Game 2: King's Quest I - Final Rating

King’s Quest holds a special place in the history of computer games, pioneering the way for many years of Sierra titles that used either the same technology, or gradually improving variations of it. From that perspective, it really should be given nothing but praise and adulation! But this blog isn’t only about figuring out which are the most important adventure games in the history of the genre (although that certainly plays a role), it’s also about finding out which ones are still enjoyable to play today. With that in mind, the PISSED rating system may not be too kind to this undeniable classic. Let’s find out!

Puzzles and Solvability
For the most part, King’s Quest is about finding objects and figuring out when to use them. On that level, the game is pretty successful. If you have the cheese and the carrot when coming across the rat and the goat, it’s not difficult to figure out what to do. When you have a bucket of water in your inventory and you’re confronted with a fire-breathing dragon, you don’t have to be Einstein to introduce one to the other. The challenge is in finding the items before you need them, and in knowing what commands to give that the parser technology understands. This last statement, combined with the fact my first adventure games were all by Sierra, is probably the reason why I formed the habit of mapping out the whole game area and collecting items before trying to complete any puzzles when playing adventure games. Of course none of the above can prepare you for the stupendously difficult Old Gnome question, but the alternate solution to the game means I shouldn’t be too harsh on that one. I’m giving the game a 6 for this category.

My very own pet goat!

Interface and Inventory
There’s not much to say about inventory here. It’s easily accessible and allows you to inspect individual items in more detail, which can lead to very important information. The interface is a different story! Credit must be given to Roberta Williams, and the team of developers that made the game, for producing the first animated adventure game. For the time it was truly impressive and groundbreaking, and led to pretty much every adventure game made since! However, the fact is that the limitations of the parser technology and the mind-numbing sluggishness of the movement in the game make it pretty frustrating to play in modern times. Don’t get me started on my experience of trying to climb that frickin’ beanstalk without saving every 2 seconds. Oh, and one more thing that I really should mention in hope that someone out there benefits! You can use the number keys for movement, which is something I really, really wish I knew before I started. Walking down the stairs from the cloud section  by pressing up then right then up then right then up then right (repeat about 100 times) to get near the bottom, only to figure out that pressing 3 on the number pad makes Graham walk down stairs diagonally was...well let’s say it didn’t please me. Considering everything, I’m going with 4.

So...my reward for answering that impossible riddle is climbing a stupidly difficult beanstalk!

Story and Setting
When compared to the very interesting and rich story of Below the Root, King’s Quest is simplistic and cliché. But then it’s easy to argue that it’s supposed to be, with Roberta taking most of it from fairy tales and other stories that she’d read while growing up. The expanded story that came with later versions of the game goes some way to adding a bit more depth, but no story including leprechauns that like music so much that they all dance out of their abode at the mere site of a fiddle leaving their treasures to be ransacked, not to mention fire-breathing dragons that hide beneath wells and yet are afraid of water, is going to impress from a literary point of view. Oh well, I guess the game is supposed to be charming, not to mention playable by young children, so it’s possible that judging it from a literary standpoint is a bit unforgiving. The colourful and fantastical land of Daventry is a fine place for such a fable too, so I’ll give this a generous 4.

As tempting as inheriting the 48 screens of Daventry is, this speech is not particularly rousing.

Sound and Graphics

King’s Quest was incredibly ambitious when it came to graphics. It wasn’t just that the game introduced animation to a historically static genre that made it so impressive. It also added simulated depth perspective, offering an admittedly crude three dimensional viewpoint to the player. The animation itself was adequate, certainly not awful, and the fairy-tale basis of the story meant the very bright colours fit the game thematically. However, I’m writing this blog in 2011, and it’s difficult not to snigger when looking at Roberta’s attempts at creating creatures such as the rat and the dragon, which look like they were illustrated by a four year old. As for sound, well there was quite a bit of effort put into making music that would take advantage of the PCjr, but audio technology for home PCs still had a long, long way to go before it wasn’t ear piercingly horrible. The majority of the game is silent, which is a blessing really. Sound and Graphics gets a 5 for historical significance.

They really struggled to get items in proportion in the early games. That coke can is massive!

Environment and Atmosphere

The way that Sierra made their early games wasn’t really conducive to feeling part of a larger world. The entire land of Daventry was limited to an 8 x 6 grid and contains around four inhabitable structures. They would eventually learn that it’s better to set up unpassable boundaries at the edge of the grid, hinting at a greater world beyond, than to have the screens wrap around like a globe with a surface area the size of a football field. Daventry does however have a magical feel to it, with bright colours and numerous references to fairy tales and mythology spread out across the land. What definitely would have added to the atmosphere was some decent quality music and background noise, but that’s a little much to ask of a game create over twenty five years ago. All things considered, Roberta and co did a decent job at creating a new world that would spawn several sequels and inspire countless other adventure games, so 6 it is.

The gingerbread house is undoubtedly one of the cleverer parts of King's Quest.

Dialogue and Acting

In any other context, the dialogue of King’s Quest could be considered extremely cliché and at times quite horrible. But there’s no doubt that a lot of it is merely reflecting children’s stories and fits the tone of proceedings well enough. The Leprechaun King cracks me up every time, simply getting up and walking out on his kingdom after his followers start to dance, allowing the player to take his shield and sceptre. It’s as though Roberta just couldn’t be bothered coming up with any dialogue that would allow Graham to retrieve the items, and killing a Leprechaun just doesn’t seem right, so she made him just…leave. It’s all a long way from future adventure games where dialogue is realistic, two way conversations that flesh out the story and branch depending on player choice, so I’ll have to be stingy here and give this a classification a 4.

This is about as moving as the dialogue gets.

These numbers result in King’s Quest receiving a shockingly low PISSED rating of 48. That may rile some readers up a little given the game’s significance, but I must reiterate that I’m playing these games in 2011, long after Quest For Glory, Secret of Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, The Longest Journey etc. etc. Comparatively, it’s a much lesser quality game. I didn’t expect when I started this blog that Below the Root would be rated higher than King’s Quest at this stage, but the richness of the game world and the compelling mystery of it made it a more rewarding experience, so I’m cool with that.

Game 2: King's Quest I - Won!

It took me under three hours all up to finish King’s Quest. Anyone playing it for the first time will unquestionably need more than that to locate and take possession of the three magical items requested by King Edward, but the large portions of the game I recalled from my youth made the forgotten sections far easier to deal with. It’s actually very difficult for me to tell whether the game is much easier to complete than I remembered, or whether my previous experiences with the game just make it seem so. On the surface there doesn’t seem to be a heck of a lot that would cause too much of a problem for the seasoned adventurer, as long as you uncover the necessary items before visiting certain areas. Then again, the parser technology itself makes what would otherwise be pretty straight forward puzzles far more challenging at times when the player doesn’t use the exact words it’s expecting.

Hmm, everyone's danced away. As leader I really should leave all my possessions behind and follow!

A very simple example of this is as follows. There’s a section in the game that requires you to slay a giant to retrieve a chest. Just a couple of screens away is a tree with a hole in it where a slingshot is located. Now I knew that the slingshot was in there from past experience, so when my command of “look in tree” resulted in “you can’t do that, at least not here”, I figured I simply had to try the command a different way to find what I was looking for (“look in hole” worked a treat). Another player that didn’t know anything was in there, let alone that they needed a slingshot at all, might have walked away, spending the next few hours trying to find a way of defeating the giant before giving up. This sort of deficiency with the text parser is probably what made the game, and others using Sierra’s AGI system, seem so much harder the first time around. Once you’ve played a couple of these games you begin to learn what commands work, and you also get a bit of an idea about the types of places that the creators hide items.

I recall being petrified of this giant as a kid

So I’ve mentioned that King’s Quest 1 is relatively easy to complete, but that’s not to say that there isn’t anything challenging in there. Climbing the beanstalk will undoubtedly require numerous restores, but there’s one particular riddle that is next to impossible to solve. I knew how to figure out the answer this time around after using a walkthrough (for this bit) last time I played, but I’d love to hear from anyone that honestly managed to figure it out themselves. I’ll describe the riddle and the solution now, so if you really want to try your luck, skip the next paragraph. It’s worth mentioning that to Roberta’s credit, you can still complete the game without solving the riddle, which is surely one of the first examples of multiple pathways through an adventure game. There may have been alternate solutions to interactive fiction games, but I haven’t played enough to know. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has experienced such a thing prior to King’s Quest.

Jack and the Restore (many, many times!)

Graham meets an old gnome on his travels through Daventry who offers a gift if Graham can guess his name within three attempts. There’s not really any hint around as to who the gnome is, but if you just happen to be super knowledgeable about fairy tales, you might take a stab at Rumplestiltskin. You’d be wrong though, as there’s a note that can be found in the gingerbread house that states that sometimes you need to think about things backwards. OK, so if you assume that this message is meant to be applied to the old gnome’s riddle and not somewhere else in the game, you could guess nikstlitselpmur. This answer would be correct in the more forgiving remake of the game, but in the original you would still be incorrect. The way to solve it is to reverse the alphabet and to replace the letters of Rumplestiltskin with the newly ordered code. A becomes Z, B becomes Y etc., so Rumplestiltskin becomes Ifnkovhgroghprm. Seem ridiculously hard? Well, imagine my surprise when I entered the above this time around, only to be told that it was still not quite right. For some unknown reason, you have to type the answer in capitals, making this puzzle one of the most stupidly difficult ones I’ve ever come across.

Bill? No...Bob! Oh...um...don't tell me!!!

Roberta has since stated in interviews that she “received a LOT of letters about the old gnome's name” and that “it was an awfully nasty puzzle”.  Anyway, I ended up finishing with a total of 141 out of 158, and considering I never used my ring of invisibility, can only assume I missed an opportunity to use it. I do seem to recall killing the witch last time I played, but since she wasn’t home when I blatantly burgled her, I didn’t need to endanger myself this time round. In the end, despite the problems with the text parser, the movement speed (or lack of), and the harshness of that riddle, I still found King’s Quest to be enjoyable and look forward to moving on through the rest of the series (I believe I’ve only ever played the first three games). I remember very little about part two, but it will probably come flooding back to me as soon as I start playing. We’ll soon find out, but first I need to apply the PISSED rating system to King’s Quest 1. Stay tuned…

Hail to the King baby!

Game 2: King's Quest I - Nostalgia in Slow Motion

The human brain is an amazing thing really. It’s been over a decade since I last made my way through King’s Quest and yet not only does it seem familiar, I reckon I have around 90% of the solution stuffed away in the recesses of my mind. Why my brain has retained this sort of information I have no idea, but it might make a few of these early Sierra games quicker for me to blog through than it would have otherwise. It seems old habits do indeed die hard also, as on starting the game, I immediately set out to play the game the same way I would have as a kid. That involves mapping the entire play area, collecting items wherever I come across them, with the sole intention of completing the map before getting stuck into the quest itself. This is very easy to achieve with King’s Quest, as Daventry is basically an 8 x 6 grid of screens that wrap around on each other once you reach the end. In other words, if you go south for six screens you’ll end up where you started.

Graham's last words: "I'll just cross this bridge here. It looks easy enough!"

As a kid playing the game on my Amiga, I would have drawn this grid on a piece of paper. These days I use Excel, a trick I was forced to learn when playing through Might and Magic I a couple of years ago. Using Excel is great, as you expand the size of the cells or add new columns and rows whenever required, rather than being stuck with the piece of paper you started with. So to give you an idea of what my screen looks like while I’m playing games for this blog, I have DOSBox open in a small screen at the top left, the Windows 7 Snipping Tool bottom left (I need it easily accessible so I can grab something on the fly), and Excel covering the right side half of the screen. I also have a Word document open (but generally minimised) so I can write down any notes for the game or the blog as I go. I’m sure there are other ways that work for other people, but this system feels comfortable and achieves my goals with little difficulty.

Primitive I know, but then so is the game.

I’d forgotten how short adventure games were in the early days. My first session on King’s Quest was only one hour long and yet I’ve racked up around 50 of the 158 possible points already. I’ve covered and mapped over two thirds of the screens in the game, and collected a bunch of stuff including a carrot, pebbles, a dagger, some cheese and a golden walnut and egg. The only reason I didn’t get further in that hour was because my character (Graham) walks incredibly, painfully slow. Watching my character move in slow motion across the screen while I’m being chased by a witch is as frustrating as it is comical. I seemed to recall that last time I played the game, I’d set the speed to fast and ripped my way around Daventry, but when I attempted this technique this time around my character raced through three screens and plummeted into the water before I could blink. It might be that this is something they corrected for later Quest games, but can anyone advise on how to increase the speed without making the game unplayable?

This is not the sort of thing you want to try at 500kms/hr.

One obvious difference between this, the first true animated graphic adventure game, and more modern games, is that you can very easily do things in the wrong order, making the game impossible to finish. This would never be allowed to happen in modern adventure games, where you can safely assume that every time you enter a new section, you’ve either already got the tools you need to complete it, or they’re somewhere in the section itself (normally a combination of both). This is unlikely to occur to me all that often in King’s Quest since I kind of remember what items I need to get passed certain sections, but I did find out the hard way that catching a ride with the eagle prior to getting the cheese and the fiddle (or the four leaf clover) first doesn’t end very well. Still, it’s easy enough to load a saved game prior to grabbing the bird and look for the items that might be able to assist. Apart from the slothfulness of Graham, playing King’s Quest is an enjoyable and highly nostalgic experience so far, and I feel like I might be able to get through it in just another hour or two, unless there’s something I’ve entirely forgotten about.

Oh I remember this! I just feed the rat the cheese that I got from...um...aaarrrggghhhh!!!

Game 2: King's Quest I - Introduction

If you like adventure games but have never seen this screen, you're probably under 30.

I doubt anyone who purposely visits this blog at any stage wouldn’t have heard of King’s Quest. It may be the second PC game on Wikipedia’s Notable Graphic Adventure Games list, but it’s without question the granddaddy of the genre as a whole. I can’t even be certain which game was released first, as I can find no mention anywhere of what date Below the Root was officially released in 1984 to compare with King’s Quest’s 10th of May. Regardless, as I mentioned in my Below the Root posts, that game did have rudiments of what we now consider to be an adventure game, but they were mixed in with platform action and a small amount of role playing elements. King’s Quest on the other hand was a direct follow on from parser driven interactive fiction and text based graphic adventure games that had previously been produced by the likes of Infocom (Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Planetfall etc.) and Sierra themselves.

Roberta Williams: The grandmother of adventure games.

The story and general design of King’s Quest can almost solely be attributed to a woman named Roberta Williams. Along with her husband Ken, Roberta founded a company called On-Line Systems in 1979, for which the couple intended to develop and commercialise a programming language for Apple computers. Around the same time, both Roberta and Ken came across a game called Colossal Cave Adventure, widely considered the first interactive fiction adventure game. Having played their way through it, both found it to be very enjoyable, but Roberta thought the experience would be more satisfying if there were graphics to represent what was happening. Realising that computers were now advanced enough for that vision to become reality, she designed an Agatha Christie inspired detective story called Mystery House. Using the concept and two-dimensional illustrations that Roberta had produced, Ken programmed the game on his Apple II in just a few nights. The result was not the first game to use graphics, but it was certainly the first adventure game to do so, with all previous attempts being entirely text based.

Mystery House: How anyone thought that was an adequate tree is probably the biggest mystery.

Mystery House was a huge success, selling over 10,000 copies (making the company around $167,000), and convincing Ken that producing games would be much more profitable than developing programming languages. The couple immediately began work on more similar titles, including Mission Asteroid, The Dark Crystal (based on Jim Henson’s fantasy film) and Time Zone. But it was the second game they produced together that is most worthy of discussion when talking about the development of King’s Quest. Wizard and the Princess was not only the first adventure game to have colour graphics (Mystery House was monochrome), it’s also officially considered a prequel to the King’s Quest series itself. Taking place in the land of Serenia, which would be revisited in King’s Quest V, the player must attempt to rescue Princess Priscilla from an evil wizard named Harlin, with the reward being half of King George’s kingdom. Roberta drew on her love of fairy tales, which she’d read a lot of while growing up, to come up with the plot and visuals for the game.

Look familiar?

Around 1982, On-Line Systems was renamed to Sierra On-Line and the company moved to California. A year later they were contacted by IBM with a proposition too good to refuse. The powerhouse company wanted a new game that would show off the capabilities of their new PCjr machine, and in return would fund the entire development, royalties and advertising. Returning to the fairy tale theme, Roberta set about designing the new game, but this time her concept included animated colour graphics, a pseudo 3D-perspective where the main character was visible on screen, a new and improved text parser, and music that would make use of the PCjr’s capabilities. To achieve all of this, Sierra developed a new game engine called the Adventure Gamer Interpreter, which they would port to multiple platforms and continue to use for years to come. As it turned out, the PCjr was a total flop, but the game, titled King’s Quest, was a massive success on other operating systems. It eventually sold more than half a million copies, and would kick-start a golden age of Sierra adventure games!

The original King's Quest cover art.

But I’m getting way ahead of myself here! I’m here to take a trip back to Daventry, which is something I haven’t done in many years, and to see just how playable and enjoyable this undeniable classic is today. It’s worth mentioning before beginning my journey that a few aspects of the game have evolved over the years, and a couple of different versions exist also. There was a complete remake developed in 1990, as was the case with many of the early Sierra games. Just to be clear, I’ll be playing the original, albeit the slightly improved 1987 release, not the remake. The original title of the game was just King’s Quest, with the subtitle Quest For the Crown only added in 1987 after the first couple of successful sequels had similar title formats. Finally, the back-story of the game was dramatically expanded on for later releases. The original read like this:  “Daventry is suffering from recent disasters and hardship. King Edward calls his bravest knight, Sir Graham, to his throne, and tells him he has heard of three legendary treasures hidden throughout the land that would end Daventry's troubles. If Graham succeeds he will become king.” That’s all I need to know to get going. See you in Daventry!

The 1990 remake looks significantly nicer, but that's not the one I'll be playing.