King's Quest

Without a doubt, King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown is one of the best adventure games ever created. Every element in this game is a breakthrough for its time. It is here that gamers are introduced to the notion of a graphic adventure, a third person mode of play, and a new method of character control on screen. The graphics may be old-fashioned compared to today’s titles, but if you want to experience the origin of the graphic adventure genre, then you owe yourself an obligation to try out this title. I think every devoted adventure fan should experience the joy of playing this game, since it is this game that heralds the next golden age of adventure gaming.

Despite these shortcomings, King's Quest was a very enjoyable game. Adventure purists will tell you that it degraded the once great text-based adventure games to cheap entertainment, but the truth is that King's Quest and its spin-offs have brought more mainstream audience to computer games than Zork ever did. The game was one of the ground stones for modern gaming, and as such deserves recognition.

I doubt many young gamers know that Sierra once was the biggest and most respected producer of classic adventure games. They kept that status for quite a few years, until LucasArts took over with extraordinary original titles like Secret of Monkey Island. Hell, in a couple of years most of the new generation of gamers probably won't even know what a point-n-click adventure is!

Unlike many of Sierra's initial Quests, this one clearly wasn't written with a septilogy in mind. It's a fair game on its own, and an interesting cornerstone of the history of game development, but a fairly average adventure. You can see the seeds of greatness in the ideas and in the functionality and animation of even the AGI interpreter. But as far as the gameplay is concerned, only sign up if you're particularly interested in the idea of playing through some classic fables.

I was ten years old the first time I played King's Quest I: Quest for the Crown. I bought it with my birthday money, back in the days when 3D simply meant your character could walk behind some things and in front of others (cutting-edge technology!) and text parsers still reigned supreme. This first King's Quest game is widely recognized as the grandfather of animated graphic adventures, and the hallmark of Sierra's two-decade dominance in the industry. It was initially released in 1983 to promote IBM's ill-fated PC Jr. Releases in a number of other formats followed, including a DOS version that used Sierra's 16-color, 160x200 resolution AGI (Advanced Graphics Interpreter) engine and still works on today's PCs.

If you do plan to try this game, however, I can only encourage you to use a walkthrough. Without it, you’re bound to feel like strangling Roberta after just a few hours of playing. KQ1 commits about every sin a graphical adventure can make! To be fair, the other Quest series (Space Quest & Police Quest) did not do much better at first either and I have a feeling that this level of absurd difficulty was really a ploy by Sierra to sell their Hint Books (which they even advertise in their games!). Still, you’re warned. Play this to see a piece of history but don’t expect a top quality game!

In conclusion, King's Quest: Quest for the Crown is a disappointing conversion. Parker Brothers never seemed to get the idea of consoles down in the 8-Bit era and as far as I remember most games they released sucked, but this one is especially disappointing because the original version was so groundbreaking and entertaining. Just taking it without doing anything is totally half-assed. In addition, by this time in video game history they were already up to Part IV, which would have been a much better conversion if they wanted to straight up port it without any changes. It's a mystery to me why they didn't, because surely Roberta Williams would have wanted to make as many version of her game as possible, and since it only came out a year prior it would have made the most sense.