Ultimate Wizard (1986)

Ultimate Wizard is an Action game, developed by Progressive Peripherals & Software and published by Electronic Arts, which was released in 1986. Craig Smith and Aaron Hightower teamed up to make an improved construction set in their homes in North Richland Hills, Texas. They communicated with Sean and Steve to understand the memory layout for the levels and then set out to create an advanced construction set better than the one included with the original game. Among other things, their construction set included the ability to create "treasure matrices" that allowed the user to create special effects similar to the ones seen in the main levels. The original set had remnants in its code alluding to features that had been disabled, likely due to their instability or lack of documentation. PP&S took the code from Craig and Aaron, and released it commercially in a package called the Wizard Expansion Set. This add-on pack also included 50 new levels from a competition held by the company specifically for the expansion; none of the new levels had any advanced features because of the limitations of the original construction set. Electronic Arts, including Paul Reiche III, used the Construction set created by Aaron and Craig to create a new set of levels. The Construction Set was also included by EA, as were a combination of levels from the original game and from the expansion pack, albeit in a different order from the original PP&S releases. The Ultimate Wizard version also featured some changes to existing levels to increase their difficulty, as well as different sprites for some of the game's monsters.

• Release Date: September 1, 1986
• Developer: Electronic Arts