Day 6: Wizardry
2020-04-29 22:54:23.819092+02 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
Influential video games, day 6: Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord
Yeah, top-down dungeon crawlers are great. The idea of RPG-ishness was certainly around. And I was gonna toss Doom and/or Wolfenstein 3d in here, but as soon as I thought about Wolfenstein 3d, I had to think about grid-layout maps with first-person perspectives.
And as soon as I thought about that, I went back to Wizardry.
This was the era of Rogue. ASCII "graphics". Top-down dungeon crawling was just becoming a thing. And suddenly you were moving through a dungeon, first-person view. Those neurons for mapping had to come into play (or you had to have graph paper).
This was D&D come to life. Ish. Kinda. It was a dungeon crawler, but it was also the inspiration for me to try to do my first 3d hidden-line removal, figure out the math to try to draw this sort of an exploration in BASIC.
And when Wolfenstein 3d came out there was the moment of "whoah, doing the perspective divide once per vertical scan line is brilliant", and when Doom came out it was like "yeah, whatever, BSP trees are cool and you still only have to do the perspective divide once per vertical scan line".
Whatever the issues with gameplay, or the fact that almost everyone who finished it used a sector editor on the saved game to give themselves buffs (or did the "flip open the floppy drive real quick if the party dies to keep it from saving the deaths" thing), this was a 3d virtual world on a microcomputer.