Sir Tech was pretty formative in my professional development. Back then game development wasn't quite as professionalized/industrialized as it is now.
My first job in the industry, back in high school in the mid 1990s, was as a part-time developer at Sir Tech Canada, working on Wizardry. They had a 20-ish person studio in Ottawa working on Jagged Alliance and Wizardry about 15 minute drive from where I was.
How I got in: In high school I saw an ad posted in the local newspaper. Even though I was 17 I applied and got the job as a 3D graphics developer. I had used my work in the demo scene as my resume. I then dropped half of my courses so I could work half days at Sir Tech on Wizardry while finishing high school.
We were using Windows NT 4 machines with Voodoo 3DFX graphics cards as our development machines. The beta of 3DS Max for Windows as the content creation package, although there was an SGI machine with Softimage on it as well. I personally was using Visual Studio with Direct3D 3 doing various experiments on how to render the 3D realistically while being fast.
It wasn't the most successful internship personally, I was pretty green, a bit disconnected from the main development drive and didn't really know how to work in that environment, but it was still fun. The demos I created worked, but my larger system architecture was lacking. Besides meeting the original Sir Tech guys at a Christmas party in the US, I did see Brenda Romero (then Brathwaite) on a regular basis in the office as she was working on the script.
It is a shame we didn't take more pictures back in the 1990s. I don't have any pictures of my time there or with anyone.
>> It is a shame we didn't take more pictures back in the 1990s. I don't have any pictures of my time there or with anyone.
I really appreciate your description and the picture it paints; it's a lot more work than taking a photograph. We take so many pics and videos these days that it can make the event or subject feel less valuable.
> We were using Windows NT 4 machines with Voodoo 3DFX graphics cards as our development machines.
I didn't realize the Voodoo was running on NT 4 but for CAD/3DS/etc I can see that being a thing. I remember trying to run Quake 2 on NT 4 (Dual P233 Tyan Tomcat IV w/128MB) but there was something that stopped me from doing so, think it was direct sound so no audio? Wasn't until Win 2k could I run games on an SMP machine.
> I didn't realize the Voodoo was running on NT 4 but for CAD/3DS/etc I can see that being a thing.
I may be incorrect about the Voodoo cards being in the NT 4 machines, if that was a driver impossibility. I think 3DS Max required Windows NT at the time? I know there was a bunch of Voodoo cards in the office as well, but maybe those machines ran Windows 95.
Could be. I do remember there being OpenGL drivers for some cards running under NT for CAD stuff. I think the ATI 3D pro turbo I had had such drivers but I cant remember if I tried running Quake or whatever.
That's a cool story. I kind of get the impression that Sir Tech in particular was always a little ramshackle, especially by that time. Wiz 8 was in production forever. Turned out cool, but a bit out of step with the time it was released.
Yeah, in spite of releasing some very important and reasonably popular games, I think Sir-Tech always kept the soul (and structure) of a small business.
I remember him from the Squeak Smalltalk mailing list, probably early 2000s. He wrote a set of bindings for the pcre regular expression library, which I used quite a bit, but which was never picked up for inclusion in Squeak (because pcre "isn't portable enough").
And, with his intellectual property hat on, he was a regular source of advice to the Squeak community (none of it in an official capacity, he would hasten to add) as they worked through the process of relicensing from the original Squeak License to MIT.
I had the pleasure of meeting (virtually) Andrew through his work with the Squeak community. I also ran into Robert Woodhead (also virtually) through the game StarWeb[1] which he played and contributed to[2].
Wizardry taught me something very important about game design (from a player's perspective).
Wizardry 6-7 were great from a perspective of becoming overpowered if you wanted to. What you did was get to level 6-8 and then change classes. I forget the exact mechanics of this. But when you changed class you started weak so had to do 1 character at a time from your party of 5. I doubt it was designe dthis way.
Anyway, it was fun. It made you feel like you were beating the game. It made content trivial but I've come to learn that a ton of players like that. It's like seeing a weakness in the system, an unintended consequence and exploiting it.
Wizardry 8 basically removed this and honestly I got bored of it really quickly as a result.
Another way to look at this is that normalizing this made everything feel the same. It robbed me, as a player, of agency. It made my choices basically meaningless. It turned a more open world into a conveyor belt.
I've seen this pattern play out in many games. Like I returned to GTA:SA to have fun shooting down helicopters taking advantages of bugs in police pathing depending on how you stood on a roof or creating massive pile ups and explosion chains on the freeway. GTA5 basically took the "fun" and comerical nature out of this aspect of the game and I basically never touched it again after the campaign.
More generally, you could probably classify this under the banner of emergent game play (not that "god mode" is particularly innovative). But emergent gameplay is both a sign of a well-designed game and what gives it longevity.
Additionally, I miss the days where there were more turn-based games. They were just more chill. The only turn-based strategy game left is Civilization. Games like Elden Ring are great but just not my cup of tea. I miss the days of Bard's Tale, Master of Magic, Heroes of Might and Magic (2 and 3), the old D&D RPG games and so on.
Baldur's Gate 3 has turn-based combat, like D&D should have. The game sure has been praised everywhere already, but as I play almost exclusively turn-based games, I can confirm that it checked all my boxes. Absolutely superb game.
I never played the Wizardry series myself, but I can see that Might & Magic 7: For Blood and Honor with its turn based combat is the title that defined for me what an RPG should feel like.
Shameless confession: I once completed Wizardry 7 with a single character, from start to finish. I remember the start was very hard, but once I survived the first few fights character development skyrocketed and eventually it became a semi-god of sorts. This was because originally the XP after fights was distributed among party members, so in a regular game every character would normally receive only XP/6. It happened quite regularly that a single fight bumped my character to the next level! IIRC I finished the game with my character having level ~120, after a number of class changes. Fun times! Can't remember how I had so much free time in my life though - I must have still been in high school or uni...
On the Mac version of Wiz 1 somehow I rolled a ninja out of the gate, which shouldn't be possible. Because I was in 4th grade and had nothing better to do I remember sitting there for hours re-rolling and re-rolling to see how high I could get and one moment saying "holy shit!".
Fast forward a bit and I had acquired a shuriken. Which if a ninja equips it, they gain a HP. Except that there was no limit to how many times you could do that. So again, because I was in the 4th grade and had nothing better to do, I sat there for hours equipping/un-equipping it to the point where eventually my ninja had hundreds of HP.
Fast forward another bit and I figured out how to duplicate a character. And from that point on my party was fronted by 3 god tier ninjas. Not a surprise that this was my first party where I managed to beat werdna.
Almost all of these are strategy games. Two that I’ve put a lot of hours into in the last year or two are slipways and slay the spire, but there are really a lot coming out all the time.
My friends and I played Wizardry on an Apple II with a green screen for so long that it would blast out the green receptors in our eyes for a while afterwards, and everything would be pink hued.
Oh man. I never noticed that, but played many many hours in the same hardware. Remember how you could tell if you’d be getting more than merely gold after a fight based on the Disk II sounds?
He was also among the hackers featured in Steven Levy's Hackers, and was a regular attendee of the Hackers Convention which has occurred annually since the book's publication in 1986. This year marks the 39th occurrence:
His jump from programming to law (which he saw as a form of hacking) was also notable. During the 1990s he'd often be found correcting misapprehensions, and occasionally affirming understandings, of intellectual property law particularly as concerned Free Software licencing and patents.
Edit: He was also a key developer, advocate, and enthusiast of the Squeak Smalltalk OOD language:
i shared a room with him at hackers one year, didn't actually get to speak with him because our sleep schedules were misaligned, but sharing the room did prompt me to read about wizardry and his career. i was sad to see the news of his passing here today; rip.
It also had an antecedent; Wizardry was very much like a single-player version of Avatar, an early multiplayer dungeon game that ran on the University of Illinois PLATO system. The cube-like "rooms," displays, and game mechanics were very similar. I don't recall the controls being the same, though, and Avatar was written in PLATO's native TUTOR language, while Wizardry was UCSD Pascal.
> There was a game on the PLATO network (circa '79 or '80) called "Oubliette" that nearly caused me to flunk out of law school. [...] Wizardry was in many ways our attempt to see if we could write a single-player game as cool as the PLATO dungeon games and cram it into a tiny machine like the Apple II.
The CRPG Addict blog has done a great job reviewing the PLATO games from a seasoned player's perspective, and he touches on some of the inspiration for Wizardry.
The original magic system from Final Fantasy 1 (you can only cast N spells per magic level, maximum of 9) is a copy of the system from Wizardry. The only difference you have to type the spell name to cast it in Wizardry, and you get a menu in Final Fantasy.
The FF1 spell list is more directly derived from D&D, though. It even has the Power Words. The sense I've gotten from reading about the development of FF is that the dev team had varied experience with existing RPGs, so the game ended up as a mixture of derivative and original ideas. (The face-to-face side view in combat was apparently inspired by football!)
Dragon Quest (which came before Final Fantasy and inspired it) took inspiration from Wizardry. Most RPG from the 80s were inspired by Wizardry. It had huge influences.
JRPGs especially! Wizardry as a series remained popular in Japan well after its popularity faded in the west. You can see games taking the general first-person dungeon crawling style straight from Wizardry in some late-90s JRPGs like the King's Field series. I think the Wizardry series itself is still going in Japan, as well.
I'm too young to have played the older games, but Wizardry 8 is one of my favorite games ever, comparable to Morrowind in the fascinating lore, music and general fun. I wish there was an open source reimplementation like OpenMW[1]. Perhaps, one day, I'll start writing one myself...
For those not aware of it, the Japanese PSX port of the original Wizardry in the late 90s(?) is also an incredible option to go back and replay these gems. Has options for quality of life features, new graphics or original, despite being a Japan only release there's an option to use the original English text for everything.
And it's got the first 3 games on one single disc with very straightforward party import/export features, so you can play through them with the same party as intended. Finding a CD .iso to emulate it is fairly easy nowadays and the games still hold up great.
Wiz8 runs pretty well still. The GOG version even still has the computer builder ad on exiting. I think they got their money's worth, because I got curious enough to go to the website in the ad and they're still in business! Who knows, they might still get the occasional sale from that 20+ year old ad buy.
Wziardry was one of the very first games I played on an Apple II, and I loved it immediately. Along with Ultima III, it spurred my obsession with computer graphics. One thing I remember about Wizardry is that it was fairly tough- I died constantly. Never really managed to get to a reasonable level, and then I found out about the bishop gold trick (https://strategywiki.org/wiki/Wizardry:_Proving_Grounds_of_t...)
Once I had the resources I tried to "win" the game and still frequently got stuck because many of the levels had dark areas with teleporters which made mapping really hard.
Wizardry was prototyped in Applesoft BASIC using low-res graphics mode. In 1982 or 1983 I briefly had a copy on a 140KB floppy disk, but I foolishly erased it because I needed the space.
I've found a couple other people who remember seeing the demo, but I don't know anyone who has it.
Can't begin to calculate how many hours I played Wizardy as a kid. I had snuck out of class and was playing Wizardy on the school's computer in the library when I saw the Challenger explode on lift off. RIP.
Speaking of nostalgia, I'm always on the lookout for a playable version of the Mac port. I've found a few of them over the years but never managed to get them to work.
I don't even want to know how many hours I spent playing this in the mid-80s, and always liked the Mac port better than the PC one my friends had.
The kicker is I do have the original box & floppy, so it's "legal". I am skeptical that the disk still works and it's been almost 20 years since I had a floppy drive at all much less attached to a computer that could read this disk.
The Mac port was really well done. I had played it on the Apple ][+ and Mac version (and now the Steam updated version). The thing with the Mac port is that it wasn't just a port but a reimplementation that was designed for the Mac UI of the day.
Hmm, I think this is one of the ones I've tried. Perhaps it was operator error, I'll have to give it another try. That version was soooo much better than other implementations I saw.
If I had a windows machine instead the remake on Steam looks like it'd also be great to try but alas.
I'd have to check... it might be playable on Steam Deck and/or streamable to a Mac.
While I've got an acceptable windows gaming machine so the Mac gets less play now, I did have a period of time where I had the Steam Deck and streamed the odd game to my Mac where I played it.
... I checked. It's ok on a Steam Deck, not great, but ok. It streams perfectly to a Mac and is quite playable on the Mac in that way. So, if you've got one, it works.
If you do try to revive the floppies, be aware that most USB floppy drives can't read 400k and 800k Mac disks, so check a mac specific forum before buying one.
My first job in the industry, back in high school in the mid 1990s, was as a part-time developer at Sir Tech Canada, working on Wizardry. They had a 20-ish person studio in Ottawa working on Jagged Alliance and Wizardry about 15 minute drive from where I was.
How I got in: In high school I saw an ad posted in the local newspaper. Even though I was 17 I applied and got the job as a 3D graphics developer. I had used my work in the demo scene as my resume. I then dropped half of my courses so I could work half days at Sir Tech on Wizardry while finishing high school.
We were using Windows NT 4 machines with Voodoo 3DFX graphics cards as our development machines. The beta of 3DS Max for Windows as the content creation package, although there was an SGI machine with Softimage on it as well. I personally was using Visual Studio with Direct3D 3 doing various experiments on how to render the 3D realistically while being fast.
It wasn't the most successful internship personally, I was pretty green, a bit disconnected from the main development drive and didn't really know how to work in that environment, but it was still fun. The demos I created worked, but my larger system architecture was lacking. Besides meeting the original Sir Tech guys at a Christmas party in the US, I did see Brenda Romero (then Brathwaite) on a regular basis in the office as she was working on the script.
It is a shame we didn't take more pictures back in the 1990s. I don't have any pictures of my time there or with anyone.