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Anyone else play Wizardry?
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Salty Dog
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191991 Gold -

PostPosted: Fri Jun 12, 2015 3:27 pm    Post subject: Anyone else play Wizardry? Reply with quote

This is really dating myself, but how many others here remember the game of Wizardry? That was the first role-playing game on the PC and the first game that people went out and bought computers to play it.

It was a Dungeons and Dragons type of game and was the first mega-game as I recall. Written for the Apple II, it was issued in 1981 under the title "Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord" and written by a company called Sir-Tech.

Books were written how to play it and they included maps of the different levels if you wanted to cheat. Someone wrote a cheat software program so you could change your character and give him different type/rank/skills and weapons.

It was just above a text-level game and had only very small graphics to show you the monsters and evil characters you were fighting.

It was all the rage. The game came on the old floppy disks and the disks were copy protected by a very clever scheme where the manufacturer actually slowed the floppy disk rotation to put an unusual number of bits on one or two tracts of the game.

We used to use a program called Locksmith to try to copy this game and it sometimes worked.

I recall the game sold for at least $50 back in 1982 - that is $125 in today's money. It was THE game to have and we played endless hours on it.
It was a single-player game and you assembled a "team" of characters to enter the dungeon. You had 4 to 6 characters and they started out as Level 1 and progressed upward as they gained experience and could eventually be upgraded to "special" or "advanced" characters.

Starting in the town, the player created a party of up to six characters from an assortment of five possible races (Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes, Hobbits), three alignments (Good, Neutral, Evil), and four basic classes (Fighter, Priest, Mage, Thief). Later on they could be upgraded to Lords, Bishops, Ninjas or other special classes. There were special weapons one could find in the game.

Anyway, this was the first really, really big computer game as I recall.

Anyone else here play it?
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Roland
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 12, 2015 7:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

No, I did not know about Wizardry back then. The first computer game I played was a primitive text-based dungeon game programmed by students at my college. At first the computer science faculty promoted it, but then they had to restrict access when it became too popular.

In grad school I played a more advanced game called Avatar. (It might still be available today under the name Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol.) It had very simple graphics like those you describe for Wizardry, but it had more races and classes. It was one of the first multiplayer RPGs. While it was perfectly possible to run solo, you could run deeper in the dungeon with larger parties. And you could also interact in other ways with other players, though there was no PvP. Especially when you died, you would depend on other players to return your corpse to the city and raise you. My main character was a Seeker, a class that specialized in exploring, rescuing dead characters, and leading parties. Like all the top Seekers in the game, he was a dwarf. I ran the character up to around level 600. After I left to start my first job, friends took the character all the way to level 999.

The game ran on the PLATO system, which was based at the University of Illinois but had other sites scattered around the country. It was programmed and administered by CS grad students, and we were technically play testers for the game. Occasionally they would take the game down to fix or rebalance things.
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Salty Dog
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Posts: 10060



191991 Gold -

PostPosted: Fri Jun 12, 2015 9:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I used to play a lot of text adventure games back then (early to mid eighties). We all started with a game called Adventure, also called Colossal Cave Adventure, that was written for a mainframe computer and then ported over to the Apple II and other computers.

Then came the Scott Adams adventure games. They had a larger vocabulary and were more interesting. I believe there were nine games in his series. Like all the other adventures, it was very important to draw maps of everywhere you went.

Finally, a game called Zork appeared. This one was a huge text adventure game and it was a bit different. It imposed time limits on you. You had only so long to finish it before you ran out of air and died. It was a monster and I have to admit I was unable to finish it. I gave up after a while and got some help.

Back then, every bulletin board had a section called "walk thrus" that gave you a step-by-step guide of how to successfully complete each adventure game. Some guys even published books of them and sold them but you could find them for free on some bulletin boards.

Actually, I need to explain something to the new people. The internet is a recent development. It did not exist for most of us before the early to mid nineties. Before the internet, we used bulletin boards that were stand-alone systems on people's privately owned computers. Someone would devote a computer, monitor, hard drive, modem and a telephone line to host a bulletin board just for fun. Lots of people would call up, log into the board, read the messages just like we do here on Hooked on Pirates and upload or download files and programs.

Many of the boards stored software that smart people had "cracked" and removed the copy protection on so the programs could be uploaded and shared with other people. Many of us became obsessed with collecting every program, especially games, out there. We wanted all the software we could get for free. It practically took over our lives. It was fun to play the games but the collecting took up all our time. I had a briefcase that held the 3.5 inch floppy disks and it was full. I would go visit other pirates and we would swap programs. It was a big deal back then!

Well, I've ranted on enough today. I had fun playing the old text adventures but software sure is a lot better today!!! Cool
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ExtraCrispy
Boatswain
Posts: 3923



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PostPosted: Wed Dec 25, 2019 4:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I played Eye of the Beholder and Lands of Lore on an emulator.

Daggerfall, Arena and Lands of Lore III are the ones I am most familiar with. They are somewhere in-between Eye of the Beholder, rogue-likes, and modern Skyrim.

I also played some re-makes on a smart phone such as, The Quest and Deadly Dungeons.
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ExtraCrispy
Boatswain
Posts: 3923



39052 Gold -

PostPosted: Wed Dec 25, 2019 5:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Salty Dog wrote:
I used to play a lot of text adventure games back then (early to mid eighties). We all started with a game called Adventure, also called Colossal Cave Adventure, that was written for a mainframe computer and then ported over to the Apple II and other computers.

Then came the Scott Adams adventure games. They had a larger vocabulary and were more interesting. I believe there were nine games in his series. Like all the other adventures, it was very important to draw maps of everywhere you went.

Finally, a game called Zork appeared. This one was a huge text adventure game and it was a bit different. It imposed time limits on you. You had only so long to finish it before you ran out of air and died. It was a monster and I have to admit I was unable to finish it. I gave up after a while and got some help.

Back then, every bulletin board had a section called "walk thrus" that gave you a step-by-step guide of how to successfully complete each adventure game. Some guys even published books of them and sold them but you could find them for free on some bulletin boards.

Actually, I need to explain something to the new people. The internet is a recent development. It did not exist for most of us before the early to mid nineties. Before the internet, we used bulletin boards that were stand-alone systems on people's privately owned computers. Someone would devote a computer, monitor, hard drive, modem and a telephone line to host a bulletin board just for fun. Lots of people would call up, log into the board, read the messages just like we do here on Hooked on Pirates and upload or download files and programs.

Many of the boards stored software that smart people had "cracked" and removed the copy protection on so the programs could be uploaded and shared with other people. Many of us became obsessed with collecting every program, especially games, out there. We wanted all the software we could get for free. It practically took over our lives. It was fun to play the games but the collecting took up all our time. I had a briefcase that held the 3.5 inch floppy disks and it was full. I would go visit other pirates and we would swap programs. It was a big deal back then!

Well, I've ranted on enough today. I had fun playing the old text adventures but software sure is a lot better today!!! Cool


I remember some Daggerfall Usenet groups.

Before the Internet, you installed Doom (1993) from a Floppy Disk.
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