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.