Andrew C. Greenberg, co-creator of the seminal Wizardry RPG series, has died at the age of 67. The news was shared on Facebook by his Wizardry collaborator, Robert Woodheadand on Twitter by programmer and game design professor David Mullich.
It’s difficult to overstate Greenberg and Woodhead’s influence on RPGs and PC gaming. Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was one of the first recognizable RPGs playable on a home computer, a translation of tabletop RPGs and games developed for the powerful PLATO mainframe computers then prevalent on college campuses to the humble Apple II.
Wizardry was one of the first — if not the first — RPGs in which players could control an entire group of characters, each with distinct strengths and weaknesses. Wizardry tasked players with exploring a enormous skeletal maze in first-person, constantly on the lookout for secret doors, traps, and challenging enemies. At the bottom of the dungeon, players could find the titular “Mad Lord” Werdna — Andrew spelled backwards. Greenberg apparently carried this amusing nickname with him long after he left the gaming industry, using it as his personal email address and username YouTube channel documented the development of a bowling score generating program.
Wizardry and the competing Ultima series proved to be extremely popular in the 1980s, and Wizardry and its sequels were ported to the major personal computers of the era, such as the Commodore 64 and MS DOS PC. One surprising result was Wizardry’s influence in Japan, where it gained even more lasting popularity and inspired the invention of the JRPG as we know it. Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii has long cited Wizardry as a major inspiration, and in Tweet from 2022 Of his first meeting with Robert Woodhead, Horii wrote: “When I think about it, it all started 40 years ago, when I really got into witchcraft.”
After co-creating the Star Saga games in 1988 and 1989, Greenberg eventually left the gaming industry to pursue law, first focusing on intellectual property law in Florida before becoming general counsel for renewable energy company Xslent. However, archived snapshot Greenberg’s personal website, as well as his YouTube channel, show that he never abandoned his interest in computer programming. According to a letter Greenberg shared Wizardry fan site from 1999married a Wizardry game tester Sheila McDonaldand they had two children together.
Andrew Greenberg left the games industry a long time ago, but his influence can still be felt in everything from Baldur’s Gate to Persona. You can experience Greenberg’s work on Wizardry more directly via Digital Eclipse recent remaster the first game to exploit suggestions from the creators of Wizardry, and also add the ability to view picture-in-picture the original 1-bit graphics.
