Wizardry was an important early influence on Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy.
Digital Eclipse's updated port and remake of classic 1981 dungeon-crawler Wizardry has released on Steam, letting you experience a piece of real RPG history with much more modern graphics and a streamlined presentation. In Wizardry you make a party or two of monster-battling heroes and pilot them in first person through a dungeon, fighting monsters and gathering treasure to find victory.
Wizardry is an unabashedly old school game, one where surprise party wipes, vicious traps, and unwinnable encnounters are the norm. For all that, though, it's a true updated time capsule of a game from that era, when the RPG was a pretty new idea and nobody was quite sure how everything should work yet. It's very much about resource and risk management over being big, explosive heroes.
"This is the original game, and I cannot stress that enough," said developer Ian Sherman during a release stream. "Everything that was in the original game is in this game. There were some bugs ... that have been corrected."
Wizardry was a vitally important game in the history of RPGs when it released back in 1981—not in the United States, where it did well but there were similar games, but in Japan. Japanese players loved Wizardry, and it's often cited as a direct influence by both Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest creators on the first games in those equally-venerable series.
You can find Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord on Steam for $35.
Developer Digital Eclipse has been on something of a roll in the past year, having created the critically acclaimed The Making of Karateka and Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, as well as being acquired by Atari.
