Tim's List Technology Geek Technology manager Tim Schmelter leans to the more relaxed side of gaming: adventure, role-playing...anything without overly stringent reflex requirements. Unlike Matt, he has not mastered Super Mario anything. • Message Board The Countdown (in chronological order) 10.) Star Trek (Text) 9.) Pac Man 8.) Wizardry 7.) Deadline 6.) --------- 5.) --------- 4.) --------- 3.) --------- 2.) --------- 1.) ---------

By Tim Schmelter
Austin360

No. 8: Wizardry I - III

(Sir-Tech, Apple II, 1981-1983)

The Game: By today's standards, a pretty standard dungeon crawl. At the height of popularity of Dungeons & Dragons, this was a way to get your fantasy fix without the bother of assembling a group of like-minded folks with a bunch of graph paper.

The game had complexity and depth, coupled with challenging puzzles and exciting action. It used role-playing conventions familiar to pencil and paper gamers, but kept things moving quickly by virtue of the fact that you didn't have to tally up physical rolls of a 20-sided die every few seconds during combat.

You are in a maze of twisty little passages...

What Was So Great About It: Wizardry stands in my memory as the best game I never played. Three fellow students in my high school programming course had played them and were constantly talking about it. Beyond loving the descriptions of the fiendish enemies, fantastic spells and diabolical puzzles, it instilled a case of envy that I've carried with me to this day: "I will never go without a game I really want again."

Of course, it took me a long while to build up a sufficiently flexible income stream to actually make good on that promise. But 'Wizardry I - III' remains the itch I never satisfactorily scratched.

Impact On The Rest Of Humanity: Fantasy games have been on computers for a long time, starting back with 'advent.' 'Wizardry,' though, really gave a boost to the computer fantasy role-playing game. Appealing to the same demographic as the traditional pen and paper games, the computer RPG allowed the warrior wannabe to hack, slash and cast spells on demand, instead of waiting for Friday night's marathon pizza party/D&D session. Couple that with the fact that it was released on a personal computer (the Apple II), as opposed to only being available via a university mainframe, and suddenly the computer RPG was a viable gaming genre.

Various games since then have taken computer RPGs to far higher levels. In some cases, they've done it by streamlining the combat and making a more action-oriented RPG. In others, they've enriched the storyline to mammoth proportions and provided enough side-quests to fill hundreds of hours of gameplay.

But all of them owe a debt to the pioneering 'Wizardry' series, blazing the trail from graph paper to CRT.

Coming Next Week: No. 7. Deadline: Would you like poison with your text adventure?