Sir-Tech

~ the goodbye ~

Sirotech Software was set up in the fall of 1979 in Ogdensburg, New York, by Norman and Fred Sirotek with Robert Woodhead. It incorporated as Sir-Tech Software in the spring of 1981 and released Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord that fall, written by Woodhead with Andrew Greenberg.

The game was a first-person party dungeon crawl on the Apple II with no automap and permanent death for everyone you had spent forty hours building. You drew the maze on graph paper yourself. It sold well enough in America to carry seven numbered sequels across twenty years, but the American career is the smaller half of this story by some distance.

The later work was Canadian. Sir-Tech Canada developed Jagged Alliance 2 in 1999, a turn-based mercenary game that people still play and still mod today, and Wizardry 8 in 2001, which arrived roughly a decade after the audience for that kind of thing had thinned out. The New York company had already stopped by then. Wikipedia puts that at 1998 and other accounts put it at 2001, and the sources genuinely do not agree.

The entire first decade of this company happened on a machine I never touched. Apple II software in 1981 was an American mail-order and hobby-shop culture, and it had no route into Turkey at all, where the personal computer arrived later and mostly as a home micro plugged into a television. I came to Sir-Tech backwards, which is how most people outside North America came to it: through Japanese games built on top of the thing it made.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

Wizardry's real career happened in Japan. ASCII published it there from 1985 and it settled in as a fixture rather than a nostalgia item. Yuji Horii has said plainly that Dragon Quest came out of Wizardry and Ultima, which puts a game written by two people at Cornell directly underneath the biggest series in Japanese consumer software.

From there the series stopped needing Sir-Tech to exist. Japanese studios made Wizardry games continuously into the 2010s under license, including console entries that never came out in English at all. The name is more familiar in Japan now than it is in the country that produced it.

~ what it became ~

Strategy First took the Jagged Alliance franchise rights from Sir-Tech Canada in 2002 as part of a restructuring, and the series has been restarted by other people repeatedly since, most recently as Jagged Alliance 3 in 2023. None of that money went anywhere near the people who made the second one.

Wizardry went somewhere stranger. The copyright ended up inside a numbered Ontario shell company that turned out to be owned by Robert and Norman Sirotek, and in 2006 that company sold the franchise to a Japanese buyer. The series finished where its actual audience had been sitting for twenty years. Sir-Tech Canada itself closed in late 2003 with no announcement worth the name, which is a quiet ending for a company that shipped the first commercial dungeon most people ever saw.

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