Wizard's Dominion
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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1983 American Software
Status: Full Game, Findability: 1/5

Coding: Unknown
Graphics: Unknown
Sound: Unknown

One of the harder things to ascertain when investigating a potential GTW is sorting out those games that are simply ‘Missing in Action’ from the genuine ‘Games That Weren’t’.

Wizard’s Dominion is one such game. A Dungeons & Dragon’s game from the early 1980s it was advertised as being released on the TI 99/4A and the C64, however today the only version that can be found online is the TI 99/4A version. The C64 version has dropped off the map entirely.

If the programmer is the same as the TI version, it was written by Thomas D. Johnson and boasts the usual dungeon crawl fare of swords, ogres, magic and ‘thousands of caves’.

The relative prevalence of the TI version online, where you can download two versions of the manual and buy the game on ebay (at a pretty high price) compared to the absolute absence of any reference to a C64 version suggests the game probably ended up unreleased, if it was completed at all.

Well, thanks to excellent preservation work by Hedning/Genesis Project – the game was found in a local Swedish loot of random disks in November 2016.  The disk was dirty and anonymous and unreadable, until cleaning up the disk and getting it to fully read after 4-5 attempts.  It seems the game was sold in Sweden by a reseller called Computer Boss International (see photo)

It is possibly the last existing copy of the game, and we’re very lucky to finally see it preserved.  Genesis Project have also done a fully updated and fixed version of the game, which you can also find here!

A great find and a case now closed finally!

Contributions: Robinson Mason, Hedning

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Wizards Dominion was a popular graphic adventure written for the first 16 bit home computer the Texas Instruments TI 99/4A in 1982, and ported to C64 in 1983. Until now you'd only find the Texas version to download online, but thanks to Genesis Project the game has been rescued and is available now on CSDB.

The game is a Pseudo 3D isometric turn based RPG. Explore the caves to find the Wizard's chamber and progress to the next level. Each cave has an ogre, who starts at the cave exit and tries to hunt and kill you. But you are armed with weapons, spells and can try to kill the ogre in turn based combat. Reach the Wizard's chamber on the 10th level to become the Master Wizard and win the game. As the game is written in C64 BASIC, the redraw routine on each move can make exploration feel, a little sluggish. But if you're running in VICE, you can turn on Warp Mode to fix that. Just remember to switch it off in combat, or between levels, or you could miss vital information.

You will need to read the instruction manual, and reference cards, which have been scanned and bundled with the download. Progress needs to be recorded onto a scoresheet, so you can recover your character state in between plays... Which sounds silly now, but is really quite fun if you were ever fond of early 1980s role playing games. Also if you enjoy hacking BASIC listings together on your commodore, the 3000 or so lines of source code can be displayed by typing LIST after quitting the game.  If you can cope with the basic graphics, and follow the game honestly without cheating, then there's a lot of fun to be had here.  Don your helmet, and save the Wizard's Dominion!

Update - Since this article went live a new version was released which not only fixed alot of issues including spelling errors, but also improved the games speed. You can see the changelog below for the latest version Wizard's Dominion &D 101%

- several spelling errors have been corrected
- upon death, the game does not quit to basic but restarts.
- all the fingerpoking keys are disabled
- getting back a basic source after reset is disabled
- the entire sprite plotting thing, that originally required to split the basic ram and erranously wrote into the tape buffer was explanted and moved to a safe space and also replaced with a faster routine
- obviously the game was speeded up using method X (watch out for more like this)
- since the entire process to edit the source required new tools, a door was opened for unlimited future improvements to programs of this kind
- several erranous things have been removed from the source, i think the original really just works on razors edge.


https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/wizards-dominion/
http://www.indieretronews.com/2016/12/wizards-dominion-lost-early-c64-rpg.html
