Wizardry — six characters go down, and often fewer come back Runs here
1985 · Sir-Tech Software · System 7 · Mini vMac (Mac SE) · 512×342 black and white
Guide updated September 2026
You make six characters, equip them out of almost no money, and walk them into a ten-level maze under the castle. The maze is drawn in wireframe from the front of the party, there is no automap, and if the whole party dies down there the bodies stay where they fell until another party goes and fetches them.
Wizardry is where the party-based dungeon crawl comes from. Everything with a marching order and a wireframe corridor — Bard's Tale, Might and Magic, Eye of the Beholder, most of the genre for a decade — is downstream of this.
Boots into the castle. Make characters at the Training Grounds, buy equipment at Boltac's, then take the party to the Maze.
Controls
| Mouse | The castle menus — Training, Hotel, Shop, Temple, Maze |
| Arrow keys | Move and turn in the maze |
| Menus | Inventory, spells, camp, and inspecting a character |
Sir-Tech closed in 2003 and a commercial remake of this title is sold today by Digital Eclipse. That remake is new software and does not contain this 1985 build, which has not been sold in decades — but because a paid modern version exists, this comes down immediately if any rightsholder objects.
Archives
- Internet Archive — the Macintosh floppy this copy was made from.
How it works & what to expect
| Machine | Macintosh SE, 512×342, black and white |
|---|---|
| System | System 7.5.3 — see the note below |
| Emulator | Mini vMac, compiled to WebAssembly |
| Version | 1.10 |
| Saves | Characters save inside the emulated Mac, in your browser |
Almost everything from 1985 on this site boots its own System. Wizardry will not: its original floppy produces a Sad Mac on an emulated Macintosh Plus, every time. The application runs perfectly well when copied onto a System 7.5.3 disk, which is what this is, so it comes up to a desktop for a moment first.
There is no automap. Graph paper is not a joke here — it is how the game was played, and the maze is designed on the assumption that you are drawing it.
Why it is remembered
It defined the form. A party of six, classes and alignments, a wireframe first-person maze, turn-based combat against ranked groups of monsters. Wizardry did all of it first on a personal computer and most of the genre simply adopted the template.
It is genuinely unkind. Characters die permanently, resurrection can fail and turn them to ash, and a total party kill leaves your equipment on the dungeon floor for whoever goes to get it. Nothing is softened.
It mattered enormously in Japan. Wizardry became a bigger franchise there than in its home market and directly shaped a generation of Japanese role-playing games, which is why remakes keep appearing.
Getting started
Make a balanced party: two fighters at the front, a thief, a priest and a mage behind them, and a sixth of whatever you like. Roll until you get decent bonus points; there is no penalty for rerolling and the first few levels are brutal without it.
Buy armour before weapons. Surviving the first floor is a question of not being hit.
Go down one level, map a few corridors, come back and rest. Wizardry rewards short trips far more than deep ones, and the most common way to lose a party is being one fight further in than the spell points allowed.
Questions people ask
Is this the modern remake?
No. This is the 1985 Macintosh Wizardry. Digital Eclipse released a commercial remake of the same title in 2023–24; that is separate, current software and is sold.
Is there an automap?
No. The maze was designed to be mapped on paper and the game gives you no help with it.
Do characters die permanently?
Yes. Resurrection exists, can fail, and failing can reduce a character to ash.
Can I save?
Characters and progress save inside the emulated Macintosh in your browser.
Why does it show a desktop first?
Wizardry's own floppy crashes an emulated Mac Plus, so the application runs from a System 7.5.3 boot disk instead.
Do I need Wizardry I finished to play Wizardry II?
The original expected you to import a party. Knight of Diamonds is also on this site and can be started fresh, though it is balanced for experienced characters.
Put Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord on your own site
Free, no permission needed and no account. Paste this where you want the machine to appear; it brings its own emulator and asks nothing of your page.
<iframe src="https://macemu.com/embed/wizardry/"
width="512" height="342"
style="border:0;max-width:100%"
allowfullscreen
title="Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord"></iframe>Sized to this title's real screen. How embedding works.
