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Sir-tech Canada Releases Wizardry 8 136

Posted by Hemos from the i-wub-that- dept.
NichG writes "Sir-tech Canada has finally released Wizardry 8. This has been long awaited by fans of Wizardry 7 (1992) and the series of games which precluded it. It should be available at Electronic Boutique. For those not familiar with the Wizardry series, they are first person, turn-based (more precisely, phased) RPGs, which grew from pure dungeon crawl to RPGs with plot and characters with whom to interact." This, the Bard's Tale series, and the first four Ultimas together were where most of the late 1980s went for me.
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Sir-tech Canada Releases Wizardry 8 More

Sir-tech Canada Releases Wizardry 8

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  • Sweet (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Now everyone will finally understand why I named my kid Werdna
  • I may very well owe my geekdom to Wizardry (I). It was the first game I ever played on my friend's Apple IIc. I can remember plenty of floppy disk switching, and punching holes to make single sided disks double sided.

    I just got to play "Day of Defeat" last night. Man how things have changed!

    • Re:What a blast from the past. (Score:4, Funny)

      by yatest5 ( 455123 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @08:39AM (#2562853) Homepage
      Punching holes in floppy disks to make them double-sided was where its at (was?). Any others got cool examples of technology that's screwed that you can improve with dodgy methods? (no overclocking stories, boooorrring!)

      Best thing I ever did was at my Amiga game piracy club - there was a fervour waiting for Speedball 2 to come out. We modified a floppy disk with a melted chocolate mouse under the disk cover and scribbled 'speedball 2' on the front. Much amusement when some poor bastard put it into his computer. Even better, you should have seen the excitement on the poor bastard's face when he 'found' a copy of Speedball 2 on the floor. Swwweeeet. Jesus, children are evil!!
      • I remember being able to hack Apple's DOS like crazy since it was on a boot portion of the disks, unlike the hardware DOS that systems like Commodore had. I had a neat little protection scheme where I swapped around the catalog track and added in some encryption to the data so it could only be read with a special boot disk I kept on me.

        I also made a dummy version of a friends disk where I swapped all of his DOS commands around. Delete became run, format became catalog, etc. He was horrified when he thought he lost all the data on his disk, but then I relented and gave the original back to him.

        Later, when the 3 1/2 floppies came out I remember using a soldering iron to burn holes in the disk cases in order to double-side the disks. It worked great if you made a template to space the hole properly.
      • what about the c-64 daze? i remember when paperboy was going to come out soon for C-64, and this kidhack at high school wanted it bad.

        we took an ordinary 5 1/4 floppy, took out the actualy shiny disk inside, and covered the shiny portions with a mixture of matchheads and fingernail polish remover. we put it back into the sleeve (making sure shiny parts still shone on the gap bits), and wrote PAPERBOY on the front.

        we anonymously put it in his locker at school, and the latest thing i heard was that his 1541 commodore floppy drive was melted shut, hahaha.

        yesterday, they were kidhacks. today, they're script kiddies.
    • Man... I remember those good old Apple IIc days and Wizardry too! This makes me want to start playing it from the beginning all over again.
  • ... that it's what everyone hopes it will be.

    After the below average Ultima 8 and the visually spectacular-but-totally-incompatible-with-my-compu ter Ultima 9, it'd be nice to have a proper RPG that would bring back all of those memories of IBM games with low-resolution CGA/EGA computer graphics with absolutely awful PC speaker sound tracks.

    Then of course, there's playing the same game on your Amiga. ;)

    Taffyd.

  • Post Wizardry 5 (Score:3, Informative)

    by YakumoFuji ( 117808 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @08:46AM (#2562858) Homepage
    i alwayst felt that 6 and beyond were dreadfull. there are lots of fans of wiz gold, etc but post maelstrom + werdna, etc, they totally lost the plot.

    4+5 imo are the best of the trilogy and i especially liked playing Werdna and starting at the bottom of the tower.

    the wiz series was also the first to my knowledge to award your characters for winning the game, and taking that into the next game, so when you won you got a chevron. quite cool.

    the best bit was that from 1 to 3 required you to have played and passed characters along, so you could only play wiz3 by playing wiz2 and wiz1!! (although it limited market share i guess)..

    nice to see an old school title come back. pity it has no old school charm.

  • Download the demo or view gameplay movies HERE (Score:4, Informative)

    by at-b ( 31918 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @08:51AM (#2562868) Homepage
    Don't hammer the server too much, though. There're limited login spaces, so it shouldn't be too much of an issue.

    Gameplay movies:
    MPEG file [sir-tech.com]
    Zipped File [sir-tech.com]

    The demo is available from here..
    3dgamers [download link] [3dgamers.com]
    or here
    FilePlanet [download link] [fileplanet.com]

    No accusations re: Karma, please. I'm at the cap. And Wizardry 6 and 7 were the best RPGs I've ever played.

    Alex T-B
    St Andrews
  • Hell yeah. I've played 7 since '95 and I still haven't beaten it! I got around to beating Wizardry 6 though ;0. It's great to see that one of the greatest games ever is up to 8. I had the baddest party too, untill my drive got formatted. Level 35 characters who could kill fiereos, demons and such in one shot! Never quite got around to beting the game though :( I need to see if I've got an old savegame SOMEWHERE to import into 8, which is way overdue by the way. On my CD, I have a Preview for Wizardry 8 that says it's out in summer of 99! I sure hope the extra time means they did things right. Man, I think I'll have to play 7 tonight.
  • i got one word for you..

    TARJAN
    • Mangar's Mind Mallet!

      Still the single greatest spell name in any RPG, ever. IMHO of course! :)

      LEXX

  • Replay Wizardry 1-5 w/emulators (Score:5, Informative)

    by cpfeifer ( 20941 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @09:02AM (#2562901) Homepage
    Here [geocities.com] you can download the original Apple II disk images and an emulator for windows/dos. There are also links to the SNES ports.

    In wizardry I, don't forget the really good Bishop cheat. Create a Bishop (need right mix of stats), and then identify item 9 until you succeed.

    *Excelsior!*

  • ohh the memories (Score:2, Informative)

    by GW Hayduke ( 19878 )
    17 hours 53 minutes.... That was my first all night graphic RPG. My friend and I waited weeks to pick up our copies.. We then "signed-out" a couple schools Apple II+'s for a weekend of gaming. Halfway through the session we had to crack the covers and have cooling fans blowing across the mobos to cool em off.
    It's been YEARS since I've played them, but it's kinda neat to remember lahalito, dilto, Montino, Mahalito, and the all mighty Tiltowait.

    Also just a bit of trivia....
    Wernda and Trebor are the names of the programmers who wrote it backwards..
    yeah yeah everyone should know it, but I thought I'd repeat that for people new to the old school game thing :)
    • Wernda

      Werdna ... spell it right, or he'll come after you!
    • "lahalito, dilto, Montino, Mahalito, and the all mighty Tiltowait"

      OMG! Until I read that I thought I'd forgotten it, but it all comes flooding back.

      I spent many, many, many hours in "The Bard's Tale" on the apple macintosh - first playing the game and then hacking the database to modify the maps. I even wrote my own disassembler to assist in the process. I wonder how much lower my GPA was because of it. Doesn't matter, I suppose, I still graduated and got a job doing 3D graphics hardware/software.

      I still have the maps, all carefully hand drawn, lying around somewhere. However, I used to hate how you could be teleported to a different point on the grid without realising it, which would screw up the cartography!

      Simon
      • holy shit... i remember all that too!!!!

        a few months ago a friend on a message board made some comment about what he did in high school was hang out in the proving grounds of the mad overlord and it blew my mind cuz i hadn't thought of wizardry in a really long time and all these memories flooded back....

        oh how i loved playing that game on my mac plus.
  • Bard's Tale, that takes me back. I used to test for EA back then (and Infocom) and spent countless hours (thank god they're countless) on the first two in this series on a Commodore 64. They made as much on selling the solution booklets as they did on the software. Speaking of flashbacks, anyone else out there do an Infocom "Marathon of the Minds" [csd.uwo.ca]? I'm listed in the middle there. But both teams did NOT deserve to win, dammit. We finished the game (Hollywood Hijinx) half an hour before they did, but because of a glitch in it (pre-release version) it didn't tell you it was over and that the bad guy was supposed to escape when you saved the girl, so we kept playing. I still bear the scars...
    • I completed both Bard's tale 1 and 2 back then, but did leave the part III somewhere near the end. Somehow it wasn't as good. But I remember reading initially the reviews on Commodore User, Games Machine and other magazines and drooling the games because I could get my hands on them only when I finally purchased an Amiga.
  • I'm excited to see a new Wizardry. I haven't played Wizardry since I had my old PCjr years and years ago. But, the screenshots make it look like it's a 2-3 year old game already. Is it just me, or does it look like they really skimped on the graphics?
  • It's been *that* long... the people with comments above must have an old DOS machine laying around for Gold Box retro-gaming... hmm, sounds like a good idea ;)

    From the screenshots, it looks like a 1st-person Doom/Quake perspective (which is nothing new; they all had that, just not the modern look)... can't wait to see if they toss in a beholder for face-to-face combat.

    Anybody play test or review this yet?

  • You dare not recognize the Eye of the Beholder series in your dungeon-crawler schema?! I still, to this day, think that those are some of the best first-person RPG's that ever lived. Although they didn't have a huge plot it was about as close as you could get to tabletop RPG in a bite-sized candy shell, imo.
    • Eye of the Beholder was a cheap ripoff of Dungeon Master [dmweb.free.fr].
    • Tabletop dungeon crawls generally don't depend on how fast you can roll the dice, and done well, involve actual tactical skill.

    • Are you surprised? I almost had hope for him when he stated that Ultima 1-4 were his 80's passion. When I realized that the last digit was a 4, instead of a 5, I understood the hopelessness of his situation. Failure to acknowledge perhaps the greatest CRPG of all time---Ultima 5, may mercy be unto it, hail the king, etc...---makes him slightly more palatable than JonKatz. Hrmm, maybe that's a bit harsh.

  • My Wizardry cheat (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tmark ( 230091 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @09:29AM (#2563034)
    I bought Wizardry (I) when it first came out, and I loved it. I remember diligently making maps and even trying to sell them to computer magazines - an editor from Computer Gaming World offered to pay me $100 to publish the maps, when I was about 11 years old. Of course I never got paid, and I have no idea whether the article even got published, but I digress...

    I'm sure I wasn't the only one who did this. In those days Wizardry ran on Apple Pascal. You loaded two discs. In those days, if you had two disk drives, you were golden, and I had two. Anyways I quickly discovered that if something untowards happened, you could flip the latch on the drive really quickly and prevent the game from writing your death to disk. The Apple would make that familiar grinding sound, but you could safely reboot, and find yourself more or less back where you were before. Made advancing through the levels *real* easy.

    Anybody else remember practically crapping your pants when the computer went "beep-beep-beep" and you say *W*E*R*D*N*A* for the first time ??

    Those were good days. I can't say I've ever truly loved a game as much as that one.
    • lol. i had forgotten about this till now =) i had an apple iie w/ a double disk drive, and you're right, that was just the shit then. my friends and i used to use this cheat. i don't remember if you could easily use a sector editor on the disk to modify your players too. you could do this with the bard's tale (anyone remember this game?). i think i learned hex because of that game.
  • I LOVED that game!

    The trick of opening the drive door when you got killed was a classic...

    Really playable, truly enjoyable game. Simple, yes - but it had all the necessary elements and it played fast without superflous graphics and glitz.

    Ahead of it's time, IMO.

  • A game that was HUGE on the Mac...

    Now only available for the PC! Well, at least right now, hopefully. :(

  • Not to rain on the parade (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lord_Pall ( 136066 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @09:41AM (#2563115)
    But this appears to be the last of the sir-tech games..

    If i remember correctly, Sir-Tech's publishing arm went out of business around 15-18 months ago.. Their development house struggled for a while afterwards, finished wizardry 8 and one other title I don't remember..

    Wizardry 8 languished, finished, for a while.. They didn't have a publisher.. I think somewhere during that period they shut down operations (Or at least laid off a LOT of people)

    And now wizardry 8 is out.. An extremely depressing moment for computer gaming.. One of the longtime companies and founders of PC gaming is gone..

    Sure sir-tech had some big stinkers.. Virus, Druid.. But they also did some of the truly great games. Jagged alliance, Wizardry..

    With Interplay foundering, sir-tech gone, Origin DOA, SSI on its last breaths.. Well the old school rpg makers are gone.. Sorta depressing if you ask me..

    BUT! Its not all lost.. We've got new blood on the horizon.. Mostly in the shape of those rascally canadians, Bioware.. And even the longtime scapegoat.. Bethesda..

    So we've lost the old school.. Which is depressing from a historical standpoint.. But we've still got RPG developers building games that we couldn't have even dreamed of 15 years ago..

    • Well the old school rpg makers are gone.. Sorta depressing if you ask me..

      BUT! Its not all lost.. We've got new blood on the horizon.. Mostly in the shape of those rascally canadians, Bioware.. And even the longtime scapegoat.. Bethesda..

      So we've lost the old school.. Which is depressing from a historical standpoint.. But we've still got RPG developers building games that we couldn't have even dreamed of 15 years ago..

      So you think the Old school is gone eh ?

      But what about the folks who graduated and grew up with old school. You see i and many folks at Bioware grew up with Wizardry, BardsTale and Ultima back on those Apples and the like. I don't know how much closer to old school you can get. I still think we are the Old School you are refering to. Now the Old School Players are now making RPG's...

      I just can't wait for the goodness to come my way.

      /satterth

    • > Sure sir-tech had some big stinkers.. Virus,
      > Druid.. But they also did some of the truly
      > great games. Jagged alliance, Wizardry..

      Did you notice that the games you sunk (i.e. Druid and Virus) where not developed by Sir-Tech but only distributed by their now-defunk distribution arm? But the ones you said where truly great (i.e. Jagged Alliance and Wizardry) where developed in house?

      Neat huh? :-)
    • Don't forget the Realms of Arkania series. Mmm, Shadows Over Riva. Gotta love the happy music in the desolate swamp!
    • If I remember correctly, and the source I read is correct Sir-Tech is not shutting down. They have a US and a Canadian group (as well as the defunct publishing group), and one of the groups (the US I believe) was 'downsized'
    • As we're adding a map-editor and a script compiler to the Exult [sourceforge.net] project, it will be possible to 'enhance' Ultima7 (with EA's permission, of course), or create new games in the same style.
  • You just can't do better than that game. It was the first to totally capture my gaming spirit. I even loaded it up the other day and realized I still have the first 5 levels memorized. How sad is that. Who remembers the creeping coins, talk about an exp stream.

    Anyway, as with all games it hold a strong grip on what I love as a game. Build, crawl, build, craw.....I would still love to see a game just like PGOTMO to come on in an online form. You controll a group of 6 leveling characters as a group, turn based timed combat. I telling you this would be very interesting PVP in an online setting. Anyway, you just have to love that first Wizardy it was the game that started it all with me.
  • This might be the last in the series, Sir Tech is in financial trouble, and the balance rests on the sales of Wizardry.

    If you are a fan, go purchase the game.. if it sells well, sir tech might be able to pull out of their slump and bring us Wizardry 9 in a few years.
    • Sir-Tech Canada is dead and nothing will bring them back. They went bankrupt a few months ago. I'm not sure where the money is going to go, probably just the shell of Sir Tech Canada or to their creditors.

      However, I've downloaded the demo and it looks like a good non-rushed game. The demo locks up a lot, so I'll have to wait for a new computer or a patch before I dare buy it.
  • Wizardry was one of the original computer RPGs, but my hopes for this latest title are very, very low, almost to the point of not caring.

    The Ultima games--kindred spirits to the Wizardry games--had the same spark to them, way back when. But it has been shocking just how much the series has degenerated. Ultima VII was so horribly bad that Richard Garriott publicly apologized for it. It was a Mario-style game in the guise of Ultima. Ultima IX was an embarassment to everyone involved. In the process of making the game fully 3D everything else was sacrificed. When the demo first shipped, it was laughably bad. Why did they even bother?
  • I still have a functioning IIe, with a hacked copy of Ultima IV. One of the best games ever. Used to go into the character stats via some program whos name I can't recall and change all the stats to 'FF', along with my inventory. I would then proceed to attack Lord British, just to see how many guards I could kill before being taken out. Don't think I ever managed to kill LB, though...

    Anyone remember the program that allowed you to rebuild the Ultima III world?

    (tig)
  • i have wizadry I (proving grounds of the mad overlord), in the box, along with with purchase receipt (1987-7-2). i keep it in a book case for chuckles. can you say 'tiltowait'. i knew you could.

    i like the long beep that someone mentioned when you found wernda. i think i still have the maps i made sitting up late nights trying to beat it. and my play disk of my 3 level 53 ninjas.
  • Is there anyone out there who managed to beat Wiz7 w/o the help of the hint book? That game is so unbelievably complicated to beat! One of my housemates, with the book open the entire time, still took 4 months to play through.
    • Oh no, with the complexity that some of those puzzles had, like the crystal city. I would still be playing it without the help of the book.
      By far the best RPG i have played.
    • > Is there anyone out there who managed to beat Wiz7 w/o the help of the hint book?

      WizGold? Sure. It takes a long time (with or without the hints), but the story is sufficiently linear that if you take detailed notes, you'll do fine.

      Now, Wizardry IV, that's another story. I still haven't beaten it. (Yes, I have the walkthrough. No, I refuse to use it. My goal is to finish the game before I die. I'm damn glad they released the Wizardry Archives for the PC, though, as I don't think I have the patience to swap and flip all those disks in and out of my Apple //e anymore.)

      Andrew, Robert, thanks for years of great gaming.

  • What to Expect (Score:4, Informative)

    by tiltowait ( 306189 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @10:29AM (#2563441) Homepage Journal

    As long as you're not wanting GameCube-like graphics (the 3D world compares to EQ), this is a good game. The sophisticated plot and character development is a welcome change from the likes of Diablo.

    But don't take my word for it, there's a free demo available from the official site [wizardry8.com]. I also run one of the larger Wizardry fan sites [tk421.net] - check it out for more information on the series (maps, walkthroughs, etc.).

    Wizardry 8 isn't widely distributed (part of the game's delay in release was finding a distributor), but it's available at your local mall's Electronics Boutique (full retail is 50 bucks) and there's also a few cheaper [yahoo.com] prices online.

    Someone better mod this post based on my user name alone.

  • Oh, wow, I thought the entire Wizardry series was abandownware. Crusaders of the Dark Savant caused me to exhange countless hours for pure enjoynment... There is just something about casting eldritch spells at rocket-sled-riding space mutants that gets my blood pumping :-) Hopefully, Wizardry 8 has kept the original initiative-based combat system, and the wacky technomagic atmosphere...
  • Nothin like the good ol' Fight-Fight-Fight Parry-Parry-Parry.

    And the super bishops. And the tiltowait spell. The memories..
  • Everyone I'm seeing in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg is giving this rave reviews so far. Of course, these are just first impressions as the game just came out yesterday...

    This game is PHENOMENAL. I am SO going to get in trouble by my wife for staying up so late, but man, it's GOOD! - Plissken


    But the true beauty of the game lies in the gameplay... wow. All other developers out there... this is what turn-based, tactical, Role-Playing combat is supposed to be. - Aether

    This is true "old-school" RPGing...in the same legacy as Dungeon Master, Bard's Tale, Might & Magic, and of course Wizardry. This game is beautiful, deep and addicting. - Tachyon

    The real strengh is the flexibility...so many classes, races, and skills. It makes BG2 look like a console RPG, IMHO - bad sushi

    Hopefully I'm within my fair use rights as these are just excerpts and the authors, as they are, are attributed ... :)

    • Low-profile administrative toolbar a nice feature (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Many RPGs from 87 til Baldurs Gate used as much as 50% of the screen for administrative function (character data, directional controls, list of active spell effects, etc.) The screenshots for 8 do away with this gross paradigm, a nice lightweight 50 pixel margin all the way around. But games should progress past this, and soon. The Mac got drop down menus in the late 80's, sliding toolbars have been around since the early 90's, Windows got right-click menus in the late 90's, how come these screen-efficient control devices never made it into core fantasy RPGs? Anyone who's ever caught themselves looking at the screen from an angle trying to beat the next Cow Level assailant to the punch knows why this is necessary.

      lingeringdweomer
      • I've been playing the Demo and the interface for fighting is hard to use. To really enjoy this game, you need to become familar with the keyboard bindings something I intend to do when I get the game (the keybindings for movement is easy to remember, so I already use it).

        I do not know if having menus and such would actually make the game much easier and it would look ugly.
  • I don't think Wizardry prevented anything, except sleep. From dictionary.com:
    preclude To make impossible, as by action taken in advance; prevent. See Synonyms at prevent.
    I bet he meant preceded. It's a shame the editors don't ever fix this stuff before they post a story.
  • Do you know that in Japan not only movie-filled FF-like RPG games are popular, but also Wizardry series are as popular as them and have cult fans? Why Wizardry got so many fans in Japan is I think because those versions released in Japan for PC and NES are with beautiful monster graphics... though old fans prefer wireframes. There are even Japanese-original Wiz scenarios. For GameBoy there were 5 or 6 Wiz titles, and some others were released for SuperNES, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, and Windows PC. They are based on old-style, no spaceships involved, swords/sorcery background as original scenario 1-5. Only new classes and races are introduced, without losing balance. And now, original Wizardry world ceased at 8, while Japanese studio Atlus released new Wizardry title "Busin" for PS2 in Japan, called "Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land" http://www.atlus.com/Wizardry.htm [atlus.com] outside Japan.

  • another memorable Wizardry cheat (Score:3, Funny)

    by call -151 ( 230520 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @11:04AM (#2563725) Homepage
    Anyone know the blank-disc level advancement stunt?

    It worked like this- when you were in the tavern resting up, the program went to the drive to read the level advancement tables. If you pulled out the normal Wizardry disk and put in a newly formatted blank disk at that time, it would read that the experience points needed to advance to the next level were 0, so of course you would advance. Repeatedly. Of course, when you put the right disk back in, you would need a ton of points to advance to the next level, but that could be fixed by getting intentionally "level drained" by a vampire or somesuch undead to get you down one level= to the midpoint of one level below your current one, which would actually add tons of experience instead of draing it (if you had done the "advance with nothing" strategy above.) Those were the days... Contra-dextra avenue, tiltowait, oh boy!

    Does anyone know where Andy Greenberg and Robert Woodhead are these days? Wizardry was truly revolutionary... Andy was a student at Cornell in the early 80s but I don't know what happened to him after that...

  • means:

    can it read 5 1/4" floppies stuffed into my 3 1/2"-drive

    im as sure as hell going to love it.

    :-)
  • I'm sure you meant to write preceded (to be ahead of something) instead of precluded (to exclude somthing).

    Sadly, I've only played Wizardry I. Pretty cool game though, despite the limited size of the dungeon. Have to put Wizardry on my christmas list then, right next to Civilization III and Heroes of Might and Magic IV.

  • My first job in the computer industry was as a developer at Sir-Tech on prototypes for the Wizardry 8 3D Engine [exocortex.org]. It was part-time during my last year at High school. Would you believe that was back in last 1996 and early 1997?

    The guys at Sir-Tech are a good bunch though and I hope that this game comes through for them in holiday sales.

  • Anyone who likes CRPGs should play this game. I got into the Wizardry series with Wizardry 6 (I wasn't old enough to sit at a computer for the previous Wizardry games). These games have amazing character development and a great story line. The graphics in 8 are stunning. It's not Unreal or Quake, but it's better then any other CRPG out there right now. And also remember, that this game was ready to come out a year ago but the lack of a publisher stymied it's release.

    Here's to a great job by Sir-Tech! Thanks for all the games over the years! You will be missed!
  • Back in 1980/81, when I lived in Austin, this friend of mine was working on his second computer game. The first one was a little-known thing called Akalabeth. So Richard was working on his new product, something called "Ultima" ("the ultimate role playing game"). I play-tested that sucker for *hours*, and ended up as a character in the game.

    Wizardry? Heh. Newbies.
  • I can't remember whether it was Trebor or Werdna (or both) who wrote it, but there was a game on the PLATO network (circa '79 or '80) called "Oubliette" that nearly caused me to flunk out of law school. For homeboys of that time and place, I owned a Level 63 boxer (Samurai) name "Sarge" and a Level 63 Valk named "Pandora". It all came down over a 300bps link to one of those funky orange plasma PLATO terminals and, man, did it kick some serious ass. With parties of individual players from all over the country, that exprience turned me on to the power of networking. A typical night lasted from midnight to 4 or 5, when the system went down for maintenance. A couple of hours of serious dungeon-diving, followed by a couple of hours of "Empire". Man, those were the days... Out!

    • "Oubliette" on PLATO was the inspiration for the first Wizardry, in the same way that "Empire" was the inspiration for xtrek/netrek.

      PLATO was pretty remarkable...

      Some history of Netrek, with a discussion of Plato and a mention of Oubliette, is here [csuchico.edu].

  • I remember meeting one of the founders of Sir-Tech. They had close ties to the SCA Group Northern Outpost, and I was at an SCA event when I saw the white Corvette with the tag "Wizardry". O.K. people too!

    ttyl
    Farrell
  • From the website: Hear your characters come alive with the revolutionary new Personality system.

    I'm scared.

    Personally, I think W8 will be good even if it sucks. I'm so desperate for a full-party RPG in the old 1st person mode that I'll take anything!

    Don't get me wrong, Baldur's Gate is the finest D&D computer game ever written (to date), but it's always fun to try out other tactical simulation rule (TSR) systems!
  • I'm not sure if this has already been mentioned or not, but for those of you that don't want to break out an old DOS box try Interplay's versions, which run on modern OSes.

    Interplay released the "Ultimate Wizardry Archives" a few years back. It runs great on Win 95/98/ME/etc and includes Wizardries 1 - 7 and Gold. 1 is still my favorite (kill those Murphy's Ghosts for big EXP points!)

    You can even transfer the earlier versions of Wizardry to floppy and run them on another PC from within windows, all without those pesky scenario disks. I picked up the achives direct from Interplay for something like $15-20. I'd give you the exact price, but www.interplay.com is blocked by my work proxy :(

    Still, for around $15 you get 8 classic Wizardry games for probably 1/3 of what Wizardry 8 will run.

    Just thought I'd pass the info along...

    -Revoke
  • I have seen mentions of the Ultima and Bard's Tale series, but what about the Might and Magic series from the 80's (I am of course deliberately neglecting the ones released in the past couple of years). Anybody have fond memories of trying to crack the inner sanctum?
  • As one of the original authors of Wizardry, one of the nicest rewards of writing the game is reading comments such as these.

    Does anyone know where Andy Greenberg and Robert Woodhead are these days?

    You can find out what happened to me (Trebor) at the family website, MadOverlord.com [madoverlord.com]. Andy lives in Florida with his wife and two children, where he "hacks the law". He reads /. so I'll let him reply himself.

    In wizardry I, don't forget the really good Bishop cheat. Create a Bishop (need right mix of stats), and then identify item 9 until you succeed.

    This was caused by a simple bug in a check statement:

    if (ch >= "1") or (ch <="8") then ..do the identify..

    It should have been an "and", of course. So you could type in any character, and since we'd disabled boundschecking on Apple Pascal, it would twiddle bits at various offsets. Someone once sent me a list of what every typeable key would do.

    When we did the IBM PC version (which also ran Apple Pascal, btw), we deliberately left the bug in, for reasons of tradition. Thus we confidently lay claim to originating the concept of "It's not a bug, it's a feature" that later made Bill Gates billions.

    We wrote Apple Pascal interpreters for the PC, a bunch of japanese machines, and the C64/128. Wizardry 4 was written on a NEC 9801 machine, it would boot into PCDOS, then you'd type a command line and see "Welcome to Apple Pascal" (and yes, we bought a copy of Apple Pascal to run on it).

    I can't remember whether it was Trebor or Werdna (or both) who wrote it, but there was a game on the PLATO network (circa '79 or '80) called "Oubliette" that nearly caused me to flunk out of law school.

    Both Andy and I were active on the PLATO system, which was a tremendous influence on us. PLATO had email, chat, newsgroups, multiplayer realtime game, and much more, all starting in the early 70's. The multiplayer dungeon games were particularly good. Pretty much all of the basic concepts of multiplayer gaming were developed there.

    Wizardry was in many ways our attempt to see if we could write a single-player game as cool as the PLATO dungeon games and cram it into a tiny machine like the Apple II.

    They had close ties to the SCA Group Northern Outpost, and I was at an SCA event when I saw the white Corvette with the tag "Wizardry"

    That was mine. I was never a member of the SCA, however. But they were active at Risley Hall at Cornell, where Andy lived. I don't recall if he was a SCAdian. PS: I'm not nearly as dorky as I was back then.

    i have wizadry I (proving grounds of the mad overlord), in the box

    IIRC, Wizardry was the first home computer game, and possibly the first home computer program, to be sold in a box. Before that it was all ziploc bags and binders.

    Best
    R
  • Lomilwa and Tiltowait... Still the classics.

    (along with WizFix) ;P

    I loved that game, spent hours on Wizardry 1, Bard's Tale, etc.

    Still sometimes fire up the Apple // emulator to play some 40 column Wizardry... Fun stuff ;P

    Even today, when I make characters on Diablo 2, and the most modern games, I still use character names that I created for my original Wizardry characters!
  • I work as a consultant, so I ran it on my Dell 850mhz laptop (w/ 500mb ram), and it's pretty groovy. Nice graphics, interesting bad guys, I can see it seriously sucking up most of my free time for a while.
  • Someone should port Wizardry 1-5 to the Palm pilot. Being able to play those classics on the go would rock. Although we wouldn't be able to pop the disk drive open to prevent it from saving our deaths but it'd still be fun.

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