Andrew C. Greenberg, co-creator of the foundational Wizardry sequence of RPGs, has died on the age of 67. The information was shared to Facebook by his collaborator on Wizardry, Robert Woodhead, and likewise to Twitter by developer and sport design professor David Mullich.
It’s arduous to overstate Greenberg and Woodhead’s affect on RPGs and PC gaming. Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was one of many first recognizable RPGs you may play on a house pc, a translation of tabletop RPGs and the video games developed for the mighty PLATO mainframes current on faculty campuses on the time to the common-or-garden Apple II.
Wizardry was among the many first—if not the very first—RPGs to provide you management of a complete get together of characters, every with distinct strengths and weaknesses. Wizardry tasked gamers with exploring a sprawling, wireframe labyrinth in first particular person, at all times looking out for secret doorways, traps, and difficult enemies. At the underside of the dungeon, gamers would discover the titular “Mad Overlord” Werdna—Andrew spelled backwards. Greenberg appears to have carried the playful moniker with him lengthy after leaving the video games business, utilizing it for a private e mail and the username of a YouTube channel he used to doc the event of a bowling scorecard program.
Wizardry and the competing Ultima sequence would show immensely standard all through the Eighties, with Wizardry and its sequels getting ports to the foremost private computer systems of the period just like the Commodore 64 and MS DOS PCs. One stunning consequence was Wizardrys’ affect in Japan, the place it has had an much more enduring reputation and impressed the invention of the JRPG as we all know it. Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii has lengthy cited Wizardry as a major inspiration, and in a 2022 tweet about assembly Robert Woodhead for the primary time, Horii wrote, “When I feel again, it began 40 years in the past once I bought actually into Wizardry.”
After co-creating the Star Saga video games in 1988 and ’89, Greenberg in the end left the video games business to follow regulation, first specializing in mental property regulation in Florida earlier than changing into the final counsel of renewable vitality firm Xslent. However, an archived snapshot of Greenberg’s private web site, in addition to his YouTube channel, present that he by no means deserted his curiosity in pc programming. According to a letter from Greenberg shared to a Wizardry fan web site in 1999, he married Wizardry playtester Sheila McDonald, they usually had two kids collectively.
Andrew Greenberg left the video games business a really very long time in the past, however his affect can nonetheless be felt in every little thing from Baldur’s Gate to Persona. You can expertise Greenberg’s work on Wizardry extra straight through Digital Eclipse’s current remaster of the primary sport, which took enter from the Wizardry’s creators, and likewise features a picture-in-picture view of the unique’s 1-bit graphics.
