Game 33: Space Quest III - Introduction

Oh, yes! There will be blood!

After a couple of lengthy adventures in non-Sierra territory, we’re back in the comfort zone with the third in the Space Quest series. The game, subtitled The Pirates of Pestulon, was released on March the 24th, 1989, and was once again written and designed by the Two Guys from Andromeda, Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy. As usual, they weren’t alone in this endeavour, and sought the assistance of a bunch of eager young fellows, made up of both newbies and industry veterans alike. On the programming side, Mark and Scott were joined by Ken Koch (who’d already worked on King’s Quest IV so had experience with the SCI0 engine), Doug Oldfield (who would go on to work on Codename: ICEMAN later in the year) and Christopher Tudor-Smith (this was the first of many Sierra games for him). Veteran Mark Seibert was once again involved, although this time he handled only sound effects for the game and surprisingly not the music, given his credentials. The reason for this was that the music gig was given to Supertramp drummer Bob Siebenberg. From what I can tell, it’s the first and only computer game involvement that Bob had, so it will be interesting to see just how notable it is.

Someone named John T. Shaw designed the box. It's certainly action packed!

To put the game into perspective, Space Quest III was the fourth game to use the SCI0 engine, behind King’s Quest IV, Leisure Suit Larry 2 and Police Quest II. Both Hero’s Quest and Leisure Suit Larry 3, which I’ve already blogged through, were created and released after Space Quest III. It was actually one of the very first games to utilize Sound Blaster cards and interestingly, despite it also including a few examples of digitized audio sampling, they were only included in the Tandy, Amiga and Macintosh versions of the game. There was only very minimal use of digitized speech for these versions anyway (I think Roger says “Where am I?” during the introduction), so it’s not a huge loss. Before anyone makes any predictions about me getting stuck, please not that I played the game about five years ago (for the first time), so should be able to cruise through it. I own the Space Quest 1-3 Collection from GOG, so that’s what I’ll be playing (it uses DOSBox). I’ve skimmed through the manual, but its standard Sierra fare, recounting the closing stages of the previous game and then explaining the controls. It does however break away momentarily to inform the player that the Two Guys from Andromeda have been abducted by software pirates! There really isn’t a whole lot more to say in this introduction, apart from the fact you should all click on this link right now!

You gotta love these guy's wacky, self referential sense of humour!

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There's a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no CAPs will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. As this is an introduction post, it's an opportunity for readers to bet 10 CAPs (only if they already have them) that I won't be able to solve a puzzle unassisted (see below for an example). If you get it right I will reward you with 120 CAPs in return (it's going to keep going up until someone beats me)! It's also your chance to predict what the final rating will be for the game. Voters can predict whatever score they want, regardless of whether someone else has already chosen it. All correct (or nearest) votes will go into a draw.

Example Bet:

N cevingr vairfgvtngbe vf jung V nz

Va n jbeyq jurer znzznyf pneel gur ybnq
N ybire ybfg vf jub V zhfg svaq
Ba n qnexre guna rkcrpgrq ebnq

Jub nz V sbe 20 PNCf?

Extra Note: Once again, Lars-Erik will gift the next readily available game on the list to the reader that correctly predicts what score I will give this game. So, if you predict the right score (or are closest), you will get 10 CAPs and a copy of Loom from Steam! How awesome is that!? Good luck!