Join Kosta Andreadis as he plays through some of the most seminal adventure games of all time over the course of 2014. Click here for part one, which took us back to King's Quest I and here for a look back at King's Quest II and III.
During the adventure game genre’s infancy, Sierra found that combining comedy with adventure was most definitely a recipe for success. Most of the attention at the time was given to the Leisure Suit Larry series due its crude and controversial sexual themes, but Sierra also published a series of funny sci-fi adventures under the Space Quest banner.
Starting with these two.
Each game in the Space Quest series followed hapless janitor Roger Wilco across environments steeped in the sort of self-referential, satirical and pop culture-influenced humour that’s more popular today than it was at the time. With plots usually centred on end of the universe type scenarios, super weapons, and its own developers, the technical limitations of the era actually helped keep the comedy focussed and at the forefront of each game.
Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter was released in late 1986; a time when many computer games were released with pictures and profiles of their designers on the box. It may sound ridiculous now, but PC game boxes and manuals were similar to books of the time, where people could see a picture of a usually bespectacled dork accompanied by some text describing who they were and what games they’re known for. This wasn’t a practice carried across the entire industry but was something that was associated more often than not with adventure games, especially those developed at Sierra.
When it came time to release the first Space Quest, developers Mark Crowe (Artist) and Scott Murphy (Programmer) took it upon themselves to photograph themselves wearing poorly constructed costumes as alien software developers ‘Two Guys from Andromeda’ in a fashion that bucked this trend and suited their rather silly, yet genuinely funny adventure game. It was a moniker they would carry across all subsequent releases.
Having previously worked on other AGI-based adventure titles at Sierra, both Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy felt the need to break away from game worlds steeped in fantasy settings that felt like mere extensions of Dungeons & Dragons role-playing scenarios than the nerdy science fiction worlds they were interested in.
*Earth version only.
Even though the King’s Quest series had established Sierra as a prominent PC developer with a stable of designers and developers looking to provide their own take on the adventure genre, it was the science fiction based entry proposed by Mark and Scott that surprisingly seemed to garner the most apprehension. On concept alone, a fun adventure game in a science fiction setting featuring intergalactic travel and interplanetary exploration not being deemed good enough speaks more to the state of the science fiction genre at the time than anything else.
Determined to push forward with their idea, the Two Guys from Andromeda developed a short four-room demo set aboard a spaceship that featured multiple levels, elevators and aliens to avoid, which they presented to head of Sierra, Ken Williams, who finally green lit the project.
What was technically impressive about the demo was the split screen method used to display two different levels on the same screen with the player being able travel between them using an elevator. A pretty quaint idea now, sure, but it was probably this feature alone that secured the full development of the first Space Quest game.
Going down?
In 1986 the adventure game was seen as a more mature approach to gaming and a stark contrast to the mindless repetitive nature of arcade games of the time. Of course, hindsight and whatnot is everything, and now we can point to one type of game attempting to tell a story above all else and the other (those being the games played in arcades) trying to provide a feedback intensive entertaining experience. Even so, it’s still best to look at games like the original Space Quest, as products of their time. But, in creating an adventure game that aimed to be entertaining and funny above all else, the limitations of the AGI engine itself allowed for a unique comedic delivery system.
Games developed with the AGI engine featured 16-colour environments, vector-based graphics with a resolution of 160x200 pixels, and a parser interface that paired numerous nouns with verbs (“LOOK UNDER MAT”, “TAKE KEY”, “UNLOCK DOOR”, “OPEN DOOR”, oh no I’ve been robbed!). It’s this limitation of the parser interface and the experimentation on the player’s part that allowed numerous jokes to be made in preparation for things they might type. Without extensive cut-scenes and mostly text-based descriptions and short animated sequences providing feedback to players, these limitations fed directly into the structure of a basic joke, pun, or sight gag that could garner an immediate response from the player. This design methodology was used extensively throughout the Space Quest series; often the actions that resulted in players dying proved to be the scenarios ripest for comedic potential.
The four room demo created to showcase the potential of a science fiction adventure game ended up becoming the first section within Space Quest I, albeit one expanded upon. It’s in this section where the arcade nature of the game is made apparent, as you have a time limit in order to escape a spaceship that is about to self-destruct as well as collect anything that you may need later on in the game – all whilst avoiding any alien bad guys.
Of course, being a Sierra product you can escape the ship without collecting a key item like the alien translator, forcing you to restart your game later on when you realise you don’t have it… y’know, when a giant alien is trying to speak to you. If fact, although Space Quest I is a pretty short game, there are many moments where you’ll need to restart or reload an earlier save because you missed out on something.
Apart from the same dead-end scenarios seen in all other Sierra adventures of the time, Space Quest I immediately feels different thanks to the conscious decision to give players control over many actions that would normally be animated or simply described. Using an escape pod will require you to not only put on your seat belt but also power it up, use the throttle as well as program the navigation computer.
More traditionally arcade sections later in the game also have the player pilot a land speeder on a planet that looks quite a bit like Tatooine, in a similar fashion to Luke Skywalker, on their way to a spaceport that is more than a little reminiscent of Mos Eisley. These sections were new for the adventure genre and sparked both positive and negative feedback amongst players of the day, mainly due to their difficulty.
A galaxy far, far away?
In some ways they had more in common with the era’s punishing NES games than the laid back adventure game genre, with the land speeder section in particular being extremely difficult to pass on any speed setting other than “slowest possible speed that will make this section of the game last for several minutes because you’ll be playing in slow motion”.
Much like the King’s Quest series players had to save often as deaths were just as common, thanks to the many obstacles and random death events lurking around each corner. But unlike the death sequences in King’s Quest, those found in Space Quest were for the most part quite comical, and seem to almost celebrate this aspect of the game – with an almost Looney Tunes-esque sensibility given to the death animations.
This leads to a situation where if you see something ahead that looks like certain death you’d save your game and walk gladly into your demise to see the outcome. An example of this would be walking under a cliff face that clearly seems to have pulsating blobs on its underside, where of course, once you walk underneath them they open up, scoop up Roger Wilco, and turn him into mush. Although used sparingly in the first game, this trial and known-error process would prove to be a large part of the subsequent sequels’ humour.
Source : feeds[dot]ign[dot]com
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