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.

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".