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The dungeon crawler that taught Japan how to make RPGs and made permadeath feel personal.
Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead created Wizardry as a first-person dungeon crawler inspired by Dungeons and Dragons. Players assembled a party of six adventurers and explored a 10-level dungeon beneath the mad wizard Trebor's castle. Character death was permanent unless you could afford resurrection at the temple, and even that could fail, turning your character to ash. The game was brutally unforgiving but deeply strategic, with a class system, spell slots, and equipment management that rewarded careful planning. It sold over 200,000 copies on the Apple II alone.
Example
The teleporter traps on deeper dungeon levels could send your entire party into solid rock, killing everyone instantly with no save backup. Players who had spent dozens of hours building their party could lose everything to a single wrong step. This was considered a feature, not a bug.
Why it matters
Wizardry's influence on Japanese game development cannot be overstated. Both Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy were explicitly inspired by it. The dungeon-crawling RPG subgenre it created thrives in Japan to this day. Its party-based combat, class systems, and permadeath stakes became RPG cornerstones worldwide.
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