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Comment by zer0tonin | Hacker News Reader

Very sad, Wizardry is probably the most influent RPG ever made, alongside Ultima.

It also had an antecedent; Wizardry was very much like a single-player version of Avatar, an early multiplayer dungeon game that ran on the University of Illinois PLATO system. The cube-like "rooms," displays, and game mechanics were very similar. I don't recall the controls being the same, though, and Avatar was written in PLATO's native TUTOR language, while Wizardry was UCSD Pascal.

> There was a game on the PLATO network (circa '79 or '80) called "Oubliette" that nearly caused me to flunk out of law school. [...] Wizardry was in many ways our attempt to see if we could write a single-player game as cool as the PLATO dungeon games and cram it into a tiny machine like the Apple II.

https://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23752&cid=2567054

Oubliette (https://howtomakeanrpg.com/r/l/g/oubliette.html) was a precursor to Avatar, so it goes a little further back than even that!

The CRPG Addict blog has done a great job reviewing the PLATO games from a seasoned player's perspective, and he touches on some of the inspiration for Wizardry.

Oubliette: https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2013/10/game-12-oubliette-19...

Avatar: https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2013/11/game-124-avatar-1979...

Loved Wizardry.

Before Wizardry, there was Akalabeth.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Akalabeth:_World_of_Doom

Final Fantasy?

Final Fantasy is awesome but it’s 2-3 generations after wizardry and ultima.

D&D

Dragon Quest (which came before Final Fantasy and inspired it) took inspiration from Wizardry. Most RPG from the 80s were inspired by Wizardry. It had huge influences.

JRPGs especially! Wizardry as a series remained popular in Japan well after its popularity faded in the west. You can see games taking the general first-person dungeon crawling style straight from Wizardry in some late-90s JRPGs like the King's Field series. I think the Wizardry series itself is still going in Japan, as well.

The original magic system from Final Fantasy 1 (you can only cast N spells per magic level, maximum of 9) is a copy of the system from Wizardry. The only difference you have to type the spell name to cast it in Wizardry, and you get a menu in Final Fantasy.

The FF1 spell list is more directly derived from D&D, though. It even has the Power Words. The sense I've gotten from reading about the development of FF is that the dev team had varied experience with existing RPGs, so the game ended up as a mixture of derivative and original ideas. (The face-to-face side view in combat was apparently inspired by football!)

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