It also had an antecedent; Wizardry was very much like a single-player version of Avatar, an early multiplayer dungeon game that ran on the University of Illinois PLATO system. The cube-like "rooms," displays, and game mechanics were very similar. I don't recall the controls being the same, though, and Avatar was written in PLATO's native TUTOR language, while Wizardry was UCSD Pascal.
> There was a game on the PLATO network (circa '79 or '80) called "Oubliette" that nearly caused me to flunk out of law school. [...] Wizardry was in many ways our attempt to see if we could write a single-player game as cool as the PLATO dungeon games and cram it into a tiny machine like the Apple II.
The CRPG Addict blog has done a great job reviewing the PLATO games from a seasoned player's perspective, and he touches on some of the inspiration for Wizardry.
