Andrew Greenberg, co-creator of classic Wizardry series of computer RPGs with Robert Woodhead, is dead at 67. Among the most influential game designers, their 1981 hit defined an emerging genre and led to seven official sequels and countless spinoffs, homages, derivatives and competitors. No prizes for guessing where the evil wizard Werdna got his name.
Wizardry began as a simple dungeon crawl by Andrew C. Greenberg and Robert Woodhead. It was written when they were students at Cornell University and published by Sir-Tech. The game was influenced by earlier games from the PLATO system, most notably Oubliette. The earliest installments of Wizardry were very successful, as they were the first graphically-rich incarnations of Dungeons & Dragons-type gameplay for home computers. The release of the first version coincided with the first wave of Dungeons & Dragons' popularity in North America. … The first five games in the series were written in Apple Pascal, an implementation of UCSD Pascal. They were ported to many different platforms by writing UCSD Pascal implementations for the target machines.
There from the beginning. Wizardry was one of the earliest things I remember about games—a childhood door opening from print ads in 1980s computer mags. [via Time Extension]
