Wizardry Down The Ages

If you thought that overdue games were a new phenomenon, think again! In an interview on RPGVault, designer DW Bradley, the man behind the later games in the Wizardry RPG series of the late 1980s, reveals that "I had started work on my first computer RPG about the time the original Wizardry appeared".

"Once it was completed, I sent the finished RPG to the publisher, and after about a year's worth of phone calls, they accepted it for publication with one caveat - they wanted to publish it as a Wizardry game. I had to rewrite the whole RPG over from scratch, and rewrote the insides of Wizardry while I was at it. This became Wizardry V: Heart of the Maelstrom."

But the story doesn't end there... "It was finished in mid-1986", Bradley says. "But as the publisher had announced Wizardry IV: Return of Werdna several years earlier and it was still a year away from completion, they ended up holding the completed Wizardry V game for two years. Wizardry V: Heart of the Maelstrom was finally released in 1988, some four years after I had finished the original version."

And you thought that Daikatana's release was a little tardy...