In 1983, a company named Sierra (with the help from designer Roberta Williams) released King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown. The game featured “never-before-seen” 3-dimensional graphics, a character by the name of Graham of whom the player controlled with the keyboard, and a command interface for character and object interactions. Eventually, King’s Quest spawned into a series of 7 sequels not to mention becoming one of the most successful adventure series in the history of computer gaming.

My first experience with King’s Quest came in the form of the second game, King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne. This sequel featured an updated engine, a fairytale setting and overall better graphics and gameplay. In fact, the engine referred to as Sierra AGI Game Interpreter) was utilized for several other Sierra game projects including Leisure Suit Larry, Quest for Glory and the successful Police and Space Quest series, to name a few.

When I first laid eyes upon the game it had just been freshly installed on my cousin’s 120Mhz computer. The introduction was Sierra’s logo followed by their trademark “chime” which resulted in the title, “King’s Quest: Romancing the Throne” emblazened on a gold scroll.

My cousin introduced me to the world of Daventry by showing me how you could move Graham through the various “scenes” in the game (using the arrow keys) and type commands into the interface to perform tasks (ie. take trident, etc.). For example, I remember my cousin timidly approaching Little Red Riding Hood’s house — slowly edging Graham to the front door and typing “open door”. The command interpreted through the software as “open” and “door” and magically the door opened. Well, it was magic to me.

Once inside the house, you were confronted with one of two possible situations;

• Your Grandmother lying in bed, a sweet old lady with a basket full of goodies.
• The Wolf, the villian who would gobble Graham up if he wasn’t quick enough.

Whenever I played King’s Quest, I always seemed to stumble upon the Wolf, at which point I would curse the Gods for my horrid luck. Whenever my cousin played she was blessed by the luck of nature as the Grandmother would be lying in the bed.

We eventually drew a map of the game to aide us in our adventure. Since the game was split up into various sequences (or scenes), it was easy to mark that area on your map to remember where you had been. This was especially helpful when you were trapped within the screen mazes, which were the programmer’s playful attempt to drive you mad. These were screens wherein no matter how many times you attempted to reach a different screen you always ended up where you were last. To break free from this cycle, you had to figure out the correct sequence of directions, for instance North, East, West, South.

I don’t believe we ever officially completed King’s Quest 2 but that wasn’t what mattered. The important aspect was the quality of the game and how it enthralled and immersed us. Compare KQ to today’s games and you have basically night and day, but what’s great is Roberta Williams’ games created a world without 3D polygons and brilliant real-time lighting. Her work, along with the work of other 2D games of that time, brought forth a standard in computer gameplay that had never been seen before.

This standard spread like wildfire to companies like Lucasarts who along with game creator Tim Shafer developed brilliant adventure games. These included Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and Sam and Max. All of these were true gems and nothing today as far as adventure games are concerned have even come close to the quality, humor and gameplay of these classics.

Luckily the same people who played these games years ago have decided to pay back the efforts of Robert Williams, Tim Shafer, and other fantastic adventure game creators by coding new projects in homage.

These include:

Peasant’s Quest: An excellent, and not to mention almost pixel perfect parody where the protaganist is a peasant, by the guys who do Homestarrunner.

Tierra Entertainment’s excellent KQ remakes, King’s Quest 1 and 2 (VGA).

ScummVM: “A ‘virtual machine’ for several classic graphical point-and-click adventure games. It is designed to run Adventure Soft’s Simon the Sorcerer 1 and 2, Revolution’s Beneath A Steel Sky, and games based on LucasArts’ SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) system. SCUMM is used for many games, including Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max and more.” I’ve been able to play several of my classic games and it’s all thanks to ScummVM.

Sarien: “an open source, portable implementation of the Sierra On-Line Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI). It is currently under development; no production-quality packages have been released. Sarien is able to execute Sierra On-Line AGI games at different levels of playability. Leisure Suit Larry, King’s Quest II and Mixed-Up Mother Gooose are some of the games that have been played from beginning to end with Sarien.

Sarien has features not present in the original Sierra On-Line interpreter. These extra functionalities include double horizontal resolution, enhanced color palette, dictionary and picture viewers, three-channel PCM sound, support to AGDS (a Russian AGI clone) games and a “Quake console” with integrated debugger.”

This entry was posted on Monday, August 2nd, 2004 at 9:00 am and is filed under Entertainment, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.