King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder!

A rare "king" game in the series

Despite the title of the series, there are only two installments where you actually play as a king (namely, King Graham): this one and King's Quest II.

CD version

The game was also released on CD-ROM. This CD version had full speech throughout the game.

Innovations

King's Quest V was the first adventure game to be released on CD-ROM in MPC (Multimedia PC) format, the first to have digitized voiceovers, the first to use digitized hand painted backgrounds, and the first title to cost over one million U.S. dollar to produce.

Installation

Installing the game on the PC was less intuitive than other Sierra releases due to the variety of options supported. An addendum to the manual was included which attempted to explain all of the installation options. The game could be played entirely from hard disk, half from hard drive and half on floppy, or entirely on floppy if two drives were present. If you were playing with one 3.5" drive and one 5.25" drive, installation began on either 5.25" disk #6 or 3.5" disk #10. All other combinations began installation on 5.25" disk #5 or 3.5" disk #9. (confused yet? King's Quest V may also be the only Sierra title where installation doesn't begin with either disk #1 or the Startup disk.) Probably in the interest of simplicity, media cost, and sanity most (if not all) of Sierra's later games shipped with just one set of disks per package eliminating the ability to play entirely from floppy but simplifying installation.

User interface

The first game in the King's Quest series (in fact, all classic Sierra adventures) to switch to icon control from the text parser system.

Versions

King's Quest V was the first Sierra game to be available in two separate versions: a 16 color version (supporting EGA, MCGA, VGA, and Tandy/PCjr graphics) and a 256 color version (supporting MCGA and VGA only). The 16 color version came with 10 3.5" DD disks and 6 5.25" HD disks. 5.25" DD (360k) disks could be ordered directly from Sierra. (A hard disk was required to use the 360k disks.)

Awards

• Computer Gaming World
  • March 1992 (Issue #92) – Introduced into the Hall of Fame
  • November 1991 (Issue #88) – Adventure Game of the Year
  • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) - #94 in the “150 Best Games of All Time”
• GameStar (Germany)
  • Issue 12/1999 - #94 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking

Information also contributed by Adam Baratz, Mitch Kocen, PCGamer77, Roger Wilco, Sciere and Servo