In November 2018, a work-in-progress ROM appeared for a game its makers had already given up on once — eleven years earlier. What happened next turned Wizard of Wor Arcade into one of the most decorated Atari 2600 homebrews of its year: a full cartridge release, a shelf of awards, and a game you can still buy today.
A port eleven years in the making
Champ Games first tried to rebuild Wizard of Wor for the Atari 2600 in 2007, and the attempt died on the table. The arcade original was a demanding template: a maze shooter built around two warriors hunting monsters through dungeon corridors, famous above all for its synthesized speech — the Wizard taunting players in a robotic growl that was a sensation in the arcades. An official port reached the 2600 during the system’s commercial lifetime, but a conversion that truly did the arcade game justice was another matter, and in 2007 the project was abandoned.
A decade of homebrew progress changed the maths. Modern bank-switching techniques — the CDF method in particular — had effectively rewritten what a 2600 cartridge could hold and do, and in 2018 Champ Games revived the abandoned code to take advantage of them. The resurrection moved fast: by the Portland Retro Gaming Expo in October 2018 the game was reported to be about 95% complete, and demo ROMs were posted publicly soon after — the moment this site first reported on it, as an intriguing work in progress. What looked, in late 2018, like the start of a story was in fact its home stretch: one of the longest gestations in 2600 homebrew was about to pay off.
The voice that waited a decade
Speech was never going to be optional in a Wizard of Wor conversion worth its name, and the Champ Games version carries more than 70 phrases through the AtariVox voice module. Those phrases have a story of their own — one that sums up how the homebrew scene actually works.
They were created by Mike Haas for an entirely different project: an extensive hack of the original CBS Wizard of Wor cartridge called Wizard of Wor 2: The Arena, by CDS Games and Nukey Shay. When that project stalled, the voice work was left homeless — hours of arcade taunts with no game to taunt in. Rather than let them rot, the phrases moved across to Champ Games’ ground-up version instead. A performance cut for one remake ended up starring in another: nothing good in this scene ever truly goes to waste, it just waits for the right cartridge.
Far more than a port
Plenty of 2600 conversions are exercises in graceful compromise. Wizard of Wor Arcade reads instead like a statement of intent. The finished game packs in:
- 99 levels across dozens of unique mazes
- One-player or two-player co-operative play — the arcade game’s two-warrior dungeon hunts, intact
- Three skill levels
- A built-in maze editor, with custom mazes saved to AtariVox or SaveKey
- High-score saving, and speech throughout via the AtariVox
- Support for the QuadTari adapter, so two players can play co-op while an AtariVox stays connected for speech and saves — a thoughtful answer to the 2600’s two joystick ports meeting a game that wants joysticks and peripherals at once
All of it runs on a 32K CDFJ “Melody enhanced” cartridge — hardware from a different universe to the constraints that killed the 2007 attempt. The credits underline the collaborative nature of the scene at its best: code and design by John W. Champeau, graphics by Nathan Strum, speech and sound by Mike Haas and Ross Keenum, and packaging by Dave Dries.
The maze contest
Before the cartridge shipped, Champ Games and AtariAge opened the game up to its future players. A Maze Design Contest in March 2019 invited fans to build their own dungeons with the in-game editor and submit them for judging. The winning designs were built into the final cartridge, and their creators were credited in the manual.
It was a lovely touch that turned buyers into contributors — and a quiet flex, too. A maze editor confident enough to anchor a public contest, judged before release, is not a bonus feature; it’s a design pillar. Very few commercial games of the 2600’s own era treated their players as collaborators. This one did it as a matter of course.
The word “Arcade” is the point
That suffix in the title is doing real work. The 2600 already had a Wizard of Wor — the period CBS conversion is a respectable period piece — so a homebrew remake had to justify its existence in one word. “Arcade” is the promise: not a souvenir of the coin-op, but the coin-op itself, rebuilt — the speech, the mazes, the two-player hunts, the works. Everything in the finished cartridge serves that promise, from the 70-plus voice phrases down to the radar screen. It also explains the feature list’s stubborn completeness. A tribute can cut corners; a game calling itself “Arcade” cannot be caught leaving the maze editor out.
Release, awards, and an afterlife
Wizard of Wor Arcade was released on cartridge through the AtariAge Store in 2019, and the scene’s verdict arrived at the 2019 Atari Homebrew Awards: first place for Best Music & Sound, and third place in Best Homebrew, Best Graphics and Best Packaging. It was a strong year to be measured against — the awards had been founded only the year before, as our rundown of the first Atari Awards shows, and the 2019 field included fellow work-in-progress graduates like Dare Devil, nominated in three categories of its own.
Read those results again and the pattern matters: a win for the soundtrack and podium finishes for the game itself, its graphics and its packaging is breadth, not a single lucky category — four separate juries of voters, four separate endorsements. For a conversion of a forty-year-old arcade game, made by hobbyists, in their spare time, that is a remarkable spread.
Nor did the game fade once the awards were handed out. Champ Games later moved sales to its own store, where Wizard of Wor Arcade is still sold today in cartridge and ROM form, with modern compatibility notes for the Atari 2600+ and 7800+ — firmware 2.0.1.5 or later is needed, and the cartridge does not work on the RetroN 77. Complete copies change hands for around $75 on the secondary market: respectable territory for a game that began life as an abandoned 2007 side project, spent a decade as a might-have-been, and came back to outsell its own obituary.
Closing
Most work-in-progress ROMs are, at best, a promise — and this site’s archive is full of promises that quietly expired. Wizard of Wor Arcade is what happens when a promise gets kept twice: once by the programmers who waited for cartridge technology to catch up with their ambition, and once by the voice artist whose taunts waited a decade for a game worthy of them. If you want one cartridge that shows what the Atari 2600 homebrew scene can do when it aims squarely at the arcade, this is still the one to hunt down.