[HN Gopher] Wizardry Co-Creator Andrew Greenberg Has Passed Away
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Wizardry Co-Creator Andrew Greenberg Has Passed Away
Author : homarp
Score : 145 points
Date : 2024-09-03 04:11 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.timeextension.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.timeextension.com)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There's a brief biography of Werdna, as Andrew was known, on
| Wikipedia:
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_C._Greenberg>
|
| He was also among the hackers featured in Steven Levy's _Hackers_
| , and was a regular attendee of the Hackers Convention which has
| occurred annually since the book's publication in 1986. This year
| marks the 39th occurrence:
|
| <https://www.hackersconference.org/>
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute...>
|
| His jump from programming to law (which he saw as a form of
| hacking) was also notable. During the 1990s he'd often be found
| correcting misapprehensions, and occasionally affirming
| understandings, of intellectual property law particularly as
| concerned Free Software licencing and patents.
|
| Edit: He was also a key developer, advocate, and enthusiast of
| the Squeak Smalltalk OOD language:
|
| <https://web.archive.org/web/20000818185735/http://www.gate.n...>
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeak>
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk>
|
| RIP, Werdna.
| wiz21c wrote:
| Wizardry was developped in Pascal (which at that time was not
| common at all IIRC)...
| sowbug wrote:
| Wizardry was prototyped in Applesoft BASIC using low-res
| graphics mode. In 1982 or 1983 I briefly had a copy on a 140KB
| floppy disk, but I foolishly erased it because I needed the
| space.
|
| I've found a couple other people who remember seeing the demo,
| but I don't know anyone who has it.
| dialup_sounds wrote:
| Three levels of nostalgia to choose from:
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/2518960/Wizardry_Proving_...
|
| https://www.wizardryarchives.com/downloadsw4.html
|
| https://archive.org/details/wizardry-proving-grounds-of-the-...
|
| RIP, Werdna
| jghn wrote:
| Speaking of nostalgia, I'm always on the lookout for a playable
| version of the Mac port. I've found a few of them over the
| years but never managed to get them to work.
|
| I don't even want to know how many hours I spent playing this
| in the mid-80s, and always liked the Mac port better than the
| PC one my friends had.
|
| The kicker is I _do_ have the original box & floppy, so it's
| "legal". I am skeptical that the disk still works and it's been
| almost 20 years since I had a floppy drive at all much less
| attached to a computer that could read this disk.
| shagie wrote:
| The Mac port was _really_ well done. I had played it on the
| Apple ][+ and Mac version (and now the Steam updated
| version). The thing with the Mac port is that it wasn 't
| _just_ a port but a reimplementation that was designed for
| the Mac UI of the day.
|
| https://www.macintoshrepository.org/5149-wizardry-proving-
| gr...
| jghn wrote:
| Hmm, I think this is one of the ones I've tried. Perhaps it
| was operator error, I'll have to give it another try. That
| version was soooo much better than other implementations I
| saw.
|
| If I had a windows machine instead the remake on Steam
| looks like it'd also be great to try but alas.
| shagie wrote:
| I'd have to check... it might be playable on Steam Deck
| and/or streamable to a Mac.
|
| While I've got an acceptable windows gaming machine so
| the Mac gets less play now, I did have a period of time
| where I had the Steam Deck and streamed the odd game to
| my Mac where I played it.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| If you do try to revive the floppies, be aware that most USB
| floppy drives can't read 400k and 800k Mac disks, so check a
| mac specific forum before buying one.
| jghn wrote:
| oh for sure it wouldn't have ever occurred to me that it
| could possibly work
| smrtinsert wrote:
| The Wizardry box was absolutely epic. I can feel its texture
| through that jpg.
| r721 wrote:
| PC Gamer story: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/andrew-
| greenberg-co-creato...
| radiowave wrote:
| I remember him from the Squeak Smalltalk mailing list, probably
| early 2000s. He wrote a set of bindings for the pcre regular
| expression library, which I used quite a bit, but which was never
| picked up for inclusion in Squeak (because pcre "isn't portable
| enough").
|
| And, with his intellectual property hat on, he was a regular
| source of advice to the Squeak community (none of it in an
| official capacity, he would hasten to add) as they worked through
| the process of relicensing from the original Squeak License to
| MIT.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'd totally forgotten about his Squeak work. Yes, he was
| absolutely and infectiously enthusiastic about that.
| unkeptbarista wrote:
| I had the pleasure of meeting (virtually) Andrew through his
| work with the Squeak community. I also ran into Robert Woodhead
| (also virtually) through the game StarWeb[1] which he played
| and contributed to[2].
|
| [1] http://www.rickloomispbm.com/starweb.html [2]
| https://www.madoverlord.com/wiki/doku.php/madoverlord:projec...
| zer0tonin wrote:
| Very sad, Wizardry is probably the most influent RPG ever made,
| alongside Ultima.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| 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.
| danschuller wrote:
| > 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!
| djur wrote:
| 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-av
| atar-1979...
| kleiba wrote:
| Final Fantasy?
| prepend wrote:
| Final Fantasy is awesome but it's 2-3 generations after
| wizardry and ultima.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| D&D
| louhike wrote:
| 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.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| 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.
| peterevans wrote:
| 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.
| djur wrote:
| 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!)
| JieJie wrote:
| Loved Wizardry.
|
| Before Wizardry, there was Akalabeth.
|
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Akalabeth:_World_of_Doom
| glimshe wrote:
| My Wizardry anthology CD is one of my most valued gaming
| possessions. RIP.
| agluszak wrote:
| I'm too young to have played the older games, but Wizardry 8 is
| one of my favorite games ever, comparable to Morrowind in the
| fascinating lore, music and general fun. I wish there was an open
| source reimplementation like OpenMW[1]. Perhaps, one day, I'll
| start writing one myself...
|
| 1 - https://openmw.org/
| shagie wrote:
| There's a faithful (mechanics) remake of the original on Steam
| - Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord . The original
| view is in the corner -
| https://shared.akamai.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/stea...
|
| The price tag is a bit high, but the nostalgia was worth it
| (for me).
| rout39574 wrote:
| Ooo... Did it include the I-9 easter egg?
| shagie wrote:
| There is no item number that way... so no.
|
| https://steamcommunity.com/app/2518960/discussions/0/718723
| 7...
| djur wrote:
| Wiz8 runs pretty well still. The GOG version even still has the
| computer builder ad on exiting. I think they got their money's
| worth, because I got curious enough to go to the website in the
| ad and they're still in business! Who knows, they might still
| get the occasional sale from that 20+ year old ad buy.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Wizardry taught me something very important about game design
| (from a player's perspective).
|
| Wizardry 6-7 were great from a perspective of becoming
| overpowered if you wanted to. What you did was get to level 6-8
| and then change classes. I forget the exact mechanics of this.
| But when you changed class you started weak so had to do 1
| character at a time from your party of 5. I doubt it was designe
| dthis way.
|
| Anyway, it was fun. It made you feel like you were beating the
| game. It made content trivial but I've come to learn that a ton
| of players like that. It's like seeing a weakness in the system,
| an unintended consequence and exploiting it.
|
| Wizardry 8 basically removed this and honestly I got bored of it
| really quickly as a result.
|
| Another way to look at this is that normalizing this made
| everything feel the same. It robbed me, as a player, of agency.
| It made my choices basically meaningless. It turned a more open
| world into a conveyor belt.
|
| I've seen this pattern play out in many games. Like I returned to
| GTA:SA to have fun shooting down helicopters taking advantages of
| bugs in police pathing depending on how you stood on a roof or
| creating massive pile ups and explosion chains on the freeway.
| GTA5 basically took the "fun" and comerical nature out of this
| aspect of the game and I basically never touched it again after
| the campaign.
|
| More generally, you could probably classify this under the banner
| of _emergent game play_ (not that "god mode" is particularly
| innovative). But emergent gameplay is both a sign of a well-
| designed game and what gives it longevity.
|
| Additionally, I miss the days where there were more turn-based
| games. They were just more chill. The only turn-based strategy
| game left is Civilization. Games like Elden Ring are great but
| just not my cup of tea. I miss the days of Bard's Tale, Master of
| Magic, Heroes of Might and Magic (2 and 3), the old D&D RPG games
| and so on.
|
| Anyway, RIP.
| justinclift wrote:
| > Like I returned to GTA:SA to have fun shooting down
| helicopters taking advantages of bugs in ...
|
| Did you ever play the early Saints Row series? ie 1-3
|
| Those were pretty fun. The later ones turned to crap though. :(
| distances wrote:
| Baldur's Gate 3 has turn-based combat, like D&D should have.
| The game sure has been praised everywhere already, but as I
| play almost exclusively turn-based games, I can confirm that it
| checked all my boxes. Absolutely superb game.
|
| I never played the Wizardry series myself, but I can see that
| Might & Magic 7: For Blood and Honor with its turn based combat
| is the title that defined for me what an RPG should feel like.
| bhouston wrote:
| Sir Tech was pretty formative in my professional development.
| Back then game development wasn't quite as
| professionalized/industrialized as it is now.
|
| My first job in the industry, back in high school in the mid
| 1990s, was as a part-time developer at Sir Tech Canada, working
| on Wizardry. They had a 20-ish person studio in Ottawa working on
| Jagged Alliance and Wizardry about 15 minute drive from where I
| was.
|
| How I got in: In high school I saw an ad posted in the local
| newspaper. Even though I was 17 I applied and got the job as a 3D
| graphics developer. I had used my work in the demo scene as my
| resume. I then dropped half of my courses so I could work half
| days at Sir Tech on Wizardry while finishing high school.
|
| We were using Windows NT 4 machines with Voodoo 3DFX graphics
| cards as our development machines. The beta of 3DS Max for
| Windows as the content creation package, although there was an
| SGI machine with Softimage on it as well. I personally was using
| Visual Studio with Direct3D 3 doing various experiments on how to
| render the 3D realistically while being fast.
|
| It wasn't the most successful internship personally, I was pretty
| green, a bit disconnected from the main development drive and
| didn't really know how to work in that environment, but it was
| still fun. The demos I created worked, but my larger system
| architecture was lacking. Besides meeting the original Sir Tech
| guys at a Christmas party in the US, I did see Brenda Romero
| (then Brathwaite) on a regular basis in the office as she was
| working on the script.
|
| It is a shame we didn't take more pictures back in the 1990s. I
| don't have any pictures of my time there or with anyone.
| DowagerDave wrote:
| >> It is a shame we didn't take more pictures back in the
| 1990s. I don't have any pictures of my time there or with
| anyone.
|
| I really appreciate your description and the picture it paints;
| it's a lot more work than taking a photograph. We take so many
| pics and videos these days that it can make the event or
| subject feel less valuable.
| djur wrote:
| That's a cool story. I kind of get the impression that Sir Tech
| in particular was always a little ramshackle, especially by
| that time. Wiz 8 was in production forever. Turned out cool,
| but a bit out of step with the time it was released.
| santoshalper wrote:
| Yeah, in spite of releasing some very important and
| reasonably popular games, I think Sir-Tech always kept the
| soul (and structure) of a small business.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > We were using Windows NT 4 machines with Voodoo 3DFX graphics
| cards as our development machines.
|
| I didn't realize the Voodoo was running on NT 4 but for
| CAD/3DS/etc I can see that being a thing. I remember trying to
| run Quake 2 on NT 4 (Dual P233 Tyan Tomcat IV w/128MB) but
| there was something that stopped me from doing so, think it was
| direct sound so no audio? Wasn't until Win 2k could I run games
| on an SMP machine.
| bhouston wrote:
| > I didn't realize the Voodoo was running on NT 4 but for
| CAD/3DS/etc I can see that being a thing.
|
| I may be incorrect about the Voodoo cards being in the NT 4
| machines, if that was a driver impossibility. I think 3DS Max
| required Windows NT at the time? I know there was a bunch of
| Voodoo cards in the office as well, but maybe those machines
| ran Windows 95.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Could be. I do remember there being OpenGL drivers for some
| cards running under NT for CAD stuff. I think the ATI 3D
| pro turbo I had had such drivers but I cant remember if I
| tried running Quake or whatever.
| bhouston wrote:
| On Wikipedia it says that 3DS Max version 1 was only
| supported on Windows NT 3.5 and 4, later coming to
| Windows 95 with version 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
| Autodesk_3ds_Max#Version_histo... So that makes sense
| with my recollection.
| homarp wrote:
| on wizardry, https://www.filfre.net/2012/03/making-wizardry/
|
| and https://www.filfre.net/2014/06/of-wizards-and-bards/
| mikeInAlaska wrote:
| My friends and I played Wizardry on an Apple II with a green
| screen for so long that it would blast out the green receptors in
| our eyes for a while afterwards, and everything would be pink
| hued.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| Can't begin to calculate how many hours I played Wizardy as a
| kid. I had snuck out of class and was playing Wizardy on the
| school's computer in the library when I saw the Challenger
| explode on lift off. RIP.
| dekhn wrote:
| Wziardry was one of the very first games I played on an Apple II,
| and I loved it immediately. Along with Ultima III, it spurred my
| obsession with computer graphics. One thing I remember about
| Wizardry is that it was fairly tough- I died constantly. Never
| really managed to get to a reasonable level, and then I found out
| about the bishop gold trick
| (https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Wizardry:_Proving_Grounds_of_t...)
|
| Once I had the resources I tried to "win" the game and still
| frequently got stuck because many of the levels had dark areas
| with teleporters which made mapping really hard.
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