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Wizard (video game)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the Atari 2600 game. For the Commodore 64 game, see Wizard (computer game).
Wizard is a video game created in 1980 for the Atari 2600 video game system, by Chris Crawford, although it wasn't released until 2005.
The player plays as a wizard from Irata (Atari spelled backwards) and battles Imps. It takes place in a maze, but it's not a symmetric battle: the player is faster than the enemy, but the enemy can go through walls and fire faster than the player can.
Wizard was innovative in several ways. There was no need to aim, as the angle of the player's fire was automatically sent in the direction of the player's enemy. The enemy remained invisible when it was behind a wall, making it one of the first games (if not the first game) to implement a line-of-sight algorithm. It also had a very realistic (for those days) heart beat of variable volume, which became louder the closer the player was to the enemy.
The production of Wizard is detailed extensively in the book Chris Crawford on Game Design.
Wizard was never released for the Atari VCS. It was first released on the Atari Flashback 2, 25 years after it was written. Its developer, Chris Crawford, wasn't even told about Wizard's eventual release on the Flashback 2, and learned about it in an email from a fan.
Interestingly, his original prototype did not contain a 2-player mode, but the game released with the Atari Flashback 2 does.