[Excerpt from Dungeons & Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games]
These first two games are great examples of how the early computer gaming industry was so much different from what we find later on. The Wizard's Castle, for instance, wasn't published on disk or cassette, but printed in a magazine. This practice, virtually unheard of today, was common in the days when removable storage media (e.g., cassettes and disks) were prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, since most computers had such limited supplies of memory, games were by necessity written in as few lines of code as possible. The upshot was that fully playable games could be inputted in a few hours even by a certified hunt-and-pecker. Besides, many people bought computers specifically to learn programming, and typing in games seemed like an easy way to pursue that goal. The Wizard's Castle, then, was just one of many of these games that were fun to play and helpful to aspiring CRPG developers (Figure 4.1).
Originally written by Joseph R. Power for Exidy's Sorcerer computer, The Wizard's Castle was ported to a variety of systems, a relatively easy feat since it was programmed in BASIC. It's a simple game, with no graphics and only a meager story. The player's character ("a bold youth") must descend into the subterranean castle of the gnomic wizard Zot to fetch the all-powerful Orb of Zot. Players choose a race (elf, dwarf, man, or hobbit) and gender, then allocate attribute points into three stats: strength, intelligence, and dexterity. They can then purchase armor, weapons, lamps, and flares. There are also magical items, such as a green gem that prevents memory loss, an opal eye that cures blindness, or manuals that permanently boost stats. Again, what's so impressive about this game is that all of this was crammed into 5,000 lines of code! [It was actually 341 lines of BASIC. -Beej] The game is survived today by a freeware version with sprite-based graphics, programmed by a man calling himself "Derelict" who also hosts the source code to the original game.
FIGURE 4.1 The Wizard's Castle is one of the earliest CRPGs for home computers. If you wanted to play it, you had to carefully transcribe it, line by line, from a computing magazine.
In an email exchange with us concerning his game, Power remarked that his first encounter with a CRPG was at a science fiction convention held in 1975. Power was presented with an obscure mainframe game named HOBBIT, which featured "minimal character creation" and a "messy" stat-based combat system. Power remembers playing the game via a printer terminal (there was no monitor display). Nevertheless, Power enjoyed the game and decided he wanted to make his own, though improving on the areas he found deficient.