8 ms·

Wizardry Co-Creator Andrew Greenberg Has Passed Away

169 points by homarp 2y ago

kentbrew 2y ago
"Tiltowait 'em all and let the gods sort 'em out."
ainiriand 2y ago
[flagged]
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  Wrong thread?
  - kinlan 2y ago
    It's there as soon as you load the page. I get it, this cookie prompt hides the important article and there's a heap of information share.
    - dredmorbius 2y ago
      In which case, the "tangential annoyances" principle applies: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20tangential%20annoyances&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...> If available, uBlock Origin, uMatrix, or other JS / cookie blockers will help, as will incognito mode (against persistent trackers). Firefox/Android provides for these. I'm not sure what the current state of iOS browsers is, though there is a Firefox/iOS these days. Desktop systems afford far more options, of course. But the discussion is off-topic.
      - ainiriand 2y ago
        It is more than a tangential annoyance in my opinion. It blocks the article until you hide it. I'm very much in favor of ad space in free publications but this looks like milking the visitors.
  - dialup_sounds 2y ago
    It's from the cookie banner of the linked site. Off topic but still, wow.
dredmorbius 2y ago
There's a brief biography of Werdna, as Andrew was known, on Wikipedia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_C._Greenberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_C._Greenberg> He was also among the hackers featured in Steven Levy's Hackers, and was a regular attendee of the Hackers Convention which has occurred annually since the book's publication in 1986. This year marks the 39th occurrence: <https://www.hackersconference.org/ https://www.hackersconference.org/> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute...> His jump from programming to law (which he saw as a form of hacking) was also notable. During the 1990s he'd often be found correcting misapprehensions, and occasionally affirming understandings, of intellectual property law particularly as concerned Free Software licencing and patents. Edit: He was also a key developer, advocate, and enthusiast of the Squeak Smalltalk OOD language: <https://web.archive.org/web/20000818185735/http://www.gate.net/~werdna/squeak-qref.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000818185735/http://www.gate.n...> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeak> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk> RIP, Werdna.
- beaugunderson 2y ago
  i shared a room with him at hackers one year, didn't actually get to speak with him because our sleep schedules were misaligned, but sharing the room did prompt me to read about wizardry and his career. i was sad to see the news of his passing here today; rip.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
wiz21c 2y ago
Wizardry was developped in Pascal (which at that time was not common at all IIRC)...
- sowbug 2y ago
  Wizardry was prototyped in Applesoft BASIC using low-res graphics mode. In 1982 or 1983 I briefly had a copy on a 140KB floppy disk, but I foolishly erased it because I needed the space. I've found a couple other people who remember seeing the demo, but I don't know anyone who has it.
  - wiz21c 2y ago
    All of a sudden, a very expensive floppy may pop up on eBay :-) Thanks for sharing that story, I didn't know that at all !
dialup_sounds 2y ago
Three levels of nostalgia to choose from: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2518960/Wizardry_Proving_Grounds_of_the_Mad_Overlord/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2518960/Wizardry_Proving_... https://www.wizardryarchives.com/downloadsw4.html https://www.wizardryarchives.com/downloadsw4.html https://archive.org/details/wizardry-proving-grounds-of-the-mad-overlord-sir-tech-1980-source-code.-7z https://archive.org/details/wizardry-proving-grounds-of-the-... RIP, Werdna
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jghn 2y ago
  Speaking of nostalgia, I'm always on the lookout for a playable version of the Mac port. I've found a few of them over the years but never managed to get them to work. I don't even want to know how many hours I spent playing this in the mid-80s, and always liked the Mac port better than the PC one my friends had. The kicker is I do have the original box & floppy, so it's "legal". I am skeptical that the disk still works and it's been almost 20 years since I had a floppy drive at all much less attached to a computer that could read this disk.
  - aidenn0 2y ago
    If you do try to revive the floppies, be aware that most USB floppy drives can't read 400k and 800k Mac disks, so check a mac specific forum before buying one.
    - jghn 2y ago
      oh for sure it wouldn't have ever occurred to me that it could possibly work
  - shagie 2y ago
    The Mac port was really well done. I had played it on the Apple ][+ and Mac version (and now the Steam updated version). The thing with the Mac port is that it wasn't just a port but a reimplementation that was designed for the Mac UI of the day. https://www.macintoshrepository.org/5149-wizardry-proving-grounds-of-the-mad-overlord https://www.macintoshrepository.org/5149-wizardry-proving-gr...
r721 2y ago
PC Gamer story: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/andrew-greenberg-co-creator-of-the-influential-wizardry-series-of-rpgs-has-died/ https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/andrew-greenberg-co-creato...
radiowave 2y ago
I remember him from the Squeak Smalltalk mailing list, probably early 2000s. He wrote a set of bindings for the pcre regular expression library, which I used quite a bit, but which was never picked up for inclusion in Squeak (because pcre "isn't portable enough"). And, with his intellectual property hat on, he was a regular source of advice to the Squeak community (none of it in an official capacity, he would hasten to add) as they worked through the process of relicensing from the original Squeak License to MIT.
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  I'd totally forgotten about his Squeak work. Yes, he was absolutely and infectiously enthusiastic about that.
- unkeptbarista 2y ago
  I had the pleasure of meeting (virtually) Andrew through his work with the Squeak community. I also ran into Robert Woodhead (also virtually) through the game StarWeb[1] which he played and contributed to[2]. [1] http://www.rickloomispbm.com/starweb.html http://www.rickloomispbm.com/starweb.html [2] https://www.madoverlord.com/wiki/doku.php/madoverlord:projects-weblord https://www.madoverlord.com/wiki/doku.php/madoverlord:projec...
zer0tonin 2y ago
Very sad, Wizardry is probably the most influent RPG ever made, alongside Ultima.
- flyinghamster 2y ago
  It also had an antecedent; Wizardry was very much like a single-player version of Avatar, an early multiplayer dungeon game that ran on the University of Illinois PLATO system. The cube-like "rooms," displays, and game mechanics were very similar. I don't recall the controls being the same, though, and Avatar was written in PLATO's native TUTOR language, while Wizardry was UCSD Pascal.
  - danschuller 2y ago
    > There was a game on the PLATO network (circa '79 or '80) called "Oubliette" that nearly caused me to flunk out of law school. [...] 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. https://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23752&cid=2567054 https://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23752&cid=2567054 Oubliette (https://howtomakeanrpg.com/r/l/g/oubliette.html https://howtomakeanrpg.com/r/l/g/oubliette.html) was a precursor to Avatar, so it goes a little further back than even that!
    - djur 2y ago
      The CRPG Addict blog has done a great job reviewing the PLATO games from a seasoned player's perspective, and he touches on some of the inspiration for Wizardry. Oubliette: https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2013/10/game-12-oubliette-1977.html https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2013/10/game-12-oubliette-19... Avatar: https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2013/11/game-124-avatar-1979.html https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2013/11/game-124-avatar-1979...
- kleiba 2y ago
  Final Fantasy?
glimshe 2y ago
My Wizardry anthology CD is one of my most valued gaming possessions. RIP.
agluszak 2y ago
I'm too young to have played the older games, but Wizardry 8 is one of my favorite games ever, comparable to Morrowind in the fascinating lore, music and general fun. I wish there was an open source reimplementation like OpenMW[1]. Perhaps, one day, I'll start writing one myself... 1 - https://openmw.org/ https://openmw.org/
- shagie 2y ago
  There's a faithful (mechanics) remake of the original on Steam - Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord . The original view is in the corner - https://shared.akamai.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/2518960/ss_24174f7c94f2c7028aff6f9c425aad15b500364e.jpg?t=1724265557 https://shared.akamai.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/stea... The price tag is a bit high, but the nostalgia was worth it (for me).
  - ultimafan 2y ago
    For those not aware of it, the Japanese PSX port of the original Wizardry in the late 90s(?) is also an incredible option to go back and replay these gems. Has options for quality of life features, new graphics or original, despite being a Japan only release there's an option to use the original English text for everything. And it's got the first 3 games on one single disc with very straightforward party import/export features, so you can play through them with the same party as intended. Finding a CD .iso to emulate it is fairly easy nowadays and the games still hold up great.
    - dudinax 2y ago
      There's a similar release for the Super Nintendo.
  - rout39574 2y ago
    Ooo... Did it include the I-9 easter egg?
    - shagie 2y ago
jmyeet 2y ago
Wizardry taught me something very important about game design (from a player's perspective). Wizardry 6-7 were great from a perspective of becoming overpowered if you wanted to. What you did was get to level 6-8 and then change classes. I forget the exact mechanics of this. But when you changed class you started weak so had to do 1 character at a time from your party of 5. I doubt it was designe dthis way. Anyway, it was fun. It made you feel like you were beating the game. It made content trivial but I've come to learn that a ton of players like that. It's like seeing a weakness in the system, an unintended consequence and exploiting it. Wizardry 8 basically removed this and honestly I got bored of it really quickly as a result. Another way to look at this is that normalizing this made everything feel the same. It robbed me, as a player, of agency. It made my choices basically meaningless. It turned a more open world into a conveyor belt. I've seen this pattern play out in many games. Like I returned to GTA:SA to have fun shooting down helicopters taking advantages of bugs in police pathing depending on how you stood on a roof or creating massive pile ups and explosion chains on the freeway. GTA5 basically took the "fun" and comerical nature out of this aspect of the game and I basically never touched it again after the campaign. More generally, you could probably classify this under the banner of emergent game play (not that "god mode" is particularly innovative). But emergent gameplay is both a sign of a well-designed game and what gives it longevity. Additionally, I miss the days where there were more turn-based games. They were just more chill. The only turn-based strategy game left is Civilization. Games like Elden Ring are great but just not my cup of tea. I miss the days of Bard's Tale, Master of Magic, Heroes of Might and Magic (2 and 3), the old D&D RPG games and so on. Anyway, RIP.
- ido 2y ago
  Civilisation is absolutely not the only turn based strategy game left: https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Turn-Based/ https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Turn-Based/ Almost all of these are strategy games. Two that I’ve put a lot of hours into in the last year or two are slipways and slay the spire, but there are really a lot coming out all the time.
- haspok 2y ago
  Shameless confession: I once completed Wizardry 7 with a single character, from start to finish. I remember the start was very hard, but once I survived the first few fights character development skyrocketed and eventually it became a semi-god of sorts. This was because originally the XP after fights was distributed among party members, so in a regular game every character would normally receive only XP/6. It happened quite regularly that a single fight bumped my character to the next level! IIRC I finished the game with my character having level ~120, after a number of class changes. Fun times! Can't remember how I had so much free time in my life though - I must have still been in high school or uni...
bhouston 2y ago
Sir Tech was pretty formative in my professional development. Back then game development wasn't quite as professionalized/industrialized as it is now. My first job in the industry, back in high school in the mid 1990s, was as a part-time developer at Sir Tech Canada, working on Wizardry. They had a 20-ish person studio in Ottawa working on Jagged Alliance and Wizardry about 15 minute drive from where I was. How I got in: In high school I saw an ad posted in the local newspaper. Even though I was 17 I applied and got the job as a 3D graphics developer. I had used my work in the demo scene as my resume. I then dropped half of my courses so I could work half days at Sir Tech on Wizardry while finishing high school. We were using Windows NT 4 machines with Voodoo 3DFX graphics cards as our development machines. The beta of 3DS Max for Windows as the content creation package, although there was an SGI machine with Softimage on it as well. I personally was using Visual Studio with Direct3D 3 doing various experiments on how to render the 3D realistically while being fast. It wasn't the most successful internship personally, I was pretty green, a bit disconnected from the main development drive and didn't really know how to work in that environment, but it was still fun. The demos I created worked, but my larger system architecture was lacking. Besides meeting the original Sir Tech guys at a Christmas party in the US, I did see Brenda Romero (then Brathwaite) on a regular basis in the office as she was working on the script. It is a shame we didn't take more pictures back in the 1990s. I don't have any pictures of my time there or with anyone.
- DowagerDave 2y ago
  >> It is a shame we didn't take more pictures back in the 1990s. I don't have any pictures of my time there or with anyone. I really appreciate your description and the picture it paints; it's a lot more work than taking a photograph. We take so many pics and videos these days that it can make the event or subject feel less valuable.
- djur 2y ago
  That's a cool story. I kind of get the impression that Sir Tech in particular was always a little ramshackle, especially by that time. Wiz 8 was in production forever. Turned out cool, but a bit out of step with the time it was released.
homarp 2y ago
on wizardry, https://www.filfre.net/2012/03/making-wizardry/ https://www.filfre.net/2012/03/making-wizardry/ and https://www.filfre.net/2014/06/of-wizards-and-bards/ https://www.filfre.net/2014/06/of-wizards-and-bards/
mikeInAlaska 2y ago
My friends and I played Wizardry on an Apple II with a green screen for so long that it would blast out the green receptors in our eyes for a while afterwards, and everything would be pink hued.
- allenrb 2y ago
  Oh man. I never noticed that, but played many many hours in the same hardware. Remember how you could tell if you’d be getting more than merely gold after a fight based on the Disk II sounds?
StanislavPetrov 2y ago
Can't begin to calculate how many hours I played Wizardy as a kid. I had snuck out of class and was playing Wizardy on the school's computer in the library when I saw the Challenger explode on lift off. RIP.
dekhn 2y ago
Wziardry was one of the very first games I played on an Apple II, and I loved it immediately. Along with Ultima III, it spurred my obsession with computer graphics. One thing I remember about Wizardry is that it was fairly tough- I died constantly. Never really managed to get to a reasonable level, and then I found out about the bishop gold trick (https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Wizardry:_Proving_Grounds_of_the_Mad_Overlord/Secrets https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Wizardry:_Proving_Grounds_of_t...) Once I had the resources I tried to "win" the game and still frequently got stuck because many of the levels had dark areas with teleporters which made mapping really hard.

169 points by homarp 2y ago

kentbrew 2y ago

"Tiltowait 'em all and let the gods sort 'em out."

ainiriand 2y ago

[flagged]

dredmorbius 2y ago
Wrong thread?
- kinlan 2y ago
  It's there as soon as you load the page. I get it, this cookie prompt hides the important article and there's a heap of information share.
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    In which case, the "tangential annoyances" principle applies: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20tangential%20annoyances&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...> If available, uBlock Origin, uMatrix, or other JS / cookie blockers will help, as will incognito mode (against persistent trackers). Firefox/Android provides for these. I'm not sure what the current state of iOS browsers is, though there is a Firefox/iOS these days. Desktop systems afford far more options, of course. But the discussion is off-topic.
    - ainiriand 2y ago
      It is more than a tangential annoyance in my opinion. It blocks the article until you hide it. I'm very much in favor of ad space in free publications but this looks like milking the visitors.
- dialup_sounds 2y ago
  It's from the cookie banner of the linked site. Off topic but still, wow.

dredmorbius 2y ago

There's a brief biography of Werdna, as Andrew was known, on Wikipedia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_C._Greenberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_C._Greenberg> He was also among the hackers featured in Steven Levy's Hackers, and was a regular attendee of the Hackers Convention which has occurred annually since the book's publication in 1986. This year marks the 39th occurrence: <https://www.hackersconference.org/ https://www.hackersconference.org/> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute...> His jump from programming to law (which he saw as a form of hacking) was also notable. During the 1990s he'd often be found correcting misapprehensions, and occasionally affirming understandings, of intellectual property law particularly as concerned Free Software licencing and patents. Edit: He was also a key developer, advocate, and enthusiast of the Squeak Smalltalk OOD language: <https://web.archive.org/web/20000818185735/http://www.gate.net/~werdna/squeak-qref.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000818185735/http://www.gate.n...> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeak> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk> RIP, Werdna.

beaugunderson 2y ago
i shared a room with him at hackers one year, didn't actually get to speak with him because our sleep schedules were misaligned, but sharing the room did prompt me to read about wizardry and his career. i was sad to see the news of his passing here today; rip.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

wiz21c 2y ago

Wizardry was developped in Pascal (which at that time was not common at all IIRC)...

sowbug 2y ago
Wizardry was prototyped in Applesoft BASIC using low-res graphics mode. In 1982 or 1983 I briefly had a copy on a 140KB floppy disk, but I foolishly erased it because I needed the space. I've found a couple other people who remember seeing the demo, but I don't know anyone who has it.
- wiz21c 2y ago
  All of a sudden, a very expensive floppy may pop up on eBay :-) Thanks for sharing that story, I didn't know that at all !

dialup_sounds 2y ago

Three levels of nostalgia to choose from: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2518960/Wizardry_Proving_Grounds_of_the_Mad_Overlord/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2518960/Wizardry_Proving_... https://www.wizardryarchives.com/downloadsw4.html https://www.wizardryarchives.com/downloadsw4.html https://archive.org/details/wizardry-proving-grounds-of-the-mad-overlord-sir-tech-1980-source-code.-7z https://archive.org/details/wizardry-proving-grounds-of-the-... RIP, Werdna

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jghn 2y ago
Speaking of nostalgia, I'm always on the lookout for a playable version of the Mac port. I've found a few of them over the years but never managed to get them to work. I don't even want to know how many hours I spent playing this in the mid-80s, and always liked the Mac port better than the PC one my friends had. The kicker is I do have the original box & floppy, so it's "legal". I am skeptical that the disk still works and it's been almost 20 years since I had a floppy drive at all much less attached to a computer that could read this disk.
- aidenn0 2y ago
  If you do try to revive the floppies, be aware that most USB floppy drives can't read 400k and 800k Mac disks, so check a mac specific forum before buying one.
  - jghn 2y ago
    oh for sure it wouldn't have ever occurred to me that it could possibly work
- shagie 2y ago
  The Mac port was really well done. I had played it on the Apple ][+ and Mac version (and now the Steam updated version). The thing with the Mac port is that it wasn't just a port but a reimplementation that was designed for the Mac UI of the day. https://www.macintoshrepository.org/5149-wizardry-proving-grounds-of-the-mad-overlord https://www.macintoshrepository.org/5149-wizardry-proving-gr...

r721 2y ago

PC Gamer story: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/andrew-greenberg-co-creator-of-the-influential-wizardry-series-of-rpgs-has-died/ https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/andrew-greenberg-co-creato...

radiowave 2y ago

I remember him from the Squeak Smalltalk mailing list, probably early 2000s. He wrote a set of bindings for the pcre regular expression library, which I used quite a bit, but which was never picked up for inclusion in Squeak (because pcre "isn't portable enough"). And, with his intellectual property hat on, he was a regular source of advice to the Squeak community (none of it in an official capacity, he would hasten to add) as they worked through the process of relicensing from the original Squeak License to MIT.

dredmorbius 2y ago
I'd totally forgotten about his Squeak work. Yes, he was absolutely and infectiously enthusiastic about that.
unkeptbarista 2y ago
I had the pleasure of meeting (virtually) Andrew through his work with the Squeak community. I also ran into Robert Woodhead (also virtually) through the game StarWeb[1] which he played and contributed to[2]. [1] http://www.rickloomispbm.com/starweb.html http://www.rickloomispbm.com/starweb.html [2] https://www.madoverlord.com/wiki/doku.php/madoverlord:projects-weblord https://www.madoverlord.com/wiki/doku.php/madoverlord:projec...

zer0tonin 2y ago

Very sad, Wizardry is probably the most influent RPG ever made, alongside Ultima.

flyinghamster 2y ago
It also had an antecedent; Wizardry was very much like a single-player version of Avatar, an early multiplayer dungeon game that ran on the University of Illinois PLATO system. The cube-like "rooms," displays, and game mechanics were very similar. I don't recall the controls being the same, though, and Avatar was written in PLATO's native TUTOR language, while Wizardry was UCSD Pascal.
- danschuller 2y ago
  > There was a game on the PLATO network (circa '79 or '80) called "Oubliette" that nearly caused me to flunk out of law school. [...] 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. https://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23752&cid=2567054 https://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23752&cid=2567054 Oubliette (https://howtomakeanrpg.com/r/l/g/oubliette.html https://howtomakeanrpg.com/r/l/g/oubliette.html) was a precursor to Avatar, so it goes a little further back than even that!
  - djur 2y ago
    The CRPG Addict blog has done a great job reviewing the PLATO games from a seasoned player's perspective, and he touches on some of the inspiration for Wizardry. Oubliette: https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2013/10/game-12-oubliette-1977.html https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2013/10/game-12-oubliette-19... Avatar: https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2013/11/game-124-avatar-1979.html https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2013/11/game-124-avatar-1979...
kleiba 2y ago
Final Fantasy?

glimshe 2y ago

My Wizardry anthology CD is one of my most valued gaming possessions. RIP.

agluszak 2y ago

I'm too young to have played the older games, but Wizardry 8 is one of my favorite games ever, comparable to Morrowind in the fascinating lore, music and general fun. I wish there was an open source reimplementation like OpenMW[1]. Perhaps, one day, I'll start writing one myself... 1 - https://openmw.org/ https://openmw.org/

shagie 2y ago
There's a faithful (mechanics) remake of the original on Steam - Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord . The original view is in the corner - https://shared.akamai.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/2518960/ss_24174f7c94f2c7028aff6f9c425aad15b500364e.jpg?t=1724265557 https://shared.akamai.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/stea... The price tag is a bit high, but the nostalgia was worth it (for me).
- ultimafan 2y ago
  For those not aware of it, the Japanese PSX port of the original Wizardry in the late 90s(?) is also an incredible option to go back and replay these gems. Has options for quality of life features, new graphics or original, despite being a Japan only release there's an option to use the original English text for everything. And it's got the first 3 games on one single disc with very straightforward party import/export features, so you can play through them with the same party as intended. Finding a CD .iso to emulate it is fairly easy nowadays and the games still hold up great.
  - dudinax 2y ago
    There's a similar release for the Super Nintendo.
- rout39574 2y ago
  Ooo... Did it include the I-9 easter egg?
  - shagie 2y ago

jmyeet 2y ago

Wizardry taught me something very important about game design (from a player's perspective). Wizardry 6-7 were great from a perspective of becoming overpowered if you wanted to. What you did was get to level 6-8 and then change classes. I forget the exact mechanics of this. But when you changed class you started weak so had to do 1 character at a time from your party of 5. I doubt it was designe dthis way. Anyway, it was fun. It made you feel like you were beating the game. It made content trivial but I've come to learn that a ton of players like that. It's like seeing a weakness in the system, an unintended consequence and exploiting it. Wizardry 8 basically removed this and honestly I got bored of it really quickly as a result. Another way to look at this is that normalizing this made everything feel the same. It robbed me, as a player, of agency. It made my choices basically meaningless. It turned a more open world into a conveyor belt. I've seen this pattern play out in many games. Like I returned to GTA:SA to have fun shooting down helicopters taking advantages of bugs in police pathing depending on how you stood on a roof or creating massive pile ups and explosion chains on the freeway. GTA5 basically took the "fun" and comerical nature out of this aspect of the game and I basically never touched it again after the campaign. More generally, you could probably classify this under the banner of emergent game play (not that "god mode" is particularly innovative). But emergent gameplay is both a sign of a well-designed game and what gives it longevity. Additionally, I miss the days where there were more turn-based games. They were just more chill. The only turn-based strategy game left is Civilization. Games like Elden Ring are great but just not my cup of tea. I miss the days of Bard's Tale, Master of Magic, Heroes of Might and Magic (2 and 3), the old D&D RPG games and so on. Anyway, RIP.

ido 2y ago
Civilisation is absolutely not the only turn based strategy game left: https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Turn-Based/ https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Turn-Based/ Almost all of these are strategy games. Two that I’ve put a lot of hours into in the last year or two are slipways and slay the spire, but there are really a lot coming out all the time.
haspok 2y ago
Shameless confession: I once completed Wizardry 7 with a single character, from start to finish. I remember the start was very hard, but once I survived the first few fights character development skyrocketed and eventually it became a semi-god of sorts. This was because originally the XP after fights was distributed among party members, so in a regular game every character would normally receive only XP/6. It happened quite regularly that a single fight bumped my character to the next level! IIRC I finished the game with my character having level ~120, after a number of class changes. Fun times! Can't remember how I had so much free time in my life though - I must have still been in high school or uni...

bhouston 2y ago

Sir Tech was pretty formative in my professional development. Back then game development wasn't quite as professionalized/industrialized as it is now. My first job in the industry, back in high school in the mid 1990s, was as a part-time developer at Sir Tech Canada, working on Wizardry. They had a 20-ish person studio in Ottawa working on Jagged Alliance and Wizardry about 15 minute drive from where I was. How I got in: In high school I saw an ad posted in the local newspaper. Even though I was 17 I applied and got the job as a 3D graphics developer. I had used my work in the demo scene as my resume. I then dropped half of my courses so I could work half days at Sir Tech on Wizardry while finishing high school. We were using Windows NT 4 machines with Voodoo 3DFX graphics cards as our development machines. The beta of 3DS Max for Windows as the content creation package, although there was an SGI machine with Softimage on it as well. I personally was using Visual Studio with Direct3D 3 doing various experiments on how to render the 3D realistically while being fast. It wasn't the most successful internship personally, I was pretty green, a bit disconnected from the main development drive and didn't really know how to work in that environment, but it was still fun. The demos I created worked, but my larger system architecture was lacking. Besides meeting the original Sir Tech guys at a Christmas party in the US, I did see Brenda Romero (then Brathwaite) on a regular basis in the office as she was working on the script. It is a shame we didn't take more pictures back in the 1990s. I don't have any pictures of my time there or with anyone.

DowagerDave 2y ago
>> It is a shame we didn't take more pictures back in the 1990s. I don't have any pictures of my time there or with anyone. I really appreciate your description and the picture it paints; it's a lot more work than taking a photograph. We take so many pics and videos these days that it can make the event or subject feel less valuable.
djur 2y ago
That's a cool story. I kind of get the impression that Sir Tech in particular was always a little ramshackle, especially by that time. Wiz 8 was in production forever. Turned out cool, but a bit out of step with the time it was released.

homarp 2y ago

on wizardry, https://www.filfre.net/2012/03/making-wizardry/ https://www.filfre.net/2012/03/making-wizardry/ and https://www.filfre.net/2014/06/of-wizards-and-bards/ https://www.filfre.net/2014/06/of-wizards-and-bards/

mikeInAlaska 2y ago

My friends and I played Wizardry on an Apple II with a green screen for so long that it would blast out the green receptors in our eyes for a while afterwards, and everything would be pink hued.

allenrb 2y ago
Oh man. I never noticed that, but played many many hours in the same hardware. Remember how you could tell if you’d be getting more than merely gold after a fight based on the Disk II sounds?

StanislavPetrov 2y ago

Can't begin to calculate how many hours I played Wizardy as a kid. I had snuck out of class and was playing Wizardy on the school's computer in the library when I saw the Challenger explode on lift off. RIP.

dekhn 2y ago

Wziardry was one of the very first games I played on an Apple II, and I loved it immediately. Along with Ultima III, it spurred my obsession with computer graphics. One thing I remember about Wizardry is that it was fairly tough- I died constantly. Never really managed to get to a reasonable level, and then I found out about the bishop gold trick (https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Wizardry:_Proving_Grounds_of_the_Mad_Overlord/Secrets https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Wizardry:_Proving_Grounds_of_t...) Once I had the resources I tried to "win" the game and still frequently got stuck because many of the levels had dark areas with teleporters which made mapping really hard.