom the power of the amulet.

The theft of the amulet and the discovery of the underground labyrinth brought Trebor to the verge of madness. His attempts to clear the labyrinth and to face Werdna were unsuccessful. After a year he only had the first four levels under control. All attempts to go deeper were in vain. Trebor decided not to make any further attempts for the time being and also gave up control of the top levels. Before the withdrawal, he deposited a secret item on the fourth level and had numerous traps installed on the top three levels. Then he named the labyrinth his training ground for new recruits (English Proving Grounds ). Whoever found the hidden object received a reward. Anyone who also brought back the amulet would be included in Trebor's personal bodyguard. Five years after the theft, the player's group of heroes set out to bring the amulet back.

Game objective and principle

Character design

The player starts in a city in which he creates a hero troop of up to six people. There are five races to choose from (human, elf, dwarf, gnome, hobbit), three attitudes (good, neutral, evil) and four basic classes (fighter, priest, magician, thief). There are also four so-called elite classes (bishop: priest and magician spells, samurai: fighter with magic spells, lord: fighter with priest spells, ninja: fighter with thief skills). Characters can switch to these as soon as they have achieved the required character values. Priests usually cast healing spells, mages cast attack spells instead. Bishops who can combine the two do not achieve the strength of a specialist. In terms of sentiment, good and bad characters usually cannot be together in a hero group, but there are gaps in the program that still allow this.

After the characters have been equipped with a basic set of armor and weapons, the group descends into the dungeon below Trebor's Castle. This consists of a labyrinth of ten levels , which are designed increasingly difficult. The game is a typical dungeon crawler . The aim is to discover treasures and ever stronger pieces of equipment, to gain experience points by killing enemy creatures in order to improve your characters, and in the final level to defeat the evil archmage and obtain his powerful amulet. The goal of each level is to find an elevator or the stairs to the next level without getting killed.

presentation

The graphics are comparatively simple, only 10% of the screen shows the dungeon with line graphics from the first person perspective , the rest is occupied by on-screen texts. Nevertheless, this meant an enormous step forward compared to the long text-based games. If it comes to an encounter with an enemy creature, the dungeon window is replaced by a portrait of the enemy. Opponents appear individually or in groups of up to four creatures. As there is no automatic map function , the player has to draw his own maps if he wants to keep track of the level, e.g. on squared paper . This is important for the success of the game, since orientation is often made more difficult, among other things by areas that are under a dark spell and therefore have no contours for orientation, or teleporters that move the player to other places. But there is also a magic spell that shows the current position of the group, as well as a teleport spell at higher levels that can be used to quickly switch between the levels of the labyrinth. However, this requires some care as both the level and the coordinates of the destination must be entered. These result from the coordinates of the current position, the teleportation target is indicated based on the necessary steps to the north, east, west or south. Incorrect information can lead to the group materializing in a trap or a wall, which is associated with a game over . Also, the original release of the game didn't make it clear when teleportation took place. Instead, the game continued seamlessly as if the player had taken a step forward.

Level of difficulty

The level of difficulty of the game is very high. Among other things, players cannot save their progress within the dungeon, but have to leave it first. If all group members are killed, the game can no longer be continued (only later Wizardry games offered the possibility to continue from the point where the characters died). Therefore, playing through could take several hundred hours. Wizardry saves the game progress and the information about the hero group on a scenario disk, which has to be read in to continue after the Wizardry program has started. In order to be able to play the successors Wizardry 2 and Wizardry 3 , Proving Ground of the Mad Overlord must be completed, as the player characters have to be read in using the scenario disk for the sequels.

Cheats

A number of program loopholes allow the characters to gain unplanned amounts of experience points and gold. According to co-author Robert Woodhead, this was the result of a bug caused by not checking the field boundaries. These have been deactivated because the RAM is limited to 48 kB. When the PC versions were released, this bug was declared a feature and deliberately retained.

development

Publications
platform United StatesUnited States United States JapanJapan Japan
Apple II  Sep 1981 ?
PC booter / DOS   1984 ?
Mac OS   1985 ?
FM-7 -  Nov 1985
PC-98 - Nov 15, 1985
PC-88 -  Dec 1985
Sharp X-1 -  Jan. 1986
Commodore 64   1987 ?
MSX ?   1987
NES  July 1990   1987
PC engine ? July 23, 1993
Super famicom - 0June 1, 1999
Game Boy Color ? Feb 23, 2001
WonderSwan Color ? 01st Mar 2003

programming

Wizardry was originally written in BASIC , but later converted to Pascal after BASIC proved too slow for playability. The completion was then suspended until the appearance of a runtime environment that allowed playing on an Apple computer. Overall, the development took two and a half man-years . Wizardry was influenced by earlier games for the university PLATO computer systems , especially by Oubliette . In 1980, Norman Sirotek founded Sir-Tech Software , under whose flag the game was marketed. In the same year Sir-Tech released a beta version of the game - still under the title Dungeons of Despair - at the Boston Computer Convention 1980. Despite the unfinished state, this version has already found numerous buyers. The final version was finally released the following year.

The versions of Wizardry 1 - 3 for Commodore 64/128 have a common code base with the original Apple versions, since both systems use the same 6502 Pascal interpreter, which supports the connection of overlays and low-level functions to the hardware offers. UCSD Pascal was also used for the IBM versions, but with an x86 version of the interpreter. Problems with Wizardry were the long loading times and the extensive disk access. The Commodore versions, which were particularly badly affected, contained a variety of workarounds. In the C128 mode, the VDC memory is used to store the overlays and the RAM expansion unit is supported in both the C64 and C128 modes . Wizardry 2 - 5 also recognize whether a VDC with 16 or 64 kB is available and can use the “burst mode” of the VC1571 drive for faster loading times.

Content

The terms Werdna and Trebor are backscripts of the first names of the two developers, Andrew C. Greenberg and Robert J. Woodhead. Your initials ACG and RJW also appear on the eighth and ninth level cards.

reception

Wizardry received great praise from both critics and customers. The US game magazine Computer Gaming World (CGW) praised it as “one of the best computer game classics of all time”. It is complex, but still playable, and without major errors. Only the danger of the heroes' quick demise was described as a minor defect. The game topped the readers' list of the five best adventure games for five years until it was replaced by Ultima IV in 1986 , and with a score of 7.69 out of 10, Wizardry was among the first to enter the magazine's Hall of Fame in 1988, in which games were recorded that achieved high reader ratings for a long time. In 1990 the game landed at number 9 in a reader poll for the personal best games of all time, and in 1991 the CGW editor Scorpia wrote that "although mainly hack and slash , it is still a great experience even today". Under Sir-Tech, the game had eight successors over the next 20 years and helped set genre standards with its intuitive layout and user interface.

In 1982 the game was also tested by Bruce Humphrey in the D&D role- playing game magazine The Dragon , issue 65. Humphrey wrote, among other things, "There is so much good about this game that it is difficult to decide where to start". His conclusion was: "Neither easy to conquer nor solve, I recommend this game to anyone who is tired of mediocre programs and boring dungeon encounters." The Macintosh version of the game, sometimes also called MacWizardry , was introduced in 1986 in the first edition of the new established Dragon column The Role of Computers . Testers Patricia and Hartley Lesser described MacWizardry as "a delightful reintroduction of an outstanding classic". In a later edition of the magazine they finally gave this version a rating of 4 out of 5 points.

By June 30, 1982, around 24,000 copies of the game had been sold, making it one of the best-selling role-playing games in the North American market to date ( Temple of Apshai (1979) sold 30,000 copies, Ultima (1981) 20,000). In the June 1983 issue of the US magazine Electronic Games , Wizardry was referred to as "the most popular fantasy adventure game for the Apple II at the moment."

Wizardry , like its successors, was ported to numerous Japanese computer systems such as the NEC PC-8801, making it a very popular game in Japan. Together with Ultima , it formed the main source of influence for Japanese RPG series such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest . For the Japanese market, numerous other offshoots were also created - mostly exclusively and independently of Sir-Tech's main series.

Dirk Pellet, developer of the early computer role-playing game dnd , accused Woodhead that Wizardry was a plagiarism of the game Oubliette . The background is that Woodhead had previously published a copy of Pellets dnd in the PLATO network under the pseudonym Balsabrain . In fact, Oubliette and Wizardry have some parallels, for example in terms of attributes or presentation, but in some points Wizardry also goes beyond the model, such as controlling an entire group of heroes. The extent to which the allegation of plagiarism is correct has never been clarified.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Lara Crigger: Chasing D&D: A History of RPGs ( English ) In: 1UP . Retrieved on June 5, 2008.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.1up.com  
  2. ^ A b c d e Jana Hallford: Swords & Circuitry: a Designer's Guide to Computer Role Playing Games . Cengage Learning, 2001, ISBN 0-7615-3299-4 , pp. 55-58.
  3. ^ Rusel DeMaria, Johnny L. Wilson: High Score !: the Illustrated History of Electronic Games , 2nd. Edition, McGraw-Hill Professional, 2003, ISBN 0-07-223172-6 , p. 156.
  4. ^ A b Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. In: The Wizardry Archives. Retrieved July 6, 2019 .
  5. ^ A b Gordon McComb: Playing the new adult-rated video games . In: Popular Science . 225, No. 1, 198407, pp. 92-98. Retrieved July 1, 2009.
  6. ^ A b c d Mark Marlow: Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, a Review . In: Computer Gaming World . May 1982, pp. 6-8.
  7. ↑ a b c Hardcore Gaming 101 interview with Robert Woodhead
  8. ↑ Reader input device . In: Computer Gaming World . April 1986, p. 48.
  9. ^ The CGW Hall of Fame . In: Computer Gaming World . March 1988, p. 44.
  10. ↑ CGW Readers Select All-Time Favorites . In: Computer Gaming World , January 1990, p. 64. Retrieved November 15, 2013. 
  11. ↑ Scorpia: C * R * P * G * S / Computer Role-Playing Game Survey . In: Computer Gaming World . October 1991, p. 16. Retrieved November 18, 2013.
  12. ^ Bruce Humphrey: Campaigns for the Keyboard . In: The Dragon . No. 65, September 1982, pp. 73-74.
  13. ↑ Hartley Lesser, Patricia Lesser: The Role of Computers . In: The Dragon . No. 110, June 1986, pp. 38-43.
  14. ↑ Hartley Lesser, Patricia Lesser: The Role of Computers . In: The Dragon . No. 126, October 1987, pp. 82-88.
  15. ↑ List of Top Sellers . In: Computer Gaming World . 2, No. 5, September 1982, p. 2.
  16. ↑ Explore the Worlds of Computer Fantasy . In: Electronic Games . 4, No. 16, June 1983, pp. 52-56 [52]. Retrieved February 2, 2012.
  17. ↑ Benj Edwards: 10 Classic Computer RPGs . In: PC Magazine . March 10, 2012. Retrieved August 19, 2013.
  18. ↑ Chester Bolingbroke: The Earliest CRPGs ( English ) In: CRPG Addict . December 24, 2011. Retrieved April 20, 2014.