Sir-tech Canada Releases Wizardry 8

NichG writes "Sir-tech Canada has finally released Wizardry 8. This has been long awaited by fans of Wizardry 7 (1992) and the series of games which precluded it. It should be available at Electronic Boutique. For those not familiar with the Wizardry series, they are first person, turn-based (more precisely, phased) RPGs, which grew from pure dungeon crawl to RPGs with plot and characters with whom to interact." This, the Bard's Tale series, and the first four Ultimas together were where most of the late 1980s went for me.

Comments

What a blast from the past.

[ers81239]

I may very well owe my geekdom to Wizardry (I). It was the first game I ever played on my friend's Apple IIc. I can remember plenty of floppy disk switching, and punching holes to make single sided disks double sided.

I just got to play "Day of Defeat" last night. Man how things have changed!

Re:What a blast from the past.

[Graff]

I remember being able to hack Apple's DOS like crazy since it was on a boot portion of the disks, unlike the hardware DOS that systems like Commodore had. I had a neat little protection scheme where I swapped around the catalog track and added in some encryption to the data so it could only be read with a special boot disk I kept on me.

I also made a dummy version of a friends disk where I swapped all of his DOS commands around. Delete became run, format became catalog, etc. He was horrified when he thought he lost all the data on his disk, but then I relented and gave the original back to him.

Later, when the 3 1/2 floppies came out I remember using a soldering iron to burn holes in the disk cases in order to double-side the disks. It worked great if you made a template to space the hole properly.

My Wizardry cheat

[tmark]

I bought Wizardry (I) when it first came out, and I loved it. I remember diligently making maps and even trying to sell them to computer magazines - an editor from Computer Gaming World offered to pay me $100 to publish the maps, when I was about 11 years old. Of course I never got paid, and I have no idea whether the article even got published, but I digress...

I'm sure I wasn't the only one who did this. In those days Wizardry ran on Apple Pascal. You loaded two discs. In those days, if you had two disk drives, you were golden, and I had two. Anyways I quickly discovered that if something untowards happened, you could flip the latch on the drive really quickly and prevent the game from writing your death to disk. The Apple would make that familiar grinding sound, but you could safely reboot, and find yourself more or less back where you were before. Made advancing through the levels *real* easy.

Anybody else remember practically crapping your pants when the computer went "beep-beep-beep" and you say *W*E*R*D*N*A* for the first time ??

Those were good days. I can't say I've ever truly loved a game as much as that one.

Re:Not to rain on the parade

[satterth]

Well the old school rpg makers are gone.. Sorta depressing if you ask me..

BUT! Its not all lost.. We've got new blood on the horizon.. Mostly in the shape of those rascally canadians, Bioware.. And even the longtime scapegoat.. Bethesda..

So we've lost the old school.. Which is depressing from a historical standpoint.. But we've still got RPG developers building games that we couldn't have even dreamed of 15 years ago..

So you think the Old school is gone eh ?

But what about the folks who graduated and grew up with old school. You see i and many folks at Bioware grew up with Wizardry, BardsTale and Ultima back on those Apples and the like. I don't know how much closer to old school you can get. I still think we are the Old School you are refering to. Now the Old School Players are now making RPG's...

I just can't wait for the goodness to come my way.

/satterth

Low-profile administrative toolbar a nice feature

[Anonymous Coward]

Many RPGs from 87 til Baldurs Gate used as much as 50% of the screen for administrative function (character data, directional controls, list of active spell effects, etc.) The screenshots for 8 do away with this gross paradigm, a nice lightweight 50 pixel margin all the way around. But games should progress past this, and soon. The Mac got drop down menus in the late 80's, sliding toolbars have been around since the early 90's, Windows got right-click menus in the late 90's, how come these screen-efficient control devices never made it into core fantasy RPGs? Anyone who's ever caught themselves looking at the screen from an angle trying to beat the next Cow Level assailant to the punch knows why this is necessary.

lingeringdweomer

Kind Words Much Appreciated

[rjwoodhead]

As one of the original authors of Wizardry, one of the nicest rewards of writing the game is reading comments such as these.

Does anyone know where Andy Greenberg and Robert Woodhead are these days?

You can find out what happened to me (Trebor) at the family website, MadOverlord.com. Andy lives in Florida with his wife and two children, where he "hacks the law". He reads /. so I'll let him reply himself.

In wizardry I, don't forget the really good Bishop cheat. Create a Bishop (need right mix of stats), and then identify item 9 until you succeed.

This was caused by a simple bug in a check statement:

if (ch >= "1") or (ch <="8") then ..do the identify..

It should have been an "and", of course. So you could type in any character, and since we'd disabled boundschecking on Apple Pascal, it would twiddle bits at various offsets. Someone once sent me a list of what every typeable key would do.

When we did the IBM PC version (which also ran Apple Pascal, btw), we deliberately left the bug in, for reasons of tradition. Thus we confidently lay claim to originating the concept of "It's not a bug, it's a feature" that later made Bill Gates billions.

We wrote Apple Pascal interpreters for the PC, a bunch of japanese machines, and the C64/128. Wizardry 4 was written on a NEC 9801 machine, it would boot into PCDOS, then you'd type a command line and see "Welcome to Apple Pascal" (and yes, we bought a copy of Apple Pascal to run on it).

I can't remember whether it was Trebor or Werdna (or both) who wrote it, but there was a game on the PLATO network (circa '79 or '80) called "Oubliette" that nearly caused me to flunk out of law school.

Both Andy and I were active on the PLATO system, which was a tremendous influence on us. PLATO had email, chat, newsgroups, multiplayer realtime game, and much more, all starting in the early 70's. The multiplayer dungeon games were particularly good. Pretty much all of the basic concepts of multiplayer gaming were developed there.

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.

They had close ties to the SCA Group Northern Outpost, and I was at an SCA event when I saw the white Corvette with the tag "Wizardry"

That was mine. I was never a member of the SCA, however. But they were active at Risley Hall at Cornell, where Andy lived. I don't recall if he was a SCAdian. PS: I'm not nearly as dorky as I was back then.

i have wizadry I (proving grounds of the mad overlord), in the box

IIRC, Wizardry was the first home computer game, and possibly the first home computer program, to be sold in a box. Before that it was all ziploc bags and binders.

Best
R