Trivia
In the German gaming magazine GameStar (issue 01/2007) King's Quest was named as one of the "Ten Most Influential PC-Games". It managed to link texts and graphics and caused the rise of Graphic Adventures.
From 1995 through 1996 Boulevard Books published a trilogy of novels inspired by the King's Quest game setting of Daventry and featuring members of its royal family as the main protagonists:
- The Floating Castle (1995), by Craig Mills, dealing with adventures Prince Alexander experiences between the events of King's Quests V and VI;
- The Kingdom of Sorrow (1996), by Kenyon Morr, filling in some blanks regarding King Graham's activities between King's Quests II and III; and
- See No Weevil (1996), also by Kenyon Morr, taking place seven years after the Kingdom of Sorrow and giving Graham's daughter, Princess Rosella, a chance to rule as regent during a crisis.
King's Quest was the first Sierra game to use the AGI game engine, which was used in Sierra's later games throughout the '80's. The way the engine was setup made it easy to port a game written with AGI to other computer platforms.
The website Homestarrunner.com created a game named Peasent's Quest quite similar to King's Quest. It had EGA graphics, text based typing, and the main character Rather Dashing is designed a little like Sir Graham.
One puzzle, naming the gnome's real name must have been deemed too hard (or obscure) in the original version of King's Quest. I believe the clue was "Think back-wards" or something along those lines. The answer? The player had to write out the alphabet as follows:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
And substitute the letters from "Rumplestiltskin" with the letter below on the line. Of course most people entered "Rumplestiltskin" spelled back-wards (logical) and this didn't work. In the SCI (1987) re-release of the game the puzzle was made simpler with "Rumplestiltskin" back-wards being the correct answer.
Contributed by
Tibes80 (1498) on Jan 01, 2003.
Sir Graham was so named because of designer Roberta Williams' fondness for graham crackers.
The developers used encryption to hide code from pyring eyes. The encryption key was "Avis Durgan." However, nobody can remember why this key was chosen, or who "Avis Durgen is -- not even Ken Williams!
(Courtesy of PC Gamer Magazine -- July 2000)
.. but Al Lowe does remember;
"Avis was Jeff Stephenson's wife's maiden name. I guess he was in love! "
A complete version of King's Quest is available on Classic Games Collection CD featured with the July 2000 issue of PC Gamer Magazine.
Originaly developed by Sierra On Line and produced by IBM as a show piece for the IBM PCjr. The game was later produced by Sierra and was the foundation of the best-selling King's Quest series. (Editor's Note: Check out the IBM box's front cover--it has a completely wrong description and picture of King's Quest; this is because the box ad copy was written before the game was completed.)
