ABSTRACT
In all my years interviewing game designers and other game industry professionals, the one game that seems to come up most often is Sir-Tech’s Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (1981). It was many gamers’ first introduction to role playing on their home computer, and while the audiovisuals seem primitive today, they were more than sufficient to fire the imagination at the time. Furthermore, the game’s infamously challenging difficulty level and the possibility of permanently losing your entire party (eradicating weeks, months, or possibly even years of work!) gave it an emotional resonance lacking in most other games. While it wasn’t the only computer role-playing game (CRPG) on the market (we’ll look at Richard “Lord British” Garriott’s Ultima games in Chapter 17), Wizardry made an indelible impression on a generation of game designers and established many of the “dungeon crawling” paradigms still at work in modern CRPGs.
