These were always games that I’d watch my older brothers play. I have decently vivid memories of them enjoying and eventually beating KQ6, and hate-playing KQ7 until giving up near what I assume was the end.
We never had any of the Lucasarts games for some reason, and I’ve never gone back and revisited either company’s output.
At the very least, I think Sierra’s pre-VGA AGI games look absolutely lovely.
I’d be interested in hearing from someone more knowledgeable about how Peasant’s Quest fits into this conversation, as a parody/response to the early King’s Quest series.
i remember being in a channel on EFnet and talking about how awesome the fully cartoonified graphics of King’s Quest 7 were and he was like “pff, nice try kid” and then private messaged me a link to his self-hosted ftp server with an iso of The Curse of Monkey Island on it “try this on for size dipshit”, etc.
I appreciate that the hint guide for Space Quest I used as a kid obscured the answers to questions unless you used this magic pen thing. There was a question about always getting stuck in the magnetic chair. When I finally revealed the text, the guide gave me endless shit because that part didn’t exist in the game.
This is a really interesting comparison and would categorize Sierra games as fundamentally distinct from the text adventure games they grew out of. It also lets us look at Prince of Persia and Another World as Sierra descendants, fulfilling a fantasy of direct control in these adventure game scenes.
‘Comic book as PC game’ doesn’t feel as you’re playing them, with the extent of backtracking and pixel-poring; it feels claustrophobic and locked-down instead of zippy and breathless. But we could lay that at a failure of this game design to express its inspiration.
Do you think there’s an argument that players experienced resetting and running through earlier content like re-reading a comic book? Games are so goal-focused that they so easily blind players to the represented world in favor of the symbolic functional pieces, so I think this could only exist as a post-hoc designer justification.
I know so little about IF history that I don’t really know where King’s Quest fits into it, or where it branched off from, but it is a well that I wish we’d gone back to a little more. Functionally it was first a world you had to explore, and map, at your own pace. After that you had to identify and solve the three big puzzles each of which had a violent solution that would fail 50% of the time, and a nonviolent solution that was worth more points. That aspect I know it shares with Zork. Also it had optional treasure. I’m always a big fan of optional treasure.
I don’t know if King’s Quest II was rushed to market because of the first game’s success, but with how much of a toybox mess every version of that game is I’d believe it. III was the first game to try and work the rags-to-riches fairytale theme into its gameplay, with the strict timer, stealth, and having to teach yourself alchemy, and I don’t know if the contemporary response was that it made the game too hard, but that’s certainly how history has treated it.
After that the KQs fell into a similar design mold: take a linear story, push that timeline into weird tetris shapes to add item puzzles, and place mission critical items on the cliff’s edge of yawning chasms.
King’s Quest came out a year after Planetfall, and the same year as the second game in the Enchanter series, and the Hitchhiker’s Guide IF game.
In other words, right when the puzzle design and writing of IF games was becoming significantly more sophisticated, Sierra upends the industry by making a game that had colorful impressive graphics.
King’s Quest 3 was actually my favorite of the parser based KQ games because it had a more cohesive scenario and actual puzzles that could be solved without hints
I definitely slide into the common argument that Infocom/LucasArts are better and so invalidate Sierra games. But there is a lot of interesting ideas that come up in their games! King’s Quest III is so brutally hard but I find myself more drawn to it than others because of the harmony between what you and the character experiences. Nowadays with saves being so fast and easy, I don’t find the hundreds of deaths to be so annoying. I like watching instant karma play out.
i never played the first king’s quest but remember finding an LP of it to be really fascinating, both in the extent of the magical thinking it required and also for the ways that strange ritualistic vagueness actually meshed pretty well with the source material (which seemed to be pulling more from shaggy-dog fairy tales and nursery rhymes than heroic fantasy). climb into one specific random tree to get the necklace, give the necklace to the bird, watch out not to get caught by the goblin roaming around etc. here’s a fragment of an online walkthrough:
i know all adventure games are similarly weird when summarized, and things like wandering characters, semi-random events and generic empty locations are Zork holdovers which mostly got pruned out of the genre later as it became its own thing. but it is interesting to me, in things like early King’s Quest and early Wizardry, to not only have that hermetic and magical approach to game design but also a sense that this was seen as something to be cultivated.
I don’t think even in their day I thought they were “good” games but what I liked about the space quests but didn’t have the words for at the time was how they were based more in buck rogers than alien or star trek. at least until the star trek parody one.
I’m not even sure anyone at Sierra ever played Zork, they were kind of infamous for never playing games by their competitors and never playtesting their games
It turns out I was confusing Zork with Adventure! which i guess does have that pirate who wanders around and steals your stuff. the sierra-related articles on that site make a fairly plausible case for the company as a weird mix of like, one part hobbyist tinkering to four parts ruthless capitalism and technical demonstration, maybe helping to explain why a lot of these games occupy that weird place of being both very well known and not very fondly remembered.
other main thing i associate with sierra are their early attempts at a kind of swinger-themed branding with “softporn adventure”, ken williams on which below:
