Games That Weren't 64^®

One of the harder things to ascertain when investigating a potential GTW is sorting out those games that are simply ‘Missing in Action’ from the genuine ‘Games That Weren’t’.

Wizard’s Dominion is one such game. A Dungeons & Dragon’s game from the early 1980s it was advertised as being released on the TI 99/4A and the C64, however today the only version that can be found online is the TI 99/4A version. The C64 version has dropped off the map entirely.

If the programmer is the same as the TI version, it was written by Thomas D. Johnson and boasts the usual dungeon crawl fare of swords, ogres, magic and ‘thousands of caves’.

The relative prevalence of the TI version online, where you can download two versions of the manual and buy the game on ebay (at a pretty high price) compared to the absolute absence of any reference to a C64 version suggests the game probably ended up unreleased, if it was completed at all.

Well, thanks to excellent preservation work by Hedning/Genesis Project – the game was found in a local Swedish loot of random disks in November 2016. The disk was dirty and anonymous and unreadable, until cleaning up the disk and getting it to fully read after 4-5 attempts. It seems the game was sold in Sweden by a reseller called Computer Boss International (see photo)

It is possibly the last existing copy of the game, and we’re very lucky to finally see it preserved. Genesis Project have also done a fully updated and fixed version of the game, which you can also find here!

A great find and a case now closed finally!

Contributions: Robinson Mason, Hedning

Supporting content

• Downloads
• Gallery
• History

Available downloads

• WizardsDominion101%&D-GP (zip)
• game_wizardsdominion (zip)
• wizardsdominion_refcard1 (pdf)
• wizardsdominion_refcard2 (pdf)
• wizardsdominion_manual (pdf)

Gallery

Update history

05/12/16 – A brilliant find made by Hedning/Genesis Project. Game confirmed as released and now preserved. Case closed!