The first time I started King’s Quest on our family’s ancient IBM PC, I had no clue that I was, in fact, about to play a game that my future self would forever appreciate for its audacious creativity and lip-biting challenges. We’re talking about an era when video games themselves were just a few crude pixels and a couple of monosynths bumping into each other on the screen, a far cry from games today, which have Oscar-worthy storylines and genuine actors goading us into taking those fateful next steps and pressing onward. Of course, I could still recall the Sierra On-Line logo fading into view after a mysterious screen door slammed shut, something that within the next 24 hours was going to pull my pre-teen self-deep into a fictitious medieval story, no matter what happened around me in the “real world.”
During the 1980s, video games were still in their infancy. Most were unsophisticated and focused on gameplay that was conducive to achieving high scores. In this context, the appearance of King’s Quest in 1984 was a very big deal indeed. The game was one of the first to merge simple graphics, an actual (by 1980s standards) story, and puzzles into a single experience. Before, adventure games had been mostly text-based, with a player using a keyboard to input commands. King’s Quest, however, allowed a player to direct the main character, a graphical presence on the screen, by using a keyboard or joystick to point and click on the pathway to adventure.
The first screens of the game dazzled me with their vibrant, multicolored glory, as if I were somehow privy to a fantastic secret. The kingdom of Daventry had a kind of storybook feel to it, something that King Graham would later experience when he was magically whisked away to the land of the imagination with Mother Goose. The very step taken by Sir Graham (or King Graham) during his quest as the Person-of-Great-Stature-and-Virtue reeked of damsel-in-distress syndrome, even while the legendarily vibrant, ever-youthful gal I could only imagine as my wish-fulfillment sidekick.
King’s Quest was committed to the art of storytelling. The game was not just about solving puzzles; it was about going on a grand adventure. The very first King’s Quest had what now seems like a straightforward story, but it was actually very compelling for players at the time. The narrative of the first King’s Quest went: King Edward, for whatever reason narcoleptic monarchs make their requests, was at the point of death and just wanted to assure the future of his kingdom would be secure. Sir Graham, the white knight of simplicity, ventures out into the world of 1980s fantasy stop motion, encountering various characters and strange visions limited only by the dreams of the demented and the fruitful gnomes of our 1985 imaginations.
Another aspect of King’s Quest to really laud? The puzzles. The series has always been strong with these, but they’re especially good here. They hop merrily about from one sort to another: Some are pure brainteasers, the kind of logic problems you just have to stare down; some arise from the many, many objects you can take along in your inventory and the wide variety of ways in which you can interact with the game world (and all the engrossing and intensely irritating ways in which you can get them wrong). I retain an idiotically vivid memory of solving the Rumpelstiltskin puzzle; you’re presented as if at the tabletop with a very simple and very ancient sort of cypher, but the payoff, the moment of “ah-ha!,” makes it another of King’s Quest’s justly drubbing.)
The King’s Quest series evolved as it moved forward. In every new act, it leveled up in both gameplay and story. While all games are filled with heroic deeds, the heroes of this series are known not just for their courage but for their ingenuity. As the series has progressed, the various kingdoms in King’s Ques* have been filled with an increasingly large number of extremely interesting characters who made the series better and better. These characters have filled out the various courts, forests, and magical lands that you, Graham, Alexander, and Rosella have been fortunate enough to visit.
The series wasn’t afraid to reach for new tools; it just used them really well, both in individual installments and when pulling new technology into the service of the story.
In 1985, the original game’s successor, King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne, was released. The second game saw Graham, now the king of Daventry, venturing out from his kingdom in search of the damsel Valanice, who spun around and around inside a magic mirror. Once Graham had taken in her nonstop revolution, the mirror had shown her life on the edge of a tower somewhere. Valanice was in some kind of bad situation, but it wasn’t exactly clear what that was. What was clear was that the puzzles in the original game were no match for the much more sophisticated ones here in the second game, which also had a much more intricate story.
The 1986 release of King’s Quest III: To Heir Is Human took video game storytelling in a whole new direction. After two successful adventures with King Graham as the protagonist, designer Roberta Williams decided it was time for a new hero: in this case, Gwydion, a young boy who’s been enslaved by the evil wizard Manannan. In a shock twist that occurred partway through the game, the player learned that Gwydion was actually Prince Alexander, son of King Graham and Queen Valanice, and the whole “To Heir Is Human” thing was a wordplay ruse to distract the player from the true storyline.
Princess Rosella stands out in 1988 as a great female lead in a computer adventure game. This is another big hit for the Roberta Williams series. King’s Quest IV was one of the first games in the series to play around with what could be done in the world of the graphics and sound that the new SCI engine had created. The SCI engine could only handle 16 colors at once; Williams tried to build as many rich, story-like details into the piece as possible, with Rosella embarking on a beautifully crafted journey into an even more fanciful land. King’s Quest IV has Rosella traveling to Tamir, a land of beautiful locales and a day-and-night cycle that adds both realism and challenge to her quest. Rosella is the “beauty,” and in certain scenes, various forms of a spell during the “night cycle” result in Rosella transforming into a beast; once the spell is broken, she’s as beauty once again, performing equivalent tasks within the compute game.
The King’s Quest series was known for its challenging gameplay. What really set it apart was the level of difficulty bundled up in each episode, which wasn’t particularly merciful if you didn’t have the observation, logical reasoning, or problem-solving chops to get to the bottom of a problem; and the 8 episodes certainly were pretty frequent with a lot of problems. Being as they were from the Big Bad ’80s, these half-baked brain teasers were particularly immune to walkthroughs, too.
The 1990 release of King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! was particularly tough. This point-and-click game traded the text parser system of the ultra-old-school King’s Quests for a more accessible (yet no less difficult) series of puzzles. The really hard part? Most of the puzzles in KQV make very little sense. You’re King Graham, off to save your family from an evil wizard. Along the way, you solve puzzles by, for instance, throwing a custard pie at a yeti to make it sneeze so hard that it’s stunned long enough for you to walk past it. You’re not adventuring so much as just being really, really good at figuring out inventory. Since this game was also an early entry in the CD-ROM format, it had lovely graphics and very good music to help make the overall experience more palatable.
The 1992 King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow is often hailed as the zenith of the King’s Quest series. The narrative virtually burst from every pore of the game, providing a tale of the sort that Roberta Williams, the game’s co-designer, was famous for telling. Within that tale, Prince Alexander of Daventry navigated not only through a number of diverse and dangerous environments, but he also had to find his way through the problems that these rooms of the game often presented. He got through only because you got through. Working with Alexander was like being the smarter end of a personal intercom system and part of an intriguing rescue operation.
Even amidst great difficulties, the series uses its characteristic light and quirky touches to alleviate the tough predicaments. The adventures are full of playful ripostes to a variety of fabled or historical parodies as well as sly servings of prose-y pop culture, even more so than in the sweetly subversive Monkey Island games. And throughout, characters in the series serve up trenchant dialogue while the games unfurl in a manner that is the prerogative of the sort of fiction writers who stand at the top of their craft.
King’s Quest has become a classic of the gaming industry. Its blend of the infinite imagination of fairy tales with clever storytelling, big and sometimes devious puzzles, and very good writing gave rise to a new genre of computer games. Adventure games in their heyday brought enlightening and entertaining experiences to players who could solve all kinds of clever, unexpected, and sometimes funny puzzles. The heart of the series really was that, puzzle-solving.
The series made a major breakthrough in graphics and animation. At a time when videogame designers were using a very restricted color palette and often stiff, almost puppet-like pixel art to tell their stories, King’s Quest was one of the first to make use of vector graphics. Though not quite as detailed or as lush as the hand-drawn art found in the better animated cartoons of the day, these graphics were still clearly the next step for a medium clearly on the edge of full-scale animation and color. When it came to storytelling, King’s Quest and its sequels were videogame pioneers. And some of the stories told in those games are quite good.
Many other adventure games have followed King’s Quest, and their lineage to it is pretty explicit. Gabriel Knight designer Jane Jensen flatly says that King’s Quest IV is her favorite game; “it was a beautiful fairy tale with a very rich, involving story and wonderful, magical settings,” she coos in the KQIV hint book. To hear her say it, the Gabriel Knight games are practically fan fiction. That hint book is part of a boxed set I and some other lucky gamer out there possess; bought new, it was worth more than its weight in gold when it was your only hope for solving those dastardly KQIV puzzles.
Also, the King’s Quest series helped make Sierra OnLine a top developer of adventure games. The King’s Quest games were innovative and told good stories, and they were very polished by the standards of the day. (Work that was very Glinda the Good Witch, if you ask me.) They built Sierra a fanbase of dedicated adventurers. With Sierra OnLine on top, the adventure game genre could be taken seriously. At a time when the industry was still feeling its way around in the effort to go from arcade-bred simplicity to the “cinematic” quality of a good interactive movie, Sierra’s King’s Quest games helped convince the world that both the adventure game genre and the industry as a whole had reached the mature phase of development.
Countless people remember King’s Quest as one of their first real gaming experiences—an odd jumble of bright colors, demanding puzzles, and whoa! Some of the stuff that passed for animation back then was pretty strange. But the games were also mediated by a family connection, and I think that matters. Your dad didn’t just put a new game on the computer for you—he installed it! Anyway, both my parents were actually pretty big King’s Quest geeks, and playing those games with them was a big part of my childhood.
To sum it up, the King’s Quest series has carved out a rich and lasting niche for itself in the video game world. It set a tone for not only the dynamic nature of the games it directly produced but also for the many games that followed. King’s Quest was the grandfather of the pure adventure game, with its best moments making clear what was so special about the new interactive form of entertainment. The “magic mirror” moment from the first game, as I remember it, was simply one of the most nerve-tingling things you could experience on a home computer at that time. And you had to actually do something to rescue that king!
