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Hey, everyone! The spiffy new Digital Eclipse-developed remake of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is out now on a variety of platforms. It’s very good! It also gave me a chance to speak with one of the people behind the original game: Mr. Robert “Trebor” Woodhead. He had a lot to say about the making of the original game, what he thinks of the new remake, and a whole lot more. Ever wonder why there are ninjas and samurai in Wizardry? You’ll find out by reading this interview! Also sitting in with us and chiming in at times was Mr. Justin Bailey of Digital Eclipse, a fine fellow who was able to provide additional insight on the remake. Get yourself a drink, because this is a big one.
Introductions and M&Ms
TouchArcade (TA): It feels kind of silly to ask this, but… tell us who you are and what you’re about, and also your favorite pizza toppings. That’s very important.
Robert Woodhead (RW): My name is Robert Woodhead. Back in the day I used to write computer games, and later on subtitled anime. Basically, I’ve spent my entire life just doing very strange things with computers. And my favorite pizza topping is none, because I’m not a big pizza fan!
TA: Wow! That’s actually a new answer to that question. Well done! And over here?
Justin Bailey (JB): About me: I was previously involved from a business side in bringing back another classic, Grim Fandango with Doublefine. Wizardry was another iconic game that was commercially unavailable for over two decades. My role was lining up the financing, getting the rights, and distributing the game, so I guess you could call me a producer. I’m currently on a veggie kick, so my favorite pizza toppings are mushrooms, mixed olives, and red onions.
RW: Now may I ask you a question?
TA: Sure, go ahead!
RW: M&Ms: Plain or Peanut, and why?
TA: Ah, Peanut. I like that mix of saltiness and sweetness. That’s the way to go. How about you?
RW: Um, I’m a Peanut fan myself, but the best answer I’ve ever had to that question – I used to ask that question when we were interviewing people to work at our company – was Extra Crispy. I hired the guy on the spot.
TA: Really? Well, that’s an outside-the-box answer, so…
RW: There you go! That’s a true story.
JB: I thought you were going to say “none”. The right answer is always “none”. (laughs)
TA: I thought maybe it was going to be someone who chooses the Peanut ones but then they suck the chocolate off, and then eat the peanut independently because those guys are a little strange, but in a way I respect that hustle.
RW: Well, there’s something to be said for biting it in half and then extracting the peanut, and then the second half of the chocolate.
TA: That is true.
JB: That, that is how I like to eat my Peanut M&Ms.
On Messing Around and the Origins of Wizardry
TA: I love this, we’re already off to a good start! This is fantastic. Okay so, my next question. So obviously, you’re one of the co-creators of Wizardry. To what extent have you been involved with the remake?
RW: Um, mostly just giving some advice and feedback when asked. You know, I personally feel that developers and creators should have as much freedom as possible. I was very lucky when I was writing Wizardry that there was nobody around to tell me what to do, and so when it comes to new Wizardry games like they’re doing here in Japan, or the remake, I feel that it’s very important for the new developers to have that same kind of freedom to, when they’re faced with a game design problem, make their own decisions. If they want feedback from me in terms of whether it feels like Wizardry, sure I’ll give that to them, but they should trust their own judgement.
Quite frankly, with the remake, I mean… when they showed me the kinds of things they were doing, I was going like, “of course, that’s obvious, that’s exactly the right thing to do”. And in a couple of cases it was like, “oh wow, that’s a… that’s a really cool thing that you did there, you know, I’m really impressed”. I think they just hit it out of the park.
TA: Thank you. So, I did my homework a little with previous interviews that you had done, and I’ve seen you answer the question about how you made Wizardry in the first place with Andrew (Greenberg), but there was one thing I didn’t see answered. So, before you were working with Andrew on Wizardry, you were working independently on something similar called Paladin. What led you to want to create that? Where was the motivation there for that?
RW: It’s pretty much the same thing. I mean, I was looking for a game to write. Doing a dungeon crawler seemed like the obvious next thing to do, based on all the games I had seen that I had really enjoyed. So okay, let’s try to do a Dungeons & Dragons game! Basically, I was only a few weeks into the project when I found out that Andy was also doing the same sort of thing, and after we talked about it and compared notes, it seemed like such an obvious thing to do, to combine our efforts.
He had spent a lot more time thinking about the game design and the story… the lore, if you will. And I had a lot more time to work on the programming because I had been thrown out of school for a year… (laughs) for messing around on computers too much, so I had the time. He was in graduate school, or getting his Masters, I don’t remember which, but he was much more time-limited. He did the initial game design, and then I went off and started implementing it. The first thing we wrote was the database editors. Wizardry really is a business database program that is pretending to be a computer game.
TA: I can kind of see that, yeah.
RW: So that was the division of labor.
TA: One little question, I guess. What was the idea behind having multiple characters in the party? Because I think that was kind of a new thing, right?
RW: That was actually our way of having the same feeling as both the tabletop Dungeons and Dragons, where you play with a party of people, and also the multiplayer games on PLATO where you would have people at various terminals all around the country that were playing together. The thing is, how do you get that sort of thing on a dinky little Apple II? Having a party of multiple characters seemed to be an obvious way to solve that problem.
TA: So were you a Dungeons & Dragons player?
RW: Oh, definitely. That’s another reason I got thrown out of Cornell for a year! I was playing Dungeons & Dragons for like, 70 hours in a weekend. (laughs)
TA: What type of character did you play? What race, class, alignment?
RW: I was usually Lawful Good. My main character was a cleric, his name was Cant, and that’s why you have The Temple of Cant in Wizardry. Many of the names in Wizardry come from the Cornell Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Like the trading post, Boltac’s Trading Post. Boltac was a character of a friend of mine in the game. So we stuck him in the game. A lot of the friends of me and Andy ended up in the game one way or another.
TA: That’s cool. You kind of briefly touched on this earlier, but… having a game similar to Wizardry on PLATO, and then trying to fit it onto the Apple II are two very different things. Can you recall any of the major programming challenges you ran into trying to make Wizardry?
RW: The big thing was that our development environment on Apple II was 64k, because we had the little extra 16k of RAM, the memory card that you had to have to run PASCAL. But at release, we could only depend on 48k being there. Apple eventually came out with the much-delayed Run-Time System, which would run PASCAL in 48k. But it had such a limited amount of memory that there were a lot of things you couldn’t do. Like, you couldn’t run the full operating system and compile, and stuff like that, but you could run programs. Wizardry ran very comfortably in 64k, but not so much in 48k, and it took about two months of refining the code and optimizing, and learning how to write stuff so that it compiled to one fewer byte. It was a huge challenge.
And the other aspect of it was that I was a young programmer. I was very energetic, but still young and inexperienced. I had taken some computer programming courses, I had read some books, stuff like that. But it’s not like today where you’ve got a programming problem, and you can just Google and up comes Stack Over
