Game 13: Police Quest I - Final Rating

Game 13 is in the bag and I imagine the PISSED rating system won’t be too unkind to Police Quest. There are obvious flaws that will bring down the total, but I think it does enough elsewhere to still be a contender. Time to find out!

Puzzles and Solvability
As I’m sure I’ve made it clear in my previous posts about Police Quest, almost the entire game is based around following procedures described in the manual as opposed to using logic and common sense to solve puzzles. The various scenarios that Sonny faces throughout the game, including the crash scene, the DUI, the weapon-packing criminal, and the drug bust, are all completed by opening the manual, finding the relevant instructions, and applying them to the situation with no alterations. It’s kind of fun to see things unfold, but there’s no real sense of achievement at the end of it all. On top of this, whenever you are struggling to figure out what to do, the game will often blatantly tell you, making the game overall pretty easy to complete. However, the few times Police Quest does put the ball in your court, demanding the player make some decisions of their own, the parser just isn’t up to the standard that games like Leisure Suit Larry had set (I’ll talk about that in the next section). Overall, I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the procedural based scenarios, but they held no real challenge and therefore gave no real satisfaction.
Rating: 4

Making the player check whichever car their going to drive every time they want to use it does not result in fun

Interface and Inventory
I might as well cover the text parser while I’m already talking about it. While the underlying technology behind the parser in Police Quest is the same as it was in previous Sierra adventure games, in this instance not much effort seems to have been made to allow the player multiple commands for any given task. You want to ask about the transmitter pen? Ask about pen doesn’t work. Ask about transmitter does! You want to take the FBI Most Wanted List page out of the clipboard? Take page doesn’t work. Take list does! This leads to false negatives, where the player is put off the correct path through no fault of their own. The only other differences in interface between this game and the others I’ve already played are the mini-games, which play more of a role here than they have previously. You spend a lot of time driving and playing poker, so it’s good news that the interface to these is solid. Driving around is pretty easy and while doing it at higher speeds is not, the same could easily be said for real life too! The only strange thing to note about that is that you can drive backwards or forwards with no discernible difference, which doesn’t match the reality that has been applied to the majority of the game. The inventory is as you would expect and not worth mentioning.
Rating: 5

I'd pull over too if the cop pursuing was keeping up with me whilst driving backwards!

Story and Setting

I’m not even sure there is technically a story to speak of in Police Quest. The game is broken up into numerous separate scenarios, most of which have no connection to any overarching plot. The developers did try to inject some ongoing subplots, such as the gremlin practical joker in the station, the Sweet Cheeks romance, and Sonny’s friend Jack having issues with his daughter’s drug problem, but none of them run full circle, either never receiving a resolution or reaching one with no real lead up. Calling the game Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel is pretty misleading, as no mention is made of the Death Angel until the undercover situation that closes the game. It’s not like you spend the game trying to hunt him down and get caught up in other situations on the way. I’m not going to be too harsh here, as the developers achieved exactly what they set out to do. I just think they could have included a real plot and still given the player the chance to use real life police procedures.

Rating: 5

Jessie Bains! OMG!!!! It's actually Jessie Ba...um...who did you say it was again?!

Sound and Graphics

The sound effects are pretty much identical to other Sierra games of this period (minimal usage and low quality). As for the music, I can’t say it was particularly memorable, which is exactly what I said for the last game Margaret Lowe worked on, King’s Quest III. She seems to have a knack for creating adequate yet completely forgettable music for Sierra adventure games. The graphics are also as you expect, but it’s definitely worth pointing out that Police Quest has the most variety out of all the games I’ve played so far. The game isn’t limited to the Police Station and takes the player out onto the road and to locations as various as the cafeteria, a bar, the city jail, the beachfront, the local nightclub, the courthouse, the city park, and a grand hotel. All of these locations are convincing and colourful, and I imagine Mark Crowe must have had significantly more time to produce all the graphics required than he did for the likes of Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry. I still can’t justify giving the game the first 6 (if the music had been better, I might have) for sound and graphics, so it’s 5 again.

Rating: 5

Plenty of room at the Hotel Delphoria. Any time of year, you can find it here.

Environment and Atmosphere

The developers did a great job of making Lytton feel like a real, thriving community. Not only does the player gain access to all the locations I spoke about in the Sound and Graphics category, they also get a top down view of the whole city while driving around. This really does give Police Quest the most complete game world that I’ve experienced so far, so the game certainly deserves credit for that. If you’ve ever seen the movie Police Academy, then you’ll know what that type of humour is like, and some of that has been injected into Police Quest. However, there are certain scenes that have a much more serious tone, and I think this works given the very real threat that Sonny faces during them. The pulling over of Marvin Hoffman (later known as Jason Taselli) is a highlight on this front. The atmosphere in the game jumps around a bit due to this mixing of comedy and serious police work, but I think it works overall, which is probably why I enjoyed the game so much despite all my criticisms.

Rating: 7

Take Police Academy, add a little bit of L.A. Confidential, and a touch of Casino Royale, and mix! What do you get!? (Actually, you probably wouldn't get Police Quest, but I tried you know?)

Dialogue and Acting

I can’t be sure, but I’d imagine Police Quest has the most dialogue of any of the games so far. When I scan the hundred plus screenshots that I took whilst playing, the first thing I notice is just how many of them are filled with words rather than images. I imagine anyone playing this game back in the 80s would have been forced to take a lot of notes on paper, although there admittedly is a notepad and pen in the game that you can use to write important things down. Jim Walls input into the game gives all of this dialogue a certain level of authenticity, but Al Lowe’s silliness (and I say that with the utmost respect) is just as evident. The one area where the game doesn’t match up to say, Leisure Suit Larry, is the level of optional detail in each scene. In that game, you could ask about pretty much anything on any screen and get a relevant and often hilarious response. In Police Quest, undoubtedly due to the game giving the player such little room for experimentation, most requests are met with default responses such as “it’s not important” or “you don’t have one”. It’s a bit tough to criticise the game too much for dialogue that isn’t there rather than the stuff that is though, so I’m giving the game a 6 for Dialogue and Acting.

Rating: 6

Hang on, did I just give this game a 6 for dialogue? Nah...I couldn't have!

Police Quest gets a PISSED rating of 52, which is the same score that Below the Root and King's Quest III received. They're very different games to this one with different strengths and weaknesses, but I'm not unhappy with that result. It rightfully came in below Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry and didn't come close to Maniac Mansion, and that's the way it should be. I'll be very interested to see what parts 2 and 3 are like, as I have no idea whether they continue on with the procedural style puzzles or take it in a different direction altogether. But, they're a long way off, especially when I may not survive Shadowgate! It's time...

Game 13: Police Quest I - Won!

Sonny Bonds Journal Entry 3: “It seems my day from hell has ended in the most unexpected way. I, Sonny Bonds, have taken out Jessie Bains (aka The Death Angel)! Not without a fair share of drama I’ll add, which when combined would probably be enough to write a book about one day. At the end of my last entry, I was trying to find a way to make sure Jason Taselli stayed behind bars. After trying and failing to figure out how to use the station printer, I ended up ripping off the FBI Most Wanted List I’d seen on the narcotics clipboard, hoping it would be enough to convince Judge Palmer. It was! With Taselli behind bars, Laura and I responded to a drug deal tipoff in the city park. It was a pretty nerve-wracking experience, but we arrested the dealer that’s been causing so much trouble at the local High School, along with some stupid kid that will probably get a slap on the wrist. It’s at this point where my day took a dramatic turn for the worse!

Another fine enactment of crime fighting that sadly involves merely following instructions to complete

Taselli had escaped prison just hours after I’d put him there, and a short while later, I was identifying his body down at Cotton Cove. Someone obviously wasn’t happy with the way the bust went down, and I soon found out whom that someone was! My next task was to go undercover and infiltrate the gambling scene at the Delphoria Hotel. I died my hair blonde and dressed up in the most ridiculous suit, but it obviously worked as I was in the secret back room playing poker in no time. Not only that, I won my way into a higher stake game later in the evening, where I was once again victorious. One of the players I beat turned out to be Jessie Bains, the number one most wanted man around, and he invited me up to his penthouse suite to discuss a business opportunity. I took the opportunity and thankfully I had back up, as someone tipped him off that I was a cop! I took him down before he could do any damage and The Death Angel will be spending a significant amount of time (as in the rest of his life) behind bars!”

The Death Angel goes down, the ultra-violent way! (First person to get my little joke gets 10 points, and it has nothing to do with Clockwork Orange)

Sorry for the long intro, but I’ve got through a heck of a lot in the last two nights leading up to the completion of Police Quest. In total, it’s taken me eight and a half hours to finish, and I’ll say straight up (before I make a bunch of criticisms) that I enjoyed the experience overall. It’s not going to top the leader board when all is said and done, but it won’t be a long way off either. I won’t spend too much time in this post giving overall impressions though and will leave that to the Final Rating post tomorrow. There’s still plenty to talk about that came out of the last third of the game, and I’ll start with where I left off last time. The downside of having a blog like this one is that a growing number of people watch me making mistakes and struggling through sections of games that are really quite easy. There are undoubtedly going to be times, if there haven’t already been some (the cell in Maniac Mansion for example), where you guys just can’t believe that I haven’t been able to solve something when the solution is right there in front of me. This has to be expected though as regardless of how simple things appear, one misunderstanding or one wrong command in adventure games can lead to misdirection and confusion. My printer woes in Police Quest are a perfect case in point!

The clipboard that made me look like a fool in front of all my friends! :(

You see, you don’t need to print anything in Police Quest. Nor do you need the computer that I found the warrant for Jason Taselli on. In fact, there’s absolutely no reason to ever go into the computer room in the police station in the first place. This begs the question of course…why is it there? Developers of adventure games have a bit of a balancing act to perform. On the one hand that want to create an environment that feels real and that has great depth, but on the other hand, they want to avoid drawing the player’s attention to irrelevant information and unintentional red herrings. Would a police station have a computer room? Sure...why not! But there’s not a single other room in the whole game where something doesn’t happen, so I don’t think I can be blamed for spending time in there trying to achieve something out of nothing. However, this red herring is not really the issue at heart when it comes to this particular puzzle. The issue is that all I needed to take with me to Judge Palmer, to convince him not let the suspect go free on bail, was the file from the cabinet, which I had, and the FBI Most Wanted List on the clipboard, which I’d read many times over. When I first read the FBI List, it seemed an obvious item to take to convince the judge, but my command “take page” was met with “take it where?”. I then tried to take the clipboard itself, but my command was met with “the clipboard cannot leave the narcotics office”. These two responses led me to believe that the evidence I needed was elsewhere, and when I found the Federal Warrant on the computer, that seemed to be the logical answer. Well, we all know how that went!

The first room I checked out in the game and the only one where I didn't do anything.

The answer in the end was to “take list” instead of “take page”, but it took some hints from Alfred and Tk for me to even try that (10 points to Alfred for getting in first, 10 points to Tk for such a spoiler free hint). All of this could have been avoided if the developers had been a little less finicky with what commands players could use in certain instances. I don’t recall other Sierra games being as painfully pedantic as Police Quest is when it comes to getting the words exactly right, and I’ll briefly jump ahead to another important section of the game to give another example of the pain it caused me. After cleaning up at the poker table for the first time, Jessie Bains told me to come back later and join him for a more private game where the stakes would be higher. I headed back up to my room, as there didn’t seem to be any other apparent thing to do in the meantime. Once I arrived, my backup team entered the room and told me they would have my back when I met up with Jessie again later on. Before leaving them, I took a look over the earlier screenshots where the undercover plan is first discussed, to see if there was anything else I needed to do. There was mention of two items I would need, the first being a gun hidden within my cane, and the second being a pen with a transmitter in it. I had the cane on me, but I couldn’t see the pen in my inventory. I thought I should ask the backup team whether they had the pen, so I typed “ask about pen”. The response was “how can you do that?”

Man, I just love to dance! Just gotta move my body you know! Ooohhhh... By the way, does anyone have a pen!?

Having at least asked the question and thinking that perhaps the pen was on me already (just not showing in my inventory), I went back downstairs and spent another twenty minutes playing poker, winning poker, following Jessie up to his penthouse, and then getting shot and killed because I didn’t have any way of telling my backup team where I was. Reloading back to when my backup and I are standing in my room, I tried “ask about transmitter” instead of “ask about pen”, and was subsequently given the device! I had to go and win numerous hands of poker all over again due to the game not accepting the word “pen” when describing a transmitter in the shape of a pen. You could argue that in these instances I should have spent more time asking the question in a different way, but the game gives you no indication that asking in any way might result in anything other than “how can you do that?” It doesn’t say “Bob doesn’t have a pen” or “you don’t need a pen”. Neither does the game make it clear as to whether the pen is something you need to get from the backup team. You’re told you will need it at some point, but not where to get it, who to get it from, or even if you already have it (why wouldn’t they just give it to me with the rest of the attire?). I can only describe it as lazy writing, which is surprising given how incredibly thorough Al Lowe in particular was for Leisure Suit Larry.

The two rules of poker success: 1) Never tell everything you know.

Thankfully, given that I had to spend a lot of time playing poker to finish the game, it’s fairly well implemented in Police Quest. I really enjoy poker and fancy myself to win a few hands here or there, and I think for the most part it plays ok here. I did notice that the opponents tended to fold more often than not when I had a good hand, suggesting some cheating AI, but overall I was able to apply the same tactics I would in real life with good results. A word of warning for anyone hoping to play the game down the track, make sure you set the game speed to fastest before sitting down at the table. The amount of time you spend waiting for cards to be dealt, for chips to be put down, and for decisions to be made is absolutely mind numbingly long if you have it on normal or even fast. Regardless of how good the poker minigame is, I did find it a little unusual to spend the last hour of an adventure game playing cards. Everything wraps up extremely quickly once you leave the table and in fact, there is absolutely no action needed by the player other than walking from the card room to the penthouse. The rest unfolds without user interaction, making the big climax feel less than satisfying in my opinion. I’ll save the rest of my ranting (and add some positives) to the Final Rating post, which I should be able to write tomorrow. For now, I’m going to prepare a little bit for one of the more daunting projects I’ve had since...well...since Mortville Manor. It’s nearly time for Shadowgate! I’m scared...really scared!

Nothing says victory like pashing a prostitute called Sweet Cheeks in front of the whole town. Living the dream!

Game 13: Police Quest I - Epic Printer Fail

Sonny Bonds Journal Entry 2: “As if my day hadn’t already had enough excitement, I’ve now had to deal with overly aggressive bikies, an insanely drunk driver, a depressed pal, and last but certainly not least, a revolver packing criminal on the run! It seems that everywhere I go in this godforsaken town, there’s something I need to deal with. Lucky I’m trained for this stuff! Those bikies knew they never had a chance once I got my nightstick out and they left the bar without any further trouble. As for the drunk driver and “Marvin Hoffman”, the narcotics freak that tried to ruin my day, they’re both spending some time behind bars after taking a ride in my patrol car. Speaking of patrol cars, I don’t think I’ll be spending much time in them from now on, as I’ve received a promotion to the narcotics department! I’ll be working with Laura Watts and will be driving around in unmarked cars in casual attire, at least for the foreseeable future. My first case is try to get something on Mr Hoffman that will convince Judge Palmer not let this obvious criminal out on bail. I think I’ve got enough to nail him too, as I’ve found an FBI warrant for Jason Taselli, who often goes under the alias of...yeah you guessed it...Marvin Hoffman. I just need to figure out how to use this damn printer!”

Just remember kids, there's nothing funny about people driving under the influence...a young swan attempting take off...bahahahaha

My last couple of Police Quest sessions have continued in a similar fashion to the first one, with slightly more emphasis on logical deduction rather than merely following procedure. The game is extremely linear, with one success leading to another assignment pretty much immediately, and there’s never any doubt about what you are required to achieve next. Apart from the minutes of cruising around town in the patrol car, waiting to witness a felony or for a call to come through on the radio, there’s a general sense of urgency that pushes the game ever forward. There’s always somewhere that Sonny needs to be, whether it be the station, a bar, the courthouse, the jail etc., and often he needs to be there within the next fifteen minutes, so there’s just no time (or need) to muck around and search every screen the way you would in most adventure games. I still haven’t decided how much I like the game, and I might not be able to make a real judgement until I find out how it all wraps up at the end. It’s certainly quite different to every other game on the list so far and makes for a refreshing change, but whether or not being coaxed through a day in the life of a police officer is satisfying enough once all is said and done, could very come down to personal preference.

Al Lowe just had to get a half naked woman into Police Quest somehow!

While the game is still holding my hand a fair bit and requires following manual procedures more than it does brain power, there have been a couple of places where it surprisingly hasn’t, resulting in my progress being delayed. It’s these times that you realise the developers of the game really had their hands tied. Considering how little knowledge the average person has about the goings on in the day of a policeman, they had no choice but to give as much instruction as was required. After all, real cops don’t learn on the job do they!? The game (and the manual) made it pretty obvious that to make the bikies leave the bar, you need to use physical force, ideally with a nightstick. What neither the game nor the manual told me is where that nightstick is located. I’d collected everything I needed from my locker and around the station in general, but I’d never come across a nightstick. I eventually just tried typing “get nightstick” while I was sitting in the patrol car and was pretty surprised (not to mention ecstatic) when the game responded with “ok”. Did I just miss something or is there no lead to let you know that the nightstick is in the car? Maybe it’s just common knowledge that cops leave nightsticks in the patrol car when not on duty and my lack of cop knowledge is to blame? Or maybe, I should be grateful that the game for once didn’t hand the solution to me on a platter instead of complaining! Either way, once I had it, merely taking it out in the bar was enough to make the bikies run away with their tails between their legs.

Run home and cry to mama!

Pulling over the hilariously drunk dude and administering the alcohol test was a more straight forward affair, literally following the manual instructions step by step before driving him to jail. I’ll admit that I suffered a game over here for not putting my gun in the locker at the front of the jail, resulting in my prisoner grabbing it and shooting me as soon as I took his cuffs off, but that’s a mistake I’ll only make once (and I assume many have made before me). Capturing Marvin Hoffman was a surprisingly tense and cinematic experience, with a real sense of imminent danger given to the scene. It was still just a matter of following instructions though: exit car, draw weapon, command suspect to exit vehicle, command suspect to stop, put their hands in the air and lie face down, cuff suspect, search suspect, read suspect rights, put them in the car and drive them directly to jail. Failure to do any of these steps in that exact order results in your death, but the manual very clearly tells you what to do and in what order. I got stuck at the jail for a while once the guard asked me what Mr Hoffman was being booked for. The game didn’t seem to like any of my answers (murder, evading police, speeding, homicide, unlawful possession of a firearm). I eventually started trying different codes that were listed in the manual for each of the above crimes, but they wouldn’t work either. Finally I tried narcotics, which a radio transmission had suggested the suspect had a prior arrest for, and it worked. Given all the other things this guy has done wrong, I felt that was a little bit pedantic.

This was a great scene that brilliantly mixes adventure style commands with cinematic excitement

By this point in the game, it appeared that my progress was only going to be halted by "find the right  command" problems, and that keeping the manual at my side at all times would likely be enough to get me through. However, Police Quest had a surprise for me. I’m presently pretty damn stuck! My first case in the narcotics department is to find any evidence that might stop the judge from releasing Marvin Hoffman on bail. Basically this evidence needs to be found within the station itself, and it took me all of about one minute to find what I considered to be enough to keep the guy under lock and key. I checked out a file in the narcotics cabinet that showed me all the details on Marvin Hoffman, including photos. I then found an FBI Most-Wanted List on a clipboard in the office that had the same dude going under the name of Jason Taselli, who sometimes goes under the alias Hoffman. Heading into the computer room, I searched the database for Jason Taselli and found a federal warrant for the guy, which included his alias Marvin Hoffman. So what’s the problem I hear you ask? Case closed, get to the courtroom! Well, I tried that, but unless I can give them actual evidence of the warrant, I get thrown out in contempt of court. The most obvious solution would be to print the warrant, and the computer does appear to have a printer, but I can’t see any way to make that happen. Any command while using the terminal is treated as search criteria and any commands about printing while not using the terminal result in a negative. I’m still not certain whether this is yet another find the right command problem or something else entirely. Well...I was criticising the game for being too easy. It’s time to face the challenge!

A shame they didn't have iPhones back in the eighties

Game 13: Police Quest I - Gunshots and Helen Hots

Sonny Bonds Journal Entry 1: “Just another day of protecting and serving the community really. We had a briefing at 13:00 sharp where Sergeant Dooley gave us the rundown of recent events. We’re to look out for a black 1983 Cadillac, license number LOP1238, which was reported stolen last week, and he also informed us of a recent spate of drug related arrests for teenagers from Jefferson High School. As soon as he’d finished, I collected my stuff, checked my car, and hit the road! It didn’t take long for some drama to come through over the radio, with a nasty crash reported on the corner of Fourth and Fig. As soon as I got there I knew this was no ordinary accident. The driver was dead, with a bullet hole to the head! A witness informed me that he saw a light blue Cadillac racing alongside the vehicle and then heard a gunshot, with the now deceased driver immediately swerving off the road and crashing into a wall. I called it in and let the homicide team take over before heading back out on patrol. Not too long later I witnessed a red sports car run a red light and took pursuit. The driver, suitably named Helen Hots, clearly thought that pouting her lips and showing off her assets would get her out of receiving a ticket. I’ve been doing this long enough not to fall for that crap and gave her one anyway. The people of this city need to learn to respect the law!”

Showing off my incredible powers of deduction!

I’m just over an hour through Police Quest and so far it’s pretty easy going. Many readers have suggested that the game is more about following protocol than solving puzzles, and so far that seems to be totally correct. The game has really been about taking cues from what’s happening on screen, looking up the manual to see what the correct response procedure should be, and then following it using basic text parser commands. That’s not to say that I haven’t run into any trouble on the way. In fact, I had a game over message within the first three or four minutes of play, apparently not attending the briefing on time. I had another shortly after when, despite knowing that I had to check my car prior to driving it, I obviously didn’t do it thoroughly enough and got a flat tire within a few seconds (turns out you have to do one full circle of the car and not just “check car” on each side like the manual suggests). While these sorts of things might seem overly pedantic, at least Police Quest has the courtesy to end your game shortly after the mistake, rather than making you play on before ending abruptly hours later (I’m looking at you Space Quest!).

Insert Police Academy quote here

I haven’t really needed to use much logic yet. The manual tells you exactly what equipment you will need before you’re ready for a day in the field (including a gun, handcuffs, briefcase, notebook, ticket book, pen, ammunition etc.), it tells you to check your car before driving it, it tells you what rules to follow on the road and under what circumstances, it tells you what actions to take depending on what type of felony you have witnessed. If you follow the manual, you really can’t go wrong, at least not so far anyway. In a way, Police Quest feels a bit like an entire game based around piracy protection. It was only a few games ago that I was criticising the way a third of the points in King’s Quest III were awarded to the player for entering the spell recipes found in the manual correctly. Well that could very well be all there is to Police Quest! On top of this, the game itself also holds your hand throughout most of the proceedings, letting you know what it is you’re supposed to do next. When I pulled over Helen Hots, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was supposed to do or say. I tried checking her breath, thinking she may have had alcohol, but the game responded with “you haven’t asked for her license yet”. I asked for her license and then tried to write her a ticket, only for the game to respond with “your briefcase is in your car”. So, I got my ticket book and pen out of my briefcase in the car and wrote the ticket, then tried to give it to Helen. The game responded with “she hasn’t signed it yet”. Get the picture?!

Helen Hots: A test many teenage boys failed!

However, despite all of this, Police Quest is somehow managing to be fairly entertaining. Maybe it’s just that I spent all of last week struggling through the incredibly nonsensical and frustrating Mortville Manor. In comparison, spending time in another Sierra sandbox, with all its predictable behaviour and humour, is simply a joy. It also has one particular feature that makes it feel different to the other games on the list so far. You spend quite a bit of time driving around Lytton, either waiting for something to come through on the radio or looking for some form of trouble that you can follow up. This is handled with a top-down perspective and while it’s by no means riveting, it gives the game a level of freshness and unpredictability that the AGI formula might otherwise have struggled to achieve. I look forward to getting back to the game, and I really hope it offers some real challenges at some point to take it from being merely a police procedure training simulator and into the realm of Maniac Mansion and Leisure Suit Larry, with their clever puzzles and/or witty dialogue. Given the amount of procedures listed in the manual that I haven’t yet put into action, I have my doubts that it’s going to be able to compete.

Top-Down Perspective: A first for adventure games!

Game 13: Police Quest I - Introduction

I know what you're thinking! "Did he fire six shots or only"...hey, hang on a second!

By 1987, Sierra had already covered a wide range of genres with their AGI adventure game engine. The King’s Quest series had fantasy sorted, Space Quest had science fiction covered, and Leisure Suit Larry took care of…um…let’s call it adult comedy. The company was smart enough to realise that they should continue to expand their themes, therefore attracting a new audience without competing with their own product. Ken Williams, the co-owner of Sierra, had a few ideas as to where they might venture next, but it was a chance meeting with retired police officer Jim Walls that would lead to the next series launch. Walls had spent fifteen years in the California Highway Patrol unit, and had been forced to retire after a shooting incident left him traumatized.  Williams had already considered a series based on the experience of police officers, and when he mentioned to Walls that all he really needed was a real officer’s involvement in the game’s development to maintain realism, Walls volunteered his services and a partnership was formed. Walls then went about writing a story that included real life police officer protocol and situations, and would go on to assist in the development of numerous other games both in and out of the Police Quest series.

Jim Walls: Mmmmmmmm...donuts!

To get the job done, Williams recruited the usual suspects to develop the game. Al Lowe (Leisure Suit Larry) and Scott Murphy (Space Quest) would program it, Mark Crowe (Space Quest & Leisure Suit Larry) would handle graphics, and Al’s wife Margaret Lowe (King’s Quest III) would write the music. They were all pretty used to the technology by then, and were able to crank out a game in a matter of months. In this case, the result was released as Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel for the PC, Apple II, Amiga, Atari ST and Apple IIGS in the backend of 1987. The game is based in a fictional town called Lytton, California, and the player takes on the role of Sonny Bonds, a driving patrol officer. It’s most well known for including many puzzles that require proper police procedure to succeed. In fact, it was reported to have been used as a training tool for police officers. There’s a quote out on the net that says “Police Quest has proven to be a practical, effective training tool officers enjoy using. It safely demonstrates to rookies the consequences of failing to observe police procedures and can serve as a valuable refresher course for experienced officers.” This sounds an awful lot like a marketing ploy to me, but I haven’t played much of it yet, so who am I to judge.

The City of Lytton

As usual, I’ll be playing through the original version of the game and not the 1992 VGA remake. Having purchased the Police Quest Collection of GOG not too long back, I was very disappointed to find that it only includes the remake and not the original. This is one of the only times GOG has dropped the ball in my opinion and I hope they rectify it at some point. The other Quest series collections they have include the originals, so I’m not sure what happened this time around. In the meantime, I’ve been able to download a copy of the 1987 version and the documentation that came with the GOG collection seems to be the same that came with the original (please tell me if anyone thinks there’s a difference). Speaking of documentation, there is a heck of a lot of it (a manual, map, reference guide and newspaper), and it contains a lot of police jargon and procedures. It’s actually a bit daunting, so I hope it’s not a matter of learning it all and merely requires referring to once every now and then. I do recall playing Police Quest as a kid, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t able to get very far without the manual, which isn’t at all surprising now that I‘ve got my hands on it. I’m far better equipped to get through it now, and am very much looking forward to getting stuck into it. My gun is locked and loaded and I’m ready to hit the road, once I check my car first of course.

Thank you to Manny for letting me know that the original cover I used was the remake. 10 points!