Questprobe: The End

Did the Chief Examiner ever save his people?

Scott Adams’s Questprobe is one of the most ambitious adventure game projects ever attempted. The goal was to release twelve games and twelve comic books over four years. Each game had to attract new players, but also build on the previous ones in terms of characters and puzzle complexity. Each new comic had to expand on the story of the Chief Examiner as he struggled to save his doomed race. The whole mess was years ahead of its time: it would be more than two decades before another company tried to publish episodic adventure games on such an ambitious schedule. Unfortunately, the changing game industry took its toll on Adventure International and the Questprobe series was cancelled after only three games. Even without new games, the story of the Chief Examiner was picked up by later Marvel writers and brought to its conclusion. In this special “ending” post, I’m going to take a look at how Marvel ended this series as well as speculate a bit on “What If” the series had continued. There’s no gameplay here!

I want to stress that the following is the “official” ending to Questprobe, but not the one intended by Scott Adams and his team. Scott has modestly insisted that they did not have an ending planned out, nor was he thinking on the games more than one ahead. I’m not sure that I buy that exactly, but let’s see what Marvel has in store for us.

Lost Classic: Questprobe #4: X-Men

Written by Joe Pranevich

The Chief Examiner shows off his gem collection. (From the ending to Questprobe #1.)

Last time, we completed Questprobe Featuring the Human Torch and the Thing, the third and final Questprobe game to be released out of a planned twelve games. Shortly after that game came out, Adventure International faced bankruptcy and all of the games in progress were cancelled. That would have been the end of the story except for two things: Scott Adams had already started work on the fourth Questprobe game and had it in a partially working state, and Marvel would revive the character of the Chief Examiner a few years later to wrap up the Questprobe plot line. The most amazing part of this is that Scott kept the partially completed game stored away and has been generous enough to allow me the chance to play it. This is a “Lost Classic”, a game that could have been. Next week we will post interviews with Scott Adams and Kem McNair, then we will wrap it up with a final epilogue as we look at Marvel’s continuation of the characters as well as a few surprises.