Team Pixelboy Official Web Site : Wizard of Wor

The deadly game's origins remain shrouded in cosmic folklore, and indeed, only the Wizard himself could tell its true tale. For centuries, astronauts have been kidnapped randomly along the trade routes between solar systems, and thrown into the Wizard's space maze for his entertainment. Pitted against hordes of merciless monsters and also pitted against each other, the poor souls who were forced to fight for their lives never lived long enough to escape and tell the tale.

But now, you and your squadron of space marines are out to stop the Wizard once and for all. The problem is, the Wizard was ready for you, and captured your spaceship like all the others before you. Armed with laser rifles, your squadron may actually survive in the space maze long enough to impress the Wizard and draw him into the maze. But seeing the face of the Wizard of Wor may be the last thing you will ever see...

After completing the software of Operation Wolf and Majikazo, the guys of the Lemonize team were eager to code another ColecoVision game. They picked a game and decided not to tell me what it was. They just told me it was a well-known arcade game, and they asked me to trust them. After the great work these guys did with Majikazo and Operation Wolf, I felt I could actually trust them, so I went along with it.

Eventually, one of the Lemonize team members left and the rest of the team decided to cancel the project. At that time, they told me what the game was, and well, let's just say I was almost relieved to see the project cancelled. The game they had picked was interesting, but I don't think it would have been a good seller on the ColecoVision.

Soon after, the Lemonize team started a new project, and they wanted to keep it a secret from me again, but I wasn't going to play along this time. But once they revealed that their new project was to code a ColecoVision version of the famous arcade game (and equally famous Coleco vaporware title) Wizard of Wor, I gave them the green light with two thumbs up! :-)

Lemonize went out of their way to reproduce the arcade game as faithfully as possible. For instance, player 2 is CPU-controlled in the single-player mode, a feature which is present in the arcade game but is not present in any of the existing home conversions released in the eighties. The game also features speech samples taken straight from the arcade version!

This game was completed and released in 2017.

TEAM PARTICIPANTS

Armando Pérez Abad : Software programming and beta-testing
Michael Markowski : Software beta-testing
Joe Blenkle : Software beta-testing
Luc Miron : Box design, game manual, cart label, software beta-testing
Garrett Gilchrist : Box art

Dale Crum / Doc4

www.doc4design.com

Oliver Puschatzki : Box printing services
Harvey deKleine : Electronic sourcing and assemblies

SPECIAL THANKS: Tobie St-Aubin, Albert Yarusso and all AtariAge forum members.

Here is a promotional YouTube video of Wizard of Wor for ColecoVision, which was prepared by the Lemonize team. The game screens you see in the video are from a work-in-progress version of the actual ColecoVision game.