11

KING ’S QUEST: QUEST FOR THE CROWN (1984): PERILOUS PUZZLES, THORNY THRONES

Roberta Williams’ King's Quest: Quest for the Crown, published first in 1984 for IBM's short-lived PCjr platform, established many of the features we take for granted in modern adventure games. It's hard to exaggerate its importance on the development of the genre, to which it introduced brightly colored animated graphics, a navigable, pseudo-3D environment allowing for three axes of movement, and the quirky, irreverent humor that would dominate the adventure scene until Cyan's Myst exploded onto the world in 1993 (see Chapter 12, “Myst (1993): Launching Multimedia Worlds”). Sierra On-Line, the software publishing company formed by Williams and her husband Ken, would soon become the world's preeminent publisher of adventure games, releasing many highly popular and influential games based on the King's Quest model. Although few serious critics would claim that King's Quest is without flaw, it represented a huge leap forward and is still played in various versions by adventure game fans today.

Critics and gamers alike were blown away by the colorful animated visuals of the original King's Quest on the IBM PCjr.

The history of King's Quest begins rather inauspiciously. Instead of releasing the game directly to the dominant computer platforms of the era (Apple II, Atari 8-bit, and Commodore 64), Sierra arranged an exclusive licensing deal with IBM for their upcoming PCjr platform. The PCjr, as the name implies, was intended as a cheaper, more family-friendly personal computer than the business-oriented IBM PC, and offered better sound and graphics, as well as built-in joystick ports. However, the PCjr's high price and a combination of other factors (awful keyboard, limited memory, compatibility issues) made it uncompetitive in the marketplace. Even with IBM's golden reputation, heavy advertising budget, and costly efforts to avert disaster (including a new and better keyboard), the PCjr failed miserably. Thankfully for adventure game fans, Sierra soon rereleased the game for other platforms, including the Tandy 1000, a much more successful IBM PC-compatible computer inspired by the PCjr. Sales of the game soared as scores of gamers flooded into software shops, eager to play the game that all their friends and magazines were talking about.

Roberta Williams was no stranger to the adventure game market, having already established a name for herself with Mystery House, The Wizard and the Princess (both 1980), and Time Zone (1982). All three of these games were among the firsts for their genres. Mystery House was the first graphical adventure game, and—though laughably primitive by today's standards—this Apple II game was tremendously progressive. Despite its crudely drawn monochrome graphics, poorly edited script, and one of the worst text parsers in the business, it still sold more than 11,000 copies in its first year of release.¹ The Wizard and the Princess upped the ante with color graphics and sold even better than its predecessor. Time Zone was by far the most ambitious graphical adventure game produced by anyone prior to that time; it shipped on six double-sided floppy disks at a time when many games fit comfortably alongside many others on one side. Unfortunately, the exorbitant cost of the game (over $100 in 1982 dollars) prevented its success, despite the immense size and somewhat improved graphics. Williams and Sierra produced several other “Hi-Res Adventures” during this era, but certainly none to rival their later King's Quest. We should note, too, that the company was called “On-Line Systems” during these early years, changing to “Sierra On-Line” later on to avoid confusion with another company.

IBM's traditionally stuffy packaging and cover art for the original IBM PCjr version of King's Quest contrasted with the game's whimsical, storybook setting.

IBM made a smart decision in asking Sierra On-Line to create one of its popular adventure games for its PCjr. Roberta Williams was determined to up the ante yet again, producing a game that would not only look better than the competition but offer a much freer range of movement. Although Williams maintains in several interviews that she prioritizes plots and characters over interface, King's Quest was a technological marvel. Not only were the 16-color animated graphics superior to Sierra's earlier works, but this time the player controlled a character that could move in three dimensions, all in real time. Williams’ earlier games had been shown in first person, and it's interesting here to note that the designer felt that a third-person perspective would be more realistic—we'll see that line of thought reversed in the next chapter, when we discuss Myst. King's Quest isn't true 3D—the character does not shrink or expand as he moves toward the foreground or background, but could go behind or in front of objects on the screen. It was still an impressive feat for the time.

Although Time Zone's scope was impressive, the visuals were anything but.

King's Quest simple parser worked in conjunction with real-time character movement to heighten the sense of interaction in the gameworld.

Simplicity was one of Sierra's main goals while designing the interface, but the game still relied heavily on textual input. As with Sierra's earlier games, the text parser was woefully dumb compared to Infocom's Zork (see Chapter 25, “Zork (1980): Text Imps versus Graphics Grues”), a fact that the legendary text adventure developer exploited ruthlessly in its magazine ads. A bigger problem, though, was that the relatively low resolution of the graphics made it difficult to identify certain objects; what looked like a stone might actually be a walnut. Typing “TAKE STONE” would simply result in the same error message over and over; only “TAKE WALNUT” would work. Although savvy players found ways to deal with these problems (such as typing “LOOK GROUND” to learn the name of the object), others were forced to rely on hint books or advice from friends. The cumbersome and vexing text parser was dropped in later Sierra adventure games (including King's Quest V), though some fans objected that doing so inhibited their (perceived, at least) freedom and creativity.

Even though King's Quest's interface was easy for novices to master, the game itself was often quite difficult. The character, Graham, was easily and frequently killed in the adventure, so frequent saves were necessary to prevent tedious repetition—another factor that the game's diehard fans offer as a “feature,” since it extends the time it takes to complete the game and thus ups the “play value.”

A nastier problem was that it was also quite easy to get the game into an unwinnable state, so that even though Graham wasn't dead, there was no way to complete the game without restoring to an earlier save point. Sometimes it wouldn't even be obvious to players that they'd reached such a state; they'd simply continue trying things for hours or even days until finally giving up. Roberta Williams earned a reputation during these years for creating hard puzzles and obscure or even misleading clues.

One such puzzle in the game concerns a condor. The idea is to stand in a certain spot on the screen (walkthroughs have gone so far as to offer close-up screenshots to help) and enter “JUMP” into the parser at just the right moment. The precise timing and placement, combined with the somewhat obscure command to jump (why not catch or grab?) stumped many gamers. Another puzzle is based on the old fairy tale about Rumplestiltskin, but with a twist—when players were asked to name the gnome, they might not have realized that an earlier clue to “think backwards” meant they had to transcribe the name Rumplestiltskin using a backwards alphabet, yielding “IFNKOVHGROGHPRM.” Williams admitted that this was an “awfully nasty puzzle,” but defended it as a “typical ‘advanced’ puzzle in those days.”² Yet perhaps the most infamous and frustrating “puzzle” has the player climbing a beanstalk. The climb involves careful coordination with the keyboard, since Graham will fall to his death at even the slightest deviation from the preestablished (and difficult-to-find) path. Even seasoned veterans were forced to save and restore countless times to finally get to the top of the beanstalk. Fortunately for modern adventurers, these and other puzzles have been simplified in later remakes of the game, and of course the diehards maintain that the challenge is what makes the game fun in the first place.

As we've alluded to several times already, the difficulty of the game is a point of contention among fans of the series and genre. Later adventure games, such as those from LucasArts, were much more forgiving; players were encouraged to explore without fear of dying or making the game impossible to beat. Some fans of the older style disliked these changes, claiming that gamers simply weren't patient or intelligent enough to meet the challenge. Sharply disagreeing with this opinion is Ron Gilbert, designer of LucasArts’ breakaway comedy hit The Secret of Monkey Island (1990). His 1989 diatribe, “Why Adventure Games Suck,” has been widely quoted and is worth partially quoting here:

Some people say that following [my] rules makes the games too easy to play. I disagree. What makes most games tough to play is that the puzzles are arbitrary and unconnected. Most are solved by chance or repetitive sessions of typing “light candle with match,” “light paper with match,” “light rug with match,” until something happens. This is not tough game play; this is masturbation. I played one game that required the player to drop a bubble gum wrapper in a room in order to get a trap door to open (object names have been changed to protect the guilty). What is the reasoning? There is none. It's an advanced puzzle, I was told.

Gilbert's essay is very much still relevant today, and it's easy to think that one reason the adventure game genre has declined somewhat in recent years is that not enough developers have read and applied it. In King's Quest's defense, there are usually at least two possible solutions to the puzzles, and there are, of course, many diligent gamers who have completed it without any outside help.

Cynics might point out that, whether by design or not, the difficult puzzles created a healthy niche market for Sierra's own set of hint books. However, Sierra didn't seem to object to others’ hint books, and both Roberta and Ken Williams had high praise for Peter Spears's The King's Quest Companion, which offered hints integrated into a novella based on the games. A historian would do well to pay attention to the hint book industry, as they were widely read and applied by adventure game fans.

According to Roberta Williams, the King's Quest series is primarily about personalities and stories: “Trying to come up with mind-bending puzzles and brain-twisting plots was never something that I strived for.”³ As you may have inferred from the earlier description of the puzzles, most of the stories and personalities involve popular folk and fairy tales, though usually with a twist to throw off gamers familiar with the outcomes. Whether one enjoys these games depends on their willingness to be charmed by the stories and characters, aspects that stand in stark contrast to Cyan's revolutionary Myst series.

The goal of King's Quest is to recover three stolen artifacts for the Kingdom of Daventry. These items are a shield that makes its bearer invulnerable, a chest that never empties of gold, and a mirror that shows the future. The mirror, which will play a strong role in later King's Quest games, was taken by a wizard who promises in exchange to “bring an heir” to the king and queen, who have been childless throughout their long and otherwise happy marriage. Rather than bear a child, however, the queen becomes deathly ill. Now a dwarf shows up who offers to cure the queen in return for the shield. The dwarf takes the shield, but the queen dies shortly after. The miserable king, however, manages to rescue a beautiful princess, whom he takes for his wife. When she learns about the chest, though, she runs away with it, leaving the king without a bride and the kingdom without its last magical artifact. The player's character, Sir Graham, shows up to help, and is promised the throne of Daventry if he can restore the three artifacts.

The low-resolution graphics sometimes made identifying objects quite difficult, as seen here in King's Quest II. Thankfully, typing “LOOK TREE” causes a pop-up window to appear that offers a text description of the object (a stake). Sierra relied on its text parser to both control the game and supplement the graphics technology.

King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne, released in 1985, continues the story introduced in the first game. Graham is now King Graham, and adventure ensues after he uses the mirror to find a suitable bride and queen for his kingdom. He is teleported to the land of Kolyma, where Hagatha the witch has trapped Valanice in a quartz tower. Graham sets out on a quest to save the damsel in distress, but rescuing her means searching all over Kolyma for the three missing keys and, of course, solving many puzzles along the way. The game's title, by the way, is an allusion to Romancing the Stone, a lighthearted 1984 action film/romantic comedy starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner.

The second King's Quest game was written with AGI (Adventure Game Interpreter), a tool comparable to Infocom's Z-Machine (see Chapter 25, “Zork (1980): Text Imps versus Graphics Grues”). AGI, introduced in the 1984 multiplatform release of King's Quest, allowed writers and graphic designers to work independently of programmers, focusing on story and puzzle design rather than the game engine. It also made it easier to offer ports to the platforms of the day; once an AGI port was available for a given platform, Sierra could offer its entire library to its owners. AGI allowed Sierra to quickly develop and release not only later King's Quest games, but a plethora of popular spin-offs (which we'll discuss in a moment). The downside of Sierra's reliance was that many AGI games look and feel quite similar, and major innovations were a long time coming. An upgraded engine called SCI, or Sierra's Creative Interpreter, was introduced in 1988 for King's Quest IV. The superior audiovisuals of SCI offered 320 × 200 resolution (AGI was limited to 160 × 200), and support for sound cards and mice, two innovations that were rapidly being adopted by PC gamers. We'll discuss these issues later in this chapter.

King's Quest II is often considered one of the weaker games in the series. Harry Kaplan of Adventure Classic Gaming, for instance, calls it a “virtual carbon copy of the original title in both concept and style,” and a sequel that has “lost both the charm and freshness of the original.”⁴ There were again objections to the puzzles, which some found illogical, and criticisms of the story, which some found hopelessly cliched. What's interesting from a historical perspective is the tension between the need for innovation and continuity: here, the sequel was too similar to the prequel, and suffered for it. Later games, especially the last one, would vary too widely from the model, again disappointing or even enraging loyal fans. Williams has stated in several interviews that she always carefully read and considered criticism of her games, which ranged from the highest flattery to the grossest insult. In any case, even the “worst” games in the series tended to sell more copies than previous entries, though that fact might be explained by the broadening market and rising demand in general.

Box back for King's Quest III.

The third game, King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human, debuted in October of 1986, and again found a ready audience of fans eager to return to Daventry. However, they must have been shocked to discover the game is not about Graham or Daventry, but rather a boy named Gwydion who has been kidnapped by Manannan, an evil magician. However, Gwydion does eventually make his way to Daventry, where he rescues Princess Rosella and saves the kingdom. Some fans were disappointed that the game didn't continue the storylines established in the earlier games, but most of the complaints focused on the difficult, frustrating gameplay.

Roy Wagner, writing in the June 1987 issue of Computer Gaming World, recommended that players buy the hint book immediately, since “there will be very few that can get through this game without a lot of help.” Again, the problems were illogical puzzles and the expectation that players would recognize objects on the screen, which, as Wagner quips, are “drawn with two colors and a few pixels.” There were also plenty of difficult climbing sequences, which seemingly only a true zealot would ever hold up as a selling point. Another controversial issue was Sierra's decision to integrate a copy protection system that expected players to have access to the printed manual. At certain points, players were asked to type in portions of the manual. Unfortunately, these weren't always accurate, as Emily Morganti of Adventure Gamers describes: “You're supposed to follow the directions in the manual to the letter, space, and period, but even then, some don't work. For example, typing ‘Mold the dough into a cookie,’ as written in the game manual, yields the response ‘What's a mold?’ (I took a lucky guess and found that Gwydion needs to ‘pat’ the dough instead.) Even without typos, it's very easy to mess up these spells, and it's game over if you do.”⁵ Fortunately for Sierra and fans of the series, these problems weren't bad enough to stymie sales, and modern gamers can find all the necessary manuals and codes easily enough online. After King's Quest III, Roberta Williams took a break to produce Mixed-Up Mother Goose (1987), a popular edutainment title designed for young children. The box cover showed Roberta Williams herself, surrounded by a group of children, including her own.

King's Quest IV put players in control of a female character, Princess Rosella. One of the starting puzzles involves this unicorn, who shyly retreats each time Rosella gets too close.

The fourth King's Quest, The Perils of Rosella (1988), makes an even more radical break from the series than its prequel. The most talked-about change concerns the protaganist, who is now female. King Graham's daughter, Princess Rosella, is whisked by the fairy Genesta to Tamir, where a magic fruit grows that can cure her father (who has recently suffered a massive heart attack). As we noted previously, this is the first King's Quest built with SCI, and critics made much of the improved audiovisuals and interface. However, they were again aggravated by the often illogical, obscure puzzles. The tedious and frustrating climbing segments are back, but another oft-criticized puzzle concerns a bridle. Scorpia writes about the puzzle in her December 1988 review of the game published in Computer Gaming World: “Finding [the bridle] can be a frustrating experience, since it is not visible on the screen, and you would never know it was there unless you had Rosella search every possible spot on the screen. There are no clues at all to this, therefore you might not even search very long, if at all. And as the location itself is not easy to reach (you have to do some swimming, among other things) it makes the situation that much more exasperating.” Again, gamers hoping to finish the game sprang for a hint book, and it truly seems difficult to accept that such challenges make the game more fun to play—no matter what the zealots claim.

King's Quest V made a tremendous leap in graphics technology, making the older games look primitive by comparison. It also integrated full support for the mouse. The greatly simplified interface may have been more intuitive, but some fans objected, claiming that the older text parser allowed for more creative and fulfilling approaches to problem solving.

The next game in the series, King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder (1990), made another leap forward in graphics, this time to 256-color VGA. In her March 1991 review of the game in Computer Gaming World, Scorpia remarked that “this is the game to boot up when you want to show off your VGA system,” a sentiment shared by plenty of other gamers and critics at the time. An updated version released a year later on CD-ROM went a step further by offering digitized voices, but shoddy voice acting raised some question whether this was really an upgrade to the original. Another big change is a switch to icon-based interaction, with the cumbersome and oft-lamented text parser finally laid to rest. This design made the game much more accessible to newcomers, and also reduced the frustration associated with trying to find the right word that would satisfy Sierra's hopelessly limited parser. However, again gamers were burdened with illogical puzzles and tedious action sequences (several of which were timed).

King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow, released September 1992, is usually regarded as the finest game in the series, and it shows up on several “greatest game” lists. GameSpot, for instance, includes it on its “Greatest Games of All Time” list, describing it as a “clever, beautiful, and unique adventure game [that] is truly one of the best games that the genre has ever had to offer, and reminds us sadly that adventure gaming may be dying rapidly, but it's never going to be forgotten.”⁶ Adam Rodman wrote for Just Adventure that “I, the reviewer, personally believe that King's Quest 6 is the best adventure game Sierra has ever produced, and it would be one of my top candidates for the best adventure game of all time.”⁷ Indeed, it is hard to find any serious fan of the genre who can't appreciate the title, and it's certainly a worthy introduction for anyone new to the series.

Adventure game fans note King's Quest VI for bringing together two of Sierra's most celebrated designers: Roberta Williams and Jane Jensen, the designer responsible for the hugely popular Gabriel Knight series. Although fans will of course recognize the familiar blend of folk and fairy tales that are one of the series’ trademarks, they seem more thoughtfully and artistically explored here than before. What appears at first to be a very basic plot (Prince Alexander sets off to find Princess Cassima) expands rapidly. Alexander must contend with four different islands in the Land of the Green Isles, each with its own theme and personality. What makes the story worthwhile are the characters: neither Alexander nor Cassima act in the stereotypical ways we might expect from the previous games, and the people of each island have a unique theme and personality. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the puzzles are much less frustrating than in previous games, and the game is much more forgiving of mistakes, thus encouraging experimentation. It's quite accessible to novices, especially when compared to previous entries.

The biggest change graphically was a lengthy introductory 3D cutscene; it was cutting edge for its day and provided gamers with a new “tech demo” to show off their systems. The intro is particularly impressive in the later CD-ROM release, which features professional-quality voice acting. Both versions boast full 3D animation and dramatic music. The introduction sets up the context of the game and introduces the characters. Though of course the actual game is less impressive than this cinematic introduction, everyone knew it was only a matter of time before graphic technology caught up with the imagination of visionary designers like Williams and Jensen.

One of the best puzzles involves five gnomes, each with a single, highly amplified sense organ (and no others). The player must find objects for Alexander that will fool the gnomes into thinking he's not human. For instance, one gnome has an acute sense of smell, and must be fooled by waving a flower under his nose. Clever and original puzzles such as this abound in the game, and have delighted the countless gamers who have managed to solve them.

The series seemed to decline after the sixth game, perhaps because Williams was by that point engrossed in her Phantasmagoria project, an adult-oriented game that incorporated large amounts of full-motion video. King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride appeared November 1994, and seems to be an effort to create a game in the style of Disney's Aladdin and similar animated features. It featured cell animation and SVGA graphics, qualities that still give the game a distinctly modern look, despite its age. The protagonists are Queen Valanice and Princess Rosella, who has been resisting Valanice's requests that she seek a suitable husband. Rosella leaps into a magic pool and is followed by a dumbstruck Valanice, but the two are transported to a realm named Eldritch. The game shifts from Valanice to Rosella as the two search all over Eldritch for each other. The rather cutesy nature of the story, characters, and animation style seemed a rather sharp contrast to the previous game, which seemed to cater more to mature gamers. The Princeless Bride also offers a simplified interface reminiscent of Cyan's Myst, which had debuted the year before. The puzzles were also far easier (or more intuitive) than ever before, naturally with zealous fans of the “hard” puzzles of previous games objecting.

King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow, is widely regarded as the best game of the series. Shown here is the memorable gnome puzzle. Each gnome has only a single sense organ, and it's up to the player to find ways to exploit this fact to convince them he's not a human being. For this game, Roberta Williams was joined by Jane Jensen, who went on to create the best-selling Gabriel Knight series.

King's Quest VII brought the visual quality up to that of an animated film.

In 1996, Sierra On-Line was purchased by CUC International, an event that signaled the beginning of the end for the developer's prominence. Because Sierra was a publicly traded company, the decision wasn't up to CEO Ken Williams, and he found afterwards that “I had no power to control things, and they got out of hand. I transferred out of the games division, primarily because I couldn't stomach watching my company being ripped apart.”⁸ Although Sierra would continue making games for some years, it's hard not to imagine how this tragedy behind the scenes was affecting morale and, subsequently, the quality of the final King's Quest games.

While some fans may have found The Princeless Bride disappointing, the final game, Mask of Eternity (1998), aroused much greater controversy. The boldest change to the gameplay was the introduction of role-playing elements. Sierra had achieved great success with Lori Ann Cole's Quest for Glory (also known as Hero's Quest) series of adventure/RPG hybrids, but many fans were appalled to find them in a King's Quest game. Sierra had been doing poorly for some time, and Williams felt that a drastic change was necessary: “I was trying to bring new blood into the genre … thereby trying to keep it from dying. Times change, and tastes change … they just do, and you've gotta do what you've gotta do to try and reach the biggest possible audience to keep a genre alive…. The old-style adventure game that we all know and love will just not cut it in today's world.”⁹ Williams had also been quoted in other interviews claiming that because computers were now more affordable, the audience for games had become less sophisticated—many of them just couldn't handle a difficult game like King's Quest.

Mask of Eternity went 3D and bears little resemblance to the previous games, a fact that upset many fans. The main character, Connor, can run, jump, and fight, arcade elements that were intended to make the series more accessible to modern gamers. Whether these innovations helped or hindered the game is controversial, though designer Roberta Williams thought they were essential to revitalize the genre.

Reactions to the game were mixed. IGN's Tal Blevins called it a “welcomed addition” to the series, though acknowledging that “more traditional fans of the genre will probably scoff at this one.¹⁰ Vince Broady of GameSpot was likewise favorably disposed: “Sierra should be applauded for trying something new, even if its reach somewhat exceeds its grasp.”¹¹ However, two of the Internet's biggest adventure game sites, Quandary (defunct) and Adventure Gamers, gave it failing scores. Josh Roberts's review for Adventure Gamers describes a game “caught between two genres, unable to fully succeed in either,” and complains about the uneven graphics, “complicated” controls, and the “stiff, boring, and frequently just plain irritating” protagonist.¹²

It's easy to compare the controversy surrounding the final King's Quest with the final Ultima game (See Chapter 23, “ Ultima (1980): The Immaculate Conception of the Computer Role-Playing Game”); both Roberta Williams and Richard Garriott felt that the tried-and-true models established by their earlier triumphs just weren't compatible with the modern industry. The two icons had always striven not just to be on the leading edge, but rather the bleeding edge of game design. They played a vital role in establishing higher standards for PC games. Countless gamers upgraded their graphics and sound cards—if not their whole systems—just to play the latest King's Quest or Ultima, and it's quite possible that their risky efforts in these areas laid the foundation for the modern PC industry. Now that their games had been over-shadowed by the next generation of top-tier developers—Cyan, id, and Bethesda, to name just a few—they no doubt felt something drastic had to be done. Unfortunately for both, this drastic action served more to alienate existing fans than win new ones.

Mask of Eternity deviated from its predecessors in several key technological aspects, the most noticeable being the shift to full 3D graphics. It also offered a choice of perspectives: third-person or first-person. This ability to shift perspectives proved vital, as so many of the puzzles involved precision running and jumping sequences reminiscent of Tomb Raider (see Chapter 18, “Super Mario 64/Tomb Raider (1996): The Third Dimension”). The world was very massive, consisting of seven regions, each with its own look and theme. The story introduced a new protagonist named Connor, who accidentally turns the entire citizenry of Daventry to stone when he picks up a mysterious object (a shard of the titular mask). Connor's quest, naturally, is to restore their freedom, a task that requires exploring nearly every inch of the sizable gameworld.

King's Quest legacy is immense, particularly regarding the adventure game genre. As we mentioned earlier, the early adoption of the multiplatform AGI and SCI engines made it easier for Sierra to quickly develop and release games. The first of these was Space Quest, a 1986 game developed by Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy. This zany and irreverent game was rife with parody and satire of popular science fiction, and launched a highly successful series that lasted for five sequels. A more controversial spin-off series is Al Lowe's Leisure Suit Larry, a notorious 1987 game intended for mature audiences. The game's protaganist, the nerdy Larry Laffer, remains one of the most recognizable characters in all of adventure gaming, and games based on the franchise are still in production today, though Lowe himself is no longer involved. Jim Walls's Police Quest, a shorter-lived series that also debuted in 1987, is notable for being designed by an actual highway patrol officer. In 1989, Lori Ann Cole's Quest for Glory series debuted, which was a tremendously popular hybrid adventure with role-playing and action elements. Unlike Mask of Eternity, this earlier attempt to blur genres was a rousing success, and remains one of the most beloved of Sierra's many games and series. Although the look and feel of the games depended on the SCI or AGI engine, they pushed it in wildly different creative directions.

Box back for the Space Quest Collection.

Box back for Police Quest III: The Kindred.

Beyond influencing other developers at Sierra, Roberta Williams’ ideas spread far and wide across the industry. Although there are literally hundreds of games we could mention, by far the most important are those developed by LucasArts (earlier Lucasfilm Games). In particular, these include two classics designed or codesigned by Ron Gilbert: Maniac Mansion (1987) and The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), which are indisputably two of the greatest adventure games of all time. Like Sierra, LucasArts created its own in-house development tool called SCUMM, or “Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion,” and countless best-selling games were composed with it. Maniac Mansion offered a purely icon-based interface (no text parser), and was much more forgiving than Sierra's hits. The Secret of Monkey Island further refined the formula, making it impossible for the protagonist (Guybrush Threepwood) to die except in one place. Because players no longer had to be worried about sudden death or getting the game into an unwinnable state, they were much more comfortable exploring and experimenting, savoring the story and witty dialog. Gilbert's masterpiece has been translated into five languages and is certainly worth the attention of any King's Quest fan. LucasArts would go on to produce many best-selling graphical adventure games, giving Sierra a run for their money (or, rather, a run for their customers’ money).

Nevertheless, LucasArts only refined what Roberta Williams and Ken Williams created. The influence of King's Quest still lives on today, surviving even the onslaught brought on by Cyan's Myst. After all, the bulk of adventure games still being produced today for computers, consoles, and handhelds are in third-person perspective, not first-person, and many are loaded with characters, humor, and plots that all make them much closer to King's Quest than Myst in spirit. We also see a revival of the genre in the latest Sam & Max games from Telltale Games (starting 2006), available in episodic form online and in a combined “season” on disc. Although many critics seem to think the adventure game is dead, Sam & Max and similar projects like 2008’s Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness (Hothead Games) and Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People (Telltale Games and Videlectrix), demonstrate that gamers will always find time (and funds) for games with well-written stories, intriguing characters, and clever puzzles.

¹See The Dot Eaters’ coverage of the game at http://www.thedoteaters.com/p4_stage2.php.

²See Joppe Bos's review of the game at http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/reviews/120/.

³See Philip Jong's 2006 interview with Roberta Williams at http://www.adventure-classicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/198/.

⁴See http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/reviews/132/.

⁵See http://www.adventuregamers.com/article/id,590/p,2.

⁶See http://www.gamespot.com/features/6144989/index.html.

⁷See http://www.justadventure.com/reviews/KQ6/KQ6_Review.shtm.

⁸See Philip Jong's interview with Ken Williams at http://www.adventureclassic-gaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/197/.

⁹SeeRandySluganski'sinterviewwithRobertaWilliamsathttp://www.justadventure.com/Interviews/Roberta_Williams/Roberta_Williams_Interview_3.shtm.

¹⁰See http://pc.ign.com/articles/153/153529p1.html.

¹¹See http://reviews.cnet.com/pc-games/king-s-quest-mask/4505-9696_7-30976333.html.

¹²See http://adventuregamers.com/article/id,96.