Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 162: Wizardry - Podcast Chat of the Mad Overlord

Episode Date: July 30, 2018

Jeremy talks to Wizardry programmer Robert Woodhead about the history and inspirations behind his influential all-time role-playing classic.

Hey folks, it's that time again, time for a live Retronaut Show. I'll be heading up to Long Island Retro Gaming Expo at the cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, New York, to talk about the history of Capcom Super Joe, star of Commando and Bionic Commando, live with the guys from Hardcore Gaming 101. Come see us Saturday, August 11th, and stick around afterwards for an evening meetup. Hope to see you there. This week in Retronauts, Conversations with the Mad Overlord. Everyone and welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish, as usual.

And with me this week, we have a very special guest, one, Mr. Robert Woodhead, the programmer of wizardry. and, you know, entrepreneur of other provenances as well. Good afternoon or good morning or good evening, depending on where you are. So, Robert, thanks very much for coming on to the show this week. I'd love to talk to you about not just wizardry, but about, you know, kind of the place that game has in video game history and about, you know, your influences, your inspirations, and kind of where you went beyond wizardry. Okay. Well, I'm glad to be here.

So, yeah, I gave the very, very general introduction for you, but I don't know if you'd like to maybe explain a little more about kind of your career and maybe give sort of the high level view of that just to familiarize some of our audience with the work you've done and kind of the games you've created. Well, I guess the way I usually explain it is that my career has basically always been doing weird things with computers. In the early 80s, I wrote computer games. I wrote antivirus software a little later. In the late 80s, I started going to Japan a lot and ended up founding one of the first anime releasing companies, Animago, which is still puttering along to this day. I've done basically just a lot of very strange things, often, you know, for bizarre reasons that seem like good ideas at the time.

And I basically just blindly stumble around trying to find interesting things to do. How did you land on programming in the first place? That happened in high school. I found a book in the library called 101 Basic Computer Games, which is one of the seminal books along with, there were another couple of books, but that was one of these seminal books about computer programming that was sort of just generally available.

And I got interested in it. And there was just one minor problem. There were no computers. In 1975, there were no PCs. And by accident, I happened to learn that a local college, about 30 miles away from my house, had a computer. and the only reason I learned this is because that's where I had to go to take the PSATs and just blindly by accident found out about this. And one of the things I've learned in life is, and that I've always told my kids,

is if you don't ask, you don't get. So one of the luckiest things I ever did in my life was I asked, can I come and use this computer, this high school. kid went to the college and basically asked. And the guy who ran the computer said, I don't care so long as you do it on weekends when nobody else is here. But I was like 15 years old, 14, 15 years old. So there was this minor problem of, you know, how do I get there? My mother would drive up to the college in the morning, drop me off, drive back home, and then drive up in the evening to pick me up and drive back home. So like 120 miles a day. And she did it usually both

Saturdays and Sundays for my entire, for about 18 months while I was finishing up high school. And that gave me the opportunity to play around first with a PDP-8E, which was one of the standard mini-computers of the day. And later, via a teletype, 110 bits per second, to an early time-sharing system, the Dartmouth time-sharing system. And that's where I got my early exposure to commuter programming. And then I went off to school at Cornell in 1976, and there they actually had computers that I got a chance to use.

Admittedly, punch cards and all the old Stone Age, stone knives and bearskins type of stuff. But that's where I got my first serious academic exposure to computing. And also, Cornell was one of the few colleges in the country that had something that was very, very special. And they had two Plato terminals. And Plato is one of the great sort of unsung heroes of computing and gaming. Because Plato was basically where everything you love about the Internet was invented between 1970 and 1975.

So Plato, is that like a programming language, or is it a computer system? Plato was a nationwide computer system. It was run on what, for the time, was a supercomputer, a cyber CDC 6600, and it supported hundreds of terminals around the country. now these terminals and remember this is early 70s they had 512 by 512 bitmap graphics they had a plasma screen in fact the plasma display terminal display screen was invented at plato they had touch panels they could even project microfiche through the display and it was created and its ostensible purpose was for computer teaching. In fact, it stood, Plato stood for

programmed logic for automated teaching operations. It was designed to help people write software to teach things. In fact, Plato programs were called lessons. But what ended up happening, the unintended consequences of that was that because all these terminals were networked together and they had very low latency, like less than a tenth of a second round-trip latency, they generated a social community. And that expressed itself not only in things like message boards and chat. and those kind of social things, but also in games. So Plato ended up, the people who wrote games on Plato,

which, by the way, were multiplayer games, you could play with people all over the country. They ended up being the first people who were able to address some of the important problems, computer gaming, you know, game balance, you know, putting multiple people together, synchronization, you know, the social aspects of gaming, especially PVP gaming. They were the first people who had a chance to really experiment with those. and that ended up being hugely influential, not only to me, but basically to a huge number of people

who were active in the early PC gaming industry, Mitch Kippur of Lotus, Plato person, Silas Warner, Kessel Wolfenstein, Plato person. The list goes on and on, and Andy Greenberg and I, who wrote Wizardry, were just two more of those people. Yeah, I really appreciate you giving some more context to Plato because it's something that I've read about a lot and heard about a lot but never really had the importance of it

explained. The way you describe it kind of strikes me the way people describe Xerox Park in the early 80s, like this just kind of like this incubator for great ideas and visionary technology that would kind of disseminate into the mainstream and become just part of our lives nowadays.

Yeah, I cannot emphasize enough how important Plato was for the development, I guess I would call it of social computing, of the idea of people using computers in groups, people interacting over a computer, as opposed to somebody using a computer to solve their particular problem. And that, of course, was totally unintended. The original idea was just, you know, we want to provide lessons. Like, we want to provide an interactive lesson on genetics, so we'll let you breed flute fries on the screen with graphics, which is one of the sort of standard lessons people would demonstrate to show what Plato could do.

And you could just, like, you know, touch the two flies you wanted to breed and see what their offspring would be like. So that's what they wanted to do with it. You know, what it ended up showing people how to do was something way more than that. And that's one of the, I think, most important lessons is that sometimes the unintended consequences, the sort of like things that you would never think about going in tend to be the most important products of a particular project. Yeah, I feel like people, anytime they come across

new technology, one of the first things they want to do is make games out of it. No, porn. First porn than games. I don't know if there was porn on Plato, but... I'll neither confirm nor did not. Okay, so the second thing they want to do is make games. And, you know, something like Oregon Trail emerged out of this

teletype system, which was supposed to be for education, but it became something that was a fun way to learn and it evolved into a game, and that's still making the rounds. They just came out with, I don't know if you've seen that, the little handheld, yeah, that you get a target, it's great. And it's crazy because that game was designed, what,

40, 45 years ago, maybe longer than that, I can't remember the exact date, but it's been, you know, it's decades old and it's still like this, this fun idea that people can pick up and play. So I, yeah, I don't know. I have always enjoyed that aspect of the way technology

and gaming develop in tandem. You mentioned the fact that you, you know, you mentioned the fact that, you know, video games, or not video games, but computers were so hard to come by. The idea of computers as a scarce resource, I think, is something that's really alien to the modern world. I'm, I'm just old enough that I remember when computers were starting to show up and, you know, like one in every school or something like that. But yeah, before that, it's, it's really interesting that you would be drawn to programming despite the fact that you didn't have really a means to make use of that interest, make use of that skill. Like, what made you interested in

in seeking that out. I don't think you really spoke to that. If it was just like a, like just some innate fascination, or if you saw, you know, the potential there for something more? I think it appealed to the way I think. One of the nice things about computer programming is you get to, like, completely control something, you know, you, or at least you have the illusion of control.

control. And, you know, especially for somebody, you know, I was kind of socially isolated and very awkward when I was young, still am to a certain extent. And, you know, there's so many things that are not in your control, but here is something that can be. So I think that spoke to me. And, you know, I you know, computers were not available, but they were a known quantity. You know, I was a child of the 60s, so, you know, I grew up with the space race. I was a huge space fan. And so, you know, that was something that informed my interest in technology. I think if I had been born 100 years earlier, I would.

would have definitely ended up being some sort of like an engineer messing around with steam engines or something. Just the computer stuff was the kind of unusual, interesting thing that turned out

to be available to me just at the right time. And I basically just lucked into it. Like if the librarian at the local library hadn't like had some strange like twist in her mind or like I don't know maybe she didn't drink her coffee

one morning and you know didn't play if she hadn't placed an order for that book we wouldn't be having this conversation so once you got to Dartmouth how long did it take before you started you know making your own projects on on Plato and creating your own you know original works or was it was it more like a collaborative sort of thing Well, first of all, I went to Cornell. Oh, sorry, sorry. Dartmouth was the time sharing system. Right, right, remotely.

Sorry, I got that mixed up. That's okay. Well, I was definitely playing around on the local Cornell systems. Mostly, at least for the first few years, I was taking as many computer science courses as I could. Cornell had a computer science department, but no computer science degree at the time. So I was doing math and computer science. I ended up getting my degree of all things in psychology. In terms of messing around on Plato, I, you know, really got addicted to Plato, as did many people.

And basically, in fact, it affected my grades significantly. The summer of 1977, I actually went to summer school in the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, which is where Plato was located. That was where their central thing was, and basically messed around on Plato for the summer. It's where I wrote my first assembly language program. It's where I watch Star Wars, the year Star Wars came out, first show. You went to the first show in Urbana of Star Wars, the matinee, and the place was a third empty, you know, third full, something like that, because nobody had any clue. Yeah, I've heard it took a while for that to kind of catch on, but being a space fan, I'm assuming

you were key to it. Well, I was a science fiction fan. Right, right. But if you've ever seen the original true. trailer for Star Wars that you've seen it. It's awful, isn't it? It's terrible. I would not go see that movie. Yeah. It's like, so we basically only hardcore science fiction fans went to the first show. But the story I tell about it is that, you know, so like we're just sitting in there and then that the little blockade runner comes

over and we go, wow, that's actually really cool. And then the starter story comes over. Draws dropping as Holy fuck Oh, this is What's the language level on the show? I mean, don't go full blue The occasional obscenity is okay So at the end of the first show

Basically everybody Pretty much ran out and formed two lines One was at the box office to get tickets to see it again The other was at the pay phones Remember those things? It was the pay phones to like call People always say, you have to come and see this movie. And then, like, by the evening shows, it was lines around the block.

That's awesome. Yeah. So that was kind of a little bit of a digression. Yeah, well, anyway. But that's okay. You cannot nerd about Star Wars and Star Trek. I mean, yeah, yeah. Star Wars was one of the first movies I ever saw.

I saw, you know, when it reintered theaters, I think, in the early 80s, and they added episode four, like I saw it in a drive-thru with my parents when I was maybe like four years old, five years old. And, uh, yeah, like I still remember, you know, vague little flashes of that drive-thru or drive-in theater screen, the Jawa sand crawler and that sort of thing. Like kind of a, a very memorable, formative experience there. Yeah. I'm sure that's why I'm here right now talking to you. Yeah. So you said that you started messing around with, with Plato stuff. And, um, I don't think we actually got to the point where you are creating your own programs. No, I wouldn't say I was creating my own programs.

I was definitely experimenting with stuff. I was seeing what other people were doing and wondering, like, how the heck did they do that? But although I was programming at that time and I was, you know, stumbling around trying to learn the craft, I wouldn't say that I was doing anything really significant. I was more of a player. You know, I was definitely, you know, wanting to learn things and, you know, making some stumbling first steps. But I didn't, I don't think I really became a real games programmer other than just doing some simple experiments until personal computers came out. So what was the first personal computer that you owned or at least had access to on a regular basis?

I had a TRS 80. I was actually at the time working at one of the first computer stores, Computer Land in Ithaca writing accounting software, business software for them. And I really wanted an Apple too, but I couldn't afford one. So when I was home at Christmas, I think maybe like junior year, there was a local radio shack that had a TRS 80 and they didn't know what to do with it. They didn't really want it because it was like taking off space. And so I got it at a really good price. And when I got back to college, I proudly told my boss.

I had gotten a computer that I had gotten a TRS 80, and he fired me. He likened it to a Ford salesman driving into work in a Chevy. I actually got a job within like a few days at the college doing computer programming for a really wonderful professor and of all places, the hotel school. It turned out the hotel school was doing a lot of pretty innovative work in computers because Because hotels were one of the first industries to really start using computers big time. And so he was doing a lot of research on computer systems for hotels. And I got a job with him for more money, which was especially sweet, being a teaching assistant for him.

Okay. So basically once you had your TRS-80, then you pretty much had open access to, you know, computing. I'm assuming before that it was, you know, shared systems and that sort of thing. Yeah, I had it in my dorm. Right. So I feel like that probably opened up a lot of horizons. Yeah, I mean, I started doing my own implementations to some of the classic games. I started thinking about like, How could I do some of the Play-Doh games on the stinky little computer? Like, you know, how would that style of game work on a TRS-A-D-home computer? I ended up, the first professional product I released was a little tape that had 15 games for $15. And it was, it was basically Tier S-80 implementations of all the, all the classics, you know, mug-wump,

and I think there was a reversy game in there and stuff like that. And that actually, you know, sold a few copies. I was, I was pleasant, I was very surprised. I didn't think, I thought maybe I'd sell like two or three of them. I think I sold a couple of hundred. It's great. In terms of capabilities, how much were you scaling down the Plato system to fit onto TRSA? What's the ratio?

Are we talking orders of magnitude here? Well, it's complicated because Plato was a shared system. I would say you had much less memory and resources, but probably equivalent amounts of computational power. You didn't have the graphics that Plato had. Play of 512 by 512 pixels. Nobody saw that again until, you know, the Mac. Right. I mean, it literally, actually, the Mac was only 512 by 342.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It was like half that size or half the vertical resolution. So there were definite limitations. And, of course, the big thing was that in Plato, you could do multiplayer. I mean, it's, it had this natural way. way of allowing different people to share memory in the side of the same program. They had a thing called common memory, which was common to everybody,

and everybody could read and write it. And the other cute thing they did was the way the time sharing was done. There was a very natural and easy way to basically do semaphores. You could guarantee exclusive access to particular bits of memory. I have a sneaking suspicion that many of the improvements in Plato that were done during the early 70s were done basically because some guy who's writing a game needed it. And he went and talked to the system programmers and said, you know, it would be really nice. And the system programmers, of course, all playing the games would then go and implement it. So how did you go from converting, you know, Reverse and Hunt the Wumpus to T.R.S.80 to,

wizardry? Like, what's the chain of evolution there? And how do you go from, you know, point A to point B? Well, at the end of the first semester of my senior year, Cornell asked if I might want to take a little time off because of low grades. Actually, they were pretty firm about it. So I, which you can imagine, my mother was not amused. So I had to spend the next year sleeping on my mom's couch. Now, my father had died just before I went to college. And he had an industrial company that produced resin-coated sand, which is an industrial material

that's used to make the molds, which mold of metal is poured in, to make castings. And my mother took over the business and brought in a partner, a guy named Fred Siratak. And Fred had another business that produced these little commemorative, it was called commemorative gifts, And they produced spoons and other things that were like engraved, you know, the handles were engraved, things like that. And he needed, he decided he needed to computerize his inventory because they had like hundreds of different spoons they had to keep track off. And so my mother volunteered me for the job of doing this since I was doing, I was sitting, you know, I was lying on her couch all day long, feeling very sorry for myself. So we went off and got an Apple 2. And we got an Apple 2.

It had the memory card, so it had 64K. We got the Pascal because I was familiar with Pascal from Cornell because Pascal was used there. A couple of just drives. and so I set to work doing this inventory system for him. And in my spare time, of course, I've now got a computer, the computer, so I start messing around with experimenting with the games. And the actual, actually, the first thing I did was I did a, I did a, I started playing around with data structures to learn a little bit more about the Pascal implementation.

I ended up producing this kind of tree-structured database program called InfoTree, which we ended up calling Infotree. And so Fred had two sons, Rob and Norm, and somehow they found out I was doing this, and Somebody had the idea, like, why don't we try and sell this? So we ended up selling, you know, in the little zip-lock bag type of thing, the database program, and actually sold, again, you know, several hundred copies, which, you know, I was very surprised. And then somebody had the idea of doing a game. because they, you know, games had started come up for the Apple II, and, you know, after hours, a lot of the computer time on the Apple II was being used for them and said, well, why can't we do this? I don't, I don't for the life of remember whose idea it was.

So I started thinking about it, and I thought, like, you know, what game do I want to write? and I'd like to write a space game and one of my favorite games on Plato was a game called Empire which is just like one of the most amazing games ever done.

I mean, to my mind, it's still, to this day, holds up. It's a tremendous tactical, strategic space war game, multiplayer. And I love that game.

so I thought to myself how could you ever do this on on like this little dinky apple too and I started playing around with it learning how the graphics worked and I realized I couldn't do a multiplayer game so I need to do a single player game

so So I said to myself, well, if this was a single-player game, you know, how would you do it? You know, you would have, you would either have to be attacking or defending. And I came out, and so out of that idea, the sort of basic idea of what became galactic attack came out. So I tried to adapt what I'd seen that had worked on Plato. and I had to add things like it. If you have one of the players as a computer, you've got to have some sort of AI.

So I had to come up with crude AI that would like try to play a reasonable game and just see how much you could do within the limitations of the machine. And so that's where that came from. And so we started selling that, and it actually started selling fairly well. The thousand copies in like the first few months of, I recall correctly. And again, this was kind of a Ziploc thing. So Rob and Norm come to me and they say, well, you know, what's next? And so I started thinking about it.

And one of the other things that had caused me to get thrown out of Cornell was playing too much D&D. Okay. Way too much D&D. We had a huge D&D club at Cornell that would basically play from Friday evening till Sunday evening nonstop. So this was like first edition stuff, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. This was the original Whitebecks.

And there obviously had been dungeon games on Plato. So I started thinking about how to, how a game would you do this on the limited resources you had available on on the Apple 2 and how would you deal with the single player aspects? Because the thing that was great about the Plato games was so you could join with a bunch of your friends and go down and beat on the monsters, and you couldn't. You can't do that on the little single player, Apple II. And so I started writing a game. I started, you know, flushing out some ideas. And that game, my working title for it was Paladin.

And then completely by accident, I honestly don't remember what the chain of events was. I heard that somebody I knew from Cornell, Andy Greenberg, who was also a Plato person, was also working on doing a kind of D&D-type game on the Apple Tube. And we got in contact with each other and started talking about it. And it turned out he was further along in the project than I was. He had actually written a game in AppleSoft Basic that had a lot of the core design features that Wizardry later used. And he had one thing that turned out to be probably the most important thing.

He had the name, Wizardry. And as soon as he told me, the name was. I go like, that is an awesome name. And he also had a very interesting resource. He had a bunch of friends who were avid gamers who would play the game and tell him everything that sucked about it. There's something very important about that kind of focus group. Yeah. Well, so we had, so we decided that it didn't make sense. It made sense. It made sense. for us to kind of join forces because I had the time to do the programming and he had the time to do the design and he had his friends to do the testing.

So we kind of did beta testing before there was beta testing. So we made a deal to split up some split up. any money that ha ha might come from this and we started working on the game we got together we fresh out of design I went back and started writing

database editors to edit the dungeons and things like that and he started thinking about the kind of like events and stuff that would have to happen inside the game and and so basically over a period of about 18 months

we had a working version about six or seven months after we started developing a working version in the I guess the fall of 80 maybe because we went to the Trenton Computer Festival I think that's the first time place we ever publicly showed it and the game itself came came out in, I think, September of 81. And so that's basically how that all kind of went together.

So kind of a two-man project with a very helpful pool of talented beta testers, as you say. Yeah. They were called Warg, the wizardry advanced research. That's awesome. Yeah. So I'm curious to know more about kind of how you adapted the idea of D&D into a computer game. You mentioned that the Plato games had a multiplayer component. And, you know, you look back at the early days of role-playing games on computers. And I feel like a lot of different people were sort of approaching the concept of, like,

how do I D&D in a computer space when you lack, you know, the human element. And coming up with different solutions, like, you know, Zork was very heavily inspired by the D&D experience. But that game doesn't really have combat. It has, you know, like the thief that you can pull the knife on. But that's pretty much it. sword on, it's really focused more on the story aspect. Whereas wizardry, I feel like it's pretty much the exact opposite. There's a story there, but it's, you know, just kind of like to send you into the dungeon and then kind of let you go and develop your party and fight a lot of

monsters and find treasures and, you know, eventually defeat them at Overlord. Hack, hack, kill, kill, loot, run. Basically. So, you know, it's like the two polar opposite aspects of the RPG. How did you, yeah, I'm curious to like to know how you, you went in that direction as opposed to more of a Zork direction, or, you know, something that was some sort of synthesis of the two, or if that was even possible given the limitations of computers back then. I think a lot of that really comes down, you know, most people don't want to admit it, but a lot of that sort of stuff really comes down to it seemed like a good idea at the time.

We're all informed by our experiences. I mean, whenever you do anything like this, you basically take everything you've seen and learned in the past, and now you have something new to apply it to, new technology, a new computer, whatever it is. And you just look at it and say, like, you know, how can I take advantage of this particular environment in order to do things? So, you know, I've seen all these great games. I played both on the computer and paper and pencil.

I had all these experiences. It's so handy. And we're saying like, okay. now we've got this new medium, you know, these little encapsulated computers, you know, how can we, how can we do cool, as cool as stuff as we think we can in this environment, given these constraints? You know, and as the constraints change, you know, other people look at it and say, well, they did this. You know, now we have this. What can we do with this set of resources? So in that aspect, you know, anything anybody does is basically just a link in a chain.

It's this long chain. And it goes back way before D&D. It goes back to tabletop board gaming. And before that, it was like military war gaming and Tolkien. and Prince Caspian and, you know, all that sort of stuff. All of these things at any point in time, you know, people take all their influences and then they just sort of like do what they think is cool. And then some, and then other people see that. And they say like, well, I've got these new resources or, you know, I can do better than that.

and they try and do what they want to do, and it just goes off into the future. Yeah, by no means by being critical about the direction you went with, Missouri, because it's, you know, it's, I think it's a valid interpretation. If you look at old D&D, some modules were very story-driven,

and some were just about going to the dungeon, fight monsters, avoid traps. And I feel like that's maybe the direction you went with that. But I'm curious if that reflects the experiences you had when you did tabletop gaming, if your sessions were more like about the adventure of it, the combat of it, if it was more focused on the, like, talk to this guy and learn his story and that sort of thing. I think we always wanted to do more and more story.

The original games, you know, each game, I worked on the first four wizardry games, and each game in the series had, we tried to do something a little bit new, adding. little story elements and and tried to make that aspect of it richer within the context of the game engine because we were really pushing the limits of

what an Apple 2 could do. I mean we were swapping things in and off disc like crazy. We were you actually had to flip the disc when you played it and that was so that we could put the database for the game in the same place as the operating system was on

the other side of the disc. All sorts of really bizarre little tricks like that. But we're definitely always trying to add sort of to make the game have new aspects to it. In a particular story, I mean, which is why, for example, Wizardry 4, the entire premise of the game was flipped. Now you're the bad guy. And that game is really a puzzle game. And so that was our attempt to play with that aspect of the experience. Okay. So obviously, you know, in turning the tabletop role-playing concept into a video game,

you didn't want to just copy D&D. you wanted to bring your own ideas to it. Can you talk about how you sort of developed systems and mechanics and, you know, spell classes and things like that? I mean, was that mostly your partner or was that kind of a collaborative effort? I'm curious to know, like, you know, wizardry, I think, is a very distinct game from D&D. So I'm sure there was a creative process there that I'm curious to know more about if you think it's anything worth talking about.

I think that the previous games had given us a basic structure, you know, things that worked, things that didn't work. Then the problem, really, was, you know, how can you do these things efficiently? Efficiently, you know, again, it's a resource problem. So given the constraints you're working under, you know, what game systems are the most important? What things do you kind of have to fake? Because, you know, you have to kind of cheat a little bit to get done. And what aspects of the –

of the environment, allow you to do things that you might give you a solution that that makes your life a lot easier. For example, in wizardry, the spell names seem to have a kind of a syntax to them. That was done as a bit of a storytelling aspect. In fact, we eventually ended up telling people that a lot of these names, especially place names and things like that. And Wizardry are all mock Welsh. Why? I have no idea.

They just sound Welsh. They just ended up sounding Welsh. You know, too many consonants. Lots of double Ls at the beginning. Yeah, yeah. But, so, for example, Andy came up with this syntax for the spell names. And when you type in a spell name, the computer has to recognize which spell you're casting. And this actually turned out to be a problem because, you know, literally having the strings for all the spell names was taking up too much memory.

I mean, it's only about 500 bytes. But 500 bytes was precious. So what we ended up doing was in the code. We didn't store the spell names. We had a little hashing algorithm, a really dumb hashing algorithm that would reduce whatever you typed into when you're entering a spell name to cast it, whatever you typed in, it would just hash it to a single 16-bit integer,

and then we just compare that, which ended up saving us 300 bytes. The only problem was I didn't have any resources for good hashing algorithms. and the Ashing algorithm I came up with on my own was really bad and there was no matter what levers and dials I pushed because I had to get this done like in an afternoon no matter what dials and levers I pushed I couldn't get it to come up with unique numbers for each spell

I was always a hash collision So we ended up taking the easy way out, which was we changed one of the spell names so that it wasn't in the regular thing. I forget which one it was, but there's one of these progressions of spell names where one of them just, like, is not what you would quite expect it to be. And that is solely so that it would not collide in the hash algorithm. That's really interesting. But yeah, those technical limitations really affected these early games. you know, people were making for things like Apple 2 and TRS-80. And I feel like a lot of creativity and a lot of iconic elements came out of that.

I mean, you talk about the syntax of spells. Like you look at pretty much any Japanese RPG that's come along. And they have something very similar, like the Dragon Quest games. They have like a progressive naming system for each of their spells. Final Fantasy. Like the ice magic is Blizzard, Blizzara, Blizaga. So you know there's like, you know, there's that same sort of syntactic logic. that you introduced, and it became just something that people do with RPG spells.

So that's, you know, it's interesting to know how iconic elements. Right. Like, these things came about for a certain reason, you know, like a practical limitation, but they've been adopted as just how they work. Oh, it's on the tip of the moment. There's a word for things like that, for technological things like that, that have just, you know, kind of, kind of, kind of, of ossified and become something that everybody does, even though there's no longer any

real advantage to it. At the time there was, now there isn't. But it's still sort of there's such an installed base of users and expectation that everybody, that's the sort of default solution. man. No matter who you are, brushing your teeth is one of the most important parts of your day to stay healthy. Quip knows that, and their team of dentists and designers is focused on helping you take care of your mouth better. Quip is an electric toothbrush that costs a fraction of bulkier brushes, but still packs just the right amount of vibrations to help clean your teeth.

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each week on podcast one. And remember to rate and review. Hi, it's Jamie, Progressive's employee of the month two months in a row. Leave a message at the... Hi, Jamie. It's me, Jamie. I just had a new idea for our song about the Name Your Price Tool.

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Yes? No, maybe? Anyway, see your practice tonight. I got new lyrics for the rap break. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates, Price and Coverage Match Limited by State Law. So wizardry is a ten-level dungeon, and you create a party of six, six characters. Okay. So, you know, that's, you know, by, by I think modern standards, that's a fairly

compact game. But obviously it was meant to be played for a very long time. So I'm curious about, you know, working with the beta testers you had, the wargs, how did you find the right balance of like difficulty and challenge and like at what point did you say, okay, that's too frustrating. We have to dial it back. You know, things like having to go back to town to be able to save and, you know, characters in the back row not being able to attack with short-raged weapons and that sort of thing. Like, how do you, how did you fine tune that? Was it just a, like, a long, laborious process?

Well, some of those things were just technological limitations. Like, the reason you had to go back to the town to save was that we couldn't layer in the save code to the other areas of the game. We would run out of space or the particular the particular way we were having to interleave things on and off disk

in particular segments of code that kind of stack up. So you can have, you have the base core code and then on top of that the, say a module like the, the,

you know, the town could get loaded in. And when you went into the dungeon, the town stuff just got discarded and it loaded in from disk the core dungeon code. But then when you got into combat, on top,

it would then throw that away, bringing the combat code, and then when you were actually fighting, it would actually load in sub-levels. That's why there was a lot of disc activity when you were actually fighting was because there was like one sub-layer for physical attacks.

There was a sublayer for spell attacks. Okay. And that was solely because we were so limited on the amount of memory that we had to do this kind of interleaving. But we, to, in order to add, like, the feature of being able to save in game, apart from actually having to store that information somewhere of, like, where you are, it would mean we would have to write another segment, of code that we'd bring in, and not only would we have problems with space in memory,

we'd also have problems with space on disk. We had 280, 512 bytes sectors accessible on disk. And that had to store, even with the disc flipping thing that we were doing, that had to store the entire program and all of it. of the data for the game and the save game data. And we used every single sector in the final wizardry game. I mean, there was absolutely nothing left over. And adding a line of code that caused one part of the program to become one block bigger

would break the entire game. We didn't have the space for it. And so there was a continual battle, you know, adding a level would have added two blocks. It's about 1K. So 10 levels. Why was it 10 levels? Because that's how many levels we thought we could get away with. So were there elements that you had to remove from the game that you really, you know, wanted there just for space reasons?

And also, you know, the game is sort of. infamously difficult, and it doesn't seem like it's afraid to really challenge you with things like teleporter mazes and things like that. But were there things that were just too hard, and the orgs were like, you've got to dial this back? Yeah, well, there were definitely things that we actually had in the code at one point that we ended up taking out, you know, the little kind of cameo encounters. If I recall correctly, there was there was a cameo encounter you would get at one point where you basically ran into Thundar, the Barbarian, who was a cartoon character, that I don't think it ever made it into the final game,

or it may have actually been still in the database, but it was disabled and we would never get it. And there were definitely things, you know, things we wanted to do that we ended up saying, okay, we just like, we don't have the code space for this, so we can't do it. but the balancing was mostly doing things like making sure that there was a fairly steady progression of encounter difficulty as you went deeper in the dungeon and we actually had encounter tables and stuff. for figuring that out so that you would occasionally get, like, a really tough encounter, but those would be fairly rare, and you would be able to calibrate your risk in terms of, like, if you pushed it too hard, you would occasionally get an encounter that was just going to wipe you, but if you were cautious and played conservatively, that would be very, very unlikely.

So it was all that sort of risk reward type of thing, I think is something that actually leverages the players as much as it does the game in that it allowed players to sort of pick their level of challenge. I mean, we weren't thinking about like having a dial in the game that let you turn up and down the difficulty. You know, that would have been way too advanced for us back in the day. But you could definitely, by the way you play the game, calibrate that stuff. Stuff like, you know, the three people in the front are in physical contact and the people in the back are a bit protected but can't attack physically. That's pretty standard out of war gaming. So, you know, once we came up with the idea of,

of like, well, how do we do this multiplayer thing? Well, we can't give you multiple players, but we can give you multiple characters. So that's our attempt to bring that kind of social aspect into it. Then that kind of thing becomes a very natural thing to do. And we didn't realize it at the time. We thought that pretty much everybody would be just playing this by themselves, but it did turn out that a fair number of people would play socially,

which was not something we kind of expected, but did turn out to be kind of an interesting byproduct of the design. I don't think it was intended, but it was a nice sort of unintended consequence. Yeah, you know what you mentioned about, part about the sort of player calibrated difficulty level, the risk reward, I think. Was that something that you had, like, you picked up from other games, or was that something that you guys intuited yourself? Because that is, that is a core component of so many RPGs, like computer RPGs and console

RPGs now, the idea that you kind of build your own difficulty, like the further you range a field, you can get greater, you know, benefits from it. But that's really standard in any D&D campaign. I mean, you know, I was playing D&D back at a corner. I started doing a little bit of GMing in the big Cornell campaign. That sort of stuff. I mean, everybody knows the deeper you go in the dungeon, the nasty of the monsters are. Right, right.

Yeah, obviously, like, the idea that, you know, you go to the new floor, you're going to find nastier monsters. But I mean, even, like, within the same floor, just like within one foray into the dungeon, the longer you spend there, the more likely you are to come up across something that's just going to, like, wipe you out. But, you know, do you want to keep going and keep cultivating more experience? Because it's going to take you time to get back. Yeah, and you haven't used up all your resources yet. You can still go a little further.

So it kind of creates that, you know, a sense of risk there. Like, I can keep going and I can really benefit from it, but is it worth the possible downsides? I think that sort of stuff is a natural consequence of the sort of genre and type of the game, the fact that you, it's just flows out of the fact that you're a certain distance away from safety. And actually, one of the things I've always found quite interesting about when people talk to me about how much they enjoyed playing the game was almost invariably have a story about they were having this great expedition and they got all this great loot and they're running back

and like three steps away from town, they hit an encounter. And it's like, no. Yeah. And if I had known that, we would have probably twisted up so that we had a slightly higher chance of getting an encounter when you head back towards town because that turned out to be such like an emotional experience for people. But it's completely an unintended consequence of just. just like the physical structure of the game. Almost all of these things are, I mean, especially back in the day, we just had no idea what we were doing.

We were informed a little bit by the things we had done, but there wasn't this body of experience. So what we were doing in wizardry, what Richard was doing in Akalabath and Ultima, They're all, we're all just kind of blindly stumbling around trying to, you know, figure out what works and what doesn't. And, you know, some things worked and some things didn't. And we basically, you know, there are a lot of people who were trying to do these kind of games. And I think we basically got lucky.

We, I think, made some good decisions, but we also lucked out in a lot of ways. I mean, that's one thing that, as I've become older, I've come to realize just how big a part, just pure blind chance and circumstances have in the course of a project or even a life. I mean, if I hadn't gone to Cornell, if I hadn't, if that librarian hadn't brought that book into the library, if I hadn't gone to the right college, if I hadn't. If I hadn't had the right teachers, if Cornell didn't have Plato terminals, you know, if Star Wars hadn't come out. I wouldn't be here talking to you. I wouldn't be married to my wife, who I met because she was my interpreter when Anamago was getting started up. And the only reason I met her was because she was hired by a Japanese friend who ran a Japanese software company. okay and so like all these things like pure chance um and i think that's that not to wax too

philosophical philosophical but i kind of feel that whenever you talk about successes in your life you have to do it with a certain amount of humility because there are because you're often just by pure chance in like the top five percent of possible outcome that could have happened and you just, you know, lucked out. And there's a lot of other people who are working just as hard or just as smart and just as talented back at that time that the circumstances came out in a totally different way. So you have to take everything with a kind of a grain of salt and not kind of like think you're that hot shit because it turns out you're probably not.

or at least you're not, your shit isn't hotter than most people's. Right. So I totally agree with that. Since we're kind of on a philosophical tangent to kind of bring it back just a little bit, let me ask kind of like the biggest question on my list here, which is what do you think makes a great role-playing game? Oh, my goodness. At its core, I think it has to provide really significant emotional experiences.

And it has to allow you to project yourself into the characters in the game. I think you see this in the really best games. You know, you're carried along in the story with this character, but you can empathize with them. You get a chance to make decisions that, like, how you would be if you were in that situation. So it's a projective thing. So I think that that the real,

really great games are the ones that find maybe some new or better or interesting twist on how to do that. Recent examples, Fallout 4, and especially Witcher, The Wild Hunt. I mean, I actually don't play a huge amount of games. I'm literally just too busy. But the types of games I generally play are kind of like building games, construction games. But because they, especially games where I can actually implement a computer inside of the game. For some reason, I have just a great love of doing that. But when it comes to role-playing games, the ones that have captured my attention are the ones that provide that kind of emotional journey experience

where you can play through Fallout as a complete and utter bastard or you can play through fallout as trying to be as empathic as you can. And the same thing goes with Witcher. And so I think that that is the important core aspect of them. I think that's really basically what the game is, are really all about. Do you think you can still have those emotional experiences without a strong narrative, you know, just from the emergent gameplay that comes out of the games? Or do you think games should be looking at?

deeper than that these days? I don't know if I'm the right person to ask. I can only speak to my own personal experience there, which is that I like games that challenge me on a philosophical and emotional level, at least in terms of like the role-playing games, because they are projective. And I think if you're going to,

going to be doing a role-playing game, you want your players to be able to role-play. So I think that sort of kind of goes hand in glove with, you know, I don't think you can write a good role-playing game without being able to do that. Okay. Interesting. Not that I understood that at the time, mind you. But no, I mean, you know, what you created has become a cornerstone of the genre and, you know, people build on top of that and take that as an instrument.

inspiration and, you know, have been able to find ways to balance the deep sort of combat there with the more story-driven puzzles and things like that that you saw in games like Zork. So, you know, it's an evolutionary process. I wouldn't say cornerstone. I'd say just link in the chain. Or maybe like link in the chain mail. Okay. Nice.

You know what I mean? Because, really, it's everything depends on the past and informs the future. So, I mean, I think, you know, people will 20 years from now look back at Witcher and say, boy, wow, that really charted the course. But if you look at the broader perspective where Witcher came from and all the, all the things that were going on in the industry around the same time, I think it's a much more nuanced story. I mean, I don't disagree that, you know, no one comes up with the first idea. There's always, you know, you're always taking something from the past. But I do feel like, you know, wizardry is a milestone in that it took all these ideas and processed them into something that works in a computer context.

And it, like, I still see its influences in so many games today. And not just like a vague influence, but one of my favorite series is a series called Etrine Odyssey, which is very, very much in the vein of Wizard Like it's, you know, pretty light on story, very heavy on the exploration. You go into the dungeon. It's on Nintendo DS or 3DS, so you use the bottom screen, the touch screen, to draw the actual map instead of having to use graph paper. But it still has, you know, the first person dungeon exploration and turn-based combat. And, you know, you roll your own characters from set classes and that sort of thing.

So, you know, people are still taking, you know, the ideas that you laid down 35 years ago and saying, like, how can we spin this into something? new and create something original out of this while still being very true to, you know, to the ideas that came along before. So, yeah, I'm not trying to like puff you up or anything like that. Just like, you know, I, I've talked to so many game developers, RPG developers, especially in Japan, who cite wizardry is a huge influence. Like Yuji Hori, who designed Dragon Quest and Akitoji Kawazu, who created the Saga series, and let's see, who else Koichi Nakamura, who helped work on Dragon Quest and then created the Mystery Dungeon series of roguelikes.

Like, all of them has cited wizardry. Like, they imported the game before it was even localized into Japanese. They saw it at like Macworld or something. We're just like, this is amazing. I need this in my life. So they imported it and, you know, stumbled through a game in a foreign language that was all just text. And they loved it.

Fortunately, not too much. I didn't have the bites for it. That's true. But still, like, you know, it was a, you know, a game in a foreign language that was probably a little alien to them and a little challenging in that respect. But it really spoke to them and it influenced them and the games that they created out of it, like Dragon Quest and Mystery Dungeon and Final Fantasy and so forth. Like, these are still pillars of the games industry right now.

They're games that you can go buy the latest sequel. And all of them were inspired in some way, you know, to some degree by by wizardry and the wizardry trilogy, I think. Well, there could be an argument made that's just a founder effect in that wizardry was just had wizardry and Ultima just happened to be the games that were able to literally jump across the ocean. Okay. A lot of the stuff that was going on in the D&D, you know, tabletop gaming, much of that, you know, would need, because of all of its text, would need to be localized. So that was delayed. They didn't have access to Plato. So they, and they didn't have access to a lot of like what was going on in the sort of homebrew computer industry. So what happened was there were, you know, several games that became popular in the U.S. that, for which, you know, they did jump over. And then, of course, when you have a founder couple in a new ecosystem that's completely unexploited, they explosively radiate.

But, you know, what the original, you know, species was, is pure random. okay and it probably would it probably there's just like one guy in Japan who noticed wizardry and imported it and told his friends yeah I have no idea who that is I'd like to thank him I he has no idea who he is probably but that kind of you know cause this thing to spread out and again pure luck okay and I will say that in terms of wizardry success in Japan, a huge amount of credit has to go to the people who worked at a company called Fortune that did the original localization of wizardry. In fact, one of the reasons I started going to Japan was to help them with that localization.

And some of the tricks we had to do in order to get wizardry to run on all these different machines, we turned all of these different Japanese machines into Appletoos. Okay. So like a virtual machine? Yeah, they all, well, Wizardry was written in Pascal, which runs under a P-code interpreter. And so they wrote P-code interpreters for all these different architectures. And that's how we did wizardry on the PC here and the Commodore here. It was all done by writing P-code interpreters.

And the other thing they helped me figure out was like how to do localization into foreign languages. So like by the time the Japanese wizard who came out, we had moved all of the text in the game into a database and it actually constructed things using templates and grammar strings. We actually had code in the game that would decide whether or not, for example, to say a something or and something. or and something, you know. And we had modules like that to support all the different languages. So that's how the localization into Japanese was done. And then later, the German and French

and I think there were a couple others, but that was after my time. They just did an insane amount of work and sufficiently good that Wizardry 4, we actually didn't program that on an Apple. That was programmed on a NEC, PC-9801. Really? Okay. I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. Interesting. Because it was the fastest PC-like machine available at the time.

So I would boot up into their MS-DOS clone and type in a magic command line and suddenly I'd see, Welcome to Apple Pascal. I could program. I actually had to buy a copy of Apple Pascal to run on the 9801 because they had written a P-code interpreter, a lot of run. And it was like about 10 times faster than doing the same thing on a on a on a mac interesting so that is something i i wanted to ask you about is you know the kind of the way this game spread into japan and became so influential over there and so popular you you really feel it's just you know kind of like circumstance time and place do you think there's something within the game like the style or um the concept behind it that resonates with with that audience or like is it really just i really don't know it's

sort of a chicken and egg thing, is it because wizardry really appealed to them? Or was it because wizardry was just the first one there? And so everyone decided, well, that's how it should be done. I have no idea. It's one of these situations where oftentimes there is no real answer to those questions. It's just the way it turned out. I mean, personally, I think the best version of the original wizard game ever done was the Nintendo.

Really? Interesting. Because they, first of all, they managed to cram the entire game into a cartridge. And second of all, they leveraged the special graphics capabilities they had

to make a really nice presentation, you know, really nice looking dungeons. That was By Aski? Did they do the conversion on that themselves? Yeah, they did. And so they did, you know, all the people in Japan did just, like, tremendous work. I was really, really impressed by them.

Yeah, it's interesting because there are still maybe four or five Japanese developers making games very much in the wizardry mold. And you really don't see that here in the U.S., even in the indie games space. It's really hard to come across someone who's like, hey, yeah, I got to make a game like that, even though, you know, that was, that was a, it was a foundational game here just as it was over there. But for some reason, it's, it's really kind of just stayed, you know, bubbling right beneath the surface over there. And it seems to still have a lot of followers. And a lot of them make it into English. And most of the wizardry style games I've played have been from Japan and made, you know, within the past 10 or 15 years. So I don't know, it's just, it's interesting to me. And it's always something I've wondered. about because I hear it come up so much in my interviews with developers over there. It's just how much that game meant to them and how it was so inspirational. Maybe it was something as dumb as the fact that when we were writing wizardry, the big TV show, the big TV event was Shogun.

And so we kind of got into Japanese stuff. And so we put a few things in the game like one of the character classes. and there's a particular blade, the Murrah Sama Blade. Actually, it should be Muramasa, but we typoed it. That could play gets misspelled in games a lot, actually. Yeah, probably because of us. So, you know, and we just put it in there because it kind of sounded cool. So maybe that was the reason.

I have no idea. Fair enough. But, you know, that connection did eventually. sort of lead you on your your current path to animago. How did that come across? Like, at what point did you realize, like, you know, I really want to get into bringing anime into America as opposed to making video games? Well, the standard story I tell about this, which has the virtue of being absolutely true,

is that I was working on... Wizardry 4. I forget what I was actually working on at the time. So like 8788-ish? Yes, 89, late 88. Anyway, I had just gotten a video board for the Macintosh 2 called the ColorSpace 2, which did Genlock. It allowed you to put graphics on top of video. And I'd just gotten it to play around with it because I thought it was kind of a cool thing, you know.

I get to have the company buy me a cool toy, right? And Roe Adams, who's the author of Wizardry Four, or the designer, he was a big anime fan. And we were living in, I think, at the time. And so he was a member of the Cornell Japanese Animation Club. And back at this time, of course, there were no subtitled tapes. Basically, the way it worked is they would play a bootleg tape, a copy, 10th generation tape from Japan. And the one guy in the club who happened to speak Japanese would do a live translation. Right. Okay.

Poor bastard. I know him, too. He worked for Enemigo for several years. So he saw me playing around with this video board, and he said, can you use that to put text? on top of the video. And I said, yes. And he said, well, could you do subtitling? And I said, I don't see why not. And he says, well, we could subtitle some of these anime so that we can show them at my club and, you know, give them away. And I just thought about it for like 10 seconds and said, well, you know, I go to Japan all the time. We could, I could go get some licenses and we could actually release this as a, do this as a business. And five minutes later, when we had stopped laughing,

and by laughing, I mean, on the floor, can't breathe, what an incredibly stupid idea this is. It was sort of like, oh, why not? And so that's how the company started. It was kind of a weekend, fun, stupid thing to do just because we could. And so we, we subtitled an anime as a test. It was something we later released called Vampire Princess MeU.

And then we used that as a demo and managed to get a license for a title called Mad Ox. We got that license from a Japanese trading company based in New York. Because nobody in Japan wanted anything to do with us because who are these crazy guys in who want anime. I'm like, who subtitling anime, like that is a stupidest idea. And they were right, obviously. It was a stupid idea.

But then after that came out, I got a fax. This was back in the day when facts was important. From Toshio Okada, who was the one of the founders of Gynax, which is one of the, which is the kind of the really cool animation studio in Japan that was started by fans.

And they, also were doing a lot of software and other things. And he said, you know, I know you're trying to get some licenses. So tell you what, why don't you come over Japan and be a guest at this computer convention we're doing? And if you do that for me, I will get you a bunch of appointments at all the anime companies. And so I said, okay, it sounds like a deal. Free trip to Japan. Why not? So I go. And he not only got me the appointments, he arranged my interpreter. So I ran around Tokyo all week with this young woman

Natsumi and all we did was go to appointments and then kill time between appointments and stuff like that. I got to know her very well. At the end of the week, you know, I asked her to go out with me. We've been together ever since.

That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, so that that's, so even if Anamigo had completely crashed and burned, it would have been worth it for that. But a couple months later, I get another fax from a company called ArtMick. Apparently, they had gotten very drunk the night before and decided to give us a try. And that's how we got our first few titles, including Bubble and Crisis, which is one of the classic anime titles. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the first anime I ever watched and pulled me in. I was like, this is crazy. This is awesome.

Yeah. So that's, again, you know, sequence of chances and little tiny things that led up. to go and do that. And it ended up being something I've been doing for, you know, 25 years now. Yeah, you've moved more to a Kickstarter model now. How has that been working out for you? I'm assuming pretty well because you keep doing them and I keep buying them. So, and you're bringing over the classics, which I really appreciate because those wouldn't otherwise be available here on Blu-ray, you know, high definition without,

without those kick-starters. Well, we did that because after the Great Recession, we kind of downsize, we kind of downsize, the company. And, you know, also I'm getting to the point where, you know, 10 years or so I'm going to be retiring because, you know, I'm 59 now. And so we sort of wanted to just kind of scale back on the level of intensity. So what we came up with the idea of doing was using Kickstarter not as a funding method, but as a marketing and distribution tool. Because for these kind of special limited edition, very high quality box sets, it doesn't make sense to pay the Amazon tax of 40 or 50% to get distribution when you can go straight

to the people who really want it. And it makes a lot of these projects viable. So it seemed like, again, it seemed like a good idea at the time. And we tried it out and it's been pretty successful. and quite frankly, they're a lot of fun to work on because you really get to nerd out on the details. And you also get something that I didn't really appreciate at the beginning, but I came to very quickly,

was that because you're effectively working as doing a commission for a group of patrons, you can tailor that to exactly what they want. and you can work, you can get to involve them in the design decisions. And so you give them an emotional experience. The way I like to explain it is that the essential problem in the digital media field is that anybody can copy a Disney movie. You know, bits of bits, they're easy to copy.

but nobody can copy a trip to Disneyland. So what we're trying to do in these projects is provide not only the movie, but the trip in terms of like you get to see us make all these horrible mistakes and like, you know, help us make the decisions like, you know, do we want, do you like this layout better than this, you know, what special features would you like, things like that. and in fact we've actually let some people actually work on the projects and it turned out that every time we've done that as like one or two people have turned out to be like so incredibly good that we now just are hiring them professionally to do it for us you know we that first project basically became their portfolio and now they're professionals and they're doing it for not just us

but for other people which I think is kind of cool that that was, again, something completely unexpected that came out of it was that it would provide people with kind of their intro into this, well, I don't know if I should call it an industry, but into this particular strange profession. Okay. And you're about to launch a gunsmith Cats Kickstarter? That was like an OAV series, right?

Yeah, three episodes of OVA, back in the mid-90s. for some reason and it's it literally is again pure chance all of the ones we've done so far have been shows that had Kenichi Sonoda heavily involved in them like a character designer or character designer and writer was he involved with the otaku no video yes okay he did he did some of the character designs okay oh yeah i definitely know he was a bubble gum crisis and writing bean and gunsmith cats yeah but yeah that that is an interesting coincidence so i assume you know him pretty well at this point. Yeah, yeah.

Your buds. Natsumi just went off to Japan this morning as we record this. And like this weekend, she's going to be going out to coffee with Sonoda to check on the diesel. He's going to be doing a couple of cool things for this new project. So to check in with him. And he's a really interesting character. I'm sure. His work has some very interesting idiosyncrasies, lots of cars and lots of cars and

Lots of guns. Yeah, in fact, he's, it just came out yesterday. He is going to Anime Central, which is a convention in Chicago. Okay. In May. I'm going to say May 20th-ish, but I'm not quite sure, because they're, they just announced they're going to be premiering a new gunsmith cat short film. Oh, really?

Yeah. And I'm sure that he is going to take the chance to go to a couple of gun ranges and shoot off. Very big guns. All right. So, all right. Well, I'm going to. to wind this interview down now because it's been an hour and a half. But before I wrap it up, I did have a couple of questions that some

listeners sent in to direct to you. So if you don't mind answering a couple of those. Sure. Okay, great. The first one is from David Langley, who says, Wizardry 4, is fascinating both in how much of a tonal and structural shift it made from the first three games and its celebration of your fans by

placing their parties in the game. What made you want to implement these ideas? Oh, that's an interesting question. I think it all stems from the core idea, which is to completely reverse the game. In other words, make you the villain, or at least you, the person, the antagonist of the original games. And once you do that, it's... becomes a, these become sort of natural decisions. You know, that choice and the choice to make it a puzzle game really kind of informs a lot of the decisions.

And in terms of letting actual players' characters be the teams in the game, That we basically did because it saved us time. Everybody else could build up characters for us and teams. And all we had to do was write a little code that could basically analyze and roughly grade those teams in terms of how powerful they were. And then you can just plug them right in where we need them. So a little bit of logical evolution and a little bit of pragmatism. Yeah, I mean, you know, and as with so many things, it just seemed like a cool idea at the time. All right, from Juan Guterres, he writes a little paragraph here and then has a bunch of questions.

I'll kind of pare it down. Despite not liking dungeon crawlers, I'm quite interested in wizardry's influence in the development of RPGs, particularly Japanese RPGs, starting with Yuchi-Hori's visit to America, where he saw wizardry and other early RPGs that led him to develop Portopia, and Dragon Quest, which in turn helped pay the way for future JRP's, popularity of the genre and Japan seems to have come in part from wizardry. So that's kind of reinforcing some of the things that I was saying. So he wants to know, let's see,

which is your favorite game of the series? Oh, that is a difficult question. I would say that this is sort of a situation of once you know how sausage is made, you never want to eat it again. In that, when you start writing one of these, you think, oh, this is going to be the coolest one you've ever done, stuff like that. And when you finally get through the death march of finishing it, it's like, it's like, this is the one you have the one you hate the most. So I think

to use a Star Wars analogy, most people would say that and I would agree that the Empire Strikes Back is the best, but you can't compare it to a new hope because it was the first.

Okay, so it exists on a different plane. It's really not comparable. So I enjoyed the first one the most because that was the one where we were struggling with all of the real technical, you know, just details are like, how the hell do we do this in terms of getting the core game to work? I enjoyed the fourth one most in terms of that was the one that was the greatest struggle in order to tell the story that we wanted to tell, which is why it was so late. There was about a year when I was seriously convinced that it would be ready, I would have it finished in a week for an entire year. I was like, it'll be ready next week.

I'll be done with this next week. And it kept being like, no, we kept running into these roadblocks. So it was very frustrating to do, but it's the one that, you know, I felt it was the one where we got to do the most kind of different things in the game. At the same time, I think it's probably the least accessible of the games, just because it's so focused. So it was really designed to be, like, for the expert and to be really hard. Some people would say too hard, and I think that's a valid thing. I mean, because, again, we were struggling and, you know, kind of blindly looking around for, like, you know, what is the right level of difficulty? What is the balance?

What makes a puzzle too difficult or not difficult enough? And you learn by making mistakes. Well, finally, from Ben Elgin, are you going to get Macross 7 released over here once Harmony Gold's dang Robotech license finally expires? The question many of us would love a happy answer to. Yeah, I have a standard answer to questions like this. If you've ever seen me at a convention, you'll know it. But for the benefit of those people who haven't, the answer is, I will neither confirm nor deny the confirmation or denial of our our licensing plans. I will neither further confirm or deny the existence of Japan,

Japanese animation, or our company. So, sorry, Ben. Yeah, I mean, the answer is, who the hell knows? If the opportunity, there are tons of shows that if the opportunity presents itself to do a new release, I would definitely do it. And, you know, weirder things have happened. After all, we did release Macross. And, you know, we did release Macross. And that happened because the stars aligned and it turned out to be the right thing for us and for Harmony Gold to do. If somebody from Harmony Gold is out there, they listen to this podcast, it might spark something in them and they'll get together with us and maybe something can be worked out. But, I mean, I never want to say that we can do something or we will do something because

one thing I've learned in this business is that there are just so many unknown. I mean, it took two years to work out the details for doing our first Kickstarter because it was so new that nobody had really used that. And that was dealing with a company we dealt with for like 20 years. That we, you know, we knew everybody there and we've been seeing them for years. But getting everybody to agree, it took a huge amount of time. Now, on the subsequent ones, it's been less. But even gunsmith cats, it took about 18 months of working out the details before we were able to finally announce the project.

And of course, almost every week of that 18 months, I was convinced that it was going to be. We would be able to announce it next week. Right. Well, I think that is all I have for you. So thank you very much for your time. Would you like to tell everyone where they can find you in your projects online, social media, websites, Kickstarter, etc.? Yeah. Anamago.com, A-N-I-M-E-I-G-O.

on Twitter at Anamago. Also on my personal Twitter is at Matt Overlord. And if you're interested in what Andy Greenberg is doing, he's at Wizard Wardna. Okay. Nice. Yeah. And let's see what else. Yeah, we're on Facebook and stuff like that.

But I'm not a big social media person. You know, that's for kids these days. But we do post any time. we're doing something new. And the animato.com website, you can just buy all of our stuff. It's all there. All right, great.

Well, thank you, Robert. And I'm going to wrap up now by saying that I'm Jeremy Parrish. You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite. You can find Retronauts at Apple Podcasts, podcast, one, at Retronauts.com. And, of course, we're supported through Patreon. Check us out there.

Get early access to the show. It's awesome. And that wraps it up for this week. week. So thanks, everyone, and thank you, Robert, once again, for having me here and sharing so much of this history behind wizardry and just the RPG in general. It's great. My pleasure. Pluto TV is the leading free streaming television service. Watch more than 100 TV channels and thousands of movies on demand all for free. No credit card needed and no sign up.

Pluto TV is the easy and completely legal way to watch your favorite TV shows and hit movies. What are you waiting for? Never pay for TV again. Download Pluto TV for free on all your favorite devices today. My new 499 sourdough patty malcombo with two types of melty cheeses is the perfect comfort food for the uncomfortable things in life. Like guys named Ronald, it's just something about that name. Try my 499 sourdough patty milk combo. Only a jack in the box. Limited time only price and participation may very small fries and small drink. The Mueller report. I'm Edonoghue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town.

I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving a President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral.

It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.