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Amazing Stories (1985-87) was an anthology of fascinating tales proposed by director Steven Spielberg. The series, lasting for two years, brought together several feature-film directors and writers including Robert Zemekis, Joe Dante, Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese to name a few.

Of the episodes that I can remember the most are that of Ghost Train and an episode starring Mark Hamill as a junk collector. The story depicts the life-long passion of a collector of ‘junk’ or what others — namely people like you or I — believe to be junk. As the old saying goes; One man’s junk is another man’s treasure. Eventually as time passes the collection of junk is auctioned off thus earning the old man millions upon millions of dollars.

Amazing things in life always intrigue us. This is because we want to believe in miracles and amazing stories and let them into what can be an otherwise mudane and recycled lifestyle. When you hear about a fountain in Egypt that weeps gold tears you remain glued to the television in a zombie’s trance. Or, upon flipping through the channels you happen upon a temple in Tibet that is buried within the chasms of a spectacular ice cave you are instantly intranced. Why? Spectacular events spark the imagination and the intrigue.

At work I’ve been in charge of redesigning frontends (and sometimes the occassional backend) for a variety of personal, professional and non-profit web sites. The consensus from those I’ve shown my redesigns to is one of two things; it either looks great and marks an improvement or looks too professional, too textbook.

My experience in this profession, and in any profession if you think about it, is that you will never please everyone. Most people have different theories and tastes when it comes to design and it’s evident when you show them your work.

I began my career in art painting landscapes, sculpting clay and doodling cartoons. My work received the same breadth of opinions and to be honest most of the negative comments affected me personally and professionally. I remember reading about how Kevin Smith (director of Mall Rats and Chasing Amy, amongst others) received a negative comment on the a View Askew forum about his movie Dogma. He mentioned that he literally wanted to go to that guy’s house and ask him why he felt the need to bad mouth his movie — maybe even going as far as pushing him around. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure Jerry Bruckheimer could care less if he receives negative reviews so long as he breaks a box office record.

There is a point in our professional lives wherein some of the comments you’ll receive will be taken personally, but in those times you might want to take a step back and look at the full picture. You’re not going to please everyone and the ratio from those who like your design to those who don’t might be unbalanced.

What you have to remember is that you, as the artist, will always receive negative feedback but you will also receive positive feedback. No matter the ratio, positive feedback is most important in building your ego and round any edges wherein negative feedback might improve your skills, if you take it in excess of a grain of salt.

My wife and I bought one of those water filtration systems for our faucet, figuring it would be a cost effective solution to buying bottled water. After installing the piece on our faucethead, I noticed that it mentioned in the instructions that you had to flush it out for 5 minutes. Afterwards it noted that the lifetime of the filter would be 100 Gallons or 4 months, whichever comes first.

The replacement filter costs $16.99 at Target and on rare occassions they’ll run a special knocking the price down about 10% of the original cost. This means that every 4 months when we have to replace the filter we’ll be spending almost 20 bucks a pop, which equals to the amount of about $60 a year. I figure we were spending close to $80 a year on bottled water (a few cases with about 4 or 5 milk gallons of water).

In addition to owning a faucet filter, we also own a pitcher which we fill and place in the refridgerator for cold water. My wife likes her water luke-warm cold, if there is such a thing, and I, on the other hand, prefer water ice — straight from the Artic — cold. This might be attributed to all those mountain visits I went on as a kid and drank straight from the creek.

Only one time did I have an unpleasant experience with cold water in Canada where I almost drowned in an ice cold lake after slicing the bottom of my foot on a smooth, but extremely sharp, stone.

Aside from that experience, I love the taste of water and have permenantly replaced my Coca-Cola drinking habits with the pure and unaltered taste of water.

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.”