Like Akalabeth, Wizardry portrays the dungeons (called The Maze) in 3D wireframe graphics and first-person perspective. However, one nice innovation is that when battle is joined, the dungeon graphic is replaced by a color portrait of one of the attacking monsters (up to four groups of them can attack). It's a great opportunity for art, and we'll see it countless later games, such The Bard's Tale and The Pool of Radiance (1988).

The dungeons are arranged on a 20 x 20 grid, which makes them ideal for mapping onto graph paper. Since the dungeons are fixed rather than random, players could really benefit from having a good map laid before them. The map offers detailed instructions on making such a map and lets player know that "mapping is indeed one of the most important skills that successful Wizardry players possess."

Whereas some gamers found the task irksome, others enjoyed it almost as much as playing the game. I find the cartography fascinating, especially when I consider how CRPGs evolved from Colossal Cave and other exploration games. Mapmaking remained a critical skill for many years to come, at least until CRPGs began featuring automapping tools.

The storyline of Wizardry is standard fare. The Evil Wizard Werdna has stolen a magical element from Trebor (Robert spelled backwards), the Mad Overlord. Furthermore, Werdna has used the amulet to create a ten-level fortress maze beneath Trebor's castle. Trebor has declared this maze his bodyguards' proving grounds, and of course it's up to the party to descend into it, battling whatever monsters stand between them and the amulet. It's easy to see the connections to the older mainframe games, many of which offer the same quest for an all-powerful magical amulet.

Wizardry was created by Andrew C. Greenberg and Robert Woodhead, then students at Cornell University, who spent some two and a half years developing it. The reason for the delay was that the game had originally been programmed in BASIC, but that language had proven too inefficient for the game to run smoothly on an Apple II.

They converted the game to PASCAL, a decision that it made it much easier to port the game to other platforms later on. Unfortunately, PASCAL programs required 48 K of RAM to operate, and Apple II needed an optional RAM expansion called a Language Card to run them.

It wasn't until 1979 that Apple introduced the Apple II+, which came preequipped with the required 48 KB of RAM. In short, Greenberg and Woodhead were at least a year ahead of the technology and had to wait for gamers and the computer industry to catch up with them.

Fighting for Your Right to Party

Wizardry brings us to an interesting question about CRPGs. Is it better to control a party or a single adventurer? One way to answer this question is by posing another: which is more like tabletop role-playing games?

On the one hand, almost all conventional D&D games involve groups of players and their characters. Usually, Dungeon Masters will encourage the players to select characters who complement one another, the ideal being at least one of each basic type (fighter, thief, cleric, and mage).

This way, the characters can work together to devise strategies and overcome obstacles -- for instance, a sorceress might be extremely vulnerable in hand-to-hand combat, but devastatingly effective at range; it becomes the fighters' job to occupy the monsters so that she can cast her spells. Thus, it would seem that party-based games like Wizardry and Ultima III are closer to the D&D model.

On the other hand, D&D players only control one character at a time and are asked to assume the role of that character during the session. Looked at from this perspective, single-hero games like Ultima and Rogue are closer to the ideal, since it's much easier (theoretically, at least) to identify with a single character than a whole group of them.

Unfortunately, this problem has yet to be solved, and CRPG fans and developers have long been divided on the issue. Currently, the industry seems to have settled on the single-hero model; of the top three CRPGs currently available, none is party-based. We'll return to this critical issue throughout the book.