Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

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Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

Developer(s)	Sir-tech Software, Inc.
Publisher(s)	Sir-tech Software, Inc.
Designer(s)	Andrew C. Greenberg Robert Woodhead
Series	Wizardry series
Release date(s)	1981
Genre(s)	Role-playing
Mode(s)	Single player
Platform(s)	Apple II, Commodore 64, MSX, NES, PC booter
Media	Floppy disk, Cartridge, CD-ROM
Input	Keyboard

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is the first game in the Wizardry series of computer role-playing games. It was published in 1981 by Sir-tech Software, Inc..

This was one of the first Dungeons & Dragons-style role-playing games to be written for computer play. The game eventually ended up as the first of a trilogy that also included Wizardry II: The Knight of Diamonds and Wizardry III: Legacy of Llylgamyn. This game needed to be completed in order to create a party that could play in the remainder of the trilogy.

[edit] Gameplay

Starting in the town, the player created a party of six characters from an assortment of five possible races, three alignments, and four basic and four elite classes. The party then descended into the dungeon below Trebor's castle. This consists of a maze of ten levels, each progressively more challenging than the last.

The style of play employed in this game has come to be termed a dungeon crawl. The goal, as in most subsequent computer role-playing games, was to find treasure including ever more potent items, gain levels of experience by killing monsters, then face the evil arch-wizard Werdna on the bottom level and retrieve a powerful amulet. The goal of most levels was to find the elevator or stairs going down to the next level (without being killed in the process).

Combat against a group of samurai in the Apple II version of the game

The graphics were extremely simple by today's standards; the screen was mostly full of text, with about 10% of the screen devoted to a first-person view of the dungeon maze using wireframe 3D vector graphics. By the standards of the day, however, the graphics were a step forward from the text-only games that had been far more common. When monsters were encountered, the dungeon maze disappeared, replaced by a picture of one of the monsters. Combat was against from 1 to 4 groups of monsters. The automap feature standard in today's RPGs had not been invented yet — so the player actually had to draw the map for each level on a piece of graph paper as he walked through the dungeon maze, step by step. Failing to do this would often result in becoming permanently lost, as there were many locations in the maze that had a permanent "Darkness" spell upon the square, making the player walk blindly.

The game was often unforgiving of mistakes or bad luck, requiring the player to start over if the party was killed in combat or accidentally teleported into solid stone. But the challenge ultimately became part of the appeal, and the game still holds nostalgic appeal for many old-time computer gamers.