Deadspin writer and Chopped champion Drew Magary wrote a new book, The Hike, which comes out next week. Since the novel was inspired by old point-and-click adventure games, we’ve asked Drew to come review the original King’s Quest for Kotaku. Don’t worry: the book is way better. – Jason
I should not remember the King’s Quest series fondly. I should not get roped into playing it every time I stumble upon sarien.net, where you can play the original version of King’s Quest I, along with other classic Sierra game titles, for free.
I should be well past King’s Quest by now, leaving it a relic of my youth forever and ever. It was the first adventure game I ever played that went beyond simple text (like Zork) and gave you pictures to go with the text commands. (The first time I played King’s Quest I, it was in black-and-white, but you can play it in colour now.) It was like the evolution from silent movies to talking pictures, only in reverse. But of course, that kind of evolution in computer gaming came with a great many… quirks. Bugs. Fuckups, as it were.
It’s impossible to play any classic King’s Quest game without dying five bazillion times. At a certain point, all that dying stops being dramatic and becomes an active nuisance: gaming busywork. There are no maps to refer to in the first game, so you have to stumble from screen to screen, walking at a painfully slow pace, trying to remember where everything is (you could also map it by hand, but fuck that shit). If you use an item improperly, you have to go back to a different save point. The dialogue is stilted. Also, since the commands are finicky, it’s easy to get stuck forever if you don’t have a cheat guide, sometimes literally stuck if you manoeuvre Graham next to a rock and can’t get out.
King’s Quest III became notorious for including a magic manual that you HAD to keep on you while you played so that you could recite spell commands from it verbatim. Without the manual, you were fucked. And movement was so tricky that you ended up dying over and over again anyway.
I never finished it.
Today, if you play a retro point-and-click game like The Silent Age or The Last Door, the programmers are savvy enough to spare you all this tedium. You are physically blocked from walking off a cliff. If you decide to touch a venomous spider monkey, a text prompt pops up and says, “You probably don’t wanna do that.” Challenges are maximised while frustration is minimised. That was not the case with King’s Quest. You can go play it for six minutes and see for yourself. I should never wanna play it again. It’s wildly irritating.
And yet, I adore it. I adore it so much that I wrote a novel partially inspired by that old style of gameplay. (My hope is that the audio version of the book comes as a box of multiple disks, in order to capture the feeling of unboxing something from the 1980s.) Every time I see little Graham prance across the screen in his stupid hat, I turn into a wet puddle of commercial nostalgia. I am twelve years old, perusing the aisles at Radio Shack looking at ugly PC game boxes. Look at Graham out there, questing his arse off:
I can’t look away. Somehow, 8-bit animation has endured even after being graphically surpassed by infinite leaps and bounds. My kids play Minecraft even though they could play games that do NOT make you feel like you’re horribly nearsighted. 8-bit manages to hit the sweet spot between reality and your imagination. There’s just enough information for your brain to fill in to make the story feel like your own. And that has allowed the old Sierra games (King’s Quest, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry) to take up permanent residence with my inner child, alongside Star Wars and all the other standard 80s geek shit.
But hey, I’m getting all Cameron Crowe on you. Let’s talk about whether or not you, fair Kotaku reader, should play the first King’s Quest game, and join Sir Graham on his quest to find stuff hidden inside poorly marked rock holes.
On a PC, you control Graham with the arrow keys and type commands into the prompt. Even once you master Graham’s movement (Oooh! I can go diagonal!), you are still certain to be killed many times over by the following things:
- Water
- Crocodiles
- A witch
- Chasms
- A dragon
- Angry leprechauns
- More water (sometimes Graham can swim, and sometimes he can’t, which is bullshit)
Play progresses when you find items, magical and otherwise, secreted in logs or under large rocks. To this day, whenever I spot some big hole in a tree, I like to think there’s a big arse treasure inside of it instead of a pile of grubs. I am usually disappointed to find the latter. You have to use the inventory in the exact right spots to fend off the aforementioned dragons and witches. There are also trolls and elves and all the standard fairy tale characters, and it was a real dickshitting moment as a kid to go from reading and watching movies about fairy tale creatures to actually interacting with them.
Even though the bugginess of King’s Quest I will make you want to put your hand through the monitor, it makes the breakthroughs that much sweeter. At one point you plant beans in the ground to grow a beanstalk, and are thus freed from the restricted grid of play you’ve been stuck in for hours and hours. It feels like graduating. Then you gotta deal with a giant and suddenly you’re angry again. I don’t WANT modern games to be this annoying, but like any beloved totem of youth, I feel an undeserved affection for the process of mastering the game’s flaws.
I don’t play video games much anymore, mostly because of adult responsibilities. But, for me, a great video game is more engrossing than pretty much any other art form, often dangerously so. I don’t even wanna know what kinda germs were in my old computer chair. And once in a while, I stumble onto a new game that echoes the Sierra classics of old, or I turn to the classics themselves, and I get sucked back in.
It’s not like Candy Crush, where I know the game is eating away at my mind. If it’s a good adventure game, I’m IN the game’s world, solving its problems, and I never wanna get back out. That’s what awesome games do. And because of the influence that King’s Quest had, there are plenty of them to go around now. You should play it, and then come yell at me for having suggested it.
Comments
12 responses to “King’s Quest, Quest For The Crown: The Kotaku Review”
Ah good ole Kings Quest, I was more of a ‘Quest for Glory’ person (wasn’t it Dragons Quest or something before it was renamed?
I think it was renamed from “Hero’s Quest”.
QfG2 is still one of my all time favourite games.
Hero’s Quest – before they had to change it for conflicting with the board game of the same name. Best Sierra series for me by far.
The theme song of Heroes Quest(Quest for Glory) still resonates with me… especially Erana’s Peace coming out of my adlib card,
I still remember running that gauntlet with all the brigands only to type “jump log”, only to realize that there were other ways it could be done, Back then… this blew my mind.
these games are brutal. no coddling or hand holding here. you fuck up and havnt saved in 4 hours and missed grabbing that piece of straw from the first 15 minutes of the game. stiff shit. you cant finish now. you fell in the water – your bad, crocodile food it is for you, start again.
I did finish Kings Quest III – it took about six years and that was only after someone at school told me where the wand was.
I love that game. I am pretty sure I got it as a birthday present.
Also, without Sierra games, there is no way I would have learnt to type so quickly.
I never remember it being so brutal, my fondest memories of KQ were going to school the next day to tell my mate what I’d done, and eager to hear what he had done too. No guides or internets, still remember how awesome it felt when we finally got Rumplestiltskin’s name right. Incidentally author guy, you could use the +/- keys to adjust Graham’s walking speed. In my youthful ignorant bliss, my copy of Kings Quest 3 didn’t have a manual or disks with fancy labels, or a box (you get the idea) so to me all the spells were a riddle that I had to figure out and again it felt pretty darn good when I worked out what the spells were. Wasn’t until much much later I found this was an early form of copy protection.
I never enjoyed Space Quest, felt the humour was just stupid. Police Quest was too picky (walk around the car every single time before driving, else game over). Hero’s Quest/Quest for Glory was the end of the world as I knew it. Same adventure style, but now with role playing. I’d loved D&D before that but the visuals on the PC games were always… pretty poor. QFG made all that better. I played QFG2 once (with my fancy imported character that had thousands of potions), then QFG3 came out with all its fancy visuals and loved it so much. QFG1 got a remaster (oh wait they did those back then??) and loved going back to it with the new point & click style and their 256 colours. Held out hope for so very long that QFG2 would get a remake but it never came.
I tried playing through Leisure Suit Larry 2 recently as I realised I’d never completed it back in the day. Towards the end there’s a section where you’re literally saving every time you take a step, because it’s just not clear where you can walk and where you can’t. It was so infuriating.
And I loved it.
I did enjoy the Kings Quests back-in-the-day (KQ5 and KQ6 are my favourites) but the Space Quest series was always my adventure game of choice. Crazy sci-fi worlds, genuine laughs, and more death than an episode of Game of Thrones!
I hated the remake.. Didn’t do it justice imo
This was the game that made me a PC gamer. It literally brought 10 year old me to tears trying to figure out the right words to type to open the door that was in the side of the hill.l
Kings Quest made me love adventure games, except the climbing the beanstalk part. Got sick of the constant falling. Could see the path, but off by a pixel or 2? Goodnight nurse.
But I have to say, Sierra did some fantastic work with this, but LucasArts added the final spit/polish for adventure games.
King’s Quest, one of my favorite PC games of all time. Probably the only series that I can play over and over. Though I never played the 8th one, and I haven’t played much of the new one yet. 1 – 7 I could play over and over if I had time.