Wizard of Wor 2-player cheat

[samiam]

I was just looking at some of the 2600 Hacks for Wizard of Wor, and I must say the 2600 “Arcade” version is impressive. After looking at the rom (which is, alas, not readably playable in Stella, because of the “joystick in the wrong port” issue), I started reading what other information on Wizard of Wor is out there, and while there’s some interesting information on its history and what not, there’s not any information on how the game was actually played.

 

Let me take you down memory lane...

 

During the peak of the coinop and Atari 2600 era, I was really too young to go in to arcades. This didn’t, however, stop me from going, much to my mother’s annoyance. Since my parents weren’t exactly condoning me being at the arcade, I never had any quarters in my pocket. So, I would go and just watch everyone else play games there.

 

Every time I saw people playing Wizard of Wor, they did the same trick to win the levels without really trying:

• Play the game as a 2-player game.
  
• Take both characters and put them in the same corner location, ideally in a corner where both directions were facing a nearby wall.
  
• Have the players facing two different directions at right angles from each other to cover both approaches to the corner location.
  
• Do nothing but hit “fire” over and over and over until the level is cleared.
  
• Later, rinse, and repeat for the next level.
  

Like patterns in Pac-Man or shooting UFOs when there was only one or two asteroids were left in Asteroids, this was a strategy not anticipated by the original game creators, and allowed people to win far more easily and play for a much longer time with relatively little effort. Indeed, one of those Arcade game strategy guides out there described this trick for winning Wizard of Wor.

 

If Wizard of Wor had been successful enough to merit a sequel (while a reasonably well-known game, and popular enough to port to the 2600 and home computers of the era, it did not dominate the arcade scene the way Asteroids and later Pac-Man did), I am sure the sequel would have changed the game mechanics to punish players who did not move and just shot anything that approached them until the level was finished.

[+stephena]

I was just looking at some of the 2600 Hacks for Wizard of Wor, and I must say the 2600 “Arcade” version is impressive. After looking at the rom (which is, alas, not readably playable in Stella, because of the “joystick in the wrong port” issue) ...

 

Have a look at Options -> Game Properties -> Controller, and set it similar to the following:

 

[Serious]

Great post.. I love this game, but I had never heard of this "trick"...

 

I was just looking at some of the 2600 Hacks for Wizard of Wor, and I must say the 2600 “Arcade” version is impressive.

 

Can you point us to that ROM?

[CDS Games]

The thread is here, and the latest "WoW Arcade" ROM is at post #63. It's incomplete but playable.

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/209266-wizard-of-wor-2-the-arena/page__st__50

 

There's also an expansion pack for the regular 2600 version, featuring all the arcade dungeons--but of course each ROM has only 2 dungeons in it just like the CBS release.