New Retro Gaming 90’s Inspiration
When Apogee announced they were making a retro game called Wizordum that had a distinctly shareware 90’s vibe going on, I thought the idea sounded cool. It’d be nice to see some of the stuff from back in the day make the rounds today while also being new to everyone. I asked one of the Apogee guys on X/Twitter for a copy of the game in exchange for a review, but they ghosted that query, which is fine. Eventually, I was able to see it in first person due to the assistance of an acquaintance.
90’s Gaming
I did not have a lot of time for gaming in the 90’s, but I had a lot more time then than I do now. There are many titles that fly by these days that I might glance at for about 10 minutes or so, with no expectation of ever finishing. There is far too much going on in life for me to make the kind of time investment most games require. So, the old Apogee model of save your game anytime was potentially a good fit. Firing up Wizordum after some backstory eventually got me to a screen like this:
That’s not really a wizard-y item, typically–the mace. However, you gotta have some melee mode, and I guess the designers thought the wizard staff was not formidable enough. Pretty soon you are bashing in suspicious walls in search of secrets and finding gold loot laying around from enemies you slay first with a mace, but pretty soon thereafter with some magic rings that shoot fireballs.
Problems With Wizordum
My problems with Wizordum, however, are not so much due to the game design or the fireball slinging. Yes, you could wonder how a fellow can sling fireballs, but I suppose God could grant a person the ability to sling fireballs if he wants to. As you get deeper in the game, though, the God hypothesis gets slammed shut due to the presence of the BFG mechanism in the weapons selection, which originally stood for Big Froggin’ Gun, (not really, use your imagination) but now stands for Big Froggin’ Grimoire. All you gotta do, of course, is just make a huge upside down pentagram with your finger and you are off to the races and things die.
This is in stark contrast to something like Doom, where there are blue million pentagrams all over the place because you are in Hell fighting demons who, it turns out really like pentagrams–especially evil ones:
That’s fine and well when you are in Hell battling evil demons. Their decor is gonna be the Led-Zeppelin-poster-in-the-bedroom equivalent of demon design/culture. Your job there is to shoot them in the face, and use their stuff against them. You are not skipping around drawing pentagrams leisurely with your finger. You are battling that and those that use that.
Same thing with Wolfenstein, which does not have any pentagrams in it as I recall, although it has a boatload of Nazis:
There is no shortage of Swastikas, but then again, a Nazi is gonna Nazi. You are killing those guys, cause they are bad and like bad Nazi stuff. Did you see robot Hitler? Nobody likes him. Did you see those skull flames in the above Doom picture? Yeah, nobody is gonna cry if the flaming skulls don’t come to their birthday party.
Bible Stuff
The Bible has some strong words on wizards, but usually the interpretation really means “sorcerers” which is a nuanced difference. Wizards might be all right–Moses is kind of a wizard. Sorcerers are doing nefarious things that aren’t sanctioned. This would include, in the case of Wizordum, invoking upside down pentagrams for the destruction of your evil nemesis. (nemeses?) Matthew 12:26 reads If Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then can his kingdom stand? So in addition to putting the player into the role of casting sorcery, it also is bad magical practice since it really would not work anyway. If you have evil demons, Satan is not interested in ridding you of those. Those are his bros. What he is interested in, probably, is screwing up your life so that you serve whatever his ends are. Sometimes that can come through from something as innocent as playing a game. Pretty soon, if you lack awareness, you remember all the times you drew a pentagram upside down in a game and nothing bad happened, so maybe you ought to try it in waking life, or you ignore it in reality because it is just a game. Of course, if the 90’s taught us anything, in hindsight, it has to be that people like Sean Diddy were running around doing all manner of crazy things that were far from anything anyone would consider holy.
Wizordum, then, to quote Maxwell Smart, “Missed it by that much”. The spirit is there, but the key to the entirety of gaming in the 90’s is missing. You want your parents to complain because upside down pentagrams are in the game to begin with, not because YOU are casting them. Otherwise, when they say the game is trying to make you Satanic, they just so happen to be right! That’s the most un-90’s thing imaginable–parents being right about technology. Apogee should know better.