Welcome to Blogging Quest. This is going to be my attempt to play through all of the Sierra ?Quest? games, one by one, and blogging everything along the way. Where better to start than with King’s Quest I – Quest for the Crown, the very first of the many Quest?s we?ll undertake.
Where to start with Sierra and me? I’ve talked previously about my love of Sierra games, and blogged my memories of playing Kings Quest 4 and Space Quest 3. They were the first games company that I really knew and was a fan of as a kid. I didn’t realize it at first, but my first exposure to Sierra was in the Apple/Commodore lab at my elementary school. Troll’s Tale was what we got to play after finishing up with Oregon Trail, or other educational games. And my next experience was on my grandma’s Apple IIe, with Cranston Manor. These games settled me into an irrational love of adventure games.
My first introduction to King’s Quest must have been around 1985/1986. My nerdy friends and I all played computer games, with only a few of them having a NES, so computer games were the common language of games between us all. A friend, Jeff if I remember right, came to school one day and was going on and on about this game he’d just played. It was great! You could walk around behind things, in front of them. You typed in what you wanted to do. You wanted to open a door? Type “Open Door” and it opened, right there on the screen! It understood you! (You could even type in bad words and it would chastise you.) Sweet!
Of course during the days of old, everyone traded and copied games for each other, so he quickly gave me the disk, which thanks to his IMB PCjr wouldn’t work on my sweet Amstrad 1512. Nevertheless, we played it at his place, and I learned the simple joys of the never ending Sierra deaths, and found to save early, save often was essential when playing a Sierra game (and even then, you could screw up and have to restart!). I began my love of the Sierra adventure game that would last me for many many years to come.
King’s Quest I was originally created to be a showcase piece for IBM’s new PCjr line of computers. It was to take advantage of the great new graphics and sound that the PCjr was offering over the competition. It was amazing at the time for an adventure game. You could see the protagonist. You could walk through the scenes and interact with them, where before they were just static screens. It wasn’t long before the game was ported to other systems, including a wide PC release, along with the Apple II, Amiga and others.
I’ll be playing the 1987 wide release of the game for DOS, it’s essentially the same as the original 1984 release, but made to run on EGA computers, and not just on the Tandy 1000 or PCjr. For a bit more history on the game and other info check out the Wikipedia page on it.
Coming soon! Day 1 of Blogging Quest – King’s Quest I – Quest for the Crown!
