Join Kosta Andreadis as he plays through some of the most seminal adventure games of all time over the course of 2014. In part one, he relives King's Quest I.

The original King’s Quest by Sierra was initially released in 1983, and although it wasn’t the first adventure game of its type and the 160x200 resolution graphics feature fewer pixels than you’d now find on some microwave timers, it was definitely ground-breaking for its time. And with all things that date back a while, it was the product of a different era.

This was a time when new episodes of M*A*S*H were still airing, when James Bond films were being released with Roger Moore in the titular role, and PCs were running DOS version 2.0. It was also a different era of gaming: in the mid ‘80s consoles were considered a thing of the past thanks to Atari’s misunderstanding of simple mathematics, and cutting edge graphics involved pixel blobs changing from one barely discernible shape to another.

READ HISTORY BOOK

The PC in the early to mid ‘80s was a luxury item, so much so that it was more commonly referred to by its acronym namesake - the "Personal Computer". This meant that the term "computer" at the time assumed that it was a machine owned and operated outside of a home, perhaps on a dedicated office floor with spinning tape decks next to flashing coloured lights. They had to insert a "personal" in there to alleviate any confusion as to how a computer ended up on a desk in the study next to the pantry (near a dead body and a candlestick no doubt). But they weren’t exactly cheap, and owning one meant you were probably in the household of an educator, scientist, or high-income hobbyist, where the PC was used for rudimentary word processing, accounting, and of course, playing games.

A personal computer from the early '80s.

Although the industry adopted the term video games, in reference to consoles, which connected to TVs in much the same way as a VCR, at this time the term computer game was also beginning to emerge in direct reference to those games found and distributed on floppy disk and running on either IBM or Apple based PCs. Throughout the ‘80s there was a distinct difference in games being developed primarily for PC and those for console. Computer games, being those for PC, were seen as more complicated, intricate, and even mature, namely due to the limitations of using the keyboard as the only input device.

This was a time before even the mouse, which was more of a luxury item during the ‘80s when DOS ruled the day. So for the most part it was just the keyboard and its litany of keys never designed to be used strictly for playing games that were then used for that very purpose. So it was only natural that a command-based interface for solving puzzles based around a rudimentary narrative would spawn a genre that we all know today as adventure games.

Sierra in the ‘80s was a name synonymous with adventure games; namely its flagship series of King’s Quest games designed by Sierra co-founder Roberta Williams. Before King’s Quest, adventure games began as simple text-based affairs where there were no graphics, just words, used to describe where you were or what was in front of you – often in an unnecessarily convoluted manner. From these descriptions players would enter simple commands to try and solve a string of puzzles. An example of how this may have played out is as follows.

“You find yourself… “

No that won’t work, the font feels a little too modern, so let’s try that again.

Sierra and Roberta Williams were pioneers in bringing graphics to these text-based adventures, in a string of what were described as Hi-Res Adventures where the descriptions were summarised to a more palatable level and the high resolution graphics referred to static vector-based images used to set up each scene.

Released in the early ‘80s, these Hi-Res Adventures gained notoriety among early adopters of PCs and although screenshots may make gamers of today look down upon the lack of realistically rendered war-crimes being committed in the name of fun, they were quite impressive in their day.

Eat your heart out The Last of Us.

King’s Quest was somewhat of a game changer in the adventure game market, as it introduced what were then described as “amazing 3D graphics” which actually equated to being able to manipulate and move a character around a screen and interact directly with the environment, meaning that to open a door you would move up to it, type in the command “OPEN DOOR” in the parser and watch the door open in a somewhat crude animation - which you could then walk through. This was actually unheard of at the time, heralding a new era and beginning what many see as the golden age of adventure games.

They just don't make box art like they used to.

King’s Quest, however, was originally played by very few people, due to Sierra’s partnership with IBM who paid for the game’s development in order to secure it as an exclusive for its soon to launch PCjr, a more mass-market approach to the PC. Although hyped as a must-have product, the PCjr didn’t launch with a price point all that dramatically different from competing products and failed to garner any real traction.

It wasn’t long before the PCjr was abandoned by IBM, but Sierra’s partnership with the company had some benefits. IBM wanted a game that could show off the new hardware’s capabilities, and this meant animation, colour, and being able to replay the game for a different outcome, adding significant complexity to a genre that was in every sense a static and finite experience up to this point. IBM’s investment meant Sierra could staff up to achieve these lofty goals.

Factually correct, but harsh nonetheless.

Writing all of this complexity into the game in assembly (machine code) was not an option, so Sierra invested heavily, with input from IBM, in developing its own engine dubbed AGI (Adventure Game Interpreter) which allowed the studio to run its own scripting language, similar to BASIC and other early programming languages - leaving the door open for both ease of development and portability.

With the failure of IBM’s PCjr, Sierra was thus able to port and release King’s Quest on other PC platforms like Tandy, Apple, and Amiga. But it was the release of King’s Quest on the Apple IIe in 1984 that saw the game become an overnight and runaway success, leading to many more King’s Quest and adventure games from Sierra - all running on its AGI engine.

OPEN DOOR… TO ADVENTURE

There’s an air of simplicity and polish around certain games that can be described as retro experiences, from early arcade efforts like Space Invaders and Donkey Kong to console titles like Super Mario Bros. By comparison, in PC games of the time - especially adventure games - there was a sense of unknown rules that were only discovered through trial and error, often resulting in dead ends and deaths.

Mechanics like this are virtually impossible to find in today’s games and playing something like King’s Quest now is not a case of reliving a timeless experience or even simply playing a brilliant adventure game, it’s more historically interesting than either of those two somewhat valid reactions.

This is because early adventure games, namely those developed and made popular by Sierra, can be notoriously cruel and unforgiving. The general rule of thumb when playing early Sierra adventures is to save so often as to get into a steady rhythm of never taking more than a few steps before hitting F5.

Apply axe repellent spray.

These days developers tend to lead the player by the nose, explaining – and in many cases, over-explaining – how to play their games. Not so here. Indeed, the key assumption made in King’s Quest is that the player (you) will have enough foresight to simply work everything out on your own and spend as much time as needed in doing so, even when key variables could be random events, like walking into a particular screen could result in a wolf mauling you to death, or not.

And as we’re talking about the mid ‘80s, any and all prerequisite knowledge before you begin the game can be found in the manual and not within the game itself, so this means that the game’s story is essentially contained within the manual. If you were to simply start playing the game it would feel like you’re exploring a castle and its surrounding areas doing a bunch of random things – mostly involving falling to your death.

The goal in King’s Quest I is quite simple and non-linear, with the clue being in the game’s very title. You speak to the king who gives you a quest - to retrieve three missing legendary treasures to restore the land of Daventry to its former glory. Oh, and your name's Graham.

One of the key aspects of King Quest was the fact that there was no real order in which you needed to complete each puzzle or collect each piece of treasure, and even though the kingdom of Daventry is essentially an 8x6 grid of separate screens that wouldn’t be too hard to memorise, keeping your own map of the environment was essential when moving around a place with a blatant disregard for dimensional physics.

This is because when you reach the end of one screen you’ll soon discover that the map endlessly loops and duplicates itself in all directions, which probably means that Sierra adheres to the Endless Universe theory. Or that the game was developed in 1983.

In today’s modern gaming landscape where quest markers work in the same way as GPS devices, the endless nature of the map can be impressively confusing even when taking into consideration its small size.

Eat gingerbread house.

King’s Quest was developed so there would be multiple ways to complete certain puzzles, and featured several non-essential treasures to find scattered across Daventry. This was apparently a design request made by IBM who wanted Sierra to develop an adventure game that would get players wanting to replay the adventure.

From this they introduced a score system that remained throughout the series that put a numerical value on completing certain tasks, with single points awarded for collecting items, and multiple points of varying number for completing tasks, depending on the solution utilised.

So, when confronting the fire-breathing dragon in the game who is protecting the magic mirror (one of the three legendary treasures) you can throw a dagger at it for fewer points, or a bucket of water for the maximum number of points.

Now, throwing a dagger at a dragon may seem like an obvious command to try out in King’s Quest, and it most certainly is. Watch out! There’s a dragon! “THROW DAGGER AT DRAGON”, the dragon dies and you don’t feel at all guilty for possibly killing a friend of Sean Connery’s Draco from Dragonheart. It’s solving some of the other puzzles found within the game that can be ridiculously complicated.

There’s one puzzle in particular that involves guessing a gnome’s name in three tries that is borderline maniacal. And not in the comic sense of the word, where someone is laughing in an evil way but in the literal sense, where there’s a hint of pure insanity.

A little nutty is it? *boom-tish*

DEFEAT GNOME… PLEASE

Before you get to the gnome, however, you need to cross a bridge, and as is so often the way in this fairy tale and fable-inspired series, it’s guarded by a troll. Getting rid of the troll can be done with the help of a goat who can scare it off if you lure it to the trroll by using a carrot you can collect from the garden outside the castle walls.

It’s also worth noting that you can in fact eat the carrot, lose points, and have to reload an earlier save where you still have the carrot; an especially cruel inclusion when the carrot is described as delicious. “EAT CARROT” is another reason to save often.

When you finally cross the troll bridge you find yourself on a small island with a gnome who asks you to guess his name. You’ll have three tries, and if you fail he’ll leave the game for good, drop a key that you’ll need and not give you the magic beans you can use to grow a beanstalk to reach the land above the clouds where a giant is guarding another piece of the legendary treasure.

Now, there is another way to reach the land above the clouds which involves climbing about a thousand or so stairs in a game where climbing five successfully warrants an F5 to save your progress, and that’s the fate that befell basically everyone, because guessing the gnome’s name correctly is impossible.

Why? Let’s sift through the solution, shall we? Okay, the starting point is that there’s a famous fairy tale gnome named Rumpelstiltskin. No doubt you’ve heard of him, but it’s worth pointing out that at no point in the game is this name mentioned at all.

Still, you wouldn’t be at fault for trying this out, especially when each puzzle scenario seems to follow a particular fairy tale or Brothers Grimm scenario. Of course, that’s not the solution, but if we follow a cryptic clue found on a note in the gingerbread house where the game’s witch lives, we may have our answer.

The note says something along the lines of “the solution is backwards” in reference to nothing in particular, so you may as well try again, this time spelling Rumpelstiltskin backwards. Wrong again, and with two tries down you should probably give up and attempt to climb the Endless Stairs of Multiple Deaths and Reloads as there’s no hint as to Rumpelstiltskin being the name’s reference point to begin with.

But, if you were psychotic you would see that the backwards in the clue is referencing the entire alphabet where A=Z, B=Y and so forth, so what simpler word than Rumpelstiltskin is there to spell using this method of World War II grade code breaking nonsense to secure the magic beans?

The end result is a game where no one really climbed the magic beanstalk, which - irony would have it, according to those that have (once the solution became public in the same way as secret war documents were, many years after the fact) - is substantially harder than the stairs to ascend.

People were clearly more forgiving in 1983, but then again, once the solutions for each legendary treasure were worked out, it wasn’t a very long game to complete, so let’s just call this insanity value for money. Once you had all three treasures you simply went back to the castle to give them to the king, who then dies, and you wind up as King Graham.

"Also, we're currently waging several hugely expensive wars, so have fun with that."

CLOSE DOOR… UNTIL NEXT TIME

King’s Quest not only saw countless versions released on different PC platforms in its day but it even had an enhanced EGA remake in 1990 (albeit one that did not sell well enough for the rest of the series to get the official remake treatment) and an even more recent free-to-play SVGA remake made by the adventure game super fans at AGD Interactive.

Of course these later versions introduced the “point-and-click” mouse approach more commonly associated with adventure games as time went on, but it is worth experiencing King’s Quest in its original incarnation.

It’s in this original version where the crude nature of the presentation fits the more clunky aspects of the puzzle solving and character movement, all of which adds to its not inconsiderable charm. These design flaws, after all, were growing pains for both the genre and a still relatively small industry.

Cribs: Medieval Edition.

In Journal Entry #2, the adventure will continue in King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne and King’s Quest III: To Heir is Human. That’s right, two adventures for the price of one. For now though, tell us about your fond - or not so fond - King's Quest memories!

Kosta Andreadis is a freelance writer and musician based in Melbourne Australia. He likes his comedy absurdist and his music disco-tinged. Why not join the whole IGN AU team on Facebook?