Interview Matt Chat 245: Robert Sirotek on Wizardry

[Infinitron]

Tags: Matt Barton; Robert Sirotek; Sir-Tech; Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

In the latest episode of his show, Matt Barton continues his interview with Sir-Tech co-founder Robert Sirotek. In this episode, Robert continues telling various anecdotes from the development and release of the first Wizardry game. Special attention is paid to Sir-Tech's successful export of the Wizardry franchise to Japan, which had a huge influence on the video game industry there. He also talks a bit about Sir-Tech's implementation of copy protection in their games, something which earned them a certain degree of infamy.

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Interestingly, Robert claims that the rights to Wizardry 1-5 are still owned by his family, and not by the Japanese. I guess that explains why they're not on GOG. I still think there might be more to it, though. I wonder if Matt had the balls to ask about that.

 

[Johannes]

It sucks that J_C is too pussy to push the interviewees on any tough issues. Though I suppose he'd get less interviews if he did.

 

[Abelian]

At the 22:00 mark, he said things will "get controversial" in part 3. Hope Matt asks him about Wiz8: SoA. It's probably going to be about Andrew Greenberg and moving the company to Canada to avoid lawsuits, though.

 

[LeStryfe79]

Matt Chat's underrated.

 

[MicoSelva]

This part of the interview was really dull. Also, Sirotek sounds like typical businessman, always referring to Sirtech's games as 'products'. I don't think ghe even mentions Wizardry by name (or barely). I know it was a long time ago, but I don't see any passion, or even shadow of passion, in him. He only lightened up when he recalled how his company beat everyone else to the Japanese market by three years or so.

It seems that we need Matt Barton to interview Robert Woodhead.

 

[Abelian]

Sirotek sounds like typical businessman, always referring to Sirtech's games as 'products'. I don't think he even mentions Wizardry by name (or barely).

I noticed that too and it struck me as kind of odd. On the other hand, he didn't have a direct role in creating the games and his role was primarily business/human resources/policy oriented, so I can understand why showed less passion than one of the devs. Speaking of which, he mentioned Robert Woodhead a lot more than Andrew Greenberg in the first interview, so there may still be some hard feelings there.

 

[circ]

Who cares about Wizardry. Where's my JA2?