Special Report
PCG INVESTIGATES
Over 40 years old, the WIZARDRY series is still kicking
The name Wizardry still carries weight, which is probably why the recent announcement of Eternal Crypt: Wizardry BC – ablockchain-based clicker game and NFT platform – went down like a lead balloon. A sad sign of the times, perhaps, but a good excuse to talk with Robert and Norman Sirotek, the brothers behind Sir-Tech, publisher of the most influential RPGs of the 1980s.
It’s hard to imagine a world without Wizardry. The first game, Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, released in 1981 for the Apple II before being ported to almost every platform of its era, is one of the key foundational works of the medium. Even in its original form it’s intuitive, accessible and (to anyone who’s played a dungeon crawler) immediately familiar.
Wizardry had players roll a party of six adventurers and send them into a deadly grid-map labyrinth full of monsters, traps and the occasional puzzle. While there was an evil wizard lurking at the bottom to defeat, that RPG grind for XP, gold and gear was the core appeal. Wizardry pioneered a lot of what’s now standard in both western and Japanese RPGs: parties, distinct battle screens, characters able to change class as they levelled up, spells following a simple naming structure.
I asked the Siroteks what defined Wizardry for them and what sets it aside from its peers of the time. They, in turn, quoted ‘digital antiquarian’ Jimmy Maher on the series, “For all its legendary difficulty, Wizardry requires no deductive or inductive brilliance or leaps of logical (or illogical) reasoning. It rewards patience, a willingness to experiment and learn from mistakes, attention to detail, and a dedication to doing things the right way.” That intuitive appeal led to Wizardry catching the eye of some of Japan’s earliest games distributors, but Sir-Tech was adamant that it wanted to retain creative control.
“We’ve got to give ASCII a lot of credit, but part of the reason why we did so well in Japan is when they came to us, they said, ‘We want to market it and we want to license it,’ and we said, ‘No, we want to control it. We want to be in control of our own destiny, so why don’t we do a distribution deal?’” says Norman Sirotek. “They agreed, and we had to deliver them the finished product in a box, shrink-wrapped and ready to go. We flew our developers out to Japan and they spent six or seven months there, converting it to about seven different computers.”
Sticking to its guns is likely what gave earlier Wizardry games such a strong identity worldwide. Sir-Tech’s core Wizardry games are split up into two distinct series: the original five are pure dungeon crawls where characters are expendable but free to be ported between games.
