Space Quest wasn’t the first computer game my dad bought for us to play. As a child of the mid-1980s with an IBM PC, I had a whole rapidly exploding industry of games spread out before me, and the first game he brought home from the store (the same store where I'd someday work!) was Oo-topos, the third of Polarware’s Comprehend series of illustrated text adventures. Space Quest came a bit later, after I was already a pro at thinking my way through convoluted parser-based puzzles.
But even if it wasn’t the first one, Space Quest was probably the most important game my dad brought home from the store, because Space Quest was my introduction to Sierra On-line. And Sierra was responsible for some of the most amazing experiences available to gamers in the '80s and '90s. When I think back on my kid years, the memories of growing up are intertwined with memories of Space Quest and Quest for Glory and, yes, Leisure Suit Larry.
I even remember the smell of the weird yellow invisible ink markers that Sierra packaged with their game hintbooks—oh yes, in those long-ago days, there was no World Wide Web to turn to for game hints. If you got stuck, you called the Sierra hint line (which, if memory serves, was a 900 number), or you went back to the local Babbage's and dropped $10 on an official Sierra hintbook. The answers were all printed in invisible ink, and you scribbled with their provided highlighter-like marker over the books' pages to reveal the answers. Later Sierra games used special blue ink and a red tinted gel filter strip to hide the answers, similar to the "tech stats" on the back of Generation 1 Transformers boxes.
Sierra was the unquestioned king of PC gaming though the mid-'90s, and the company continued to turn out solid hits even as the decade waned. However, a series of unfortunate events started in 1996 with the company’s sale to CUC International. More restructuring followed, and in 1998 the news broke that Sierra’s parent company—now called Cendant Corporation after a merger with HFS Incorporated—had been falsifying its accounting records to hide hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.
As a direct result of these losses, most of the remaining legacy Sierra employees lost their jobs on February 22, 1999, in what came to be know as Chainsaw Monday. The company would continue to publish games, but the magic had long since died—Sierra as we knew it was a many-days-dead corpse.
Last week we learned that the Sierra brand is making a return and that we might see new Sierra games built around the same magic formula of adventure and humor as the old company’s titles. The folks being brought in to create the new titles are indie developers who are well familiar with the Sierra DNA, and hopes are high that their games will live up to expectations—even original Sierra co-founder Ken Williams is upbeat.
We’ve assembled a few choice screenshots and memories in the gallery below, but wouldn’t it be great if you could jump into those old titles cooperatively and play with friends? Wouldn’t it be great to save the kingdom of Daventry with not one but a dozen King Grahams?
Enter Sarien.net. It’s a site that’s been around for a few years now, and it features javascript-based recreations of a number of halcyon-day Sierra titles, including King’s Quest I-III and Space Quest I and II. It’s a great toy to kill a weekend day with, running around with other players, typing at each other and adventuring together. Sarien.net’s lovingly-crafted multiplayer simulations show that even if the songs are old and everyone knows the words, you can still have a hell of a good time singing along with a group.
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Sierra's earlier games—like Space Quest here—were parser based. You moved your avatar around the screen with the arrow keys and typed commands with the keyboard. There was no mouse support (not that mice were super common on IBM PCs at the time).Sierra/Activision
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There were often different ways to solve problems. Here, a Sarien spider droid seeks to destroy you. You can dispose of it in different ways, but dropping this rock on it yields the most points.Sierra/Activision
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There were some arcade-ish sequences in a few games, like steering the Keronan skimmer around rocks to get to the desert town of Ulence Flats.Sierra/Activision
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Space games gotta have space bars. It's a rule. The bar at Ulence Flats actually lets you use some of your "feelies." The word refers to the long-abandoned practice of including physical items like coins or maps in the game's box; the original Space Quest came with drink coupons you could "use" at the bar.Sierra/Activision
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Escaping from Kerona requires buying a ship from a used ship dealer named Tiny. And Tiny will do anything to make the sale. Including, well...Sierra/Activision
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As with its predecessor (and all other Sierra games of the time period), Space Quest II was developed with Sierra's Adventure Game Interpreter tool. The game was released in 1987 and followed the same general layout as the first game (start at a home location, get marooned on alien planet, then escape for a boss showdown).Sierra/Activision
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Even though it used the same engine, SQ2 was graphically more sophisticated than its predecessor.Sierra/Activision
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It also featured a wicked maze that I am sad to say proved un-beatable to my 9-year-old past self. We ended up having to buy the SQ2 hintbook, which included maps.Sierra/Activision
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Space Quest 3. I drooled over this game's box for months in 1989, taking every opportunity to pester my parents into swinging by the local Babbage's so I could stare at it and dream of what the game would be like. My dad got it for me for my birthday in August, and my buddy Steve—the same Steve who now freelances from time to time as my photographer—spent the rest of my birthday sleepover playing the game.Sierra/Activision
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SQ3 was the first game in the series to use the Sierra Creative Interpreter, or SCI, instead of the older AGI. This brought higher-resolution EGA graphics, better sound, and tons of improvements in the things programmers could do with the games.Sierra/Activision
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As with all SQ titles, death was everywhere—and often hilarious.Sierra/Activision
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Space Quest 3 sort of broke the fourth wall near the end, with your hero rescuing the game's creators (Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy, the "Two Guys from Andromeda") and flying through a black hole and arriving on Earth—where the Two Guys get a job designing the Space Quest series. Oddly, Leisure Suit Larry 3 used a similar plot device at the game's end.Sierra/Activision
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Space Quest IV jumped into VGA, following on the coattails of King's Quest V's 256-color debut a few months earlier. SQ4 also finally left the parser behind and switched to a fully mouse-driven interface.Sierra/Activision
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The loss of the keyboard flattened the game and turned much of it into pixel-hunting and item-combining, but Sierra's later games were still a blast to play. The higher resolution and 256 color palette available with the shift up to VGA meant that Sierra's artists could work unfettered, and the games of this era were beautiful.Sierra/Activision
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Unfortunately, after the near-perfection of Space Quest 3, SQ4 was a little flat. It had some great moments as Roger Wilco bounced about through time (note the shifting game name displayed in the titlebar), but many of the puzzles were needlessly complex. The part where you're stuck in the Galaxy Galleria mall dragged on endlessly, too.Sierra/Activision
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Time travel brought with it some hilariously self-referential moments, though—like this bit, where you jump back in time to Space Quest I. The bar features a gang of black and white bad guys who rag on your higher-resolution self, taunting you with things like, "Oh, if it isn't mister look-at-me-I'm-in-VGA!"Sierra/Activision
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But Space Quest wasn't the only Sierra title that blew me away. Hero's Quest—later renamed Quest for Glory after a trademark dispute with Milton Bradley—mixed some role playing in with the traditional Sierra adventure formula.Sierra/Activision
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The first Quest for Glory game found you as a novice adventurer, fresh out of the Famous Adventurer's Correspondence School, ready to carve your name into the world. Your quest begins in the Alpine-like town of Spielburg, which you eventually save from the forces of darkness.Sierra/Activision
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As an RPG, QFG included character classes and stats, and how you approached situations differed depending on whether you were a fighter, wizard, or thief. Sleep was necessary, too—if you didn't have money to pay for an inn, you had to find a sheltered place to lay your head at night. Like this place here, a hidden nook known as Erana's Peace.Sierra/Activision
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QFG also included pseudo-turn-based combat, where you attacked as fast as you could type or click against bad guys. How you attacked and what you attacked with depended on your class.Sierra/Activision
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QFG 2 shifted locations from Teutonic town to djinn-filled desert, and if you played your cards right, you could end the game with a promotion to a bonus class, the Paladin. This is far and away my favorite game in the QFG series—it's complex, deep, and a joy to play.Sierra/Activision
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The game's ending varies depending on what you accomplish during the course of playing. The NPCs you helped speak for you and recap your deeds.Sierra/Activision
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The biggest feather in Sierra's cap, though, was its King's Quest series. Sierra co-founder Roberta Williams steered this series personally, and it was the most important of the company's flagships. It was also the first to make the jump from AGI to SCI with King's Quest IV. The game's box proudly proclaimed "Over 3.0 megabytes of computer code—the largest computer game ever produced!"Sierra/Activision
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KQ4 also featured a female protagonist for the first time, having the player take on the role of Princess Rosella in her quest to save the life of her father, King Graham. The game's mix of humor and puzzles and its emphasis on problem solving instead of combat made it attractive to players of either gender. I certainly spent hours and hours trying to beat the game.Sierra/Activision
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KQ4's 16-color graphics were absolutely stunning after at the time. The game even featured a day-night cycle.Sierra/Activision
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As with most KQ titles, the game interwove contemporary fairy tale characters in among the gameplay. This, for example, is the house of the Seven Dwarves.Sierra/Activision
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And the little black box down in the corner of this tomb is Pandora's Box. Opening it kills you.Sierra/Activision
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No talk of early Sierra games can be complete without at least a quick reference to Leisure Suit Larry. This raunchy adventure was the ultimate in forbidden gaming fruit to me.Sierra/Activision
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The game had the player navigate through the land of Lost Wages with the goal of "getting lucky." Though the subject matter was adult, it was handled in the same playful style as all other Sierra adventures.Sierra/Activision
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At the end of the game, Larry finds himself alone with a lady in a hot tub. The player has to give her an apple, a seemingly-useless item acquired much earlier in the game; I remember asking my dad for help with this part of the game and him responding, "Son, I think you're in a bit over your head here."Sierra/Activision
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If you died in certain spots, you were treated to an elaborate behind-the-scenes resurrection sequence, where Larry's lifeless body is lowered to the Sierra workshop and retrofitted with a new head. Other game characters are being busily worked on in the foreground.Sierra/Activision
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There were so many more games in the Sierra pantheon, though—far too many to touch on here. Each title came with a catalog, like this one from fall 1988., and I would read these things to tatters dreaming about all the Sierra games I wanted to buy. (The Internet Archive has PDF versions of this catalog and many others, too, if you want to relive your youth.)Sierra/Activision
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Police Quest occupied much of my time, too, although the first two games in the series were the best. You took on the role of Sonny Bonds, police officer in the fictional California city of Lytton. Each game came with a hefty manual of actual police procedures that you had to follow—screw up while making a traffic stop and you were likely to get murdered.Sierra/Activision
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The Manhunter series was one I never got into. Set in the aftermath of an alien invasion, the player is an agent of an invading alien force who eventually turns coat. It was gritty and bloody, much more adult in tone and content than ostensibly "adult" titles like Leisure Suit Larry. However, Gold Rush was a great title that I played practically to death.Sierra/Activision
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I also never played the side-scrolling duo of Thexder and Silpheed, both Japanese titles from Game Arts that were licensed and released in the US by Sierra. I stared at their screenshots in the catalogs for hours, though, wondering what the games were like.Sierra/Activision
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Probably not a lot of folks remember Sierra's 3D Helicopter Simulator, which let you take the controls of a simulated helicopter and buzz around buildings (and even the Space Shuttle). As with most other flight sim titles, I was never able to fly all that well—the fun was in doing weird things to break the simulation.Sierra/Activision
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