stage for a sequel, but no sequel for the game was ever released. Development Development of Wizards & Warriors III: Kuros: Visions of Power started in 1990, when, after strong sales with Ironsword: Wizards & Warriors II, Rare gave Zippo Games the rights to develop and direct the third installment in the series; the company's founders, Ste and John Pickford, co-designed the game. Ste Pickford was the lead artist and designed all the concept art for the game, while Lyndon Brooke also assisted with some of the drawings, and Steve Hughes and Andy Miah wrote the software. The game was originally titled Silversword, which was the name of the development project. The Pickford brothers came up with the concept of Kuros' disguises of knight, wizard, and thief as an homage to Ultimate Play the Game's (Rare's former incarnation) 1983 ZX Spectrum title Atic Atac. Ste Pickford said that designing a game which consisted of multiple characters, guilds, and secrets "was a dream come true at the time", saying that they wanted to pay tribute to the various Ultimate Play the Game titles they played in the early 1980s. Pickford wanted to design a game that was a step forward from most Action RPGs for the NES; he opted for nonlinear gameplay in which the different disguises and accompanying abilities would allow the player to access new areas of the map. "Wizards & Warriors III was more like a game that I really wanted to make." Pickford said. As with Zippo Games' previous projects, the concept art was drawn on paper. The graphics were then drawn with Deluxe Paint and then translated into the ROM manually, sprite-by-sprite, as the NES hardware required precision in sprite placements; this was different from what Rare did, which was to place each pixel of the graphics sprites on graph paper with marker pens and then tasked people to type the code into the ROM. Ste Pickford said that while Rare's sprite-drawing method was easier, his method, while time-consuming, was more efficient. Most everything from the previous Wizards & Warriors games were removed, except for the main protagonist, Kuros, and the game's main antagonist, Malkil. The concept art was originally drawn in black and white, even though the games were being designed in color, to save money from photocopying or printing in color - both of which were very expensive at the time. In developing the