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.”