Police Quest was designed by former CA highway patrol officer, Jim Walls, who was approached by Sierra and was asked to recall his day-to-day activities and put these situations into a game. In the game, you play Sonny Bonds, a street cop who served the Lytton Police Department for fifteen years. Now, he must stop a notorious drug dealer who is dubbed "The Death Angel" from selling drugs in schools and getting kids killed. A person who falls victim to this, is a daughter of another police officer.

But before you investigate the Death Angel, you must do a series of stops on one of Lytton's streets and arrest any person who is found breaking the law. All of them must be done with proper police procedures. One wrong move and the game is over. As well as this, you attend briefings and join your fellow police officers for a cup of coffee, and attend celebrations as well. Yes, you have to drive over Lytton and notice any unusual activity or respond to calls by Dispatch. Lytton is divided into sixteen grids. To get to your location faster, it is suggested that you use a map to locate these. On the map screen, you can access a few features by pressing three function keys. These function keys allow you to turn your police siren on, go to Code-2 or Code-3.

Since Sierra used a different interpreter (AGI) than those used in their later games, you could say that the graphics are much worse than today's standards. But at least Sierra replaced the text-only aspect of adventure games, putting graphics in their games as well as text prompts, in which you have to enter input to perform an action. Not only that, Sierra found a way to allow your character to move across the screen.

The sound is PC speaker only. However, using a program known as AGISB (AGI PC-Speaker to Sound Blaster converter), I managed to get Sound Blaster support without any problems. Police Quest was so successful that Sierra wanted Jim to create two more Police Quest games.

The Bad

The only thing that I found annoying is that every time you are about to go out on the street, you always have to inspect the car by walking around it. Otherwise not very far from the LPD will you get a flat tire.

The Bottom Line

As I said, if you're into cop shows and movies, and if you want to experience the whole thing, you should get this time. And if you do decide to, you should download AGISB to output the game's sound to Sound Blaster. And be sure to get the other two PQ games. ***½