Confidential to Atari Re: That Wizardry Purchase
Confidential to Atari Re: That Wizardry Purchase
A perfect use for that new property (in a literal sense of property).
By The LRG Team
News has come down the wire that Atari has purchased the rights to the original Wizardry series. That’s great. Limited Run has published Wizardry, and we’re friends with Atari.
And from what I’ve read, the rights to the early Wizardry games have been snarled up in a pretty messy tangle of uncertainty and confusion for as long as anyone can remember. Maybe they still are? But those early adventures helped define what role-playing games even are; we wouldn’t have Dragon Quest or Persona without Wizardry. So it would be nice if a single entity were to have a lock on their rights and could bring them back into circulation and help a modern audience develop a better understanding of (and appreciation for) those foundational RPGs seems like a win-win for everyone.
If you’ve never played Wizardry, well, it’s the foundational dungeon RPG series. Exploration plays out from a first-person viewpoint, interrupted by turn-based battles. Think Etrian Odyssey or Ray Gigant. Players venture into the dungeon, mapping out the passages and working their way downward, floor by floor. The original Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord contained 10 floors in total, one stacked atop the other, with monsters and hazards growing deadlier the further players descended.
Which got me to thinking: You know what else consists of a lot of floors stacked atop one another? Hotels. Like that other big Atari announcement from a few years ago, the Atari Hotel.
Credit: www.reddit.com/r/osr/
What I’m saying is that the Atari Hotel venture absolutely needs to cross over with the Atari Wizardry series, to create real-life role-playing dungeons. They’d need to do some fine-tuning with the concept, of course. Those pitfall trap floors are a lawsuit waiting to happen—if nothing else, a glaring OSHA violation for the poor beleaguered hotel staff. And let’s not forget the nuisance factor: Roaming hordes of undead warriors can’t smell great, which could eventually be a problem for guests on the non-dungeon floors. Especially in the summer.
But hey, that’s for the scientists to figure out. Or the realtors. Me, I’m just the ideas guy. And you have to admit, this one’s a corker. Just mind the poison damage tiles on your way to the ice machine.