When it comes to the history of RPGs, few games can claim to have been as inspirational in establishing the conventions of the genre as Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.
Originally released for the Apple II in 1981, the game was one of the first examples of a Dungeons & Dragons style role-playing game created for home computers and later went on to inspire the likes of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Demon Souls. Primarily developed by the legendary developers Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead under the company Sir-Tech, it was eventually ported to countless other platforms (including MS-DOS, NES, SNES, PlayStation Sega Saturn, alongside many others), with many of these versions being exclusive to Japan due to the game's phenomenal popularity in the region.
For the last couple of decades, the original game has not been readily available commercially, with the series instead being subject to various Japanese follow-ups and spin-offs (some of which have also been localized into English). Last September, however, Digital Eclipse announced that it had partnered with two of the original rights holders Norman and Robert Sirotek, alongside the video game investor/IP holder Justin Bailey to create a remastered version of the classic. This launched in Early Access last year and has since hit 1.0 on May 23rd, 2024 across Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, receiving an amazing 9/10 review from our friends at Nintendo Life.
As a result, we took it upon ourselves recently to reach out to Norman and Robert Sirotek, as well as Justin Bailey to find out more about how this classic title was resurrected. You can read part one of our interview with Norman, Robert, and Justin Bailey below (edited for length and clarity), which focuses on the remaster. A part two of sorts will be released in the future and will cover the original Apple II release as well as the initial commercialization of the game in Japan. Enjoy!
Time Extension: Let's start with the most obvious question. Why did you finally decide to bring back Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord now? Why all these years later?
Robert: So we knew the game was special and we knew we wanted to remaster it. It was just a question of when. I started getting calls after calls and emails and this sort of thing by users saying, 'You should take this game and remaster it and do something with it' and I kind of dismissed it because I was into something else at the time. But as the years clicked by, a fellow that we used to work with contacted us and encouraged me to look at this more seriously. They were one of the co-founders at Interplay. And, you know, I said, 'Okay'. So I started looking at it a little more seriously. But our vision to do it in a grand way required the talents of a particular studio and the breadth of a particular studio. So we started looking. And we then met Justin through Brian Fargo, who was another person responsible for the creation of Interplay.
Bailey: So Brian Fargo is a person I worked with a lot at Fig when I headed that up. I talked to him many times throughout the remaster of Bard's Tale. And I always assessed that if he was gonna do that, 'Dude, you should just go all out and do a huge one'. And we had talked about that. We talked about how much passion there was around Bard's Tale 1. And that reward tier he ended up having on his Kickstarter for Bard's Tale 4 ended up going so well for remastering 1, 2, and 3 that when we talked about it later, we were like, 'Wow, that probably could have been its own Kickstarter, just to do a crowdfunding event, take one of those games, and remaster it.'
And so I was talking to him, 'Hey, so, what else is out there that we could do this with?' And he was like, 'How about Wizardry?' And I said, 'Yeah, but where's that been?' He said, 'Well, I can make an introduction to you to Rob and Norm.' And when I approached them, it seemed that they were thinking the same thing. I don't know if it's one of those things where you're just thinking the same thing at the same time, but the three of us got together and said, 'Well, great, if we're gonna do this, let's talk about what developers might make sense.'
Time Extension: Picking up that, why did you decide to go with Digital Eclipse as the developer for the project? Why did they stand out to you?
Norman: When we first got together with Justin, we were interviewing three, maybe four, development teams. And that's when we were introduced in more detail to Digital Eclipse. After researching the products they did, what they were doing with Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration, plus some of their other games that really aren't role-playing game-based at all, they were the front runner in terms of everything we were looking for to understand really what a remaster of Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord would need. And that was the biggest challenge because a lot of companies don't understand the history of the product and they seem to have gotten it; they understood it.
Robert: [To be honest], Digital Eclipse really wasn't on our radars at the time, but when Justin introduced me to Mike Mika [Digital Eclipse's studio head], I was completely enthralled with Mike's knowledge and we just hit it off. And then we saw the studio and we saw that this was the place to be. He also had access to voice actors out of Hollywood — really professional ones — and there were other ways too that we could leverage his contacts to really improve the remaster. These were all the reasons why I settled on Digital Eclipse. And I think they've done a great job with the title.
There's still stuff that we want to do, but Rome wasn't built in a day, as they say, right?
Time Extension: A big thing we'd love to know more about is the situation with the IP and how the series was brought back. From an outsider's perspective, the rights seem to be quite confusing, with various new games being developed under the Wizardry branding in Japan (like the mobile game Wizardry Variants Daphne). We're wondering, what is the current situation regarding the rights? Who owns what? And were there any complications in terms of, releasing this game in Japan with that in mind?
Norman: Well, in my mind, the rights are very clear and simple. In others, maybe not so much. Wizardry 1 through 5 have always been owned by the Siroteks, in one form or another. And back in 2000, we sold off the Wizardry mark and the rights to 6, 7, and 8. Now the company we sold them to is no longer around, and they flipped it. And it's gone through, I guess, several flips ever since. And the current owners of those rights is, I think, [a Japanese company called] DreCom.
Bailey: Yeah, so where the rights thing comes in [with this] is just making sure it's all clean, right? Like all that stuff. The base game may have come to the US but what's been done since then. So I would say it was a considerable effort to get that done. Rights-wise, it was owned by the Siroteks and Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead — I'm sure you know that history. Greenberg no longer has any rights to classic Wizardry. I actually own Robert Woodhead's rights to the classic Wizardry 1 through 5. So between Norm, Robert, and I, we have all those copyrights.
Time Extension: Were there any specific dos and don'ts that you personally had for the project? What were the guiding principles with this remaster?
Bailey: Yeah, I think one thing that we wanted to do with the remaster is we wanted to make it authentic and get all the original parties kind of involved back again from when this became a new success. One thing we asked people was, 'Hey, what do you remember about Wizardry?' A lot of people in the US and Europe would remember either the MS-DOS or Apple II version, but we went to Japan and everybody said the NES or SNES version was what they remembered, right? So one thing about the Japanese release that we paid a lot of attention to was it's still pretty big over there and it never kind of dropped off.
One thing we asked people was, 'Hey, what do you remember about Wizardry?' A lot of people in the US and Europe would remember either the MS-DOS or Apple II version, but we went to Japan and everybody said the NES, SNES version was what they remembered, right?
So we got Jun Suemi, who had done the original art for the NES game. We actually contacted the Haneda Estate and they did the 'We Love Wizardry' soundtrack. We got them involved. We got this guy named Benny-san (Benny Matsuyama), who wrote some of the strategy guides that actually filled out some lore. Like one cool little thing that happened is if you've noticed in some of the other versions of Wizardry, as they went through, the higher-level ninjas ended up being women. And so that was something that wasn't explained, right, in the lore of Wizardry. And so Benny-san actually went and explained why the higher-level assassins were women. And he did that with a lot of stuff. So he kind of became this person who wrote some of what people in the Japanese market think of as the deep lore of Wizardry. So that was important to us to get all those people back together.
Another thing we definitely wanted to do was do this ability to play the original game and have everything new built on top of that. So that's that window inside. And so, one of the things the team wanted to do was take that and kind of retain the original difficulty of it. So it felt like Wizardry. And then layer on top of that, all of these quality-of-life improvements so that, people who remember it from the beginning can play it almost exactly as it was, right, with the same difficulty, the same bugs, same warts and all, right?
Because some people remember these bugs and they remember them with fondness. Like, for instance, when we first put it out there in early access, people said, 'We attacked the frost giants' and there used to be a bug in how the experience was calculated when you killed a frost giant and so you'd get a lot more experience and you didn't get that because we fixed it. And people asked, 'What's wrong?' So we actually had to go back and make it so you could undo some of our fixes.
And then ID#9 was another famous bug, right? And we had to figure out — what you do with it? It was something where the dev team had to go back and look at these things and look at what are bugs and what are not bugs. And then, take in mind the people who had that original experience and people playing it potentially for the first time ever and making sure their experience isn't something where they have an immediate rage quit based on the fact that how you play games has changed since Wizardry launched.
Time Extension: Yeah, we have the same question for Norm and Robert. What was the communication between yourselves and Digital Eclipse in terms of, what you envisioned for the project?
Norman: I think Justin did a really good job recapping the discussions and the attitude. What we wanted was the quality of life improvements to make the game more — let's say — playable for the current users compared to users back in the '80s, where the challenge and the frustration of Wizardry was an exciting part for them.
I think users have evolved past that. They don't really want to put up with the very demanding elements of the first product. So the quality of life improvements definitely solve that. So I like the idea that we discussed to be able to play the game in its original form and with all its difficulty, and then be able to toggle switches to bring the playability more in line with what the current user may want. They can actually customize the game to bring it to that level.
So that [solves] two problems. We want to bring in a new audience, but we also want to keep our old audience happy. And by putting all these switches in, we believe Digital Eclipse actually created a far more versatile and replayable game. You can toggle these switches here and there and all of a sudden it plays differently and with its own unique challenges. And in that sense, I think it's an absolute stunner of a product and well beyond what was originally envisioned in our inaugural phone calls. And then the other elements were, you know, bring up the graphics, bring up the imaging to more of today's current standards.
Wizardry was never a leader in graphics or you know, graphic interface eye candy. It never had that. So having more of that in the game was great, but it was never paramount. That was a 'Let's do this. Let's make it better. Let's make it prettier. Let's make it more playable.' But you don't need to make this game a stellar graphic game, because that's not what Wizardry is known for.
Robert: So, I'm going to have to pay tribute to an Antiquarian in a quote that will answer your question directly. So, the guy that came up with this - and he nailed it — his name is Jimmy Maher. Basically what he wrote was, and I'll read this to you: "For all its legendary difficulties, Wizardry requires no deductive or inductive brilliance or leaps of logic or illogic reasoning. It rewards patience and willingness to experiment and to learn from mistakes, attention to detail, and a dedication to doing things the right way." Couldn't have said it any better. So my recommendation and Norm's recommendation to Mike Mika and the development crew at Digital Eclipse was to stick to that ideology while embellishing it in ways that were necessary to bring it up to today's standards.
Obviously we're not just republishing an old game, we're remastering it. So, Mike and the development team were instrumental in all of these quality-of-life improvements. And there's a whole list of them. And I give Mike Mika and the development team that credit.
I've learned over my 40 years in the industry, you don't legislate what you want to get something beautiful. You have to encourage, you have to be sensitive to the people developing it and their skill sets and you have to let them flex their muscles. And after they flex their muscles, if they screw it up, then you do something about it. But you're not going to be upfront about squashing ideas because it doesn't create the right spirit and atmosphere to really develop a great product. And a lot of people cannot figure that out. They're just inexperienced. And it takes years to figure it out. It takes years to know what's the right balance. How do you provide the right guidance at the right time? So, I felt Mike also had that knack, and we needed somebody who knew how to do that for the benefit of the development team, and that was it. I'm sorry about the long-winded answer, but it's a simple question with a complicated answer.
Time Extension: In terms of the art direction for this game, it must have been difficult with so many people having different memories about different versions of the game to come up with an idea for art style that encompasses all of that. We're wondering in terms of the conversations that happened with Digital Eclipse, how was that sort of decided upon?
Bailey: Yeah, I mean, Digital Eclipse has this slogan of making the game you remember, not the game as it actually was. And so in this case, it was, what's in people's minds? How will they remember Wizardry when they go back? And what was happening in their minds at the time? So the art director's name is Nick Bruty. And he played Wizardry; he was a fan. The whole team had played it. I think that was one thing that Robert Norman and I looked at and were like, 'This is a big plus for this team'. And so what he did is he liked these pulp-fiction novels — the fantasy covers from the '80s and the D&D covers — so he said, 'That's the inspiration'. And he wanted to make sure that the game almost looked like that prevalent fantasy art of the time.
And so he did a bunch of art tests to try to capture that. And then at one point in the development, he made this werewolf staying in this cave with this red fog coming out. And we looked at it and we said, 'Okay, based on that, go forward with it'.
Time Extension: Just to kind of put a button on everything, from playing the game, we were surprised at how timeless it still feels. And it's the same thing that we experienced with the Bard's Tale remaster. It's just amazing that there's something out there now that if someone says they want to try out Wizardry, it's easy to point them to it and there are all these different options available. We don't know whether you guys have any closing thoughts on that.
Bailey: One thing was, as you mentioned, Bard's Tale. I think Bard's Tale, Might & Magic, Wizardry, they just had a soul to them. During Bard's Tale, when they were going back and remastering it, they had a back and forth about "What is it that keeps people coming back to it?" And I think, similar to Bard's Tale, Wizardry just had a kind of soul to it.
And I don't know. One of the things I thought was kind of cool is that you could actually take your characters in Wizardry — and I think this was not planned — and push them over to Bard's Tale and Ultima. And it was funny. I remember talking to Robert and Norm about this because, to me, that was such a cool feature and it was the first cross-promotional opportunity, right? But there were so many firsts with this game. There was the first premium boxed product. I mean, Robert and Norm are the central architects for that. The first pre-order incentive. You heard about that from Boston Apple Fest, right? And you start looking at all these things, as well as how it helped set the grounds for things like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and even Demon's Souls. You go into the maze and if your characters die, you can start another party, go down, and get their remains, right? And the creator of Demon's Soul heralded some of his design choices and the difficulty of that game back to Wizardry.
Time Extension: Thank you again for your time Justin, Norman, and Robert. We appreciate you taking the time to answer our questions.