Sierra made the games of my childhood. Are they still fun to play?
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Dunno. I think judging '80s games by Sierra games is a bad idea. I considered them bad games back in the '80s too and most of what the article goes over did not apply to the games I played on the Commodore 64, Atari ST and Commodore Amiga.
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Space Quest 0
Space Quest -1
Space Quest: The Lost Chapter
Space Quest IV.5
Space Quest: Vohaul Strikes Back
Space Quest: Incinerations
There are at least this many full fan length AGI games, not including the SQ2 VGA remake and the SQ3 3D remake. I've only played 0 and TLC, the others are new to me as of today.
Welcome to this weekend's rabbit hole, fellow janitors!
Space Quest -1
Space Quest: The Lost Chapter
Space Quest IV.5
Space Quest: Vohaul Strikes Back
Space Quest: Incinerations
There are at least this many full fan length AGI games, not including the SQ2 VGA remake and the SQ3 3D remake. I've only played 0 and TLC, the others are new to me as of today.
Welcome to this weekend's rabbit hole, fellow janitors!
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There's a fan made VGA remake of Space Quest II with full voice acting and a point and click interface. It even lets you give a middle finger to that damn root maze.
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Sierra games were rarely my thing - I spent most of my time playing arcade and platformers - and Doom - of course - but KQ5 and Quest for Glory 4 we something else. I never finished the latter - too hard, and no internet to look up hints - but I loved the music and just wandering around the world.
I remember in particular coming across ghosts of two former lovers in the woods and thinking how beautifully the game was conceived, and how much it made you wish that you actually lived in it.
I remember in particular coming across ghosts of two former lovers in the woods and thinking how beautifully the game was conceived, and how much it made you wish that you actually lived in it.
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QFG IV was actually a buggy mess on release and your version you owned was probably literally unfinishable but it's great if you play it now.
KQV is actually a real offender to me for asinine puzzle design. King Graham gets dropped in the area and needs to go up the mountain path. There's a snake in the way. Most of the game is getting rid of that snake. King and former knight Graham of Daventry needs to move or kill a snake.
What to do? First you need to wander aimlessly into a desert (pure trial and error by the way) to steal a genie lamp from bandits so you can trap the evil witch in some woods so you can like get some item from gnomes, etc etc until you get a.... tambourine!! Which is what you used to move the snake.
In parallel you need to rescue a mouse from a cat in a timed one time encounter (better hope you have the dirty boot by then!!) so the mouse will rescue you from thugs later. And you need to make sure you acquire cheese and pie. If you don't get the cheese you will fail the final puzzle of the game. If you don't get the pie you can't throw it in the face of a yeti later. Also if you eat the pie instead of the chicken leg when you're starving you're doomed by the yeti.
It's actually pretty wild when you think about it.
Edit: if you eat the pie that's just a few minutes before the yeti. If you eat the cheese instead you don't know you messed up until the end of the game (if you can even deduce what you messed up)
Edit2: actually I think you get a fishhook or something and then in the final area you have to let yourself be captured (but only once!!) so you can fish some cheese out of the mouse hole with it.
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My brain is just wired differently. These games never made sense to me, as to why I should worship the screen, to the point that a single pixel is obviously something of interest... was completely beyond me.
They were a little before my time as well, so having been spoiled the Lucas arts point and clicks... These early Sierra games just didn't click.
They were a little before my time as well, so having been spoiled the Lucas arts point and clicks... These early Sierra games just didn't click.
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Right in the Nostalgia! I play all the SQ, PQ, and KQ 2-6 (7?). I remember the acorns, the kiss from the xenomorph, Having to play the slot machine at Toshley's station to hear about the Deltaur.
As an 8 year old, the text parser was tough sometimes. Still hours of entertainment with my Brother and Dad
Anybody remember the white books with the magic marker that would make hints appear?
As an 8 year old, the text parser was tough sometimes. Still hours of entertainment with my Brother and Dad
Anybody remember the white books with the magic marker that would make hints appear?
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The very first games I ever played were Sierra games. I played Mystery House on the Apple II at school, where I distinctly remember having trouble getting it to understand "get pitcher" (most likely because I was misspelling it), and at home on my TRS 80, I played Mickey's Space Adventure.
My favorite sierra game was probably The Black Cauldron, which I played on my IIgs.
My favorite sierra game was probably The Black Cauldron, which I played on my IIgs.
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I still remember the death dialog "Restart? Restore? At least once more!".
I can't remember which game though, possibly Quest for Glory.
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I was more into Apogee games myself - Blake Stone, Duke Nukem, Rise of the Triad, Commander Keen, etc.
My favorite Sierra series was Police Quest though, I liked that one quite a bit.
My favorite Sierra series was Police Quest though, I liked that one quite a bit.
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As a companion piece, I think some of you old heads here might enjoy this circa 2000 article from Old Man Murray about the death of adventure games.
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That's a hell of a leap from "poorly* designed videogames" to "societal rot." There are still plenty of games meant to be enjoyed for a finite time, from beginning to end. Being endlessly, mean-spiritedly tricked and manipulated - in video games and otherwise - also does not simply and consistently output resilient problem solvers. It breeds mistrust and frustration, cynicism and despair.I remember that part of the game
This was a time when games had not yet been optimized for making the player as addicted as possible to the game.
The player already bought (or, more likely, illegally copied) the game - case closed.
Maybe if we had given kids in the last 30 years more of that kind of feedback, instead of introducing them to almost mandatory reward schemes as part of nearly each game, we as a society probably would have more members actually able to use common sense in RL...
Instead, we ended up with a sizable part of the population being very convinced of themselves, but at the same time easily manipulated by the exact same engage/reward mechanisms found in games into following everything and everyone willing to pay for that manipulation.
If you compare the psychological tricks of game design to motivate and keep the player engaged with the design of conservative campaigns, there is a sizable overlap - even beyond the "free to play, pay to win"- attitude of the current u.S. administration.
*This is a whole other class of problem from gun culture and fetishization, pay-to-win, gacha, etc.
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“Z”
I like the “back in my day uphill both ways to school in the snow” nostalgia, even the reverse-engineered logic that kinda sorta made trying random things in your inventory after cursor-scrubbing every scene one encounters into “puzzles.”
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I was more of a LucasArts fan.
Loved all of them, even the perhaps less successful like Loom
Loved all of them, even the perhaps less successful like Loom
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Curse was my first Monkey Island, and its humor was very formative for me; "bed-wetting doodyhead" is a favorite mild insult, and the pirate song will live rent-free in my head for the remainder of my days.
Although Murray's roar of "I'm not bald! ... I just have a very high widow's peak" hits differently when you're 40 compared to 13.
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The problem is that for most people, "addictive" is roughly equivalent to "enjoyable".I remember that part of the game
This was a time when games had not yet been optimized for making the player as addicted as possible to the game.
The player already bought (or, more likely, illegally copied) the game - case closed.
So sure, maybe we should have never invented gacha games, or slot machines, or tik-tok, or scratch offs, or cartoons, or cigarettes, or french fries, or coca-cola, or... or... but that's all easier said than done.
Maybe the closest thing we have now to "uninventing" addictive games is all the steam reviews that say "Yes I played this game 4,000 hours but I don't recommend it."
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I'm in my mid 40s. I played SQ1 with my daughter who was 5 or 6 at the time, and she liked it. Granted I did the typing, but she told me what to do. Squishing the spider brought great joy.
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Man, I loved those games but they were so, so frustrating. The worst one for me was the whale in King's Quest IV. You had to swim out into the ocean to a very specific space, through unendingly similar screen of blue water, or you would drown. When you do get to the right space you get swallowed by a whale, but you survive. Now, you have to have found a feather already or you are screwed and have to reload.
If you did find the feather, you have to climb up the whales gums to get to a very specific part of the mouth to tickle it. It is extremely difficult because the slightest wrong movement will send you falling, and there is no indication of the actual spot you have to go to and tickle the whale. And you have to be on that spot exactly perfectly, not a pixel out of place.
None of this was obvious. It took so much trial and error to even realize that this is the correct sequence of events in the first place. And then the pixel perfect requirements for climbing made it so much worse. I could never complete a game like this again today.
If you did find the feather, you have to climb up the whales gums to get to a very specific part of the mouth to tickle it. It is extremely difficult because the slightest wrong movement will send you falling, and there is no indication of the actual spot you have to go to and tickle the whale. And you have to be on that spot exactly perfectly, not a pixel out of place.
None of this was obvious. It took so much trial and error to even realize that this is the correct sequence of events in the first place. And then the pixel perfect requirements for climbing made it so much worse. I could never complete a game like this again today.
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Agree on most of the Quest games. They didn't really feel like games you were expected to actually complete, just play a while until you got stuck and then maybe come back some time later to try one more time.
However, Quest for Glory (or Hero's Quest, as it was originally called) still remains my favourite Sierra game and probably my favourite adventure game.
Sure, there were some Sierra insta-deaths, but they were not of this entirely unfair style. Well, a few comedic ones there might have been, but not enough to stop progress.
And the puzzles may have been occasionally obscure, but there was usually at least three ways to accomplish them: the thief/warrior/wizard way, and sometimes even a suboptimal way - hacking some plants down instead of casting spells or throwing rocks or climbing to the correct location to get some seed was not the right way - it was still possible to proceed, and get some kind of resolution (although it might not get the "optimal" end game that way). And you were not locked to only doing the puzzles in the way of the character you picked at the start - you could do almost all things as every class, be it casting spells as a thief or battling the goblin hordes as a mage.
I replayed the VGA remake recently, and it was still good. I seem to recall the EGA original allowed you to do some extra things compared to the remake (especially get some extra jokes out of the parser), but everything important was the way I remembered.
However, Quest for Glory (or Hero's Quest, as it was originally called) still remains my favourite Sierra game and probably my favourite adventure game.
Sure, there were some Sierra insta-deaths, but they were not of this entirely unfair style. Well, a few comedic ones there might have been, but not enough to stop progress.
And the puzzles may have been occasionally obscure, but there was usually at least three ways to accomplish them: the thief/warrior/wizard way, and sometimes even a suboptimal way - hacking some plants down instead of casting spells or throwing rocks or climbing to the correct location to get some seed was not the right way - it was still possible to proceed, and get some kind of resolution (although it might not get the "optimal" end game that way). And you were not locked to only doing the puzzles in the way of the character you picked at the start - you could do almost all things as every class, be it casting spells as a thief or battling the goblin hordes as a mage.
I replayed the VGA remake recently, and it was still good. I seem to recall the EGA original allowed you to do some extra things compared to the remake (especially get some extra jokes out of the parser), but everything important was the way I remembered.
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I see a lot of nostalgia in this thread. If you, like me, enjoy that kind of thing: I can totally recommend 'The Art of Point-and-Click Adventure Games' by Bitmap Books. There is a lot of stunning art in it, but it also explains why certain game mechanisms were used and then disappeared again.
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Then you're going to love (and I'm astonished that nobody has yet linked) The Death Generator!
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Meanwhile, at the competition across the road you just ... could not die.
I've played all Space Quests later, when the internet was available and you had walkthroughs.
I can still probably play Monkey Island 1 back to back from memory though.
I've played all Space Quests later, when the internet was available and you had walkthroughs.
I can still probably play Monkey Island 1 back to back from memory though.
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This issue of arbitrary and unknowable steps and requirements just to make games take longer "for fun" didn't stop with text games, and better graphics or input devices didn't change it. I felt the same way about games like Myst (in which I got nowhere at all until I got a walkthrough for it) and again when I tried to play Minecraft where you just have to guess what anything does or what things go together to craft items or what they'll make or how to use them.
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The makers of The House of DaVinci series are working on House of Tesla, now, too. There's a brief demo on Steam and is supposed to release later this year!
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Since this article is about Sierra adventure games, I'll bring up The Crimson Diamond, which is heavily inspired by The Colonel's Bequest and only just released last summer after several years of independent development, almost all of it done by only one programmer.
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Yes. And despite that King's Quest IV is a 40,000 fold improvement over KQ 3. I cannot believe any human beat 3 without a guide. I know my family finished 4 without a guide at least.
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This all takes me back. SQII was the first Quest game I played back on the family 286. I remember that freakin' root maze. I "cheated" and turned off the Turbo on my computer, dropping my good ol' 286 from 4 MHz to 2 MHz so I'd move slower through it.
A friend had a copy of Lesure Suit Larry. It had a trivia contest at the start that would determine how raunchy the content was. We found that once we got into the "best" content, the next time we played we could do whatever with the trivia and our save game would elevate our access.
A friend had a copy of Lesure Suit Larry. It had a trivia contest at the start that would determine how raunchy the content was. We found that once we got into the "best" content, the next time we played we could do whatever with the trivia and our save game would elevate our access.
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And sometimes, it’s not insta-death that gets you. For example, in Gold Rush…if you forget to grab an item from your house at the beginning of the game, by the time you get to a mid-game puzzle where you need it, you have to scrap the entire save and start over again.
But I will say - their latter point and click games were a lot more enjoyable. Kings Quest 6 remains one of my favorite Sierra games of all time.
But I will say - their latter point and click games were a lot more enjoyable. Kings Quest 6 remains one of my favorite Sierra games of all time.
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There were no guides when they first came out. I had 12 hours per day in a retail store in the early days of computing. They weren't hard to finish at all. And because customers saw me playing these games, they got interested and bought copies. Then they would go home to play and called me every time they got stuck. Being a walking hint book got me a lot of good will and loyal customers.
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I've been replaying some of my Sierra favorites on my vintage hardware. My first experience with Sierra was the original King's Quest, played on a family friend's brand new IBM PCjr (he was a computer store owner). It was incredible to me that unlike other games that followed a highly restricted, linear path, in KQ I could wander this digital world in almost any direction or way I wanted!
As a child I had the additional challenge of working with just 4 color CGA, which meant you couldn't actually see certain things you were meant to find, so that really stretched the game out. Some games were definitely worse than others - Manhunter: New York, which I'm playing right now, dials up the impossibility factor by 10 with that awful sewer maze that changes perspective every time you move a screen. Whoever designed that atrocity should be investigated by the ICC for violating torture laws.
I just finished SQ2 a month ago, now in my late 40s, and admit I had to go to the walkthroughs a few times because I was going wrong somewhere and no longer had the patience I did as a kid to kitchen sink it (actually as a kid I had no choice.. there was no internet walkthrough available, very few friends had a computer at all, and no way my Dad was paying for hints). That swamp on Labion, where you have to find just that right spot in 3 screens to dive.. and then figure out how to hold your breath.. brutal. And then I wasted a week because I didn't free the orange Muppet thing that was trapped. That was the worst feature of Sierra games - you could go forward quite a ways and spend days thinking you were advancing before realizing you had missed something way back, and could not proceed any further without going all the way back to your mistake and then replaying it all through again... until you hit the next one. Some of the in game puzzles had little to no logic at all. Sierra didn't care. I really hope there aren't some parallel universes where Roger Wilco is a real guy and my inability to think way, way, way outside the box cost him 1000 gruesome deaths.
Perhaps you can't go home in the literal sense, but for me a lot of the scenes in these games almost feel like real places. And I can go back to them any time I want, to see Batman pulling out of a cave or just stand by the waterfall in Black Cauldron. Vintage tech and software are about as close to time travel as you can get. Just make sure you save game when you find a safe place to stand and take in the view.
As a child I had the additional challenge of working with just 4 color CGA, which meant you couldn't actually see certain things you were meant to find, so that really stretched the game out. Some games were definitely worse than others - Manhunter: New York, which I'm playing right now, dials up the impossibility factor by 10 with that awful sewer maze that changes perspective every time you move a screen. Whoever designed that atrocity should be investigated by the ICC for violating torture laws.
I just finished SQ2 a month ago, now in my late 40s, and admit I had to go to the walkthroughs a few times because I was going wrong somewhere and no longer had the patience I did as a kid to kitchen sink it (actually as a kid I had no choice.. there was no internet walkthrough available, very few friends had a computer at all, and no way my Dad was paying for hints). That swamp on Labion, where you have to find just that right spot in 3 screens to dive.. and then figure out how to hold your breath.. brutal. And then I wasted a week because I didn't free the orange Muppet thing that was trapped. That was the worst feature of Sierra games - you could go forward quite a ways and spend days thinking you were advancing before realizing you had missed something way back, and could not proceed any further without going all the way back to your mistake and then replaying it all through again... until you hit the next one. Some of the in game puzzles had little to no logic at all. Sierra didn't care. I really hope there aren't some parallel universes where Roger Wilco is a real guy and my inability to think way, way, way outside the box cost him 1000 gruesome deaths.
Perhaps you can't go home in the literal sense, but for me a lot of the scenes in these games almost feel like real places. And I can go back to them any time I want, to see Batman pulling out of a cave or just stand by the waterfall in Black Cauldron. Vintage tech and software are about as close to time travel as you can get. Just make sure you save game when you find a safe place to stand and take in the view.
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Flashback to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and forgetting to pick up the towel.
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Most of these admittedly awful "games" of the late 80's and very early 90's (can we just call them computerized activities?) were entertaining just for the novelty of interacting with a computer and getting used to computing concepts as a child.
If you made a kid use these today instead of a tablet, they'd probably throw a tantrum. The minute that gameplay was streamlined and graphics improved, especially in the 3D accelerated era, we dropped these old games like the turds they were and moved on to the better stuff.
Personally, my taste is for the PS1-PS2/Windows 98-XP era of games - usually streamlined and modernized enough to be entertaining or tell a story, good enough controls, and no constant internet connectivity or achievement fluff. But if you like that stuff, more power to you. Everyone will have nostalgia for the stuff they grew up with and found formative. As a five year old I was supremely impressed by the little animation of DoomGuy's face that winced with pain when shot, and the glowing lava in Descent sparked a lifetime of computer fascination. I can't say the same for DOS and earlier.
The alternative to these clunky games was simply passively watching TV, so we kept clicking our buttons even when frustrated. Half the time, the jankiness was key to learning more about how your computer worked, so I'd make the case that it was educational if were weren't looking at a computing future dominated by centralized distribution and non-upgradeable systems-on-a-chip.
If you made a kid use these today instead of a tablet, they'd probably throw a tantrum. The minute that gameplay was streamlined and graphics improved, especially in the 3D accelerated era, we dropped these old games like the turds they were and moved on to the better stuff.
Personally, my taste is for the PS1-PS2/Windows 98-XP era of games - usually streamlined and modernized enough to be entertaining or tell a story, good enough controls, and no constant internet connectivity or achievement fluff. But if you like that stuff, more power to you. Everyone will have nostalgia for the stuff they grew up with and found formative. As a five year old I was supremely impressed by the little animation of DoomGuy's face that winced with pain when shot, and the glowing lava in Descent sparked a lifetime of computer fascination. I can't say the same for DOS and earlier.
The alternative to these clunky games was simply passively watching TV, so we kept clicking our buttons even when frustrated. Half the time, the jankiness was key to learning more about how your computer worked, so I'd make the case that it was educational if were weren't looking at a computing future dominated by centralized distribution and non-upgradeable systems-on-a-chip.
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Yes, one of my first games was Kings Quest V on a 386 with a 5.25" floppy drive. We DID have a 40 mb hard drive, but it was a work computer for my dad (yes, running AutoCAD and things like that on a 16 mhz 386sx!!!) so there wasn't the 10mb to spare to install the game. I played it off floppies. That meant every few screens, swapping floppies. And they didn't exactly optimize what screens were on what disc - exploring the desert section meant SO MANY DISK SWAPS since you just had to die over and over while mapping it out.
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The social aspect of these games was completely different too. There was no internet - so all of the hints for puzzles got passed around school by kids on the playground, between schools at scouts or club sports, and between towns via summer camps and kids who met on family vacations. Instant friendship could be established for the week with someone you'd never meet again.
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These games seem to have held up pretty well in terms of visits from the Suck Fairy. That's Jo Walton's way of dealing with the let down one gets reading a childhood classic and finding it just didn't hold up very well. While the game play aesthetic may have changed, these games still have a lot to offer, and not just memories of all the spare time one had when young.
P.S. These games are all past my time as a gamer. I was introduced to the genre with Will Crowther's ADVENT and PDP-1X Spacewar. In both cases, the source code was as much fun to read as the games were to play, and with them written in FORTRAN and PDP-1X assembly language Certainly, that's saying a lot.
P.S. These games are all past my time as a gamer. I was introduced to the genre with Will Crowther's ADVENT and PDP-1X Spacewar. In both cases, the source code was as much fun to read as the games were to play, and with them written in FORTRAN and PDP-1X assembly language Certainly, that's saying a lot.
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