Sierra Adventure Games: KQ, SQ, and more

Let's drive Roger Wilco all the way to town, except that hitting a rock three times on your shitty Apple ][ clone will cause him to crash.

that being said, my faves: SQ3, LSL3, Hero's Quest 1, Quest for Glory 4(Lovecraft!), Gabriel Knight 1, Colonel's Bequest 1 & 2.

Phantasmagoria should have its own special category in the halls of gaming history.

Say, whatever happened to Ken & Roberta Williams, anyway?

And who remembers calling the Sierra Hint Line?

http://www.sierragamers.com/aspx/templates/modern2.aspx?msgId=0

And who remembers calling the Sierra Hint Line?

Who remembers the hint books that you had to decode with the magic highlighter, which was cool but which over time totally yellowed out. Later replaced by the clear red decoding windows.

Who remembers the Black Cauldron game? thank god I don't...

oh wait, Freddy Pharkus, Frontier Pharmacist! Its 16-bit ragtime predated Momus' "Folktronica" by 7 years!

Why do you hate Astro Chicken and his female counterpart Ms. Astro Chicken?

My favs: KQ2, KQ3, KQ4, KQ6, SQ4, SQ5, SQ6, Dagger of Amon Ra (aka CB2), Gabriel Knight 1, and Gabriel Knight 2 (yes, it was FMV but it was actually good), Freddy Pharkus, and Gold Rush. Everyone forgets the last two but they were awesome!

oh wait, Freddy Pharkus, Frontier Pharmacist! Its 16-bit ragtime predated Momus' "Folktronica" by 7 years!

PEERLESS, EARLESS, AND FREE

I would love it if a computer game came out today with some sort of text parser, even if it were a sort of secondary interface in the game.

http://www.adventurecollective.com/screenshots/kq1-shot1.gif

I mean, I don't know what that green shit on the ground is, but somehow I managed to figure it out, and it was probably fun doing so. I'm sure with the graphics of the future that we enjoy today, it would be reasonably easy to discern.

I also just realized that I miss the more narrative structure that the text based interface gave the game in describing each new screen as you happened upon it and "look"ed at it.

but yeah, i get what you're talking about. i don't think narrative had as much prominence as it did with the text adventure era until at least the late 90s...

I used to play almost nothing but Sierra and Microprose games (until LucasArts adventures became clearly superior) and have endlessly fond memories of NOT FIXING MY SIGHTS IN POLICE QUEST 2 AND THEN JUST DYING HALFWAY THROUGH THE GAME AND HAVING TO RESTART. Also, Gabriel Knight 1 played a large role in why I moved to New Orleans.

"strafe left"
"shoot fiend"
"strafe right"
"shoot fiend"
-you have killed the scrag-
"look"
-You're in a small room with shotgun shells in each corner and a gold key in the middle.-
"take key"
-A SHAMBLER APPEARS!-
"shoot shambler"
"shoot shambler"
-you have been hit by the shambler-
"shoot shambler"
-you have been hit by the shambler-
-you die-

NOT FIXING MY SIGHTS IN POLICE QUEST 2 AND THEN JUST DYING HALFWAY THROUGH THE GAME

yeah, this was the bullshit part of sierra games. constant death due to shit you forgot to do days/weeks earlier and had to go back. "Oh sorry, Larry, you should have filled up the comically oversized slurpee cup, even tho you thought it was only a sight gag and part of the scenery since no adventure game would ever have a plot point that illogical!"

i like how LucasArts went out of their way(in MI2, i think) to openly mock this...

Attacking the ghost yields no treasure and does not damage it. Can you escape your fate?

This sounds like something Treguard would have said on Knightmare.

That is awesome. When I finally visited New Orleans in college I definitely wanted to go to the places I'd seen in the game. When I made my way to Jackson Square, I walked around for a long time staring at drummers.

Hey, are there any good Sierra-style adventure games out there that have been made by gamers since the genre's decline? I'm sure there are lots of people who still enjoy this sort of thing.

they're all 3D now. Longest Journey for one, and the sequel will be out soon.

Broken Sword 2 is a hell of a lot of fun. I heard Syberia was good but it looks kind of hippie-ish.

http://home.pacbell.net/claydale/images/paula/INN_springmap.jpg

http://loonyboi.com/if/quake/about.htm

TEXT-QUAKE

Instead of making it look like that Dire Straits video from UHF.

http://www.adventurecollective.com/screenshots/gk3-02.jpg

I generally agree, but the new Bone game plays fairly well. Iwannaplaysamnmax.

"Kirk has already been sentenced to 10 years of prison, and assessed a $3.27 billion dollar penalty. Walter’s criminal trial is still in progress. To this day, I have trouble believing they were crooks. Walter was on Sierra’s board for many years, and there was never any hint of it."

http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Reviews/SpaceQuest/Images/SS-06.gif
yayayayayayay

I played the last compilations they came out with for KQ and SQ, and they were pretty rads. Lots of great extras, and VGA version of the earliest games.

rereleasing tons of sierra sjit!

http://g-images.amazon.com/images/G/16/nav/target_dog.jpg

Look! He wants to play "Astro Chicken" too!

Holy shit:
http://sarien.net/

Welcome to Sarien.net, the portal for reliving the classic Sierra On-Line adventure games. With its focus on instant fun and a unique multiplayer experience, Sarien.net hopes to win new gamers' hearts and promote the adventure game genre.
Featuring Police Quest I, Space Quest I and Leisure Suit Larry I

seems buggy as hell, but worth exploring!

these games are all awful.

except the first laura bow. that was awesome.

http://i.imgur.com/53s7a.gif

watch it for a while

i don't get it? then again i never really played these games.

yo thomp. how can you not represent THE DAGGER OF AMON RA?

Gold Rush! It started in Brooklyn Heights and featured a fairly convincing rendering of the promenade.

hell yes!

a remake of hero's quest 2!!!!

http://www.agdinteractive.com/games/qfg2/homepage/homepage.html

i got annoyed at amon-ra and gave up quickly -- it seemed way too standardly pointandclicky after the first one, which is all modernist and shit

also i think pointless deaths? i don't know

1988-1989 was really the golden period. EGA graphics, a refined parser, great games. SQ3, KQ4, PQ2, QFG, LSL3 and Colonel's Bequest. Even the non-adventure games from that time were great, I played through "Jones in the Fast Lane" with my brothers many, many times.

Really, anybody who hasn't played LSL3 is really missing out

i was kind of glad game designers eventually gave up on the one false move and you die thing. in goldnrush therebwerenitems that, if you didn't buy them in brooklyn you'd windup dying near the end of the game. it seemed very pointless andnfutile, like it's notnlike you would know to buy them in advance. course you could spend a little more for the walkthrough

I'm fine with one false move and you die except when you can't finish a game because of something you didn't do early on. Speaking of adventure games where you die, search Newgrounds for Gretel and Hansel part 1 and 2. It's the best flash adventure games I ever played. There is really great deaths and oil painting graphics

nah unless there's a clear clue that a move will lead to death then it's bullshit imo

If everything in adventure games was clear then they'd require no thinking

and Larry would never get laid

I love that in OG Larry you'd "walk south" and immediately be run over by a cab

I discovered QFG 1 through the VGA remake so that has always held a lot of nostalgia for me. Love the super idyllic/pastoral landscape graphics.

remember playing King's Quest 6 and not being able to beat the ending because i didn't pick up a fucking mint leaf or something in a cave many hours back. i had Space Quest 4 and was completely baffled by how absurdly arbitrary everything seemed. like "oh, right, of course i have to lick the underside of this spaceship to take me to this new area". also you die every 15 seconds. i remember getting to sequences and just getting killed immediately and it was never quite clear if that was because you weren't supposed to be there yet, you didn't have the right items, or you just didn't move to the right places quickly enough. seriously don't know how anyone could make any progress with that one without a guide, which i'm assuming was very much intentional. was always fascinated by the Sierra adventure games, but they were also kind of awful and more aggravating than fun.

was around 12-14 or so when i was playing these, so maybe i was just too dumb for them idk. had more fun with the LucasArts games.

lucasarts mocked constant sierra deaths in monkey island 1. you can walk off a cliff with guybrush and he falls to his death. the sierra restart/restore/quit screen comes up and then guybrush comes flying back up onto the cliff and says, "wow, that was lucky. rubber tree" or something like that.

There was an interesting article in Retro Gamer last month re: Maniac Mansion-- which had instadeath-- Maniac's developers say, "Well, basically, we played Sierra's games and then ripped them off. We love Sierra games." Ken Williams, commenting 30 years after the fact, said, "I've never played a Lucasarts game and never will."

That said I thought SQ3's ScumSoft was meant to be a dig at Lucasarts.

I'm glad I had access to BBSes back then so's I could d/l the walkthrus. I think the only Sierra guide I ever bought(from a Babbage's, natch) was for the original Hero's Quest.

the fact that Ken Williams deliberately never played Grim Fandango out of some sort of corporate branded pride means that he really was a cunt who deserved to get bought-out and get shunted to the side. Probably.

my favorite things about quest for glory were the imaginative monsters

smooshed by the antwerp!

http://drgnslyr.tripod.com/hq1char1/aniantwerp.gif

1988-1989 was really the golden period. EGA graphics, a refined parser, great games. SQ3, KQ4, PQ2, QFG ...

i remember the games seemed to hit a wall around the time king's quest 5 came out ... like the ultima games, as the graphics got more and more elaborate they also became uglier and more distracting and the gameplay got clunkier and more frustrating.

i think i remember by the time qfg 3 and 4 came out i was already off the boat and into like delphine and bullfrog and lucasart games

^ Yes. SQ4 & KQ5 were interestingly written but a bore to play, and ugly too. I never played any of the mid-90s games but saw younger relatives playing them and they featured Disney-esque musical numbers?

Sierra issued a magazine for a while, called Interaction, I think. A school friend subscribed. Ken's Letters from the Editor were hilariously WTF: "CD-ROM video is stupid. Why would I get excited about a 16-colour movie the size of a postage stamp?" and "I hooked up to the Internet yesterday. It was slow and boring."

Phantasmagoria is the worst game I've ever played through to completion.

i remember sierra put out like a Police Quest 12: Swat 2 or something at some point. it was iirc a tactical rts type thing with police hostage scenarios and kinda squad top-down perspective? i never actually played it, only saw it advertised in gaming magazines. i wondered if it was really complex + interesting, or just kinda death throes of the storied franchise.

this i think
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Quest:_SWAT_2

have any of you played it?

hmm looks kinda like syndicate. i remember for every good game in that vein there was at least one bad one.

Haha I had no idea that was what Daryl Gates got up to once he was booted from the job.

That said I thought SQ3's ScumSoft was meant to be a dig at Lucasarts.

There was a somewhat less than subtle dig at Lucasarts in SQ4:

http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20080110190903/spacequest/images/thumb/1/1a/Boom.png/180px-Boom.png

The latest bomb from master storyteller Morrie Brianarty, BOOM is a post-holocaust adventure set in post-holocaust America after the holocaust. Neutron bombs have eradicated all life, leaving only YOU to wander through the wreckage. No other characters, no conflict, no puzzles, no chance of dying, and no interface make this the easiest-to-finish game yet! Just boot it up and watch it explode!

[Space Quest 6: Roger Wilco in The Spinal Frontier]'s subtitle comes from the final portion, in which Roger has to undergo miniaturization and enter the body of a shipmate and romantic interest, a spoof of the 1987 movie Innerspace. (This segment also provided the game's original subtitle, Where in Corpsman Santiago is Roger Wilco?, which was not used due to legal threats from the makers of the Carmen Sandiego products.)

what can you tell me about...

voodoo?

gabe knight???

http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/9893-gabriel-knight-sins-of-the-fathers-dos-screenshot-gabriel-talking.gif

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gIsF9I8DDA

music in this game owns so hard, best sierra music, tho the main theme from qfg is a close runner up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhwBonIBIgE

tho i can't find the historically-accurate-to-me pc speaker rendition

also with the benefit of 10 more years of hindsight what i said upthread abt lucasarts games being superior is total bullshit, sierra 4 life

honestly i think my love for gabriel knight 1 is at least partially b/c i had the floppy version (on like 11 disks) instead of the cd-rom with tim curry doing the worst motherfucking new orleans accent ever. worse than dennis quaid in the big easy, worse than scott bakula on ncis last week.

tell me more about... animal masks.

some great cluttered interiors in this game. comparable lucasarts game would be fate of atlantis but that's also notably cartoonier.

your old age has made you deranged, adam, lucasarts 4 ever

all i want is a dubstep track where the sample before the drop is tim curry saying tell me more abt voodoo

So You Wanna Be A Hero VGA 4 lyfe!!!

tbf I love the QFG series, have four save files all the way from I-IV

I never played the others! I'm not even sure they were in-print at the time I played the first one (mid 90s). God bless abandonware, I'll probably play the others someday.
After reading that big blog on the code/data structures Prince Of Persia, I'd love to read one on a Sierra-type adventure game. Really I just want hack that shit.

I discovered QFG 1 through the VGA remake so that has always held a lot of nostalgia for me. Love the super idyllic/pastoral landscape graphics.

Yeah otm there, except for me it was QFG 3. Some gorgeous worlds to think about.

But yeah LucasArts games win over these hands-down. Mainly for being better games and for actually making sense and not having instant deaths and the humor was better too. Space Quest and Quest for Glory were both the best Sierra ever did imo.

The Monkey Island theme song alone puts LucaArts at the top, no contest. Even the PC speaker version (particularly w MI2) is top-quality.

I did like how Space Quest 5 came with a fake tabloid. I brought that thing to school every day.

Indiana Jones was fun.

tim schaefer seems like a soft-faced nerd who laughs at his own jokes. ken and roberta williams seemed actually deranged and their idea of humor was that of an alien, like one of those aliens from incomprehensible sierra classic manhunter.

http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/11/117445/1630959-manhunter.png

i know that ken and robbie didn't do manhunter. but i think it was about them.

Those Manhunter games did look pretty awesome.

Did you guys hear the Jan Hammer soundtrack to Police Quest 3? It rules!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arcH-ZPR2W0

that track is awesome. i don't know that i ever played pq3. was it still the text parser?

i got police quest 4 (OPEN SEASON) for my birthday when it came out, so i was like 12 or 13 and i remember my stepdad being horrified by the huge PRESENTED BY DARYL GATES branding on the box. "he's basically a nazi!" he said. game itself crashed to DOS every time i tried to run it. <3 sierra.

my favorite jim walls game was codename: iceman. there is james bond-style casual sex in the first 10 minutes. also tons of sierra instadeath bullshit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wU1GK6e6fg

haha for some reason i was totally creeped out by "police quest" even before i knew who darryl gates was.

Open Season also featured mature sexual themes. At one point, the player visits a stripper's nightclub in West Hollywood, and learns about his friend's secret life. The realism is complemented by a unique reaction for inappropriate use of items in the player's inventory, rather than a generic "I can't do that" statement.

sierra vs lucasarts is really 80s vs 90s maybe; beyond gabriel knight and kq6 (and willy fuckin beamish), 90s sierra (when lucasarts is refining and refining on its way to the genre-killing grim fandango) is pretty woeful. not that i'd trade the two consecutive high school nights i spent in a stoner friend's attic playing phantasmagoria for anything. an adventure game with an fmv female protagonist, the every cutscene of which graphically depicts a guy baroquely murdering one of his wives: adam otm, the williamses are much more fucked-up and interesting as auteurs than tim "monkey pirate zombie" schaefer. (designwise tho monkeys 1 and 2 are exemplary, no doubt.) i do remember this giving me more creeps than any other mystlike.

iirc at the end of phantasmagoria, spoilers, yr husband skins some kind of local dotty grandma and chases you around the mansion wearing her

I think it's easy these days to knock "monkey pirate zombie" but back in the late 80s there was only one lousy 80s pirate movie and the old BW "Treasure Island" movie and that was pretty much it.

really tho my favorite sierra artifact was the lavish cheat guide i bought at a library sale containing adaptations of the games' plots into novellas (lotsa details about what the characters were picking up and what they were doing with it) which were purported to have been dictated by a wizard the author met when an enchanted modem began relaying the wizard's emails across the gulf separating earth from the kingdom of daventry, thus explaining the small discrepancies between these true stories and the garbled versions thereof published in your world by sierra on-line incorporated, i swear. as a kid i read this and i just couldn't be sure.

cheat guide for KQs 1-6, i meant to say.

xps good point. though I guess we'll always Roman Polanski's Pirates! and Hook

lucas arts games are so much better games - the puzzles were much more satisfying to figure out. sierra games were too arcane. tho i have formative memories of playing leisure suit larry 3 w/ a bunch of my friends. there was some code you could hit that let you skip all of the intro questions (that determined the sexual content of the game by asking questions only an adult would know the answer to - like who was famous for singing tiptoe through the tulips). one of my friends knew the code bc his pervy uncle told him. it was impossible to actually progress in any of those sierra games really - police quest i remember had these complex police stops you had to execute perfectly. i have no idea how anyone could solve any of those games w/out a walkthrough. by contrast i was able to beat monkey island 1 w/out the help of a walkthrough (except for one puzzle that i broke down to decode - using the flint + the glass + the sun to blow up the dam to flood the valley and get the rope)

http://media.pcgamer.com/files/2011/06/pq_1.png

i stalled on that same puzzle in monkey island when i was a kid! then i replayed it the other week and had no trouble with that part (scummvm on a tablet: basically the best handheld ever) only now i'm stalled getting the banana picker out of the hut. maybe in another 15 years.

Wait are you stuck in the hut w the picker or have the cannibals locked it up with a security door-upon-security door-upon-security door-upon-security door? Love that gag, when it gets to the end and they have that huge titanium door with blinking lights on the front of this straw hut.

they've locked it up a few times but ha not that many yet. i get in, sneak out, do a couple solitary laps around the island in my rowboat having a think, go back, get captured. guybrush could spend years like that.

Lucasfilm games are better than Sierra, but we only really had a couple and I was irrationally brand-loyal to Sierra, so all my fondest memories are of their games, and the highs are pretty high - the Coles and Christy Marx in particular did excellent work and just basically decided on principle to not have total bullshit puzzles (for the most part) - like, it was shit you actually could figure out, and you were satisfied for having done so. And along the way, some great graphics and environments and the fun of ASK ABOUT all kinds of shit and seeing what people would talk about... just acres of text in these games. So, so many afternoons wiled away. I don't regret a bit of it except for time wasted on Police Quest III. Thankfully we didn't have that many of the really early, super-primitive and weird ones which all seem to have been virtually unsolvable.

Big, lower-profile ones for me: Heart of China which was kind of an Indiana Jones thing, some shitty and hideous action sequences and probably a buttload of orientalism but there were some cool gimmicks, like getting to play as a different character for a while, and your actions affecting some kind of weird 'love meter' that determined whether the guy and girl get together at the end. Willy Beamish, mentioned above, with its kinda shakey 'cartoon' graphics but kinda good backgrounds, its 'trouble meter' (these two were both developed by Dynamix I think, they must have liked meters for some reason) and some pop culture things that totally baffled me, like what seems to have been a Leona Helmsley parody and a puzzle involving buttons labeled "burnt sienna," "chartreuse" and "mauve."

The wheels started to come off of Sierra right around 1993. The last games I really dug by them - Dagger of Amon Ra, Conquests of the Longbow, QFG3 - are all 91-92. The first ones I remember thinking "wow, this isn't really that good" about are KQ6 and Space Quest V, right around that time. But there are tons that I never played and just saw a few screenshots of in the magazine - maybe Freddy Pharkas is great, maybe Pepper's Adventures in Time is cool. We had Betrayal at Krondor which turned out to be a CRPG and almost totally beyond me though I soldiered on for quite a while and always wished I'd get further - as elsewhere, there was such a satisfaction of reaching a new area or scene that had special graphics as opposed to the super super ugly combat screens and navigation mode. Sorta like playing MadMaze on Prodigy really. It is totally amazing to me that they were still putting stuff out in the late 90s, let alone the mid-00s.

I finally played Monkey Island 2 last year, it was totally cool but suffered from me just not having the patience I did at age 11, to wander around trying everything, forever, until something starts to give way. Hit the walkthrough "just once" and it was over from there. Not sure if that's because the puzzles got less legit or because they were totally legit and I was just being a lazy-ass. These games were meant to be played over long periods of time, where you'd get stuck on something and spend the day at work or school the whole next day thinking about it, think about it - then a flash of insight after lunch, what if I... and then you get home and try it and that doesn't work either and it's back to the drawing board. I wonder if an overlooked cause in the 'death' of adventure games is that they simply don't work as well in a world where you have lots of games, and they are cheaper or faster, or even just more social, and in all these ways can displace the single game from the imagination and the obsessing, questing mind. Or this might just be an accident of the age I got into these - sorta reminds me of missing that feeling of only being able to buy one CD every two or three weeks, and thus really getting to know kind of mediocre albums inside and out.

Some of the puzzles in MI2 were insanely time-consuming (traveling from island to island to screen to screen) and illogical. Probably Lucasarts' most extreme example of great creativity, humor, music, evetything in-universe vs. the actual puzzling was just awful, even at the time. Day of the Tentacle was sort of like this too, but not quite as ridiculous - also really really funny throughout so it was more forgivable IMO.

I'm convinced some people at both companies got a little too greedy about selling hint books - I mean, I love Dagger of Amon Ra, but with the real time conceit it got really absurd by the end of the game about what you could miss, (not) witness or deduce. But as a kid I could only play through the game so many times before I gave up, not to mention the dozens of ways you could die in that game, and I remember caving early and buying the official book w/the red filter you would use to scan the answers.

I feel you a bit with the whole "the world's got too much media to consume to sit down and really enjoy what we had" feeling of the past, and maybe adventure games in particular have suffered a bit because of it. But the occasional revolutionary title like the original Indigo Prophecy (well, the first half) and Telltale's The Walking Dead totally convinced me that the genre can be just as great, it just fresher direction and a higher budget now to compete with everything else going for your attention. Back in the late 80s/early 90s adventure games were mostly only competing with simulators and dungeon crawlers on PC.

Tell me you played QFG4! I think that may have been the best one.

oh i forgot betrayal at krondor was sierra. that was my first Real RPG; it blew my mind entirely.

it's way better than the first two elder scrolls games imo; its reach and grasp are aligned.

i loved betrayal at krondor but gmab daggerfall was a masterpiece

my memory of daggerfall was that the bolted-together dungeons were punishingly, featurelessly gnarly and at the bottom of them there'd be a book some guy in a tavern was willing to give 75 gold for. i'm just not hard enough. morrowind tho.

morrowind dungeons are pretty stubby and lame i guess, with one or two exceptions.

the part in BaK--THE SPYGLASS AND THE SPIDER--where the company of soldiers has been murdered and you travel up and down the game's east coast solving a mystery that ends in a door in the rock face behind a waterfall opened with the use of a chess piece taken from the dead body of yr cousin's fiance: that part ruled.

I can't really remember how far I got with BaK. I know at some point I was constantly getting poisoned or plagued or something, as part of the plot. That was wretched, but pretty early on I think. After that it's a little blurry. A town at the southeast coast, some puzzle chests, and IIRC, some kind of 'frozen empty wasteland that's too damned hard' segment which is probably where I gave up.

The Laura Bow games, much as I loved them both, kinda needed to be rethought from the ground up as a different kind of genre. Like now, I would totally play a *short* indie where the explicit premise is, you'll play through this one night over and over and gradually figure out where you have to be and what you have to do to make it all work. Or even something like Majora's Mask, where the repeating 'clock' initially feels like a dumb gimmick but gradually becomes the source of all your satisfaction: you figure out just where you need to be and what you need to wear to make all these seemingly unrelated elements chain together - that's fucking cool.

But Sierra games are too fucking long for you to want to repeat all the inventory puzzles over and over, and anyway it totally contradicts the idea of a murder mystery: the detective can't have all this nondiagetic information from other playthroughs, after all. (I guess you do always retain your knowledge from when you die in some stupid way and restore, but you know what I mean.) I did somehow still muddle through both games successfully but I'm not sure I was playing them 'correctly.'

that reminds me of an infocom game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadline_(video_game)

also i think gabe knight 3 made use of being in the right place at the right time type of puzzles. as did varicella which is probably the best version of that kind of puzzle.

great use of that in the last express, where characters move around and keep secret appointments in a large but constrained space (the orient express); when you're killed or put off the train you see a clock rewinding back to a specific time, and what it means is "this is more or less where you screwed up". then it deposits you at that time. so the game is full of sierra-style unwinnable paths but it's very kind about sending you back up them, like an adventure game prince of persia; plus, moments that passed by for you the first time are assigned significance by the clock, so failure illuminates.

That sounds cool! Also reminds me of the indie I played recently, Postmortem, where you're an agent of death attending a society party during a turn-of-the-century crisis in a rapidly industrializing town, and you talk to everybody and ultimately have to choose one person for death. Then there's a cutscene based on who you chose to die, but also what you said to everybody else in the dialogue trees ("Hmm, perhaps you're right - maybe they are more 'freedom fighters' than 'terrorists'!"). I only did one playthrough because it was just a LITTLE too much dialogue to go back through again... but again, if I was a kid and only had one game, I could see really relishing going back and trying slightly different things - what if I kill the plutocrat, but this time I push the waiter more towards alliance with the disenfranchised cobbler?

xp Yeah, The Last Express totally did an awesome job of that. They re-released it digitally a couple years back, worth tracking down.

This thread is making me realized I haven't played a ton of these.

Laura Bow always looked cool. I sort of thought Tomb Raider was referencing it. Did they have some cool one based on ancient Egypt?

Yup, that's The Dagger of Amon Ra, though it's really about an Egyptian museum exhibit.

Is there a good blog/book/article taking these on in any thorough way? I've read The Adventure Gamer, but it sort of lingers on the blow by blow of what he tried and when he got stuck, and loses the connective or analytical threads. I do like his giddy enthusiasm though - between that and the jovial commentators it feels more like Usenet or a BBS than a blog, which fits the material I suppose. Still I much prefer the approach of CRPG Addict to his material... wish he would branch into Sierra games.

Have you ever read http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/ ?

Also I just got Postmortem in an indie bundle, I'll give that a shot sometime.

No, haven't read - what's good there? Seems like a pretty big back catalogue...did they do a Sierra feature at some point?

all i want is a dubstep track where the sample before the drop is tim curry saying tell me more abt voodoo

this is also all i want. i haven't played gabriel knight 1 in like 12 years and i can still hear the intonation perfectly in my head.

my favorite sierra artifact was the lavish cheat guide i bought at a library sale containing adaptations of the games' plots into novellas

they made these for space quest and quest for glory too! i have an adventure game nerd shelf on my bookcase that's just tie-in books to games of this era, since i was obsessed with them as a kid. jane jensen wrote novelizations of the first two gabriel knight books, and there were three king's quest novels that were basically generic fantasy set in the world of daventry.

Doc - they have done almost EVERYTHING! Very comprehensively too; their attitude is to try to cover every game in a series, with spinoffs, media, etc. There's so much on that site, most of it is well-covered, but just for a teeny tiny sampling, look at the links of the content that made it into Kulata's adventure book:
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/book.html
Let alone the dozens of articles they have on super obscure/one-off titles. Seriously, just start combing through it, it's almost always satisfying reads.

thread also reminded me I can't read the words Times-Picayune without hearing the old lady narrator from Gabriel Knight intoning them in my head.

Oooh yeah, this looks like a rich vein - thanks for the tip.

totally xp. not to mention the word "gabriel".