Wizardry Retrospective Interview
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The early Wizardry titles were first developed for Apple II and then ported to other platforms. How did you go about this process?
We wrote Apple Pascal p-code interpreters for each target machine. That plus a little assembly language code to abstract the graphics did the trick. We also had a text localization system that moved all the text in the game into a database; it got done for the Japanese localizations and permitted us to create any message we needed on the fly, with all the variable parts inserted into the right places.
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The ruleset Wizardry used was D&D derivative rather than a faithful implementation of D&D. Was it mainly due to hardware limitations or copyright issues? In particular, why did you not introduce D&D-style spell memorization?
We just did what we thought would work best. But some things, like the spell names, were driven by programming decisions; spell name matching was done by hashing to a 15 bit number, which was much more space-efficient.
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Have you played D.W. Bradley's Wizardries, and if you have, what do you think of them? Design-wise, were you happy with the direction the series took with Wizardry V and, later, VI and VII?
I helped David get up to speed on the Wizardry code, and supported him when he made some changes to it for Wizardry V. But I didn't play the later games in the series. When I left Sir-tech, that part of my life was over -- it was time to move on to other things.
