Retronauts - 603: King's Quest

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

In the 18 years we've been putting out this little podcast, we've never produced a single episode wholly devoted to classic Sierra games. Well, that sin against listenerkind ends TODAY as we peer back 40 years in the past to discuss the monumentally important adventure game, King's Quest. Originally intended as a means to sell a platform that died shortly after its release, this interactive fairy tale unexpectedly went on to define Sierra and spawn many more Quests over the next decade-plus. On this episode, join Bob Mackey, patron Daniel Glass, and Sierra speedrunning correspondent (and Adventure Game Fan Fair affiliate) OneShortEye as the crew gathers to discuss the series that made this California developer synonymous with adventure—and frustration! Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get two full-length exclusive episodes every month, as well as access to 50+ previous bonus episodes, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com/retronauts.

This week on Retronauts, we attempt to spell Rumpel Stiltskin backwards. Hello, everybody, welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one, Bob Mackey, And today we'll be tackling the Classic Sierra series King's Quest for the first time and covering Classic Sierra for the very first time in the 18-year history of Retronauts. I planned on getting around to it at some point in my life. Of course, I had to cover every single LucasArts game first. That's just where my preferences come in. But thankfully, one of our top-tier patrons came along and forced my hand in a very friendly way

by supporting the show at a very high level and putting in their request. and just in time for King's Quest's 40th anniversary. So before I go on any further, who is the top-tier patron here with us today who sponsored this episode? Hi, everyone. My name is Dan Glass. I'm a clinical psychologist, and I don't have any real gaming credentials other than I play them. So thanks for having me. And Dan, maybe at some point throughout this episode, you can let us know if anyone has gone clinically insane by some of the puzzles in the KingsQuest series.

Okay. We'll talk about it. And who else do we have? Who is our other guest on the line today? Hi there. I'm One Short Eye. And in this podcast you can call me Matt, which is perfectly fine. I run a channel called One Short Eye where I talk about adventure game speed runs. It's mostly Sierra-centric because that is what my dad bought when I was a kid. And those games have stayed in my brain and marinated there ever since, despite my best efforts to get rid of them. So love them. And yeah, that's my. me. Welcome to the show, Matt. And I think Matt, I didn't have a chance to look up the latest

rankings, but at one point you were the number three rolled speedrunner of Kings West One? A long time ago. So I do, I sort of consider myself an average-ish speed runner. My interest in speed running is less about the competition and more about pulling the games apart and seeing how they work. I can't even remember what I am on the leaderboards for Kings Quest. one at this point because in like the last few years a lot of things have happened and a lot of neat optimizations have gone on but typically if there's a game that I run you can find me sort of near the middle of the leaderboards for the most part I'm happy with that though and needless to say Matt knows way more than me about Kings West and as does Dan I basically did

an 18 hour cram session on these games and before I go on any further though I want to talk about our experience with the games. Mine is very simple because it should be noted that I definitely have a LucasArts bias. That's clear from me putting together all the LucasArts episodes for Retronauts. I have dabbled a bit in the world of Sierra, but by the time I got a PC, or my family got a PC in 1996, everybody was making fun of Sierra games, the older ones. I mean, that was the

era of Fantasma Goria and Gabriel Knight. It was a different era for them, but everything I learned about the old Sierra games was, hey, don't play them. And here are jokes about all the bad puzzles. So I was just a cautious observer of them for the longest time. And I love watching let's plays of them. I love watching riffs of the games. I love watching speed runs of these games. But I've never been brave enough to play them myself. And that's where I'm approaching this. I love the history of Sierra. I don't know if I love their game design sensibility. But Dan, you sponsored the episode. Where did you meet King's Quest in your life? And what is its relationship

with you? All right. I think that I first saw it at child's like hangout party or something that I was a little kid and the kid put on his dad's computer and you know there was a couple of minutes of Kings Quest 5 end game in the castle and so forth and um and that was about it and then I think it was shortly thereafter my family got a CD-ROM drive for the computer I guess was a brand new computer with the CD-ROM drive and Kings Quest 6 was packed in and I just had a good time with it it's a it's a great game we're we're not talking specifically about six today, but I think a lot of people find that to be the pinnacle of the series. And I enjoyed it a lot. I spent a few years on and off trying to

solve this game. And then I came across King's Quest 5, I think the Nintendo Entertainment System version first and eventually got the computerized, the computer is a computerized version, the PC version, and just really dug it. And it was mainly those two that I played a lot of. I went back and caught some of the earlier games and eventually have played them all. But I think that I wouldn't say that to me, they are the best designed of the games in this genre myself, but I have a huge amount of fondness for them because of the nostalgia and just the positive feelings that I get when I look at or play these games. If I could add to that for a second, I think, at least for me, and I think this is something

that the Digital Antiquarians said at one point, but I agree with it, is that LucasArts games are very well designed and they're great games but they tended to stay kind of firmly in like the comedy sort of category and then Sierra games

tended to be more envelope pushing and so they tried they risked more and they tried to do more stuff but what that meant was that when it succeeded they succeeded very well

but when they didn't succeed they crashed and burned hard in terms of their game design and so they had I guess what we would call now move, fast, break things mentality. And so for better and for worse, that's how I sort of see the difference between the two. Oh, definitely.

I think because Sierra was the more popular and more profitable developer, they had the chance to put out a lot more games and be a lot more experimental. Not everything was riding on the next Monkey Island game for them, for instance. But Matt, where did you come along and meet King's Quest? And it seems like it has shaped your life. It has. You know, I can't remember exactly the first game that my dad brought home, but I do remember it was either very late 80s or very early 90s. He just, you know, he was the one in charge of buying things and he brought home. I think it was King's Quest 5. But if it wasn't, it was somewhere around there. Eventually we got the entire series. And there was just something about that mode of game that really appealed to me. And I was a big reader as a kid. I wanted characters and stories in my games. And at least at the time, if you wanted anything resembling that, even if, as it is in King's Quest, the story and the characters are paper thin. If you wanted anything, you know, even close to that, you had to go to adventure games.

And it just was sort of chance and happenstance that I was not exposed to the LucasArts games. And so, yeah, we were a Sierra household. I'm not sure, you know, I don't ask them one of these days. I'm not sure if my dad just didn't know about LucasArts. but you know since he was the one who brought home the games that's what we got yeah it does seem it's what finds you first as a kid because i was turned on to adventure games via the nes version of maniac mansion and i just thought there's got to be other things like this and there weren't really on the nintendo and that's when i really wanted a pc for the longest time and then we finally got one

and i caught up but yeah it's all because that was just a video game available for the nintendo and nintendo power sold it to me via cover story it's a great um it's a great thing when you can have both, the best of both worlds, right? And I think it's one of these, one of these, you know, whatever, Nintendo versus Sega kinds of things where a lot of people pit the Sierra against Lucas Arts. And of course, you know, many gamers enjoyed both of them. I was, I was somebody who grew up with both of these and have a huge amount of fondness for both companies, but for their different reasons. Yeah. And I mean, they had a friendly rivalry. And in the end, neither developer really exists anymore. So to have it like, you know, still being invested in which makes a better adventure

games is kind of fruitless at this point. So I will say in the defense of the enemy, Lucas, if someone were to ask me to recommend them a classic adventure game, it would probably be a Lucas Arts game over a Sierra one for someone new to the genre just because no deaths, no weird dead ends and Dead Man Walking situations, less frustrating overall for the most part. So I'll give them that. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if this is unfair, but the way I look at Sierra Games is the way I would look at an older version of something that we are now used to, like the old-timey version of the bicycle with the giant front wheel. That's what their adventure games remind me of. And to me, LucasArts games are the standard bicycle where it's like, well, the other bike still works, but they found out a better way to make the bike. And that's the standard design for the bike.

I don't know if that analogy works at all. That's just what was formulating in my head. I'll go with it. I hope it's not insulting, by the way. But on this podcast, we're going to be talking about the history of Sierra, the origins of the first King's Quest game. Then we're going to jump forward in time to talk about Kings Quest 5, a game with a lot of both fame and infamy. And because there are so many games, we have to be very selective. But I talk Dan into covering 5 because it's the one I know the most about.

And I think the one that can probably generate the most fun discussion. So we're going to move on, talk about the history of Sierra, a company that made its mark in the world for about two decades. And then, like a lot of developers, it was acquired by a larger company, lots of stuff. identity and then fell apart. So if you are part of a small business, beware of being acquired. The same thing has happened since the beginning of time, and it happened to Sierra.

Yet, weirdly enough, before they went away, they did publish Half-Life. So a fun joke you can tell people, if they ask you what your favorite Sierra game is, just say Half-Life, and you'll just, I think it'll confuse them into submission. You wouldn't be entirely wrong, so. Whenever I see Sierra on

the CD case, I'm like, oh, right, that happened. Okay, sure. But, yeah, Sierra, founded in 1979 as online systems by the husband and wife duo, Ken and Roberta Williams. They really wanted to get into the world of business software. It was a burgeoning field. Ken purchases a teletype machine in order to communicate with a server computer. And in looking up to see what software is available on the server computer, he discovers a very important game, and that is a colossal cave adventure. And if you want more context on this,

I recommend you check out our episode 468 on text adventures. But to give more context for this podcast, basically a teletype machine is an early, early version of what we would call cloud computing today, where in the earliest versions of it, you didn't even have a monitor. You had something that spat out paper, but you were communicating with something

that was doing all the computing far, far away from you. And this is where all of the first adventure games came from. usually designed to be played by college students on college campuses, the few places outside of, you know, the military that could afford these giant mainframe computers. And, yes, they discovered this Colossal Cave Adventure game, and they got obsessed with it, and they thought this could be what we could be doing. You know, business software is fine, but this seems more fun. And, yeah, this was their main inspiration to the point where when Roberta Williams emerged from seclusion

or whatever she was doing after the death of Sierra, one of the things she launched was a reboot of Colossal Cave Adventure, which apparently released last January. I remember the Kickstarter for it or just the announcement for it, but I know, Matt, you might have some thoughts on this, this reboot 50 years later,

almost, of Colossal Cave Adventure. Yeah, well, to give a little more clarity to the oranges of it, how I understand it is that during the pandemic, Ken, I think it was the pandemic, or maybe right after it, Ken was sort of messing around in unity on their boat, I guess, because they live in a houseboat. I'm not sure if that's where he was doing it, but I like to think that they were on the boat. It sounds cooler. It's a better story.

So he's messing around with unity and he, you know, he's thinking about, well, maybe I should just make a game to teach myself this because they were just messing around. And I think it was Roberta who mentioned to, hey, you know, you ought to remake a colossal cave because that's where we started and she almost sort of tried to stay out of it for a little bit and then eventually she just couldn't help herself and then you know they came back together and then you know um they got permission to to remake it and now here we are but so i i haven't played it myself but i have seen playthroughs of the game i have seen other people speed run it and for better or for worse it is a pretty faithful remake of the original in terms of its

gameplay. Like if you were to, if you were just to tell somebody, okay, take this text adventure and then make it 3D, but keep everything the same aside from the fact that there's a graphical interface with it, that's what you get with this. And so if you have a lot of nostalgia for it, people seem to respond well to it. But if you don't like a bunch of randomness in games like dwarves popping up and just randomly killing you and your game's over, if you don't like that, then you might have a problem with this game. But, you know, it seems like if you're, again, if your goal was just to remake a colossal cave, that's what they did. Yeah, I mean, it looks shockingly accurate to the source material. And I'm happy that they did it. It's for a certain audience.

Going back to the mid-70s, though, or the late 70s, the couple sees promise in this new field. So they were really inspired by the very, very few. adventure games available for play like the pre-commercial release of Zork the handful of text adventures by Scott Adams not the Dilbert Scott Adams put a different one and not Douglas Adams the guy or a hitchhiker's guide

although there was a hitchhiker's guide game it's very complicated but yes Roberta is inspired by the medium that's burgeoning and she's also inspired by the Agatha Christie novel and then there were none so this is where Mystery House

comes in from 1980 and you know in developing this game they thought what if a video game had graphics well you know what if an adventure game had graphics and that was the big breakthrough with Mystery House it is the first known adventure game

with graphics and if you look up a playthrough of this it's for the Apple 2 the graphics are hilariously crude it is like the thing you would pin on your fridge that your four year old draws you but they were still graphics and they were not even just

pre-rendered bitmaps that were stored on a desk These were, the graphics were basically instructions telling the computer what to draw on the screen when it loads the screen. So really primitive, somebody had to do it, and they were first at bat when it came to graphics and adventure games. Yeah, I think that's a great way to put it. If you look at the graphics, we're going to even put that in quotation marks, like they're not good. Well, you know, like you said, a child could probably draw just as well. But by virtue of being the first, like it's impressive for being the first. right oh yes yeah i mean they they had that thought and it it means somebody had to have it and

it would be soon that adventure games would start having graphics pretty regularly but they were first and because of that this game was a huge hit um because there were no video game stores then it was sold the way most games were sold via a plastic baggie through a magazine they sold this for 2495 which is about 90 dollars today and it sold 10,000 copies and this is where they expanded their operation, started making a lot of venture games, and we could talk more about Sierra. They've had a lot of ups and downs, even when they were publishing a lot of games and a successful company. But it seems that pre-King's Quest, they were making a lot of bad investments. And before the release of that game, the company had shrunk drastically from 100

employees to 20 employees for various reasons. A lot of real estate investments, you know, building a house that was too big things like that but it's another common story don't get acquired and also well get ready for layoffs because that's another just common thing in game development that's been going on for the past 40 plus years and yeah the mystery house adventure game the the release of that kicked off the high-rise adventure series which is a bunch of text adventures with graphics and one of those games was wizard and the princess and it's cited in many places as being the first adventure game with full color graphics I'm I'm making scare quotes here, and contains a lot of the elements that would be associated with King's Quest.

And weirdly enough, Kings Quest 5 takes place in the same setting as the wizard and the princess. I know one of you has a little more info on this early fantasy text adventure game of theirs. Yeah, I'm sure Matt has played it. I spent some time with it. You've not played it? No, I know. Okay, well, I would say that people who have not played this are not missing all that much. that like many of these games at the time it was a cool thing to be doing to be playing one of

these games i would say the visuals are still crude just now there's color and it's not great color by the way it is just some colors um i would say the beautiful box art of the game does most of the heavy lifting for um the sort of for you to envision the setting that you're playing it's a first person game um and you're looking around and you're typing this very simple two-word parser. Just for kind of timeline context, this game came out a few months before the commercial release of Zork 1, which I guess was the end of 1980. It has none of that games humor or creativity or character. So, you know, when Infocom, who made the Zorg games said the best graphics are in your mind, I don't know if they were particularly taking a shot at games like this in particular,

but there's just not a lot here. There's a very skeletal kind of text and there's a very simple parser and the gameplay elements are illogical. So there's a puzzle where you have to give bread to a lion. It's really not clear why a lion would want that out of all the items that a person could get that a developer could have put into the game.

There's a parrot that sort of randomly gives you a vial of something or other when you give it a cracker. It's like, how would the parrot have the vial? You know, so it's things like that. And there's a lot of games of this era that worked like that. There are some puzzle or environmental elements that reappear in some of the King's Quest games, like, you know, a poisonous snake. But other than being historically interested, I would call it completely inessential even for King's Quest fans. Yeah, it really does seem like a footnote in the history of King's Quest.

And by, in just the three short years after Mystery House, they've grown so much, that they are now making video game adaptations of movies, some of the first to ever exist, and one of those is the Dark Crystal. Unfortunately, the movie is not a huge success, and their engine is looking pretty old and crusty by the time this game comes out. So

this was a big flop for Sierra, and weirdly enough, Lucasfilm would then develop the game for Labyrinth. I guess because Lucasfilm had not yet existed at the point that the Dark Crystal came out, maybe that's why they ended up making the game for Labyrinth for

the for the PC. But yeah, so like a ton of growth in just three years from making that monumental adventure game to, you know, making a movie adaptation. So, yes, their next incredibly influential game would come out thanks to a miserable failure of a platform that lasted a year. And that is Kingsquest. So before I go on, I want to cite the Digital Antiquarian, who has a great article called The Unmaking and Remaking of Sierra Online. Now, whenever I'm doing research, I'm always pleased to see the digital antiquarian's blog comes up and I'm always pleased to see that it looks like it's still from the year 2002

somebody is out there still doing it and I my head is off to you sir and this article is great it goes over a lot of details and I use this extensively in my research so please check that out so let's go back to 1982

IBM is looking for some hot launch games for their upcoming platform the IBM PC Jr and this was meant to compete with other low-cost computers and to be geared towards video games, a new thing people are excited about. Though I should point out that in this era, low cost meant it costs much more than the highest end gaming PC does today. Looking at inflation calculators, which are not ever too reliable, the low end model of this

was $2,000 U.S. dollars today, and the high end was $4,000. So it's still pretty expensive. Gaming until recently was a very, very expensive hobby. So Sierra had a relationship with IBM because in 1981, the company contacted them to port Wizard and the Princess, which we mentioned earlier, for their new platform called the PC. And because of this connection, IBM flies out Ken Williams and a highest-level Sierra employee known as Jeff Stevenson, and they pitched some ideas for this new platform. One of them, weirdly enough, is a word processor, which would become the default word processor for the PC Jr., but IBM knew, that Sierra made graphic adventures and they wanted something similar

for the launch of their new system. A game that would show off the marvelous 16 colors and offer multiple solutions for puzzles, lots of replayability. They wanted a big, flashy adventure game for this new platform. And this is

when Ken and Jeff made this huge pitch for a new style of adventure game. They knew Infocom was the big dog in the world of text adventures. So at this point, with the help of IBM, They wanted to kind of reinvent themselves and make a new game. In this game, the ideas were unprecedented.

It would have real-time control over the player character with a joystick and other elements not commonly seen in adventure games. And obviously what IBM asked for, a non-linear style game, many approaches to puzzles, lots of replay value. And in trying to win over IBM, they get the contract or whatever you want to call it. And they set off to make King's Quest, which would take, I've heard estimates, $18 months and $850,000, I believe most of which was paid for by IBM. And those are very, very uncommon numbers in the world of 1982 game development. It goes without saying that when Ken and Jeff come back from this meeting with IBM, nobody likes them anymore because they're saying, oh, you pitch this insane idea and now we have to make it. but they wanted to really show IBM that we can make this thing

we can stand behind our ideas they didn't want to back out of this very nice contract that would further their relationship so yes they set out to make Kings Quest and they use that IBM money to make a game engine that would then power the next I think 13 or 14 games for the next six years so they're using that money wisely this game engine you know LucasArts had the scum engine and the Grime engine this engine

was first called the game adaptation language or gal and then they thought well that's too cutesy so it was later renamed the Adventure Game Interpreter or AGI and Sierra they're doing very badly financially at this point in time even though the games are selling but they built a huge new office Kenner-Naburberta have a new house you know things are not looking well but also in terms of IBM things aren't looking well either

because nobody likes the PC Jr. The PC Jr. does not sell enough to make King's Quest a hit in any potential way. They can't sell enough units of the hardware itself to justify keeping Sierra in business. I mean, have either of you heard of this PC Jr.? This was new to me. It was so hated and so ephemeral, people were comparing it to New Coke. The only reason I know about the PC Jr. is because of King's Quest. And outside of that context, I've never heard of it. I have no idea, I have no idea why it failed. It's that obscure to me. Yeah. Yeah. There's a junky toy. It seems like a toy, right? It seems like a, you know,

if you look at it now, it's, you know, even the name, right? It implies that it's, you know, a little bit lightweight. And, you know, who knows, I wasn't there. But it's, it's one of these failed products that you kind of look back on and it's easy to kind of, whatever, be smarty about it. I feel bad for it. I think they had good intentions to try to make a more accessible PC for users. Yeah, it seemed like they had good intentions. How it, you know, shaped up in the end wasn't so great.

I was just reading, you know, thoughts at the time when this was new. And one of the big sticking points for people was the chicklet keyboard, a bad keyboard. And the fact that it was incompatible with a lot of IBM software was another sticking point. So, it was still fairly expensive,

but it didn't offer enough features. And despite how you know, bleeding edge, King's Quest, was in terms of what it was doing, it was not moving any system. So things look very, very bad for Sierra at this point in time. They could have just fallen apart in 1983, and that would have been the end of them. But luckily, other platforms were launching that could easily accept the port for King's Quest. Because the IBM PC Jr. had 128 kilobytes of RAM.

And existing consoles, they were used to making games for had 64K or less. But the Apple 2C launched, the Tandy 1000 launched, and that made Porting King's Quest possible. And because of this, Sierra had a strong partnership with, weirdly enough, Radio Shack, when Radio Shack was the place you went to get your computer. It was just, for most people, it seemed like that was the closest place you could ever go to get a computer. And because of Sierra's deal with Radio Shack, they were almost the default video games you would buy with your computer, just because they were the ones on the shelves at the store above the computer you were purchasing. Those are the days, man.

Does anyone remember the smell of Radio Shack? Like being in the Radio Shack and that, I don't know, it's a 1980s computer store smell. It still lives up here. We didn't go to Radio Shack, but I do remember Babbage's was the big one in the mall. Great memories of that. Briss Browsing it and, oh, gosh. Like, the smell of Radio Shack to me is if you pick up a digital clock, an old one, to just smell, smell the inside of it through that little vent.

That's it. It's probably harmful to us. Every minute you spend in a Radio Shack probably cut off a month of your life. But hey, it had some pretty nice vibes, right? So yes, Radio Shack, their partnership helps Sierra sell KingsQuest for different platforms. They climb out of their debt hole and they're soon stable again and they can go on and make more and more games. But things were really shaky between 82 and 83 for Sierra. could have disappeared entirely.

And this is a very popular game this First King's Quest. Like many of the other games to follow, it will receive ports. This one, I think there's ultimately nine or ten ports of this game, which even includes a port for the master system of all things. And this one, because there is no keyboard for the master system, you are selecting nouns and verbs instead of having a point-and-click interface. They find a way to make it work. on the console, sort of like how they find a way to make it work for the NES with King's Quest 5.

Most of the other ports look at least similar. The master system version is sort of unique in that, you know, your player character is really cutesy. And like all the graphics are really cutesy. And it just, like, all the screens are the same in idea, but it just looks completely different. Yeah. It's a goofy little artifact. Everything is a lot more squats and not as lanky. I consider the Kings Quest, one graphics to be. Everyone's just very lanky, tall and lanky. But yeah, that really is the truncated history of Sierra up until the release of King's Quest. A fascinating company, there's more to be said, but we're going to leave it there for now

and move on to talk about the first King's Quest game. This is where I will step aside a little bit because my knowledge of this game comes from the past two days. You two, you've been living with this for a very, very long time, decades. So, yeah, Kings Quest 1, published in May of 1984, happy 40th birthday for the PC Jr. although it seems like the 1987 IBM PC port is the most played version and it's the one that you will play if you download the King's Quest Collection on Steam or Gogg.

By the way, these are all playable today legally. You can buy all of these games. I believe Activision owns the rights. So, yeah, go on to Steam if you want to play what we're talking about. And the story in this game is simple, but it has way more story than almost any other game in 1984. You are Sir Graham. You're a knight.

You go to the King of Daventry to find three. magic objects. In fact, he tells you, hey, Graham, I need these three objects, and then you go off to find them in whatever order you want to. Over time, they would add more lore to the game, primarily, I believe, in the documentation to explain why you're here, who you are, the fact that the king doesn't want you to steal objects from people. These were his once, and he was tricked by a princess or something, and now he wants them back. So they're building more backstory into, you know, newer versions of the game. But in this first release, it's just, hey, I'm doing a scavenger hunt,

find these three objects, and go find them whatever way you want, whatever order you want. And that's sort of how it is in the game, even in the 87 release. But they, in the manual, they expanded the story, which I have to give them praise for their documentation, really in all the Kings West games. they really tried to make the lore and the packaging and the feelies, I guess some people call them, you know, really interesting and, you know, all the artwork and the script. Oh, it's just great.

But in the game, I replayed the first like five minutes last night to double check. But even in the 87 re-release, it's basically, hey, hey, Graham, our kingdom's in trouble. Go get this stuff and then come back. It's strange. It's strange what they change. in what they didn't change, but one of the things that they change in the two versions, they're very similar, right? Most of the time you don't recognize you're playing one or the other.

But for some reason, spoiler, when the king passes away at the end, he does a strange, kind of like spinning kind of death sequence, and they just decided to have him keel over in the updated version several years later. I guess they thought it was too silly. Yeah, it's a strange little bit of trivia there. Yeah, there's like minor gameplay difference. is too, like, if you watch play-throughs of the PC Jr. version, you can. You have to watch all of the screens be drawn in really slowly. And then there's also this weird thing where

like the original, how to describe it, it didn't really have text boxes that popped up. Everything was in the parser that's in like the lower third of the screen. So you'd type something and then it would show up right underneath where you typed, whereas in the remake, you would still type at the bottom, but then you would get feeding. back in these text boxes that would pop up in the middle of the screen. Yeah, even though it was the first release, I believe no one really considers the PC junior version, the definitive way to play Kings Quest 1. And yeah, like I was saying earlier, this game was a big deal.

It was a new kind of adventure game, one with a level of fidelity that no one had seen before. If you're looking at a long play of this, Graham has so many unique animations, unheard of at the time, to put this much work into a single character. in a video game. And alarmingly, he can walk behind objects on the screen, which Danny put in the notes is why they, they justified calling it a 3D game because Graham could walk behind a bush or behind a rock. It's 3D. If you told one of these kids today that you're going to show them a 3D game and you put this on, I think they'd be sorely disappointed, but this was cool at the time. There were foreground elements like columns in the castle or

whatever. Yeah, this was neat. Yeah, I mean, for the time, it was 3D. I mean, it's not false advertising for what, you know, you would think of at the time. It really was cool. Yeah, I mean, few games had an X and a Y axis, and if they did, you certainly really couldn't walk behind objects. That was too sophisticated for most games at the time. And the way the game begins is it forces players to interact with this new means of control before Graham even gets his mission. because before you can even understand what the game's about,

you have to walk across the bridge, walk into the castle, and walk to the king and talk to him. And it really lets you know what you're in for up front because if you stray too close to the water, yes, you will die instantly. The crocodiles will eat you. This is welcome to King's Quest.

There is danger around every corner. But I really enjoy the way the game is designed just to let the player know, okay, learn how to control the character, learn there's deaths everywhere, and then you can get on with typing in you know bad of the king talk to the king and all the things you do in an adventure game but first you need to get around these controls and understand how they work yeah and that that would be a trend throughout the king's quest games

where you can die on either the first screen or almost the first screen i'm trying to think at least three of the games you start out on a beach that you can promptly like walk into the ocean and die yeah it was it was a real trend just to let you know uh this this world is going to be harsh and like a lot of early adventure games Kings Quest 1 is fairly non-linear and it's kind of an open-world game of its era. So you can call it a 3D game, you can also call it an open-world game because a few games were, few game worlds were this large.

So it's an 8x grid, 48 screens, not counting interiors. And unlike, you know, The Legend of Zelda a few years later, there are no defined borders at the edge of this map. When you walk off the right-most edge of the right-most square, you end up on the left-most edge of the left-most square

because the map kind of wraps around in a kind of tube, which makes things very, very confusing, which makes the player have to basically map this out themselves if they don't have a strategy guide or a printout or a fax or whatever you use at the time to find your way through the world of Kings Quest 1. What was fun, too, is that if you start walking, you will keep walking even onto the next screen. So if you found, you know, the right sort of coordinate, you could, I'm trying to think,

I believe it's the case that in a few places you can keep wrapping around forever. But, you know, if you just find the right coordinate there. But, yeah, you can keep walking for a pretty long time there until you run into something. Meaning you press the arrow key to start walking. If you don't press it again, you will continue to walk in. You have to press it to stop. And that's, yeah, a little bit sort of an adjustment if you were to go back and play a game like this. And, Dan, one important note you added to the Kingsquest One Notes is that this game in this series is mostly about incorporating ideas from fairy tales into an adventure game.

When you see King's Quest, you might think, oh, what, like Lord of the Rings or, you know, high fantasy. I mean, those elements are there, but it's really incorporating these stories that, you know, presumably the children or adults playing this game have grown up with and have internalized because many of the solutions require you to know, let's say, how Rumpel Stiltskin shakes out or, you know, other fairy tales of that elk. That's right. If you sort of, if you look at the games kind of, from a, from a distance, what you see is an attempt to widen the video game audience to families, to women. And so this is not, you know, high fantasy, a resort and sorcery kind of fighting kind of medieval. This is like, you know, family fairy tale kind of medieval. And as requested by the nice people at IBM, they made this game very designed with replayability in mind. So there's a point system that's, you know, rewarding the player for performing all the possible positive actions. And in what would become a standard for Sierra games, there are lots of lots of deaths. To the point where it feels like finding all of the deaths is kind of a meta game in and of itself.

Because a lot of them verge on Easter eggs, a lot of them you're going to find naturally. But there's a reason why there are so many YouTube compilations of here are all the Kings Quest 1 deaths and here are all the Kings Quest 2 deaths. people loved trying to find every way in which the main character could die. Yeah, and that's often cited as sort of a criticism of Sierra games. I don't mind death so much. With modern adventure games, I prefer if there's like an auto save just before you die so that you don't lose a whole bunch of progress. But I don't know.

The Sierra idea of trying to make funny deaths, I guess it's just so ingrained in me that I think it's great, where I sort of draw the line. I'm sure we'll get into this is where you can get into unwinnable scenarios that you don't know are unwinnable scenarios until possibly hours later or ever. But that's another story. That was a real pet peeve of Mr. Ron Gilbert, who sought to eliminate that from every future adventure game. But I feel like so important context is that video games had a much more adversarial relationship with the player at that time. There was a thought like, oh, I'm going to conquer this game. or games would openly boast about how difficult they were on the box.

That was the era we were in. And economically, that does make sense because if you're buying a game that would today cost $150 for your $4,000 computer, you don't want to blaze through King's Quest 1 in an afternoon. So I feel like they were making these games, which a long play of Kings Quest 1 is not that long, but it was a very expensive game. So they're building in these ways to make you want to go through it again and again

and, you know, try to figure out the puzzles and avoid the deaths and everything like that. And to counterpoint to that argument, I've talked to Ron Gilbert a few times and I know you've talked to him as well, Matt. He has claimed like, well, like even in the 80s when we got mad at a computer game, we always had something better to do. So that's a counterpoint to that argument where it's like, well, I guess there was three channels and, you know, newspapers and stuff. But you go back to the hard video game and played over and over again. But Ron Gilbert says, no, we will get mad and then just walk away, even if you had a $4,000 computer in our home. Well, I think, you know, context is important to you here.

Like now I have almost no patience for this kind of nonsense. But, you know, back then when it was, you know, here, Matt, this is the game you're going to get and, you know, and this is it until Christmas six months from now. Like, that was your game. And so, you know, sort of by necessity, you had, I think, a little bit more patience. But, but, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the economy was different.

There were way fewer video games. There were no steam sales where you buy things, by the dozens you'll never play. Having a game was, it was sort of like you were committed to something for a while for a very long time. But now there's just, there's frankly too many games and we don't have enough time for them. Ron Yorke, who is also older than I was in the 80s, and I know that he had better things. to do it. I don't know that I did. You know, I was... Yes, most children didn't,

which is why I think a lot of the biggest fans of these games found them when they were kids, because they had the time to sit with them and become obsessed with them and try to find everything in them. So, yeah, lots of death in this game. There's wolves and witches and giants and huge birds just swarming around the screen, popping in at random,

and they're ready to end your life if you get too close. But this game also introduced people most people to Roberta Williams unique sense of puzzle design which is very very polarizing it's always inventive and often charmingly cruel and whenever you fail

whenever there's a death the game lightly mocks you again going back to that adversarial relationship thing I mentioned earlier there's always a little sarcastic pun they're kind of mocking you a little I think to try to motivate you to jump back in play again or at least to make you laugh whenever it

happens I would add to a lot of that Roberta has said comes from her experience playing colossal cave where that game has random deaths, it has unwittable scenarios. And so a lot of, you know, like to look at just King's Quest in isolation seems a little bit inexplicable, but when you look at, okay, she was playing colossal cave and for whatever reason that had these weird things going on and for whatever reason she just really liked that. That's where I'll, you know, at least some of this stuff comes from. And in regard to the sort of illogical puzzles,

which is sort of become a trademark of these early Sierra games, if you read that Digital Antiquarian article, it contrasts Sierra and LucasArts by saying that LucasArts had a lot of playtesters, and that was one of the big elements of their process. And Sierra, that wasn't really a consideration. So, you know, as you know, the designer would make the game, and it's like, well, this is perfectly easy

and really not have that big step of the process where other people played it and go, what the hell is going on with this. Yeah, that is a great point. I mean, the people who made the game know how to play it, and you don't want to take their word for it before you ship it. And in many cases, they did. I guess we should unfairly single out the worst puzzle in each of the games we're talking about.

And what is often cited as the worst puzzle in this game is the Rumpel Stiltskin puzzle, where if you know the classic story of Rumpel Stiltskin, you have to guess his name. And in this case, I believe in the fairies, You have to say his name backwards or spell it backwards. How does it go? I think that the original fairy tale was just, can you guess my name? Yeah, I think so, too.

It might be just as simple as that. In this version, they, yeah, I guess in this version, the twist is you have to guess his name backwards. But it's not a matter of spelling Rumpel Stiltskin backwards. The logic behind this is you, in order to figure out, you write out the alphabet, and then you write out the alphabet in reverse under that. and you basically have to spell Rumpel Stiltskin with the character's place in the reverse alphabet for every letter of Rumpel Stiltskin. And the biggest flaw in that puzzle is not just the logic of the backwards alphabet. It's the fact that at least initially they spelled Rumpel Stiltskin incorrectly, or at least in a way that wasn't very common.

So I always see this called out as one of the hardest and most, you know, you have to be a psychic and read the development. up her brain puzzles. Yeah, it's really weird. And then, like, they also, I think the only real hint, and correct me if I'm wrong, there's like a piece of paper in the witch's gingerbread house that says something like, you know, something to the effect of you need to think about it backwards, which I don't know how you connect that to, it was something like that. My memory is probably. Yeah, that's it. Sometimes it's good to think backwards, right? I'm paraphrasing, right? So you have to know, okay, there's going to be something in this game where you're going to think backwards. And I think that it's still a bit of abstruse, but, you know, when you're trying

to guess, I think it's reasonable that you might type his name in backwards. And then you're going to find, at least in this original version of the game, that this is not going to work. When they did a VGA, sorry, a high-res EGA remake a few years later, they actually allowed the just plain backwards name. But it's just inconceivable that somebody would have known that they were on the right track at all. So it's a bit. It's a bit screwy. I think they give you a hint that, like, you know, close, but no cigar. But it's just, I think it's bullshit.

It is. Now, too, I guess a tiny bit to their credit, at the very least, if you guess his name wrong three times, he gives you a key that's like an alternate solution that doesn't give you as many points and you can still finish the game. So technically you don't have to solve the puzzle, but it's, yeah, it's still bullshit. It does feel like someone realize this might be too difficult, and we might get some phone calls, although I think they were accepting phone calls back then for hints and things like that. I know they were selling hint books. They must have figured that out real early.

I was looking at the old Mystery House magazine ads for ordering the game, and it looked like you can call them. And I was reading articles saying people would call Ken and Roberta at home and ask for hints. So at least back then, they were willing to be more forthcoming with hints. I'm going to be the I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to I'm going

I'm going I'm you know I'm going to be the I'm going to I'm going to I'm I'm

I'm Thank you. Thank you. A big. And this is where Matt's going to jump in and be the authority is RNG, which is something you normally don't want at adventure games. And this is no exception because a lot of the RNG based events will hurt you. And a lot of them are necessary. But the player does not know that these things are random, at least at first.

And you might miss a lot of these things. You can be on a screen and that's where the wolf spawns in and you can't get away in time, et cetera, et cetera. but as a speedrunner of this game, Matt, you've had to deal with the nightmare of RNG. Can you explain to our listeners what that entails? Yeah, sure. So actually, yeah, RNG becomes a feature of, I'd honestly say most Sierra games, period,

but especially the King's Quest games. In every King's Quest game, there's some amount of R&G for whatever reason, who knows. But yeah, there's a few things in the speed run that are interesting. There's a fairy that can show up that has, and I'm going to sort of round the RNG estimates here because one thing that they did, instead of generating like a number from, say, 1 to 250 or something, they did 0 to 250, so all the possibilities are out of 251 and the percentages get screwy. But it looks fine in the code.

But there's an elf that can, let's see, let's talk about the favor. There's a fairy that can show up and give you a blessing, which will protect you, which seems helpful casually and is. That's like a 50-50 chance of that on some of the screens. But if you hit that, it just ends up slowing you down because you have to dismiss the text boxes and make them go away and then keep going with your run. There's the eagle, which is about a 50-50 chance. There's one screen where you have to catch a ride on the eagle to get over to a little island. not really an island, but kind of an island, where there's a mushroom that you need to get.

These games are weird. There's all sorts of weird stuff that you need to get. There's a, the most infuriating one is the cave dwarf, who on a certain part of walking up some stairs, has a 60% chance of appearing. And what will happen is that if he catches you, he will take one of your treasures,

if you have any of them. And depending on what that is, and what he grabs, you might not be able to finish the game. So those three treasures that you're supposed to be grabbing and bringing back if he takes one of those, you cannot get them back and you just cannot finish. If you have like another one of the trinkets, like there's a gem, sorry, no, there's like a golden egg, and then there's, oh gosh, what is there? Yeah, there's like a bag of gems and he might steal that and then you might be okay, depending.

But so there's that. And the other issue, I guess, for speed runners that we haven't really talked about with this is that they, as much as possible, they run it on the fast speed. And so what's interesting with these old AGI games is that the slower speeds are kind of tied to a real-time clock with how fast Graham moves. But for fastest, the way they did it was just say, well, just let your machine go as fast as it possibly can. And so when the game came out, that was fine enough, right? But as time went on, computers went, you know, got faster. Within like even a few years, you'd be moving instantly at those speeds, which created, you know, problems for that. So what speed runners try to do is, like, basically ping pong across the screens and across the map in the most efficient ways possible.

And so there's that. Yeah, so the RNG can be kind of goofy to deal with, though one of the things in the past couple of years that they've done is to route out that as much as possible. So now they only really have to deal with the cave dwarf. And if you want, I can talk about why that is, but I didn't know if you wanted to say anything else on that. Oh, no, I was just wanting some more information about the RNG and how it affects not just speed runners, but people looking to just finish the game. because a lot, again, there's a lot of random moments in this game and not a lot of player feedback to let you know, like, oh, you shouldn't be here now or, you know, come back here later with this sort of item and so on. Or even the opposite message, like there's a few screens where a wizard can show up, and on those screens he has a 73% chance of showing up, and he can, you know, like, freeze you. And you might think, oh, well, I guess I just don't go on that screen.

it doesn't really like matter you know like he's just a sort of an annoyance um and you might you know in other words you might get the wrong message you know from from going on there like you know no it is actually fine to go on that screen it's just you rolled the dice wrong which seems a bit unfair um and there's there's another situation where if you want full points you have to go into a witch's gingerbread house and be there when she's not there and that gets complicated as to whether she's in the house or not the house

and again like you said there's like there's no real player feedback you just have to try it and like go back to screens where you've already been on them until something different happens so yes we have RNG is a big issue and Dan you can speak to this the fact that you kind of have to play this like an action

game in an awkward way. The controls are awkward, but how precise you are with them matters, and you often have to have commands at the ready to do certain timing-based objectives. Right, that's just it, sort of typing in command and then waiting for the right moment and then hitting the enter button, you know, which is not something that you would be used to from most of the previous games in this genre, right? It certainly texted. Most of the pure text adventure interactive fiction-type games did not run on a real time clock.

Most of them were sort of turn-based, so there was no real kind of time pressure. And the same is true for a lot of these early Sierra games like The Wizard and the Princess. But this one, yeah, you kind of have to queue it up. I'm thinking specifically of Graham murders someone in this game. He breaks into the witch's home. He hides in her bedroom, and then you type in the command, push witch. and then you walk over to her and you hit enter and he pushes her into the oven

like in Hansel and Gretel but just the text box that pops up says Graham, whatever, sneaks up behind the witch and bravely pushes her into the oven. I think the better word would be cravenly, but it just, it's sort of a really cold moment. That's an unreliable narrator, I think, in King's West. We view his actions differently on retronauts.

I mean, so I want to point out all of these these weird qualities of the game, not to say like, oh, the developers were dumb or they were ignorant or whatever. It's just interesting to see how different this is from what will become the standard, the default model of the adventure game, the point-and-click model.

This is trying something different, something that would not really last outside of this, like, let's say, five- or six-year bubble, primarily at Sierra. And Sierra would release their own remake of this game in 1990, and this was part of a short-lived wave of remakes of all of the initial titles in their Quest series like Space Quest and Police Quest and Quest for Glory.

They were doing these remakes. It seemed that people at the time didn't like this very much, and it looks fine to me. I mean, looking at the YouTube playthroughs, it looks like a fun experience, a nicely retouched experience. But, Matt, you were saying in the notes here that the context of the release is important because this was put out at the same time

as King's Quest 5, a graphically lush and complex experience compared to a remade game from 1984. Yeah, so I put in a quote there from, there's an excellent book about the history of Sierra called The Sierra Adventure by Sean Mills. And like the way that he explains it, Kingsquest 5 and the SCI remake of Kings Quest 1,

they came out within a few weeks of each other. And so Kings Quest 5 had cutting edge, 256 color graphics, hand-drawn backgrounds, this new mouse interface, and then the remake had with like antiquated 16 color EGA graphics and typing interface. And so if you're at the store, right, you're looking at both of these because they came out at the same time and you can only afford one. It's sort of a no-brainer which one you're going to buy. Yeah. I mean, if you're looking back at it now, now the graphics have advanced far beyond what we're looking at back then. The remake is very charming. I love the dither.

EGA graphics. It's a very different look than the initial release, but I love it too. I think it's a great game. And I think that is playable in the whatever compilation you end up buying from Steam or Gog. I believe that is included in there. And Dan, you were

saying in the notes here that they were at least kind enough to let you mail in your original game to get a voucher or to get some money off of this remake, which just showed like how important their relationship with their fans was. These companies were still small and they still relied on repeat business.

It's kind of interesting, right? You could imagine this like upgrading your PS4 game to the PS5 version. And in most cases, you'd be getting sort of a game with superior, you know, graphical rendering and all this kind of stuff. Back then, you know, these were two very different games. They were built on the same, you know, everything was the same underneath in terms of, you know, the story and the setting and most of the puzzles. But they look totally different.

And Sierra at the time assumed that, well, if you could get this new, better version, you don't want your crappy old original version anymore. So you take your disc one of your original Kings Quest or rip off the front page of your manual and send them 20 bucks and you get the upgraded version, which is kind of an interesting model, right? And they did this for a few of their remakes in their adventure game series. Yeah, it wasn't a long-lasting phenomenon for Sierra, but I would have liked to see them do more. more. But as it stands, there's basically one remake for all of the initial titles in the Quest series of games. And

there's another remake made by fans 23 years ago in the year 2001, a little group called AGD Interactive made a VGA, I believe, remake of King's Quest 1 with full voice acting and including Graham's original voice actor

Josh Mandel. If you look up Kings Quest remake, long play on YouTube, you'll end up finding this before you find the legit remake by Sierra. But the work that went into this was very, very impressive. I personally am not played it, but it's a real, like, labor of love, it looks like. Yeah, it's really good. AGD Interactive does some great work.

I'd even want to shout out their remake of King's Quest 2, even though I know it's hope not what we're talking about, but really recommend that one. They took, like, a real bare-bone story and actually fleshed it out and made it this big, like, coherent thing out of what was just paper-thin kind of fairy tales. But the King's Quest one remake is good, but it's pretty much like a one-for-one remake of what that game was.

But then as time went on, they started like adding, you know, extra scenes and lore to it in a lovingly, in a loving way, in a good way that worked as well. I was very impressed by what I had seen. Oh, Dan, sorry. Yeah, I was just going to say, it's great.

And if you'd like to go back and look at these games from a historical perspective, it's important to go to the official releases. But if you're just kind of, you know, you want to get the story and you want to go back and play these games from, you know, Kings Quest 1 on, I would definitely recommend the AGD versions. They made KingsQuests 1, 2, and 3.

And they're terrific. They're in the style of the later, you know, Kings Quest 5 and 6. And so they're excellent ways to experience this. And before we move on to Kings West 5, I did want to mention that the reimagining of the series from the mid-2010s, because if you type in King's Quest on Steam or Gog,

this might come up first, and you might be confused by this. But in case you forgot, at one point, Telltale acquired the rights to KingsQuest from Activision. They were going to make these games. They found a lot more profit from, you know, making games based on popular newer IP. So a developer called the Odd Gentleman made an episodic Kingsquest series

in the mid-2010s. I only played the first chapter, but this is at a time in which Tel-Tel engine was aging horribly and in 2015 at least it was a very pretty adventure game but it was following the telltale model so your mileage may vary on whether or not you like that style of game but I was impressed and not knowing a lot of the lore of these games and not knowing a lot of the references they seem to be made for fans yeah I played it I enjoyed it overall I would just say that with each chapter, they tried sort of a slightly different style, and just how it

happens to shake out, I think that the odd numbered chapters, one, three, and five are better than two and four, but that's just, they tried doing something different each chapter. They do some really interesting things. They do some kind of recontextualization of some of the earlier, you know, the characters from the earlier games and the events from the earlier games. You might like them. You might find that it's a little bit too much of the Star Wars kind of sequel and prequel things where they try to connect everything in ways that might not have needed to be connected. But in terms of a game design perspective, I think it's a pretty well done game. And it's got Christopher Lloyd playing an elderly King Graham as the sort of the narrator.

And I think he does a terrific job. Yeah, he's great. Real Star Power. Wallace Sean is at least in the first episode of that episodic series. and Zelda Williams as well playing a sort of minor character Yeah and like the King's Quest compilation It is usually on sale for pretty cheap

You can usually get the whole series for under like 15 bucks So I thought it was good I should go back and play the rest But I reviewed the first chapter And things were moving very fast And I never got around to the other ones But it seemed like there was a lot of love behind that So I'm glad to hear that both of you liked it as well

So now we're going to move on to King's Quest 5. So we're going to move on to King's Quest 5. So we're skipping ahead, way, way forward in time. Well, only six years, but still, a lot has happened in the world of computer gaming. And this game originally released in November of 1990, and because I'm a LucasArts weirdo, I have to put this in my LucasArts timeline. So this game is out just right around the same time as Secret of Monkey Island. So we see that game coming out and sort of drawing its line in the sand saying adventure game should be like this. And we have Kings Quest 5 doing its own thing, but also going with. with the times and having a put-in-click style interface, as opposed to the old type-in the

verb you want to do interface. In terms of the plot, we're back to having King Graham as the protagonist. He was not the protagonist of three or four. And he's out on a walk. Something's going on. I think he had to get cigarettes or something. But while he's gone, this evil wizard shows up. Spirits his castle away. And he has to go to Serenia. He's got to befriend a really irritating owl, and he's got to confront Mordak to get his castle back. And yes, like I said earlier in this podcast, it does take place in the same

setting as the Wizard and the Princess to the point where you find the skeleton of the protagonist of that game. For whatever reason, he didn't make it. But those are the stakes in Kings Quest 5. And most people know the VGA version. If you look up play-throughs, if you're looking up videos

about this game, but apparently there was an EGA version. Dan, you pointed this out in the notes. It doesn't look as nice as the LucasArts EGA games, like Mark Ferrari did the art for it. I think it is probably not worth going and looking up playing up that version just for the aesthetics of it. But it's there, and I'm glad that it was available to more people. In general, it seems like that's how Sierra treated their EGA games. And I believe it's the case that very seldom did they go in and actually make a dedicated V or sorry, EGA version.

And they just sort of put it through some sort of algorithm or some sort of filter. And yeah, that's fine. And shoved it out the door. Interesting. Yeah. I believe at this time, LucasArts was leading with EGA and then releasing a VGA later. That was usually the way they did things. But yes, this game, it feels more like a contemporary adventure game if you're used to the point-and-click interface.

We were joking about this before the recording. The box art for the first release is ludicrous. it does feel like marketing was in charge of this. Well, of course they were because it was the packaging. But it looks like they had no idea what this game actually was. And they based the packaging around King Graham's hat. Dan, what are your thoughts on this? What's going on on this cover?

I think that someone may have watched the intro of the game and thought that they were looking at a Peter Pan story. And there's a man and he's flying and he's got a sort of a pointy cap with a feather in it. So they assume, well, this must be Peter Pan. So if you look at this box art, you know first of all the sort of the wordmark the logo looks pretty crappy looks kind of like clip art but yeah you see king graham holding the hands of a child who is in turn holding another child and he is flying away with other people's children we know at this point in the series what

king graham's children look like and it is not these are not his children and it looks like they put Wendy and Michael and Peter from Peter Pan and, sorry, John, rather, with Graham in the Peter roll holding these children. There's even the dog, nanny, and their friend Susie from next door. There's an additional girl there, and it looks like that was the concept for this artwork. And so it's not surprising that they ended up changing it to this sort of the iconic, beautiful box where he's standing in the snowy cliff and looking out into the castle in the Now, I do have a soft spot for the original art because that's the box that we had, but I do acknowledge that looking at it objectively, it's ridiculous.

I think their idea, I think, was like, hey, bring the whole family on an adventure, but it just sort of looks like Graham's stealing your kids. He's like he has the pipe piper, but yeah, he's pulling the family into the world of, is it Serenia? I already forgot the name of this world. Yes. Yes. And the important thing about the box, though, is that Cedric is escaping the world. We have to track him down. He cannot enter our world.

I won't let that happen because that's the thing I know most about this game. We can talk about him in a bit. But like with a lot of adventure games at the time, this started as a disc version. And then a year later, we get the talkie version, which was they would call these games talkies, like the old movies when they would become movies with synced up sound. Well, that's what happened here. And at this time, I was looking up to see how much a CD-ROM drive cost. In 1992, they were around $300 to $400 in that year's money.

So a very pricey thing to buy, very pricey accessory to buy. So when you bought this thing, you needed releases to justify the purchase of this object, which is why LucasArts and Sierra said, hey, look, we put this game on a CD. It looks the same, but we have a lot of actors. in this case, no actors. And a lot of jokes are made with bad voice. I think, oh, they got the janitor to record this. In the case of Kingsquest Five, it's about half true.

Yeah, they did grab, you know, employees around the office. And, I mean, to their credit, my understanding is they did at least, like, hold auditions, you know, and, like, they tried not to be too awful about it, but you can tell it's people from around the office. you know but again to defend it a little bit their thinking was we don't know if hiring Hollywood actors is going to make back the expense of doing that so like we don't know if that's going to pan out or not so let's not risk it um but it is looking back you know some of the line reads are pretty unintentionally hilarious yeah uh oh go ahead dan the the narrator i don't know who he is i have a lot of affection for the narrator's voice um and um i'd love to hear if

you have any more information, but there was a, I think there was a AMA at one point with Ken Williams where someone asked, was that a guy from around the office? And Ken Williams says, no, I think he's, he must have been a professional narrator or something. And if you look up his name on IMDB, you don't find this guy elsewhere. He's got a really interesting sound. He's got some articulation challenges. It sounds like he might even be maybe missing some teeth or have a bit of a pallet deformation and it gives him a very warm kind of comfortable sound and I have a lot of affection for this guy and I have no idea who he is. Yeah, the narrator's great. I would also shout out Josh Mandel did a wonderful job as Graham. You know, the pretty iconic voice at this point,

but the rest of them sort of, hey, you know, they're there. Yeah, I mean, we're not trying to be too cruel because like with the choices made in Kings Quest 1, they're just figuring this out for the first time and you're right about that Matt hiring voice actors was not the standard Lucas film games Lucas Arts they were doing that because they had the Hollywood connection well we can get you voice actors of course like we have connections

let's bring them in the Sierra is in a different location entirely with different connections entirely so I can see why hey this is our first hockey let's just keep this to us and see where this goes which is why in the next Kings quest game they get Robbie Benson aka the Beast from Beauty and the Beast

and I think even the cover says featuring Robbie Benson. Yeah, they would get, you know, lots of Hollywood talent from that point onward, for sure. But I think at this point, we have to address

Cedric, which I, okay, so Dan, in the notes you put, he is the jar jar of his time, and that's the perfect way to put it, because he was a character intended to bring light into our hearts and to make us laugh and think.

And to be a very charming character, the execution fails utterly. and I've read some thoughts from the voice actor and his thoughts are basically this is what I was asked to do and I don't like it either so but when you play this game Cedric

kind of sound my wife said he sounds like Mrs. Doubtfire then that's a great comparison to make but he not only has an annoying voice he's also an annoying creature who scolds you in the notes Matt you said he's kind of racist maybe Dan said that he's very judgy

Cedric in other words He says keep your eye on the gypsies, Graham. I don't trust them. And that's not the way that we in 2024 would refer to the Roma people. But it's not just the voice. So he's got a falsetto. If you not heard him, I recommend you look him up. So people, you know, I would say children probably are fine with this.

Matt has a great video that I think he's going to tell us about in which he sort of said the same thing that I felt at the time, which it didn't bother me. I was a kid when I played this. But it's not just the falsetto. there's also some strange line delivery, you know, the line, look out, Graham, a poison a snake. I'm not going to do the falsetto. Most of us reading that line would have emphasized the word snake, right? But he made a choice to emphasize the first syllable of the word poisonous. And it's one of these just kind of iconic line reads.

Yeah, to sort of defend Cedric a little bit, not the xenophobia, we won't defend that. But so the idea, at least according to Richard Aronson, who was the voice actor, was that Cedric was supposed to be sort of a guide for the kids who played the game. And kids tended to love Cedric and adults tended to roll their eyes. You know, I get it. But on my experience playing this first, I had the floppy version. And so we didn't have the voice acting in that. And so I didn't have the hate that people have for Cedric. though after hearing it i i get it um and cedric also has um sort of an issue where he'll give you a

couple of hints at the beginning of the game but then after that just doesn't do anything useful until the end where he accidentally saves graham's life by dying um but uh and even does that on accident but uh so he really doesn't do anything useful and and doesn't help you out in in any way, so I get that. On the other hand, I think a lot of the Cedric hate is sort of over the top. Kind of, kind of like with Jar Jar, where it's possible to like, okay, Jar Jar Jar sucks. We get it. Like, can we move on to something else?

Yeah. Sometimes it gets to that level. So I don't know. I get where what they were trying to do with Cedric. I also understand why he's a little annoying as well. but there was this great I put this in the show notes but it's something that Richard Aronson

sort of wrote to me in response to the fact that even within like a couple of years even people at Sierra were putting Easter eggs in Sierra games where Cedric was dying and getting hurt and Richard said it warmed my heart to see all those

bad things happen to Cedric the purpose of art is to evoke to invoke an emotional response and people really had to responds strongly to Cedric for him to suffer so much harm in response. I cut, for everything else you can say about Cedric, I at least like that that is Richard's attitude towards it. Yeah, and I feel like, man, I'm keeping you on the defense by by putting out a lot of flaws, but I have to assume that kids, uh, probably like this character because

I feel like we're all around the same age based on our interests. And I feel that we were the ones to say, oh, Jar Jar Jar Stinks. I hate Jar Jar. I'm so annoying. But I know kids, still liked him. Like he works the way he was intended to work on children at least. And I assume in his own way, Cedric did as well. I think so. There's another funny Cedric bit that you alluded to, Matt, was when

he sort of blocks a magic ball at the end. And I don't know if this is supposed to be funny or how they intended it, but he lies stone dead on the floor while the characters celebrate at the end of the game for, you know, a good five or ten minutes until

someone goes, oh, hey, Cedric's dead over there. Should we do something about that? Just lying on the deck dead and we forget about him. It's just a funny bit. I don't know whether it was intentional or not. Yeah, these games do have an often sick sense of humor as seen in the many

deaths. I think there's a little sadistic streak running through them. That's meant to make you laugh, for sure. This game, I will say that it was ahead of its time in terms of moving forward because Lucasfilm games, LucasArts games, they were still using the whole click on a verb, click on an object on the screen interface. This one advances that to the icon interface, which LucasArts would have. arrive at three years later with Sam and Max hit the road. But here you have a variety of icons. It really simplifies things. It eliminates the guesswork that was required from previous games. You know, you had to kind of guess what they thought the object on the screen was

named. Here, it's just like how any point-and-click adventure game works. You just move the mouse around and so on. You know how it goes. But the highlight of this game are what I will call very interesting puzzles. And when, so my life was very much like Kingsquest. It was like a fairy tale because I finished 75% of the notes and I sent them to you guys saying, I'm going to work on Kings Quest 5 tomorrow. And when I woke up, the notes were complete. I was like the shoemaker and all my, all my shoes were finished at night by the elves. And that you two are the elves in this case by putting in a lot of details about these Kings Quest 5 puzzles. I don't know who wants to start us off with the interesting approach to puzzle design in this game.

Well, I'll say a few words. First of all, I should make clear for the listeners that I love this game, I absolutely have a ton of affection for it. I loved it at the time. I still consider it to be one of my kind of favorite classic games. And yet, the design philosophy of it is not one that we would consider to be, you know, all that playable from a modern perspective. There's a lot of game design elements that are poorly aged, and I just did not pick up on them at the time as being, you know, objectively problematic. At the time, it was just, oh, you know, I'm just playing this game. I have to look up solutions sometimes. Nowadays, what you notice is there's a learn-by-dying philosophy a lot of times.

Just a couple of examples would be you have to give an object to a witch to kill her. This is a spoiler warning. There's a genie in a bottle. And you have to know that if someone opens the bottle, the genie will kill you by stuffing you into the bottle. the only way you know that is if you tried it yourself and died. There's a boat with a hole in it, and there's no way to, as far as I'm aware, to get a hint that the boat has a hole in it. Cedric certainly doesn't tell you until you get out there and you start to sink.

And then he goes, oh, there's a hole in the boat, and then you die. It's things like that. You have to jump on collapsing platforms, and you have to know which ones are going to collapse by dying and then doing it differently. You can, we know about the dead man walking scenarios in a lot of early adventure games where you use up an item and don't realize it or you miss an item, don't pick it up and are stuck later, which could be hours later. There's some deliberately malicious pathfinding if you want to walk from point A to point B and you take the hypotenuse of the triangle instead of walking

across the two legs to use some Pythagorean terminology, you'll fall down a hole or you'll wake up a bandit or something. So there's a little bit of that. They sort of knew that you had to kind of click around to get where you wanted to go. There's three different mazes in the game that you have to map out. And Matt, what else? Yeah, so before we go, I do want to agree with you that this is a game

that I have a lot of fond memories of, and I think I really respond well to games that have a good sense of place, a good sense of like, there is this world that you could jump into, and I still love the art in this game, I still love the music, I have warm, fuzzy feelings about all that.

It's just that when you examine the puzzles objectively in terms of, will this frustrate a player, does this make sense? It just doesn't pass any of those tests. The whole game is like that. One of the most famous ones is the rat and the cat puzzle. So there's one point in the game where you need a rat to bite through some ropes to rescue you, right? but the only way to get there is that after you get a boot in the desert by the skeleton that we mentioned earlier so you pick up that boot and then the next time that you walk in front of the bakery and again you have you have no indication that this is going to happen you have no reason to expect this

the narrator says something like oh there's a rat that's running down the road and there's a cat following it and i timed this last night you have a two-second window to go into your inventory and throw eye either the boot or a stick at the cat to save the rat. Otherwise, the rat gets, you know, taken and off and eaten. And if that happens, you can't win the game. But depending on how you're playing the game, you might not realize that for, like, another few hours. So it's just incredibly, incredibly cruel.

One of the others that's really frustrating, you get trapped into the witch's forest. And to get out, you have to dump honey on the ground on one of, like, I think it's seven screens. They've been only one of them works. And then lure out an elf with some emeralds by dropping it on. And then he gets stuck in the honey. And there's like eyes in the background of that to indicate that somebody's watching.

But other than that, there's really no hint that you're supposed to do that at all. And then this really bizarre sort of sequence at the end where you have to get, some cheese to activate a machine. Now, that alone is wonky, right? Because there's no indication, oh, this machine isn't working. You have to throw some cheese in it. Well, so to do that, you have to purposely get caught by a monster, get thrown into a dungeon, use a fish hook that you may have picked up a few hours ago, or maybe not. Go inside of a, like a mouse hole to get the cheese. That's if you notice that the cheese is there at all. That part makes sense at least. There's one

bit in this that makes sense. It's fishing out the the cheese with the hook. But then Yeah, but then you have to then you have to leave there. And then you have to not get caught again because if you do, then the wall where you got out of earlier gets walled up and then you

die. So like you have to get caught by this thing that you think will kill you to progress. But then not do it twice. Because then you will die. And then throw it into the machine later because I still don't understand why that is supposed to work.

Yeah, when I ask both of you questions about these games, I feel like I am just approaching them as an outsider, but all of my questions seem leading. Like, why is this like this? What's wrong with this puzzle? Because I'm thinking of adventure games that I have memorized, like Maniac Mansion, and there are fewer death states, fewer dead men walking states.

But the puzzles that make sense to me would sound just as convoluted if I explain them here in the same way you're explaining. many of these puzzles. Maybe there's a few more clues in the world, but they have the same kind of logic in many ways. You could say that, although as a big fan of the Monkey Island series, as silly as those puzzles are, and we all know the silly LucasArts puzzles, there is a bit of a cartoon logic to them. After you've done them, you're like, okay, right, the rubber chicken

with a pulley in the middle, you use it on a cable and you go slide. With this, there's really no justification for why the moldy cheese would work, even if you try to go back and look for it. And the fact that it doesn't have, you know, this overt cartoon aesthetic and logic makes it a little bit less forgivable. I will say that the next game in the series, Kings Quest 6, solves this problem for most of the time. And then once you've thrown, you've gotten through this whole game and you've thrown the cheese in there and you watch this big, long sequence that takes, I don't know, 30, you know exactly how long it takes, Matt, because you're your time this right it's i don't remember actually but it takes a lot it's like 45 seconds 45 seconds

it's it's a while you're watching this machine go on and on you're about to you know that you're in the end game and you're about to defeat mordack the wizard and you're you know you're eight years old and you're excited and then you get uh for a lot of players you get a little white box that pops up that says out of heap space and it just crashes the game and that's that's it um and uh you know i played this in windows i think and i was still getting that weird message. And it was not a Windows text box that pops up. And it's a bizarre error.

And it's one of the, you know, if you look for it now online, you'll still see a lot of people just at the end of the game hitting this game-breaking bug. And so, you know, that's just not, nobody intentionally put that in there,

but it's just the icing on the cake of some of the frustrations that, that happen. And yet, aesthetically, this is a gorgeous looking game, especially in the time. I still think the colors just pop and look great. As you said, Matt, the music, I think, is so memorable and so good.

That's Ken Allen and Mark Seward, where the composers on this game. And just terrific stuff. I especially like Casima's theme in this game, but I think all of them, I could, I could, they're in my head right now. I could still have most of them come to the front of mind immediately.

Yeah, and you mentioned, you know, the cheese at the end there, like, even, you know, with that, like, the castle is genuinely creepy. It's a creepy place, and I still think so, even, you know, all these years later. Yeah, when I watch these games, the playthrus of them, they do feel like they probably scared the hell out of kids because there are these nemesis-style stalker enemies that will just appear. And basically, there are just, you know, primitive versions of jump scares. I could see myself being terrified of this game if I had access to it as a kid. I was scared of some parts of Maniac Mansion. And one of you put in the notes about the final encounter, which to me, it seems like Sierra's own kind of take on what we see at the end of the Monkey Island games, where there's a bit

of an RNG element, there's a bit of a timing element, but here there's a lot more going on and a lot more things that aren't really communicated well to the player. Okay, I think you're talking about me there. Yeah, so, like, it's not exactly at the very end, but it, it, It is in the end sequence, and there's just a ton of RNG that's going on. So there's that monster that I was talking about that you have to get captured by him. And on every screen that that monster can show up on, there's varying percentages of whether he'll show up or not.

Sometimes it even depends on which direction you come into the room for some reason. like if you come in from the west versus the north. And then there's this really complicated sort of algorithm where it like rolls some dice to see if it appears. And then if that fails, it rolls another dice to see if the cat appears who, by the way, is Mananan from King's Quest 3. And he'll end up, you know, ruin your day as well. And then it checks to see whether Graham is in the right area of the screen. And then it like rolls a random wait time between two different. numbers and that wait time is different depending on which screen you're on like they just

went to town on weird R&G decisions that's just you know super weird and then you know the top it all off when you enter Mordax bedroom Mordax the evil wizard who's behind everything there's just a one out of ten chance that he'll show up and kill you and there's nothing you can do about it yeah it seems like with the first King's Quest they were trying they were trying to incorporate, you know, arcady elements or action game elements. With this one, with this scene in particular, it does feel like they're trying to incorporate RPG elements because RNG does make sense in the context of an RPG. And I know I haven't played them, but their Quest for Glory games had a lot of RPG elements.

So maybe they were thinking, like, of a way to dress this sequence up with those same ideas of random chance. The only thing I can sort of think of is something that you mentioned earlier was to make it scarier, like it's more of like a jump scare, you know? Like you don't know if this thing is coming or not, which, you know, is also, you know, it makes, it does also make the player experience different depending on what you do because I'm not sure how many people, you know, know, know this. But so what, I mean, what you can do is bizarrely use some peas to take out the monster and make sure, you know, you know, that he, uh, well, doesn't show up on that screen anymore, though he can wake up. That's a long story. but you can also, you know, follow this thing where you can, you know, bag the cat by, you know, tossing a fish to it and then while it's not looking, put it into a sack. You don't have to do that. You can save scum it and just, you know, if you can avoid seeing any of those things go straight to the end. So it's just this weird mishmash of stuff that it does sort of feel too like they were kind of, they were still figuring out like how they wanted these games to work.

Yeah, just trying everything, and it feels like, like you were saying, Dan, by the sixth game, it feels a lot more like a modern game. Is that true? They fixed a lot of what was wrong. They certainly fixed the voice acting. In addition to Robbie Benson, they have Tony Jay, the great Tony Jay. I can't even remember who else, but there's a lot of terrific voice acting in that. They've tried to, although they haven't entirely eliminated dead man walking through the things, they've tried to minimize it by giving you clues a few times that you're about to miss something. And they try to give you different ways to go back and get it. They haven't fully succeeded. The sequence of events are logical that you would follow.

Even though there are some pretty tricky puzzles in there that, you know, how would I have known to like go back and look a stuff? second time in this pot. But everything makes a lot more sense. And that's a terrific game. I think out of all the Kingsquest Five puzzles that are out there, the one that I think is the meanest is that if you are in the endgame sequence with Mordak, the wizard, you need to grab his wand. And unless you've bagged the cat in a certain location, which is his bedroom, you have to stand in a room and watch through the door as the wizard appears in the room and falls asleep. Then you go out and grab his wand. You've got to wait sometimes for two minutes for this

to happen. And I just cannot imagine unless you happen to be so stumped by this game that you're sitting there scratching your head or going to get a sandwich or something, how somebody would have stumbled across this. I mean, I have before it's happened, but I didn't know what I had done. And I certainly wouldn't have known if I'd waited 90 seconds that maybe I should wait another 30 seconds for just to happen. So I think it's a little bit unfair that one. Yeah, that is a bit bizarre. And even, yes, you were talking about there, if you bag the cat in the bedroom, you only have to wait 90 seconds. It may as well be two minutes. It's just, you know, I sort of highlight that as like just a weird choice that they made. I don't understand the

logic behind that. But, but, but, but there's no reason to stick around in the library. Like, you do one thing. You can't read any of the other books. Like, there's no reason for you to be there. It does feel like a kind of a cruel trick, but very clever, where the solution is to do nothing, which is very, very seldomly the solution in a game, just kind of chill out, especially in a game of that era, when you're always looking, okay, what object do I need, what things I need to do in what order? And we have to wrap up fairly shortly here, but I did want to point out that,

alarmingly, there was a NES port of this game, produced by Novo Trade. Weirdly enough, published by Konami. another fun joke you can play. If anyone asks, what's your favorite Konami game? Just say Kings Quest 5 and then just watch their face. Not the idea of way to play it, but I was watching some videos of this game. It's a feat. It is a feat.

And being asked to port this game to the NES, I will say, is an unenviable task. And they did a great job with the tools available. Any thoughts on this, either of you? I was just going to say, yeah, I am impressed by what they were able to get onto the NES. cartridge and what they were able to do. I would not recommend that anybody actually play it, but, you know, if you're going to port this over, like, I am impressed with what they actually came up with. It has some clunky controls, but I think I played it three nights ago.

I played through it, and it was fine. It's the same game that most of the dialogue made it. They changed a couple of things, you know, with gods and death and stuff. They took those references out, and otherwise you get pretty much. The same experience in a much uglier package. It's, yeah, it's simply incredible that it even exists. And I guess we're going to wrap up fairly shortly here. You two have been living with Kings Quest for a very long time.

And I really want to know, for the sake of our listeners, hey, for me too, what is the best way to approach these games in the year 2024 and beyond? Do you recommend just jumping in without any facts or anything like that or watching videos? Let's start with Dan. And what is the best way for someone to approach these games, which, by the way, are all legally available right now? You know, the way I would do it, I would take a look at the first couple Kingsquist games just to see what they looked like originally. But then, if you want to play through them and sort of get the most out of them being a modern gamer or, you know, a gamer with modern expectations and sensibilities, I would look for the AGD remakes out there. And, you know, the first game is pretty much a one-to-one of the official high-res release.

The second one is a totally different take on the second game. And the third one, I'd say, is pretty faithful again. And then you go back to the original Kings Quest 4, which, you know, is still an EGA, but it's fairly playable, although with a lot of these same kinds of difficulties. And then you can kind of play your way through. I would recommend having a walk-through handy. I think you probably get more out of it that way. And then once you get the Kings Quest 6, I think you, I would recommend that you could try to play that one legitimately just because it plays a little bit more fair.

I would say the infamous eighth game in the series, you may want to give that a miss or maybe just watch a play-through. What eighth game? There are only seven games. Any final thoughts, Matt, on just how people should interface with these games, newcomers? Yeah, I would actually agree with that. I would suggest, starting with the AGD interactive remakes, if one doesn't grab you, I think that the remake of two is probably the strongest of those three.

I would also recommend for King's Quest 4 playing a version called King's Quest 4 Retool. It is a remake of the game that keeps the graphics for the most part, but adds in a point-and-click interface and a graphical inventory. so you don't have to type anymore. There are also options that were added to turn off dead ends and to turn on auto saves, which is a pretty cool feature. But other than that, it is the original game

in all of its glory, but more friendly. So that's a Kingsquest 4 retold. And then after that, I'd probably jump to KingsQuest 6, because I think that is the best of the originals. And then after that, kind of poke around, as what strikes you. Well, thank you to both of you for being on the show and thank you to Dan for sponsoring the show.

And I will stick with my analogy here. I will continue to view this series in old Sierra games as an old-timey bike. I love seeing them. They're so cool. But if I get on one and ride it, I know I'm going to die. So too dangerous for me. But I really enjoy learning about these games

and I really enjoyed the process and the recording too. So thank you so much, Daniel, for being on the show and supporting the show as well. Oh, I'm going to do my plugs last, but before we close out here, Daniel, is there anything you wanted to plug? Do you want to be found online? Is there anything you're a fan of that you wanted to give a shout out to right here? This is the place to do it. Sure.

I suppose I don't know if I would offer my professional services on here. I do psychoeducational testing and I specialize in therapy for OCD and anxiety disorders. However, I also have a side business, which is a headphone that we. produce for people with unilateral deafness. It has two stereo channels in a single side, one above and one below the ear. So if you have single-sided deafness, you could still appreciate your full music with some stereo space and some stereo panning even with a single ear. So if you're interested in that, look up uni headphones, Y-U-N-I-U-N-I-U-Hadphones. And I'm also the lead of two science nonprofits, if anyone is interested in that,

the Applied Evolutionary Psychology Society, which is devoted to the application of evolutionary behavioral science research to apply domains like mental health, public policy, education, and so forth, and also one called psychtable.org, which is a mass collaborative reference tool for the evolutionary and social sciences that compiles the different proposed adaptations that we have in the human mind aggregates the evidence for and against them and creates a bit of a periodic table-like reference tool. So those are my non-game plugs for anyone who is interested. Awesome. And Matt, if people enjoy this podcast, I know they will love the many videos you put together on speed running adventure games. Oh, thank you. Yeah.

So you can find me on YouTube. One Short Eye is the channel. I also have a second channel called One Short Eye Speed Runs, which is just sort of a dumping ground for anything where I don't care about the views, but sometimes it's like a quick, oh, here's a speed running update on this thing that's kind of cool. Also, I guess I just want to shout out

the Speedy Adventures Discord and the Kingsquest Speed Running Discord. Those are both full of awesome speed run people who do a great job. of destroying these games and pulling them apart and figuring out how they work. Awesome.

Those people are awesome. Thank you, Matt. As for us, we have been Retronauts. You can find us, wherever you find podcasts. You're listening to us now, so you already found us. Congratulations. You're ready to play Kingsquest. And if you want to support us, please go to

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That has been it for this episode of Retronauts. We'll see you again next time. Take care. I don't know. I mean, you know, and I'm

I'm going to be able to be.