THE MAKING OF Wizardry PROVING GROUNDS OF THE MAD OVERLORD

THE CREATORS OF THE INFLUENTIAL 1981 RPG WHICH WENT ON TO INSPIRE COUNTLESS TITLES, FROM DRAGON QUEST TO FINAL FANTASY EXPLAIN HOW IT HAD ITS ORIGIN IN SOME OF THE EARLIEST ONLINE EXPERIENCES, AND WAS ONE OF THE FIRST COMPUTER GAMES TO COME IN A BOX

- LEWIS PACKWOOD

Few games have been as influential as Wizardry: Proving Grounds Of The Mad Overlord. Even if you haven't played it, you will have undoubtedly played games that were inspired by it. Indeed, after discovering the game during a trip to Apple Fest in San Francisco in 1983, Koichi Nakamura and Yuji Horii used Wizardry's battles as the basis for Dragon Quest, mixing them with the overhead perspective of Ultima. Yuji has even said that Dragon Quest's ubiquitous Slimes were directly inspired by the slime monsters in Wizardry.

Along with Richard Garriott's Ultima, which was released for the Apple II at almost the same time in 1981, Wizardry has been credited with popularising computer RPGs, bringing them to a wide audience for the first time, and setting the template for others to follow. But Wizardry itself was inspired by earlier RPGs. "I was a huge D&D player, and also I was very heavily influenced by some really great games on the PLATO system that I had access to at college," says Robert Woodhead, co-creator of Wizardry. PLATO was a pioneering networked computer system that was home to some of the earliest online games. It was "at least ten years ahead of its time, if not twenty," Robert says. "Basically, everything you love about the internet and computer games was beta tested on PLATO."