WIZARDRY'S LEGACY

Over 40 years old, the WIZARDRY series is still kicking

- Dominic Tarason

The name Wizardry still carries weight, which is probably why the recent announcement of Eternal Crypt: Wizardry BC-a blockchain-based clicker game and NFT platform - went down like a lead balloon. A sad sign of the times, perhaps, but a good excuse to talk with Robert and Norman Sirotek, the brothers behind Sir-Tech, publisher of the most influential RPGs of the 1980s.

It's hard to imagine a world without Wizardry. The first game, Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, released in 1981 for the Apple II before being ported to almost every platform of its era, is one of the key foundational works of the medium. Even in its original form it's intuitive, accessible and (to anyone who's played a dungeon crawler) immediately familiar.

Wizardry had players roll a party of six adventurers and send them into a deadly grid-map labyrinth full of monsters, traps and the occasional puzzle. While there was an evil wizard lurking at the bottom to defeat, that RPG grind for XP, gold and gear was the core appeal. Wizardry pioneered a lot of what's now standard in both western and Japanese RPGS: parties, distinct battle screens, characters able to change class as they levelled up, spells following a simple naming structure.