Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord
- Wizardry 1 redirects here. For the modern remake, see Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord Remake.
- For the anime adaptation, see Wizardry (anime).
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is the first game in the main series for home computers and ported into several different consoles, Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was developed by Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead, and launched a beta version of the game at the 1980 Boston Computer Convention.[1] In 1980, Norman Sirotek formed Sir-Tech to distribute, and followed by the final version of the game was released in September 1981 and first released on Apple II.
Plot
The evil wizard Werdna stole a very powerful amulet from Trebor, the Mad Overlord. He used the amulet's power to create a ten level maze beneath Trebor's castle. That was five years ago. Since then, Trebor has created a training centre in the upper levels of the maze from where he sends heroes further down to kill Werdna and get him the amulet. So far, no one has succeeded.
Gameplay
Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord has three primary gameplay systems. The town is where party and character management occurs, including purchasing equipment, training characters, and resurrecting or creating new ones. Characters stick closely to the RPG archetypes of fighters, thieves, healers, and magic-users while offering some advanced classes that allow the use of abilities from multiple classes. The maze is the exploration system where the player is presented with a first-person view of a multi-level dungeon and is tasked with navigating to the lowest levels of the dungeon to defeat the villain Werdna and retrieve his amulet. The combat system occurs during maze exploration when the party encounters monsters, either fixed encounters (which will always occur at the same point in the maze) or random encounters. The Wizardry series would stick closely to these core systems as the series progressed, although the underlying mechanics and management of party and save games would see several overhauls.
Monster encounters can be particularly deadly and parties have limited ability to replenish health or recover from harmful statuses between battles which makes resource management a key concern. Returning to town is the only way to fully recover a party's resources, which also means re-entering the maze at the first level. If a party is completely killed while exploring the dungeon, those characters are lost and cannot be restored without a new party entering the dungeon and recovering their bodies. Creating a map by hand (the original game included graph paper templates to assist in this process) was functionally required to prevent the player from getting lost in the dungeon, as well as identifying the quickest paths back to a given location. Elevators, teleportation magic, and other shortcuts could be discovered to make future trips into the dungeon shorter and allow a freshly rested party to resume their exploration close to where they had originally left off.
The layout of the dungeon as well as the location of key items persists between play sessions, and key items can also be transferred between characters in town. This allows a player who plans ahead to recover from the complete loss of a party by bypassing the need to reacquire, or at least making the reacquiring of key items quicker.
The game writes the results of most player actions to disk immediately, making the progression system closer to the "permadeath" style of roguelikes and less like modern games which allow the user to save and restore the game state at any time and keep multiple save files. Players at the time found multiple ways to bypass these restrictions, usually involving duplicating their save disks or ejecting save disks mid-game.
Characters
Development
Development of Wizardry started in 1978, when Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead were both students at Cornell university. It was an attempt to bring the "maze runner" style of computer role-playing game that were popular on multiuser computer systems such as PLATO to home computers.[2] These games in turn were inspired by the popular Dungeons & Dragons series of tabletop role-playing games, which can be found in their use of common mechanics and concepts including AC (armor class), discrete character classes, and a focus on dungeon exploration.
Fan translation
A finished English translation for Game Boy Color port was made by Opus since August 22, 2001.[3]
Another finished English translation for WonderSwan Color port was made by Hengki Kusuma Adi since January 3, 2021.[4]
Gallery
Cover art of Apple II release.
Trivia
- The names Werdna and Trebor are the first names spelt backwards of the programmers Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead.
References
- ↑ Jana Hallford (Swords & Circuitry: a Designer's Guide to Computer Role Playing Games (Cengage Learning), pg. 55-58)
- ↑ The Digital Antiquarian - Making of Wizardry
- ↑ http://www.romhacking.net/translations/56/
- ↑ https://www.romhacking.net/translations/5829/