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| Wizardy:Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord for PC |
My school had one of the first advanced computer labs I encountered anywhere, and it seemed impossibly futuristic in the early 1980s. It also happened to contain enough serious computer nerds—several of whom later went on to successful careers in technology—to make what happened in that room considerably more interesting in retrospect.
Most days I ate lunch as quickly as possible and headed for the gym to shoot baskets. But every once in a while I'd wander upstairs to the computer lab to see what everyone was doing.
Usually, they were playing Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.
Calling it "playing" might be generous. These guys had already figured out how to alter the game. Characters that were supposed to claw their way upward one miserable level at a time had been transformed into 100th-level demigods with thousands of hit points. Long before I understood much about computers, I was watching teenagers treat a commercial computer game less like a finished product than a system they were free to investigate, manipulate and rewrite.
That may be the part that interests me most now. We tend to remember those early computer games for their primitive graphics and brutal difficulty, but the computers themselves invited curiosity. You didn't merely consume what was on the screen. If you knew enough—or were willing to learn enough—you could get underneath it and start changing things.
Even with their absurdly enhanced characters, though, I seem to remember that they still had to slog through the endless wire-frame corridors of the maze to reach Werdna, the evil wizard waiting at the bottom.
Apparently even cheating had its limits.
Looking back, perhaps it shouldn't surprise me that some of the kids who spent their lunch periods doing this eventually made careers in computers and technology. I mostly watched from the sidelines before going back downstairs to shoot baskets. But Wizardry remains one of my earliest memories of seeing people interact with computers not as mysterious machines, but as things that could be understood, altered, and made to do what you wanted.
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