Please login to submit a screenshot

Review: King's Quest
Submitted by mattbarton.exe on Tue, 08/02/2005 - 12:39
Review Of
Williams, Roberta. King's Quest I: Quest for the Crown. Armonk, NY: IBM, 1984.

* Tagged
* XML
* BibTex
* Google Scholar

A couple days ago I finally got around to playing through Roberta William's famous King's Quest game. Knowing something about William's notoriously illogical and incoherent puzzles, I didn't even attempt this one without a walkthrough. Instead, I focused on studying the interface and trying to recast myself in that historical moment--that is, to appreciate something of the wonder the game must have inspired in 1984 (or, 1983 to be precise, when the game was released for the IBM PC/Jr). I played the original DOS version with DOS-BOX, an emulator for very old DOS titles.

To switch from Mystery House to King's Quest is a jolting experience, though only three years separate them--and more than technological differences distinguish the two. Whereas Mystery House was brutal and obviously adult-oriented, KQ is a fairy tale that seems (to me, at least), aimed at young children. However, there is gore here, and our hero is all-too-capable of suffering horrifying death--and he must kill enemies as well.

Enough has been said about William's puzzles. I'm not sure if anyone has ever solved this game without help, and I'd be very surprised if that were the case. It might, for instance, occur to someone that if he were to stand in just the right spot and type "jump" just at the right time, he might get a lift from a condor to an otherwise inaccessible location. Then again, it might not. The game was challenging even with a walkthrough, particularly in places that required judging perspective--walking up diagnolly-placed steps and across bridges is a particular challenge, and the game is unforgiving if you stray even a bit. This means getting the "up and right" rhythm just perfect, clicking up a bit and over to help Grahme over.

Still, though there are plenty of terrible things about KQ, I can't help but marvel at the things that were done right. There is no doubt that being able to move the character along three axes in animated "rooms" makes for a much richer experience than Mystery House. Plus, the graphics, while certainly not photo-realistic, are nonetheless charming--in much the way that a toy set, with its bright colors and stylized characters, is charming. When we look at some of the other games available in 1984, it's clear enough just how much King's Quest stands out as a trailbazer. All of the important conventions of even modern GAGs are laid out here by Roberta Williams in 1984. Indeed, we might go so far as to say that all subsequent GAGs are but footnotes to Williams.

King's Quest 1: Quest for the Crown has a charm to it that is characteristic of the very early games in this series. The game relies heavily on strategy and thinking in order to solve puzzles and overcome certain situations. I really like the multiple solutions aspect to this game because you have more options to solve a situation. For example, you can either kill an evil creature or figure out some clever way to trick it. Therefore, violence is not always the answer; and in many cases, it is the less desired one. Also, you have many choices on how to use the items that you find. If you did not find an item in this game, or use an item unwisely, you probably will not get completely stuck. King's Quest 1 provides so many alternatives that even if you could not solve a certain puzzle, you probably can still finish the game. This is not so for some of the later games, in which getting completely stuck is extremely common.

The superb use of fairy tale, mythical creatures, and other legends really make this game worthwhile. To climb a beanstalk in the same lands as the leprechauns or the gingerbread house is such a treat due to the clever ways these otherwise different stories are beautifully inter-twined.

If it is a cute, woven storyline that you desire, then this is a great classic game to play. The only slight setback to it is the fact that it is text-driven (if you are the type who prefers using the mouse instead). You will have to type in commands in order to perform tasks, but the vocabulary base in this game is greatly expanded over Roberta Williams' earlier games. Therefore, hunting for that certain command word is much easier now. In the remake, you are aided by the addition of the mouse cursor and stereo soundtrack (not found in the original version). The graphics are a bit less sophisticated than today's standards of graphics, but keep in mind that the original was made around 1984 and the remake in 1990. For their time, these games were the fore-runners in graphical gaming technologies. 4 out of 6 stars. -- Kimmie

Roberta says:
So IBM wanted a new type of game to show off its new computer. I was thinking about a fairy tale adventure with lost treasures, giants, dragons, leprechauns, a gingerbread house, a troll bridge, guessing a gnome's name. Underground and sky castles were always popular stories, so I had to find ways to include them too. Flat pictures wouldn't do. It had to be animated. You had to be careful climbing the magic beanstalk or you'd fall. Limited floppy space would have restricted my design, but we had been compressing our pictures by drawing them as lines and fill colors for a while. That scheme was kept all the way up to King's Quest V. People were amazed you could walk around these detailed scenes, behind trees and in front of rocks.

I received a LOT of letters about the old gnome's name. In retrospect it was an awfully nasty puzzle (using a backwards alphabet to spell Rumpelstiltskin), but that was a typical "advanced" puzzle in those days. At least you had an alternate path to win the game if you couldn't figure it out. We toned it down a bit in the remake; now you just spell Rumpelstiltskin backward. (The Roberta Williams Anthology Manual, 1996)