atari wizard game- proto story?

[christianscott]

stop before you post the link to atariprotos, great site but i already found that now whats the rest of the story? who found the proto, who owns it now etc...

[Tempest]

Actually I wish I knew. I should as Chris if he knows, as he might have been the one who leaked it. No one I've talked to has fessed up to owning it.

 

Tempest

[Godzilla]

man, i'd love to have a nice repro of wizard, it sounds like a really fun two player game. Is this the same chris crawford of eastern front/etc. fame?

[Tempest]

Is this the same chris crawford of eastern front/etc. fame?

 

Indeed.

 

Tempest

[mos6507]

Russ Perry Jr knows the most about appropriating Wizard.

 

We were going to try to include it on the first Supercharger CD but then JTS-Atari would only allow us to include one proto, so we picked Polo, a much superior game.

 

I'm usually pretty easy on reviewing 2600 games. I can definitely see the charm of ultra-minimalistic 1st-gen-grade games (which is why I'm still into finishing Death Derby one day) but objectively speaking, Wizard is a horrible game. Not being able to line up your shots alone takes away the kind of control people expect from a videogame. There just is no real challenge or reward in the game. You've only two real objects on the screen at once (the foxfire is new to me, never saw that) and they both move REALLY SLOWLY. There is also almost no sound. The AI is nonexistent. The glaive thing just heads straight for you through the walls so there is no real evasion or anything like you might get in a Pac Man style game. If you could only aim your shots AND if the glaive thing had to traverse the maze, it would be a complete game concept. Remeber that by 1980 games like Berzerk were already out with more mature gameplay. A game like this had no chance of seeing the marketplace in 1980. In 1977 it would have been right up there with Starship as one of the worst. I actually like Starship better because it has an ambience in the audio and the herky-jerky ship movements.

 

Chris must have looked at Combat and written this game as an exercise to see what could be done by modifying the stock Combat type kernel, where the gameplay was an afterthought.

 

The first time I heard about this game it was described as a sort of primitive Archon, so maybe my expectations were dashed.

 

A much better game with a similar dynamic and no maze would be M-Network's Discs of Tron.

 

The best part about Wizard is the artwork that Dan Skelton did for it when we thought it would get included in the CD, which really should now be put up here on Atari Age.

[Godzilla]

ok, lets see it :-) I still think it sounds like a fun two player game. Though obviously the one player element is not as much fun as tempest's page makes it sound? of course, you don't like star ship, so I don't know how worthy that makes any game play judgements you might be making

[broncoman]

id sure like to have one also id really like to see the box art also ?

[Tempest]

I'm usually pretty easy on reviewing 2600 games. I can definitely see the charm of ultra-minimalistic 1st-gen-grade games (which is why I'm still into finishing Death Derby one day) but objectively speaking, Wizard is a horrible game. Not being able to line up your shots alone takes away the kind of control people expect from a videogame. There just is no real challenge or reward in the game. You've only two real objects on the screen at once (the foxfire is new to me, never saw that) and they both move REALLY SLOWLY. There is also almost no sound. The AI is nonexistent. The glaive thing just heads straight for you through the walls so there is no real evasion or anything like you might get in a Pac Man style game. If you could only aim your shots AND if the glaive thing had to traverse the maze, it would be a complete game concept. Remeber that by 1980 games like Berzerk were already out with more mature gameplay. A game like this had no chance of seeing the marketplace in 1980. In 1977 it would have been right up there with Starship as one of the worst. I actually like Starship better because it has an ambience in the audio and the herky-jerky ship movements.

 

See I didn't have a problem with that, I still like the game. Though as you point out it does have some flaws. I find it just as enjoyable as any of Atari's 2K games. To each his own I guess...

 

Incidentally I'm not sure what that little flame thing is supposed to be, I just called it the Foxfire because that made sense to me. I should as Chris exactly what it is some day.

 

Tempest

[NovaXpress]

I can't believe that Wizard didn't show up as a "Sears Exclusive"

[Xot]

I think if I'd had this game back in the era of Combat, Air Sea Battle and Space War, I'd have played it to death. I'd never heard of it before this thread... now I'll have to d/l the ROM.

 

I'd love to see this released. I also think Polo is a great game and I play that all the time, too.

[NovaXpress]

I'd rather play Atari Pac-Man for a solid week than play one game of Wizard.

[slapdash]

Russ Perry Jr knows the most about appropriating Wizard.

 

There's not much of a story really... I found out Chris had that way back when I was trying to figure out programmer credits, and years later looked him up again when doing Stella. Chris still owns the proto as far as I know (I'm not sure if it's really a proto either, or just an EPROM he took home), but he was nice enough to let us dump it for Stella, but sadly we couldn't use it. I was trying to get Atari to allow us to put on the whole gamut of protos, but it didn't fly.