Acquire refreshed the Wizardry series with two PlayStation 3 games and an iPhone port. You can thank Class of Heroes for that. Back in 2006, before the Akihbara based developer had a license to create Wizardry games they made a cutesy dungeon crawler with ZeroDiv.
Class of Heroes swelled into a franchise in Japan and also helped Acquire get the rights to Wizardry. "We approached them and said hey, we make these Class of Heroes games, which are basically cute Wizardry and we’d like to make a real Wizardry game," producer Luke Rideout said to Siliconera. "IPM said and OK and we got to do it."
"Wizardry was another one of those surprisingly good sales games when we released it on PSN. People really enjoyed playing it," Rideout added. "After it was obviously doing well, we said lets do the Red Sister expansion pack. That did well, as well, then we said where should we take this next and we thought of outdoor dungeons for the current sequel."
Wizardy: Dungeon of the Imprisoned Souls was released in Japan as a digital download earlier this year. Responding to fan requests, Acquire bundled their new Wizardry game with Labyrinth of the Lost Souls to create the PS3 retail title Wizardy: Twin Pack.
"We got a lot of calls to our support line and postcards saying, ‘Hey, we want to play Wizardry, can you release a game in a [retail] package?’ We did our cost analysis and packaged Labyrinth of Lost Souls and the sequel as the Twin Pack," Rideout explained.
"Here in Japan, downloadable only full sized games aren’t done a lot. Most of the downloadable only games tend to be like LostWinds, simple platformers or little puzzle games, but we went with a hardcore dungeon crawling RPG and people were like this is something not done frequently and for the 2,000 yen price point people were like hey why not buy it," Rideout continued. "We received an award from Sony for the top grossing PSN game, so I guess we did something right! I mean even now it’s still selling well, a year and a half later people are still buying Labyrinth of Lost Souls."
"It did fairly well, I guess," creative director Richie Casper joked. "That’s the awesome thing about digital games. You don’t have to worry about retail shelf space. Obviously, those guys have to make room for new games, but for an online store you just make another page you swipe through. It’s awesome to have that."
