Wizards & Warriors III: Kuros: Visions of Power - Development

Development

Development of Wizards & Warriors III: Kuros: Visions of Power started in 1990, when, after strong sales with Ironsword: Wizards & Warriors II, Rare gave Zippo Games the rights to develop and direct the third installment in the series; the company's founders, Ste and John Pickford, co-designed the game. Ste Pickford was the lead artist and designed all the concept art for the game, while Lyndon Brooke also assisted with some of the drawings, and Steve Hughes and Andy Miah wrote the software. The game was originally titled Silversword, which was the name of the development project. The Pickford brothers came up with the concept of Kuros' disguises of knight, wizard, and thief as a homage to Ultimate Play the Game's (Rare's former incarnation) 1983 ZX Spectrum title Atic Atac. Ste Pickford said that designing a game which consisted of multiple characters, guilds, and secrets "was a dream come true at the time", saying that they wanted to pay tribute to the various Ultimate Play the Game titles they played in the early 1980s. Pickford wanted to design a game that was a step forward from most Action RPGs for the NES; he opted for nonlinear gameplay in which the different disguises and accompanying abilities would allow the player to access new areas of the map. "Wizards & Warriors III was more like a game that I really wanted to make." Pickford said.

As with Zippo Games' previous projects, the concept art was drawn on paper. The graphics were then drawn with Deluxe Paint and then translated into the ROM manually, sprite-by-sprite, as the NES hardware required precision in sprite placements; this was different than from what Rare did, which was to place each pixel of the graphics sprites on graph paper with marker pens and then tasked people to type the code into the ROM. Ste Pickford said that while Rare's sprite-drawing method was easier, his method, while time-consuming, was more efficient. Most everything from the previous Wizards & Warriors games were removed, except for the main protagonist, Kuros, and the game's main antagonist, Malkil. The concept art was originally drawn in black and white, even though the games were being designed in color, to save money from photocopying or printing in color - both of which were very expensive at the time. In developing the "Demon" mini-boss, Pickford could only use about three animation frames, as the sprite was large for the NES hardware. Pickford designed the "Worm" boss similar to the bosses found in R-Type, where a series of smaller sprites formed a snake or worm-like enemy; however, he commented that "it ended up in the game more like a giant floating head". Pickford drew inspiration from the thrones in Super Mario Bros. 3 in designing the final boss, Malkil.

However, near the end of development, time constraints led the Pickford brothers to sell Zippo Games to Rare, in which Zippo was renamed Rare Manchester. With Rare as their boss, morale dropped for the development staff, and eventually everyone left the company before the game could be completed, thus shutting Rare Manchester down. According to Ste Pickford: "One of the programmers completed the game himself after the studio closed." Pickford included a cover, which consisted of a knight in a light-blue armor, in which he said "was just something I drew for fun". However, when the final version of the game was sent to Rare for approval after the studio's closing, they threw away the cover and added their own. According to Pickford, "The document came back with about two typos fixed, a new cover, and 'revised by Tim Stamper' in big letters on the title page, with all trace of myself or any of the Zippo Games names removed, so I guess Tim had a major role." The game was published by Acclaim Entertainment and released in North America in March 1992 and in Europe on January 21, 1993.

The Pickford brothers included a couple of easter egg references. One of them revolved around the name of one of the tavern keepers, Newton N. Ridley, which is a play off the brewery Newton and Ridley from the British soap opera Coronation Street. Another easter egg reference was made to Dragon Warrior with regards to the princesses Kuros must save during the game. Upon saving a princess, she asks Kuros to marry her, prompting a yes/no response for the player; if the player selects "no", the princess responds with "sure you will" and prompts the yes/no response again - similar to the "but thou must" response in Dragon Warrior. In addition, as all three princesses will have committed to marrying all three forms of Kuros, the original plan for the game's ending was for the three princesses to come together and see their heroes whom they were going to marry, only to find out all three princesses promised to marry the same person. To rectify the situation, Pickford called for what he referred to as "the ultimate cheapo cop-out", where a UFO abducts Kuros with a teleport beam, sending him into the future and setting the stage for the next sequel which would have been called Lasersword. However, this never came to be.