Wizardry
Wizardry is a series of computer role-playing games that were popular in the 1980s. Originally made for the Apple II, they were later ported to other platforms. The latest game in the series, Wizardry 8, is available only on the PC.
Wizardry began as a simple dungeon crawl by Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead. It was written when they were undergraduates at Cornell University and then published by Sir-Tech. Original development of the game was done in Pascal.
David W. Bradley took over the series after the fourth installment, adding a new level of plot and complexity. Woodhead went on to found the North American anime import company Animeigo, and Greenberg to become an intellectual property lawyer and contributor to the Squeak open source project. Greenberg also wrote another game series, Star Saga.
The earliest installments of Wizardry were quite successful as they were the first graphically-rich incarnations of D&D type gameplay for home computers. The release of the first version coincided with the height of D&D's popularity in North America.
Ultimately the single game became a series:
- Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (1981)
- Knight of Diamonds (1982)
- Legacy of Llylgamyn (1983)
- The Return of Werdna (1986)
- Heart of the Maelstrom (1988)
- Bane of the Cosmic Forge (1990)
- Crusaders of the Dark Savant (1992) (Remade as Wizardry Gold in 1996)
- Wizardry 8 (2001)
The popularity of Wizardry in Japan led to the making of an anime OVA (direct-to-video animation).
Wizardry inspired many clones and served as a template for this type of game. Some notable series that trace their look and feel to Wizardry include The Bard's Tale and Might and Magic.
