TCW 114 - The Wizards of Sir-Tech

[Intro Music -- Airplane Mode]

Welcome to They Create Worlds. I'm Jeffrey and I'm joined by my cohost, Alex.

Those that copied Ultima with its tile based overworld exploration and tactical combat. And those that emulated Wizardry with its first person, dungeons and special pop outs with animated, sometimes animated, but graphically rendered monsters that you fought Ultima, Wizardry. Just about the entire world could be summed up by those two words. At the very beginning of all of this Wizardry was the bigger of the two by far.

However, as we'll see, that will not last. Over time as Richard gets better and better and better at making Ultima games, Wizardry for the longest period of time just stands still and is ultimately surpassed. But this is not just the story of Wizardry, even though that will occupy a lot of what we're talking about, because we are also talking about the company behind Wizardry Sir-Tech Software.

As I kind of intimated again at the end of the last episode, this company evolves in a very different manner from almost all of its contemporaries. Even though it's formed in a similar manner to some of the early companies like Online Systems and Broderbund where you get a hot shot programmer and some people with business knowledge together and they market product. It doesn't get run in the same way and it doesn't explode in the same way. We talked about how in the nineties through consolidation, basically all of the important computer game companies that were founded in the early 1980s. Either got super huge and devoured other companies or got devoured.

You can basically throw every company into that. Activision and EA getting huge and companies like Interplay and SSI and even Sierra getting devoured. Sir-Tech doesn't really have either one of those fates. It just kind of does its own thing in its own way, has some success for a while and then just kind of fades away. We're going to look into some of that and some of the reasons for that as this episode continues.

During World War II, he was a supporter of the Partisans who were resisting Nazi rule. He sheltered resistance fighters and whatnot in his castle. So he became something of a local hero in that sense as well. However, as a very successful entrepreneurial type, when the communist revolution happened to Czechoslovakia, soon after the end of the war.

He was no longer one of the good guys. According to the new government. He knew that his days were numbered in the country, so he made provisions to immigrate and get the heck out of there. He was able to do so basically by giving the communists all of his wealth, all of his property, he wasn't planning to come back anyway.

Even though obviously that hurt, most of his worth was tied up in real estate, so it wasn't stuff he could carry with him anyway, and under the new communist regime, he couldn't sell it. So even though obviously that was painful, it was stuff that he couldn't take with them anyway and was able to immigrate to Canada where he continued to serve as an architect.

Once he came West, he anglicized the spelling of his first name to Frederick. Bedrich and I could be pronouncing that wrong because I don't really know Cezch, but that is the Cezch equivalent of the name Frederick. Bedrich Sirotek, Cezch name became Frederick Sirotek senior. Frederick Sirotek senior had a son, Frederick Sierra tech junior.

Fred jr got into some very interesting entrepreneurial businesses. He did work in the construction business with his father. Which makes sense, but then he also got into something completely different souvenir spoons.

And I don't know why this was a thing. I don't know if this was just the thing in Canada or if it was something that was big across North America in the 1970s it's a different time. What can I say? But yes, he was in the souvenir spoon business. One of the things that Mr Sierra tech needed in the creation of his soons was resin sand.

Resin sand was very important in the manufacturing process. So he ended up doing a lot of business with a company just across the border in Ogdensburg New York. Way, way, way up in upstate New York. One person once said in a magazine article on Sir-Tech when describing Ogdensburg, he said, you know what you've heard about the great white North? This is North of that.

But then, uh, he died in 1975, just two years after they established the company. So Janice actually ended up being the one running it. And Fred Sirotek was relying on them for sand, and then he ended up investing in the company as well to have more control over his supply. So you've got this souvenir spoon company, Fred Sirotek up in Canada, and you have this Resin Sands, Janice Woodhead in Ogdensburg New York. Well, what does any of this have to do with anything?

It was just kind of a mess. I mean, the business was still profitable. I mean, it was still worth it in the end. Everyone was making money. But, certainly both Sirotek and Woodhead thought there's got to be a way to do this better. Like say maybe through a computer program.

And it just so happened that Janice had a very bright son, currently in college at the time, by the name of Robert Woodhead. Who would be absolutely perfect for seeing this done for the families. Robert Woodhead, I don't know exactly how he discovered David Al's book "101 Basic Computer Games", but when he was in high school at the Ogdensburg Free Academy, somehow he got ahold of this book and it just fascinated him.

We've talked about the book before. Of course, in the context of time sharing and even in last week's episode is one of the very first, commercial sources gathering together all the games that were being made across the country and compiling them in a book of type in code for other people to use. So he found this book. He devoured this book. He was fascinated by this book about the idea of being able to make a computer do something by typing in these commands. However, as I told you, Ogdensburg was kind of out in the middle of nowhere. So even though this was a period of time when more and more high school students were getting exposed to computers through time-sharing terminals, Ogdensburg Free Academy was not one of the places that had any time sharing terminal. So he had the book, but he had no way to use it.

So, not having a computer was not going to deter young Robert from doing something, anything related to programming. So he actually discovered a computer teaching device called CARDIAC. It's an acronym. It's in all caps. That was created by a Bell Labs engineer by the name of David Hagelbarger. What this was, was a cardboard fold out manual that allowed you to essentially pretend you were programming. It taught you basics of programming and allowed you to punch stuff or mark stuff on the cardboard here and here and pretend that you were making computer programs. It was intended as a public school aid in a time when a lot of schools didn't have computers.

But like so many of the other people we've talked about from this period, this engineer felt that computer use and not just computer use, but computer programming was going to be an indispensable skill in the future. So he saw this as a kind of stop gap to allow schools that couldn't afford a computer to teach programming. So that's why it's CARDIAC. It's the Cardboard Illustrative Aid To Computation. Woodhead got himself one of these, cause it, you know, it wasn't that expensive. It's something he could afford. He started programming on cardboard.

We talk about it in our time sharing episode. So on weekends he would go down and use the terminals at the college, and so he got to do some real program. But again, it wasn't through his school. I mean, it was a struggle. It was, you know, 30 minutes down, 30 minutes back using up his weekends. But he loved it.

And that's how he started to really get into programming. So Woodhead went to Cornell after he graduated, you know, very fine school, uh. And majored in computer science there. I mean he was hooked on programming by this point. He took a job with the local Computer Land, which was one of the very first computer store chains in the country.

Got a job with the local Computer Land in 1976 to help cover his tuition. Computer Land, they sold Apple II, that was their big seller. So of course he was exposed to the Apple II when he worked for the computer land. Once the Apple two came out in 77 but he could not afford one. He desperately wanted his own computer.

This was just perfect for what he liked to do. All the programming could not afford one. So he ended up going down to the local Radio Shack in Ogdensburg and purchasing a TRS 80. Which he was able to get even cheaper than the normal price. Because again, and this is not, this is not to belabor the point too much. Ogdensburg was not the most happening place in the country. It was not necessarily down with the new times. So the local radio shack was having some trouble moving those TRSA to computers. So he got himself a pretty good deal on one. So he bought himself a TRS 80 which promptly, sadly got him fired.

These were unlike any of the games we've I talked about, like Star Trek and Hammurabi, all these things that are mostly text-based. We're talking about games that featured graphics, sometimes three-dimensional graphics. And we're talking about games that were multiplayer even massively multiplayer. Not massively multiplayer as we would measure it in 2020 but massively multiplayer in the sense that you could have six, eight, ten, a dozen people playing the same game at the same time. In competition or cooperation. We're talking about role playing games.

Where you could actually explore Dungeons with a party of adventurers that were other people, like a modern MMO. It's just stunning what was capable on the system, and Robert Woodhead was right at the heart of that. So much of the, at the heart of it. Then in 1980 he was asked to leave the university for a time because his grades, we're very low. Because he was spending all of his time playing computer games on Plato.

I mean, this guy, this guy was hooked. The good news is, in the midst of all this, he was very talented with computers. So he was asked by Fred Sirotek and by his mother, Janice, to go ahead and put together this database system. So he did, he wrote this inventory software, inventory database software. This is what allowed them to finally get an Apple II, because part of his deal for creating this program, what you wanted to create on the Apple II was that he get an Apple II, the program it on. So the man finally got his Apple. He went ahead and created this program called Info Ttree. He did it not in basic, that's slow and cumbersome language, not and assembly. Which is more powerful, but but finicky and more difficult.

That's great for getting started programming. But it leads to massive spaghetti code if you're doing anything complex because it relies on all of these very basic, simple commands. So you're always routing back through these basic commands, and it's just leads to a mess of code if you're doing anything complex.

Well, there was another programer contemporaneous with the Dartmouth people that was also interested and getting ordinary people to learn how to code. But he wanted them to actually really learn how to code. So he wanted to create a language that was simpler than your Fortran or your COBOL, and certainly much simpler than your assembly or machine language. But was structured, properly, so that when you coded in it, your code was clean and beautiful and wonderful and structured at all times.

This gentleman was actually a Swiss fellow. By the name of Niklaus Wirth, who was based at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland. So he created Pascal with novices in mind. He tried to make it as easy as possible, but he also made the structure of it very, very rigid. Which is both good and bad the way that, uh, Jimmy Maher describes it in Digital Antiquarian. Uh, you know, he's got such a great blog on computer game history. Is that in Pascal, you can create a beautiful symphony, just using a music metaphor, all of the instruments in harmony, every part of the orchestra in its place, everything working together to create something beautiful. But you can't do swing or improvisation.

You have to be doing things the way Pascal wants you to be doing things or you're not doing anything at all. That sound about right to you. I'm sure you've had some experience with Pascal probably.

I mean, C already existed, but C on PCs as PCs became more robust, had more memory. C became kind of the GoTo language to do things in and Pascal, because it was more finicky, then even C is just kind of slowly got shunted to the side .And like you said, got to the point where it wasn't even being taught anymore at computer science programs. But there was a time when it was a big deal and a part of what made it such a big deal, were a couple of things. First of all, it was ridiculously portable. Now Wirth was working in the world of mini computers. He was not thinking about microcomputers when he created this language. I mean, he was created in the late sixties early seventies. But he wanted it to be widely available in the same way that the basic people wanted basic, widely available because he did see it as a teaching tool. So he created the P machine emulator. You know, we talked about the Z machine of Zork. Well, one of the main inspirations of that was the P machine, which allowed compiled Pascal code to be run on anything. So again, just like with Zork, being able to create a massively huge game that normally wouldn't fit into the memory of a microcomputer, like a Trash 80 or an Apple II. The P machine worked in the same way.

You could create a Pascal program. And then compile it and then interpret it down to these primitive microcomputers and you could create a game that was much, or a program, in this case, the game that was much bigger then that computer could normally do because you could swap in portions of memory, swap chunks of memory in an out of the beam machine in order to have something much larger.

They were still fully on board with the batch processing. Hulking iron, IBM, mainframe kind of computers, and he was trying to get them more into the timesharing interactive kind of scene. He managed to get the university to replace its old CDC computer with a Burroughs timesharing system. Burroughs is another one of these seven dwarves that was, uh, in the computer industry for a time.

But then in 1974. They went back and they got an IBM mainframe and they ditched the boroughs system and they didn't even bother to tell him. He found out about it when the Burroughs, people called him and were like, "Hey, you're ditching our computer. What's the deal?" And he was like, "I don't know what is the deal?"

So he was very frustrated that he was kept out of the loop and that he felt that the administration at his school was just horribly behind the times. He decided since he didn't have access to a time-sharing computer where he could teach his classes programming on these kinds of systems. You know, they were just going to learn the old punch card stuff. He got himself a P kit, which was a Pascal kind of development system that allowed him to work in Pascal with his students. And then, you know, he had students that then they went on and made some changes to it. They expanded the language. They put some more modern conveniences in that Wirth hadn't been thinking of a few years before.

They put a great text editor in it, which is something that it did not had before. That version of Pascal, which was referred to as UCSD Pascal, university of California, San Diego. Kind 6of became the standard for Pascal from that point forward. And you remember I mentioned turbo Pascal a second ago. Turbo Pascal was derived from this version of Pascal, which was a refinement of the original version. The Bowles was very into this emerging microcomputer scene as well. And so Pascal, the UCSD Pascal, very quickly became something that started hitting the microcomputer scene. Again, it wasn't for everybody.

Most of our early game programmers were not using it, but Woodhead did in the creation of Info Tree. That allowed him to create a very powerful database inventory management program relative to the power of the Apple II. And they decided that it was so good, that it works so well, that it was worth exploring selling this database program to other people.

So you could fly there or you could drive there. Well, they didn't want to fly there because he was going to have to take his computer with him to demo it, and they were going to have to put it in baggage. And they really didn't trust putting that in baggage. So he was going to have to drive there. But, um. I dunno if he couldn't drive or if they just didn't want to send him a loan on such a long drive. But Fred Sirotech suggests, well, why doesn't my son Norman Norman Sirotech drive you to the show. Norm was a college student at the time himself. He was at Clarkson college in their management program and was actually just getting ready to switch to engineering.

So he'd had some business classes, but he was also a little bit familiar with the technical side of things. So though this was not computer engineering or electrical engineering, this was actually engineering engineering. They actually ended up leaving Clarkson because they didn't have a very good drafting course there. So he ended up joining his father at the company in Canada and taking drafting courses on the side. So he had a few business courses. He was working in his father's business. So Fred was like, well, I'll have my son Norman take you. Norman was happy to do this. He kind of figured he'd probably hit up Atlantic city nearby, hit the casinos while Robert was showing off his program, but it, I didn't end up working that way.

Because he got to this computer show with Robert, and he was just fascinated by this emerging world of microcomputers that he hadn't even realized existed. He was kind of an independent guy. Norm was, and he was kind of chafing at working as a regular employee and doing school on the side and everything. So he decided, well, let's market this thing. Let's do this together. And you know, at this point, Robert Woodhead still a college student as well. You know, he, he had the year off in 1980 but I mean, he was still technically a college student. So the idea was that he would take control of managing this business while Robert finishing school and kind of be responsible for the sale of this thing.

You know they're going into business together with this database program. So they decided to form this company, Siro-Tech, as a pun on the family name. Siro-Tech, the name, it's check name. It's spelled S. I. R. O. T. E. K. So the tech of Sirotek is T. E. K. So they created Siro-Tech software, but tech spelled the usual way. T. E. C. H as a play on the family name. Well, that was great until they started getting tech support calls at home at four in the morning--

Let's look in the phone books. Siro-Tech, Siro-Tech, Siro-Tech. Aha. There's Siro-Tech. I call that, but it's a, you know, they don't notice the difference between the K and the ch. They call that number instead. So it's like, okay, well maybe calling it Siro-Tech wasn't the best idea for our sanity. And so that's the point that they changed the name to Sir-Tech.

Instead, they just got rid of the, O and named it Sir-Tech Software instead. So they start with this Into Tree program. You remember the Robert Wood head is also enamored with games, and he's enamored with the Plato system. So he's been working on game stuff at the time too. And in particular, there was a game on the Plato system called Empire. Which was kind of a strategic, conquer the universe kind of game. Where you're sending your ships around and landing on planets and taking over planets. And uh, you know, other players are doing the same cause remember this is real time multiplayer. You have that on Plato even though you have it virtually nowhere else.

It's a game that was pretty popular on the system. So Woodhead basically, it took that game and translated it almost entirely, whole cloth, from the Plato to the Apple II. Made it a little more arcadey, a little more action. He had used zipping around, shooting at things while you're conquering planets, and then called this game Galactic Attack. It's basically a riff on this game Empire. In, uh, early 1981, they began offering Galactic Attack alongside Info Tree. These are the two products of Sir-Tech software.

Now, Frederick Sirotek, the father, who was still kind of keeping an eye on this thing and was invested in it. He saw computers is serious business machines. He was not convinced that this game thing is something that they should really be doing. He just thought that wasn't a good fit for computers. We know now how very wrong he was about that, but that was his belief. However, when galactic attacks started selling very well. He changed his mind and they decided, okay, this is selling this game thing, I guess is something people want. What are we going to do next? Well, Woodhead again, from the Plato system had the idea of doing a role playing game. He knew Dungeons and Dragons and he knew the various dungeon crawls, D&D derivatives, that hit appeared on the Plato system. So he started working on a game called Paladin that would kind of emulate some of these Plato experiences that he had.

Well, not long after that, through mutual contacts, the sat in the other thing. He actually learned that there was another Cornell student that was working on something very similar and ends up meeting up with a gentleman by the name of Andrew Greenberg. So now we have to tell the other side of the beginning of this collaboration. Andrew Greenberg was also a native of upstate New York and his introduction to computers was actually at the race track.

So one of the employees at his dad's company showed them the computer and everything and fell in love with it and became very interested in it. So in 1975 he came to Cornell. His major was operations research and industrial engineering, but he worked a lot with computers as well and was really into programming and actually got a job doing programming for a Cornell's IT department. And that's how he put himself through school. So both of these guys are using their programming chops to put themselves through school. Just like Woodhead Greenberg was exposed to Plato and started playing the games on Plato and fell in love with Plato. But he was a bit more serious then Woodhead.

In fact, he even was able to get a job as a, essentially a system administrator on the Plato system. One of the jobs of those people was to monitor for when people were playing games and kick them out. Boot them off the system, because that was hogging resources from serious educational projects. So Greenberg and Woodhead were actually adversaries for a time because Woodhead was constantly trying to figure out loopholes and figure out ways to get on the system and play games when he wasn't supposed to be. And Greenberg was often the cat tracking this mouse and a was the one that was responsible for booting them off. So they didn't really know each other like personally, but they had a history with each other as it turns out.

Well, it was still very much in the explore, dungeons kill monsters, gain experience gathered treasure mode. At this period of time that's what Dungeons and dragons was. Even though they called it a roleplaying game. Back then too, character development was not necessarily a central focus. Even if some groups, even at that early date engaged in it, it wasn't something the rule system was specifically necessarily pushing. So he's playing D&D. He's also playing the early Plato game. Particularly one called DND. Just the letters D N D. Which it was a top down dungeon exploration, monster fighting, treasure gathering game, and then another game called Oubliette. By a guy named Jim Schwaiger, who was a another D&D player who was on the Plato system and thought, well, you know, Plato, it could be a great way to automate the tedious tasks of doing a dungeon crawl.

And so he created a game Mobley at which was very, uh, reminiscent of Dungeons and dragons dungeon crawling. Oubliette is essentially French for, for dungeon. Not exactly, but I mean, it's a kind of imprisonment space. He starts fiddling around. Basically the week before finals when everyone's supposed to be studying, Greenberg and his friends just spent the whole week goofing off. Towards the end of this period of time, he was kind of just getting sick of it. Not that he wanted to go back and study, but he was like, I'm all D&Ded out. I just want to be alone. Don't bother me. I don't want to do anything. And so his friends seeing them all grumpy, we're like, well, you know, why don't you go and put D&D on a computer or something?

And he was like, why don't I go put D&D on a computer or something? You know, they meant it as a joke, but he took it seriously. So he had an Apple II. And he went ahead and created a game that was-- It took the first person perspective of Oubliette because Oubliette was a wireframe dungeon game. DND was a top down game, but it had fairly detailed pictures for the monsters. 'Cause remember this is a high resolution plasma display. So it actually had pretty good pictures of monsters. It was line art because it had to be, but it was pretty good line art. So he took kind of the first person perspective of Oubliette and a lot of the mechanics and whatnot. He took the more detailed monster pictures from DND and he started creating his own Dungeons and Dragons style game. And he called this game Basic Wizardry.

So kind of the division of labor on this when they started working together, is Greenberg did a lot of the game design. He kind of had a knack for that. He was putting together databases and tables and figuring out stats for things and all of that kind of stuff. And then Woodhead, who I'm sure also contributed ideas as well, but the main genius that Woodhead brought to it is that he knew exactly how to get from point A to point B and make this happen. He was the guy that knew Pascal. He was a real hot shot programmer. I think even more so than Greenberg was probably. So he provided a lot of the programming oomph.

So they do it in high res mode and they want the 3D look. So they do the wireframe dungeon, but what they do is they just put it up in the corner. Just in the little corner of the screen is your view of the dungeon. And then most of the rest of the screen is taken up by stats. Stats of, your character's information on the dungeon on things you're fighting all of that. So it's graphical, but a lot of it is text. Which allows it to run on the primitive systems of the day and have these wireframe models. They also do, like I said the detailed monster art. Detailed for the time you have to remember. So when monsters appear and you have to fight monsters, then the monster you're fighting appears in that window up there. And then you get a list of commands like fight and spell and run to use on the monster. Any old school Dragon Quest fans out there are going to say, this sounds familiar.

So they made a game that was fairly difficult. They tried to make it as balanced as they could. They tried to make it as fair as they could. They didn't always succeed in that, but they really did try. But they did want it to be hard and they wanted death to be death. But they found that if you're just taking one character through and death lies around every corner, then you could end up dying and getting frustrated and getting stuck and blah, blah, blah. So, you know, they thought back to these multiplayer games on the Plato system. And one of the advantages of that multiplayer system is that if your character died and you had to start over. You could have your friends more powerful characters kind of escort you through the content and help power level you help get you back up to speed.

So they figured this was a good solution for the difficulty problem is give you a party of characters. That way, as long as your whole party doesn't wipe, you can retreat from the dungeon. You can create some new characters to join them, and then your stronger characters can help power level them again through the earlier levels.

So it felt like a way to try to keep a little accessibility in there, even through the difficulty. And it was also a way of trying to recreate as best as possible, the feel of the multiplayer RPGs on the Plato system. This made it very different from other early RPGs, particularly like Akalabeth and Ultima from Richard Garriott. Which were you control a single character that's doing all this stuff. Now, obviously Ultima went multiplayer later too, but Wizardry was very early with that. And again, it all goes back to the unique Plato environment that they had access to. So you get your group together. You go through levels of the dungeon, you level up, you fight monsters, you get better equipment all to take out the wizard Werdna, at the bottom of the dungeon. That's your goal is to defeat the evil wizard Werdna. If you were to spell that out, you would note that it is Andrew spelled backwards, as in Andrew Greenberg. In the town. You know, before you would descend to the dungeon and the place, you would kind of get your party together before you descended. There was Trebor there.

And essentially did an open beta. They essentially were giving out this half completed version of the game with promises that they would get full version of the game when game was finally ready, they'd get updated discs. So they practically did an open beta throughout Apple Fest as well, which again, incredibly unusual for the time.

So Robert Sirotek unlike his brother, he also went to Clarkson college, like his brother Norm did. But unlike his brother, he actually completed a business degree there. But he was also in programming. He was working in institutional computing at a mini computer company doing programming. So he also had this kind of business side and technical side. And he quite simply just hated his job. He didn't like the ins and outs of institutional programming. So after Info Tree and Galactic Attack started taking off and Sir-Tech started becoming kind of a real company. Robert Sirotek also joined the company. And so now you had kind of a division between Norm doing finance and administration and Robert doing sales and marketing and kind of jointly running the company together. With Fred Sierra tech, technically serving as president, but really serving more of an advisor role than a president role.

But one of the important things that Fred Sirotek did, one of the things that he advised. Is he said that in order for your product to be taken seriously, it needs to look like a serious product and it needs to be an understandable product. So he was insistent that Wizardry Dungeons of Despair have a real box with a fancy logo and fancy art and all of that. And a real intelligible instruction manual that ordinary folks picking up this game would be able to read and understand and get into playing the game.

So Wizardry was one of the very early products to ship in a box rather than a baggie. It wasn't first, but it was very early. Robert Sierra tech wrote an instruction manual for the game that was a much more in depth instruction manual for a product at that time. So again, you're looking at something that is really professionally done. By contrast, the first Ultima did not ship in a big fancy box Ultima II dead. Richard, Garriott actually sometimes tries to take credit for starting boxes in games with Ultima II. But, Hmm. Wizardry did at first, SSI did it even before Sir-Tech did with Wizardry. But, uh, you know, that's another thing that set the product apart in this very early time. So it was extensively beta tested. It was essentially demoed and publicly Betad. It had professional box design. It had professional manual. It just had all of these trappings that you wouldn't expect from a computer game at that time, and it was a bigger program and a more sophisticated program than people were used to because of the use of the Pascal programming language.

It had this great big dungeon to explore of like nine levels. It had various different monsters. All of these monsters were pictured in the game. You know, you think of its contemporaries like Temple of Apshai that we talked about in our Automated Simulations Epyx episode, which predated Wizardry as being a roleplaying game. But since it started on the PET and the TRS 80 it had character based graphics and you know, it wasn't much to look at. Even though it was popular and fun, it wasn't nearly as sophisticated as Wizardry. So Wizardry comes along and it's just like nothing anyone had ever seen before. Though it didn't end up coming out as Dungeons of Despair. Because as we've talked about before in the context of other games, this was a period when TSR, people behind Dungeons and Dragons, we're very, very, very litigious.

So anything that had Dungeons in the name, anything that had Dragons in the name, and especially anything that could be abbreviated with a double D. In this case, it would be D of D instead, or DoD instead of D&D. But still it's a double D abbreviation is going to get a threat from TSRs lawyers. And since these early games are being done by these small companies that don't want to get tied up in court, even though oftentimes the TSR going after people was very spurious. I mean, Dungeons, a common word, sorry. And there were games, you know, it, it just, it just doesn't work. You know, these small companies don't want to get involved in litigation, so it's much easier to just change the name. And that's why Wizardry. The original is not known as Dungeons of Despair, but is actually known as Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, because at the last minute, they needed a new title.

So you can't call that an absolute ranking, but it was near the top of that list. Within a couple of years that had sold a hundred thousand units, which in those early days was phenomenal. In those days, 50,000 was a hit. A hundred thousand you were over the moon. So just because the scale was so much smaller, so that was a massive, massive hit. Definitely led the field in RPGs. It left Ultima in the dust at that specific period in time. It was just a phenomenon. So of course there had to be a sequel.

They probably figured that they had enough of a built in user base for the first game, that they get a lot of sales of a second game that required the first game. And I think they were very much thinking in terms of D&D style character progression and D&D style modules where you just take your characters from one dungeon to the next dungeon to the next dungeon, each one getting harder. But your characters are leveling up, you're gaining more experience. And so they were kind of really stuck in this D&D mindset. But this was the beginning of diminishing returns. Because while every Ultima game out sells the Ultima game that comes before. Because even though they're often very loosely linked to each other, or even sometimes more closely linked to each other, there are still distinct games where you start with, uh, you start your character over each time. Even when you're playing the same protagonist. You're starting over each time, you don't have to have had the earlier game to play the later game. So sales increased with each version of Ultima. You have the opposite effect that starts happening here. Because you never ever, ever, have a hundred percent of your audience of an original game buying the sequel.

That doesn't mean you can't have bigger sales of your sequel than your original game because you bring in new players too, but not everyone adopts your sequal. Some people buy it and they decide it's not for them. Some people it was for them, but a couple of years later, for whatever reason, they're no longer into this kind of thing, and so they're just not interested in continuing. Maybe you don't even realize that there is a second game, so you don't buy it. There are a lot of reasons that the buyers of your first game don't buy your second game. So when you're locking it in, so that only players of your first game cam play your second game. You've just shrunk your sales without doing anything. Even if you have a great game, you've just shrunk your sales.

The second game was a direct sequel where you had to import a high level character to play. The third game actually started you back over at level one. That's good, but you still had to create a character in Wizardry I and then your character in Wizardry III, your characters, I should say it's multiplayer or multiple characters, not multiplayer. Your characters in Wizardry III then we're the descendants of your characters in Wizardry I. So you still had to own one to play three.

Meanwhile, Ultima, and I know I keep bringing up Ultima, but it's important because these are the two. These are the two franchises. At the same time, Ultima is changing each time because Richard Garriott is rewriting the games each time. So each Ultima is more sophisticated than the one that came before. Each Ultima has more things going on. Each Ultima is bigger than the one that came before. Whereas Wizardry is the same thing over and over again. Yes, there are new challenges, higher level challenges, different monsters. They're not complete carbon copies. But it's basically the same thing over and over again while the main competition is changing. So Ultima sales are going up, up, up. Wizardry sales, even though they started much higher, even though Wizardry was one of the first mega hats on the Apple II, Wizardry sales are going down, down, down.

The other thing that was going on during this time period is these were all Apple II games, which is fine. But as newer more popular systems come out, like the Commodore 64, they don't port Wizardry to these other platforms. Wizardry is remaining an Apple II game only. Now, the rationale they gave for this is that, as I said, they were using Pascal and Woodhead didn't think that either the Atari eight bit computers nor the Commodore 64 could really accommodate UCSD Pascal because of their disk systems. Uh, their disc drives Atari their disc system didn't have enough memory for Pascal. Meanwhile, we've talked before about how the Commodore 64 had the slowest disc drive in all of existence. Think of the slowest load you've ever had on the computer, and then, I don't know, multiplied by 10 times, I mean, it was bad.

But he apparently wasn't very interested in tools. I mean, he was interested in programming the games, but for whatever reason, he wasn't interested in programming tools. So since nobody else was creating tools to make Pascal run on those systems. Since the tools didn't exist, they didn't port to them. So now Wizardry is not only failing to change and modernize. But it's stuck on a machine that is slowly starting to lose relevance. 1983 was the peak year for the Apple II. After 1983 the Apple II starts its decline as a major gaming platform as the Commodore 64 gains more traction. So they're on the wrong system at the wrong time, and then comes Wizardry IV.

As I've said before, Greenberg and Woodhead were very much about this sense of danger and this sense of death around every corner. They generally wanted it to be surmountable, but they wanted the threat to be there. Well, they've released three games at this point, all in the same sphere. Obviously their players are very good at this point. Because remember, their player base consists pretty much of all of people who've been playing since the first game, because you need the first game to play the sequals. By this time, the ones that have stayed around the sales are diminishing, but they've got a hard core base here now.

And this hardcore base has accomplished everything they can accomplish in the first three Wizardrys. They've thrown more high level challenges at them. Those challenges have been met. So now for Wizardry IV, they decide that they have to play to that hardcore base. So Wizardry IV is the first one where you don't have to load Wizardry first in order to play it.

He started writing columns and reviews for just about every magazine under the sun. He became real close to game developers. He even wrote some manuals for some of the Ultima games. They brought him in to do Wizardry IV design, the Return of Werdna. Where in a twist, you actually play the antagonist of the first game after he's been defeated, as he tries to escape from his prison and go out and avenge his defeat. So that's an interesting twist.

There's always that release there to help you if you're a less advanced player and don't understand the mechanics as well. Well, this game doesn't have that. You only gain stats at arbitrary places and you can't wail away on lower level enemies until you feel comfortable with them and then take on higher level enemies.

Early RPGs didn't have an auto map, so people would make their own maps on graph paper. And games, like even the earlier Wizardrys would occasionally try to trip you up by putting a teleporter here, or there. Taking you to another part of the dungeon, so then you have to figure out how your map connects. But even then, it was somewhat logical in how it did it. This one just throws in all sorts of crazy things that completely disorient you and make mapping nearly impossible for any except the most dedicated of mappers. It's insane.

And worse at this time rRobert Woodhead is getting interested and other platforms and other uses of Pascal and porting the older Wizardrys to like the Macintosh and adding things like mouse support and all of this. Which is fine, but he's spending more time doing that than he is programming Wizardry IV. Wizardry IV was due to come out in November of 1984. When I say it was due to come out in November, 1984 I'm saying that they told Insider magazine, which was one of the another Apple magazine that that people read. They told Insider magazine to go ahead in their November, 1984 issue and announce that Return of Werdna was available. Because it was merely a formality that it would be available. Wizardry IV came out in 1987.

Check out our show notes at podcast.theycreateworlds.com where we have links to some of the things that we discussed in this and other episodes. You can check out Alex's video game history blog at videogamehistorian.wordpress.com Alex's book, They Create Worlds: The People and Companies that Shaped the Video Game Industry. Volume one can now be ordered through CRC press and that major online retailers. Email us at feedback@theycreateworlds.com. Our Twitter is TCWpodcast. Please consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com/theycreateworlds. Into music is Airplane Mode by Josh Woodward. Found at joshwoodward.com/song/airplanemode. Used under creative commons attribution license. Outro music is Bacterial Love by Rolem Music found at freemusicarchive.org used under creative commons had to patient license.