Saturday Morning Gaming: The Wizardry Overhaul Is a Home Run

I was probably 12 years old, maybe a bit older. The 1980’s tend to be a bit of a blur for me, a decade-long sweep of good pop music, bad Braves teams and worse luck with girls. Long hot summers and dull winters. But whenever it happened, I was at my best friend Adam’s house. Adam had an Apple IIe computer and we would frequently play games or write programs on it.¹ Adam had a new game, one that occupied two floppy disks. He put the first one in and rebooted. The disk drive burred and groaned like it was trying to give birth to a baby disk drive. And then a splash screen came up.

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A little man played a flute next to a cauldron, smoke came out and created a monster and the title of the game “Wizardry” came across the top.

I was instantly hooked.

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When I heard that Wizardry was being reimagined for modern computers, I was a bit nervous. This was, after all, an important part of my … teenagehood? It was a game I’d returned to periodically when I’d find an Apple II emulator for a modern mac or PC. There was a familiarity to it and a nostalgia to it that surpassed anything I’d found since. Yeah, I enjoyed titles like Neverwinter Nights. But Wizardry was the OG. Wizardry was what set the mold. Wizardry was your first kiss.²

The initial screenshots and beta testing looked promising. They showed a modern graphical interface with beautifully-rendered monsters. But in the corner was the simple line-and-text interface of the original. This was clearly made by someone with an affection for the original game and an appreciation of the history behind it.

The new dungeon crawler interface. Note that original game interface in the corner.

Like any responsible adult, I waited for a sale to spend money on a silly video game that I’d once played when Reagan was President. But it never seemed to go on sale. So a couple of weeks ago, I bit the bullet and paid full price.

It went on sale two days later.

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Our friend Burt Likko wrote many years ago about the wonders of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. For its time, it was a remarkable achievement: a Dungeons and Dragons game combining fantasy elements, turn-based combat and a dungeon crawler.

Within the narrow limitations of the computing power of the time, they had a hundred different monsters. They created a ten-level dungeon that had unique twists and turns. Getting to the lower levels involved finding magic elements like golden keys and the critical blue ribbon. Parts of the maps were shrouded in an undispellable darkness. There were secret doors everywhere that could be discovered by kicking every section of wall until one yielded.³ There were pits, turntables, chutes, elevators, teleports and monster alarms. The amount of thought and detail that went into the game was breathtaking.

One of the most infamous locations was the “dance hall” on level 8, a room in which all the floor tiles rotated when you stepped on them and the only way out was a mad dash around the room until you either found the teleport out or got to a wall and crawled along it until you found a secret door. Fortunately, the dance hall could only be reached by accidentally tripping a teleport on a chest — one of two dozen deadly traps treasure chests could be loaded with.

Veteran players got used to the progression. Every time you rolled a character, you got a random number of points to assign to their abilities. You’d re-roll until you got a lot of points to distribute to make a strong fighter, a brilliant mage or a particularly lucky thief. Once your party was assembled, you’d enter the dungeon, hit a couple of rooms with your weak characters and scamper back to heal. Slowly, you’d build your party up and nervously go down to deeper and more difficult levels, carefully memorizing the steps that go you there and back. God forbid someone got poisoned and you couldn’t cure them. You’d watch them slowly die as you frantically ran to the exit.

And then at some point, some disaster would befall your party and everyone would die and all that work would be undone. This was why the real ones made copies of their scenario disks (something the remake makes easier by letting you copy a game with one click so that if your party gets destroyed, you have a backup right there). Wizardry was such a huge game that you needed one master disk to load it and then a second disk to save it. Sirtech eventually set up a service to help players recover corrupted disks. Or to delete passwords that players had put on their favorite characters and then forgotten. Adam and I always hit the return when it asked for a password for a character. The danger of losing access to a beloved character seemed a lot more real than someone breaking into the house in the middle of the night to take our characters deep into the dungeon and abandoning them.

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I am pleased to report that the Wizardry overhaul is a home run. It basically takes the old game, irons out of a few of the more annoying “features’ ‘ it had, puts a smooth beautiful graphical interface over it and … that’s it. It hasn’t “modernized” the game. It hasn’t rebalanced it. It hasn’t reimagined it. It’s the same game. Stare at that little corner of the screen and you could imagine you were playing the original. It was so convincing, I kept expecting a nonexistent floppy disk drive to fire up every time we encountered a new monster.

I always wondered what “Will-O-Wisp” looked like. Now I know.

Wizardry actually went through a few different versions and the game allows you to customize the settings to whatever you want. You can go completely old school to the original — it’s literally labeled “old school” — or you can customize to the game balance you want. For example, the original version had a system where your players aged whenever they stayed in the inn to recover and would gradually build up and then start losing abilities. This was replaced at some point by “Vim” where they start with 100% and slowly lose it as they recover from injury or change classes. The Vim system was confusing at first but I gradually got to prefer it.⁴

But that’s all the details. The fun is the overhaul. The town is nicely rendered with the ruined entrance to the maze in the center and the Temple of Cant perched in lofty splendor on a mountainside. The dungeon crawler parts are a simple no-frills 3-D interface with eerie music playing over it. When you get into battle, it switches to more exciting music and displays a massive room where the fight is happening.

The fire giants are terrifying to look at. But with the right combo of spells, you’ll take them down easily.

And the monsters! The original version had a few graphics that would stand in for a variety of monsters. You would see a vague bear shape pop up and have to wait a second to see if they were giants, ogres or literal bears. In the overhaul, the monsters are beautifully rendered dynamic creations. The fire giants were my favorites: tall imposing ominous figures wielding huge battle axes with flames circling around their heads. Like the original, if you haven’t encountered a monster before, you have to wait until it is identified. The game renders this by having the monsters as literal shadows, only taking form when you positively identify them as zombie dragons or whatever and realize just how screwed you are.

We are so screwed.

The interactions are lovely too. The Lahalito spell causes a literal pillar of flame to descend on the monsters. If they cast a frost spell on your party, your screen gets shrouded in ice. One of my favorite animations is when the monsters flee rather than engage. Thieves in particular do a “peace out” gesture that made me laugh out loud the first time I saw it.

It is incredibly satisfying to cast this spell on an unsuspecting party of monsters.

But none of it is distracting or pulls away from the game itself. Every bit of new graphical content just enhances the original. And if you really want to go old school, well just stare at that little graphical interface in the corner and it’s 1984. Or 1994. Or 2004. And whenever was your first, second or third encounter with the game.

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The goal of Wizardry was to defeat the evil Wizard Werdna (the name was the reverse of Andrew, one of the game’s programmers). Werdna was incredibly powerful with a retinue of deadly vampires. To beat him, you had to get to a fairly high level — at least level 12 — accumulate powerful weapons and armor and then venture into the lowest level of the dungeon. There were seven rooms with very powerful monsters. But after each encounter, you could take a teleport to the next monster or one back to the castle. So you could venture in, try a couple of monsters and, if you were hurting, scuttle back, heal up and try again. To get to and defeat Werdna required a combination of powerful characters, good strategizing to conserve your spells and some luck encountering weaker monsters on the Level 10 gauntlet. If you opened one room and found Murphy’s Ghost, you were doing well. If you opened another and found dragon zombies and ninjas, it wasn’t happening this time.

As I mentioned, Wizardry was one of those games I kept returning to. Every now and then, some part of my brain would get a hankering to relive my Apple II childhood. I’d download an emulator and play things like Dig-Dug and Robotron 2084 and Karateka. But I always came back to Wizardry. And each time, I got a little further into the game. With Adam, I don’t think I even got through the Monster Allocation Center, the location of an extremely powerful group of monsters who protect the blue ribbon you use to get to the lower levels. As I got older and came back to it, I’d get further in. But eventually I’d lose interest. Or my party would get killed. Or the emulator would stop working.

But this time, I was determined. I built up a strong group of characters with silly names. Then, for a couple of days, I would venture into the lowest level in whatever spare time I could find — a task made easy by the express elevators — and see how far I could get. Most times, two or three encounters sent me limping back to the castle. After a few tries, I finally reached Werdna himself (“The Wizard is IN”) and, for the first time in forty years, beheld the final boss. I actually killed him the first time but his vampire retinue wiped us out. But I kept going.

Werdna will end you fast if you take him lightly.

And finally, earlier this week, everything lined up. The first six monsters were relatively weak, leaving my party in a strong state. I wasn’t surprised. And Werdna’s vampire entourage was only a couple strong. We went after Werdna like he owed us money and had slept with our sister. If he gets a turn, your party might be finished. A few snicker-snacks of the vorpal blade, a little luck on the spells and he was down before he could say “Tiltowait”. The vampires drained some levels from my samurai, but a few more spells, some more slashes of the blade and they were down.

And after forty years, I stood over the body of the defeated enemy. I had finished the game. One of my characters picked up Werdna’s amulet. And I turned around and found the teleport back to the castle, to return in triumph to gain tons of experience points and a little chevron on my characters showing they’d conquered the dungeon.

I waited forty years to see this screen. It was worth the wait.

And then that son-of-a-bitch Lord Trebor took all our hard-earned gear away. Trebor Sux. Learn it, love it, live it.

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Adam had a troubled life. He got into drugs, which eventually severed our friendship. He bounced from place to place. He had trouble with the law. He had a few kids by different women. And then he passed away a few years ago at the far-too-young age of 46. I’ve changed his name for this post just so no one looks him up or anything. I heard from him once or twice over the years and we’d reminisce about old video games and sci-fi.⁵

I thought of him after finally beating this damned game. People used to tell me I’d never have great memories of spending my youth playing video games but that’s not true. I thought of those days, before the drugs, before the legal problems, before the lost years, when we would laugh and scream as we went through Werdna’s dungeon and saw our increasingly profanely named characters fall to monsters or traps. We never defeated the game because we thought we’d have forever to do it. But it would have been nice to have beaten it back then, to have that memory, to have some faded Polaroid of the screen.

Having a screenshot as a 52-year-old man with kids and a mortgage isn’t quite that. But it’s not nothing either. And it at least gives me something to look forward to. Hey…if I live to be 100, maybe I’ll get around to beating Wizardry II.

1. 10 Print, “Fart”. 20 GOTO 10. RUN.
2. For those of us of a nerdy persuasion, it was something we played a long loooong time before our actual first kiss from another human.
3. The remake saves you this indignity by making sections of wall with secret doors glow slightly.
4. One odd touch: the infamous “Blade Cuisinart”, the most powerful sword in the game, has been renamed a more mundane “vorpal blade”. Maybe this is a copyright issue.
5. Adam also introduced me to another of my life-long obsessions — Doctor Who.