A piece of Wizardry history may now be beyond recovery. Dungeons of Despair, the pre-release test version of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord that Sir-Tech sold at Boston Apple Fest in June 1981, has not been found despite interest from the people behind the modern remake.

The lost beta has gained fresh attention after Atari bought the rights to the first five Wizardry games, but this is not a simple case of an old game waiting in a vault. According to new reporting from Time Extension, even likely leads have come up empty.

A beta sold in plastic bags

Dungeons of Despair was not the polished September 1981 release that helped define the computer RPG. It was a small-batch beta produced for Boston Apple Fest, where Sir-Tech hoped buyers would test the Apple II game on different hardware setups and report bugs before the final version shipped.

The exact number of copies is unclear. Wizardry co-creator Robert Woodhead estimated that only 50 to 60 were made, while Sir-Tech co-founder Norman Sirotek put the figure closer to 200. Either way, the run was tiny and temporary by design. Buyers were reportedly meant to receive the finished game later, which may help explain why no known copies have surfaced.

Sirotek previously described the process as extremely handmade, with copies assembled in Ziploc bags before the show. Woodhead was still making changes the night before.

"Robert Woodhead wanted to get some product out in the market for testing. Back in those days, you had so many different computer configurations that you could put into your Apple II, like legend cards, other kinds of memory cards, and so forth. And we could not test every conceivable combination. It was just physically and mentally impossible."

The beta's design also sounds far rougher than the final game. Woodhead said the scenario database was built for testing rather than balance, meaning players could encounter brutal enemies such as the devil on the first floor. The point was to expose more of the game quickly, not to protect the finished dungeon's secrets.

"Our name for it was the Dungeons of Despair. Because you would seriously lose your cool playing the game. I seem to recall that we promised people we'd send them the final version of the game when it came out in return for them letting us know if they found any problems. We also didn't make that many copies because we had to make them by hand."

Why preservationists care

The missing beta is a small object with a large shadow. Wizardry became one of the most influential RPGs ever made, shaping party-based dungeon crawling and feeding into the design history of Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy and other genre landmarks.

Digital historian Jimmy Maher's Digital Antiquarian history of Wizardry also places the Boston Apple Fest version before the final retail release, describing it as a demonstration build with only the first three dungeon levels. A separate Hardcore Gaming 101 interview with Woodhead says buyers paid $35 for the unbalanced beta and that Sir-Tech sold out, forcing the team to make more copies.

That makes Dungeons of Despair more than a curiosity. It could show how Wizardry changed in its final months, how Sir-Tech tested an ambitious Apple II RPG in the early commercial software era and how one of the genre's foundational games handled balance before release.

The search has not turned up a copy

Digital Eclipse, which released the 2024 remake of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, tried to locate Dungeons of Despair while working on the project. Former chief strategy officer and head of publishing Justin Bailey raised the possibility that Wizardry 8 designer Brenda Romero might have a copy because she began her career at Sir-Tech as a tester.

Romero has now ruled that out. Speaking to Time Extension at Dark & Doomy, a Game Republic event in Wakefield dedicated to Doom, she said the beta is on her own list of holy grails.

"Oh, god, I wish. Dungeons of Despair? No, I'm not. That, along with the uncensored Wolfenstein, is on my holy grail list. I did have a Wizardry editor that was only available inside of Sir-Tech, so that's probably the closest to a super-rare thing that I got to screw around with. But Dungeons of Despair? No, unfortunately."

Sirotek's reaction to Digital Eclipse's hunt was even blunter: "I don't know if you'll ever find that one."

Woodhead does not sound especially troubled by that possibility. Asked about the beta's fate, he said he was "just as happy for it to be lost in the mists of the past."

For game preservation, that is the uncomfortable part. Wizardry itself is playable again on modern platforms, and Atari's recent rights deal could put more of the early series back into circulation. Dungeons of Despair may remain the version that explains how the legend was stress-tested, then disappeared before the industry had learned how much of its own history it needed to save.