This became a fun RPG. When I first saw the game (back in late 1991), it however had a lot of problems. The game I first saw had little to do with Dungeons and Dragons, and was still missing most of the spell and creature animations. It also crashed a lot. Since I had at least a passing familiarity with D&D (even though I hadn't played the pencil and paper game in a decade), I was handed some D&D manuals and told to write up a bug any time the game didn't match the D&D rpg, as well as any gameplay bugs.
I spent about four of my six months as a tester at Sega working at least part time on WOTES (which was originally called "HollowWorld", after a set of D&D modules). It was one of the first games I worked on, before I moved up in the world and became a game programmer. Now, many years later, I still remember a lot about this game. I plugged my WOTES cart into an old Genesis several years ago, and found I still recalled how to get around the game world.
This is also the first game I had any sort of (very minor) creative influence on - at least a third of the Castle graveyard tombstone messages came from me (how's that for a thoroughly useless piece of trivia?). The only one I can specifically remember as mine was "He's Dead Jim" (so I've always been a Star Trek junkie, even back then).
You can still play this game using an emulator... I recently tried it out using an emulator called "Gens"... you just need to download the emulator, and then search the web for a ROM image of the game.
Cheat Codes - there are two cheat codes in the game, though one of them is virtually impossible to get.
Several people have e-mailed me about having WOTES carts that will no longer save games. This is due to the internal battery on the cartridge running out of power. In addition, one of the cheats from above requires a cart with no saved games. Go here to learn how to fix this.
Also in the realm of cheats is a list of hidden items in the game you can only access by using an emulator to play the game on a PC, and by then editting the save game files. You can find info about how to do this on the WOTES Hidden Items Page.
9/20/2010 - it seems that WOTES is still played after all these years... I got an email recently with a link to a video, showing that you can play through the entire game in 30 minutes (if you know what you're doing):
To get to my various maps of the WOTES world, click on the valley map below.
I've also included a fairly brief text walkthrough of the game. Between it and the maps, you should be able to get through the entire game, finding every item that exists (though if you find anything I missed, please e-mail me!).
Sega and Sega Genesis are trademarks of SEGA, © 1992 DUNGEONS & DRAGONS and WARRIORS OF THE ETERNAL SUN are trademarks owned by TSR, Inc., and manufactured under a sublicense from Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI), © 1992 Many of the pictures and maps used here are from the official WOTES hint book, though most have been altered by the author of this web page.