MetalJesusRocks That amuses me :) Happy to continue to share!

I think when LGR does his "Sierra Historia" it should be a joint venture with MJR , at minimum a cameo knowing MJR's Sierra connection. LGR and MJR would be the KZfaq equivalent of the WWE Mega Powers. It would explode the minds of the humanoid KZfaq masses.

Bob McLaughlin Great idea sir!

Right on metal jesus

I didn't know Sierra was still around!

Grey Bryson I love it too! It's a hallmark of games from this era, and I love going back to watch it draw itself.

Grey Bryson It's proceduraly generated to save space, most of those backdrops could easily be created with, for example. a single QBasic DRAW command.

Bastet Furry It's just vectors with flood fills. Because with 256kb of RAM there wasn't enough room for an off screen buffer. Also, they halved the horizontal resolution of the zbuffer, the hidden screen which indicates what objects you can walk in front of or behind. That makes the games REALLY low res with double wide pixels. Even though it's pretty clever, there are better ways to do it. It's just that they were in a huge hurry because... well... companies are always in a hurry! They never give us enough time to do anything right.

Grey Bryson It reminds me of Graphics Magician which I had for my Apple //e. I don't think there was a PC version. It was a graphics editor designed for graphic adventure games. Instead of saving the individual images, it saved the steps to create the image on screen - taking a fraction of the space a saved image would take. It would draw the image onscreen like what you see in the video. It was a neat program to play with.

Slade Simon LGR actually did a review of a game built with that editor.

You've described wonderfully what I totally agree with: Much of the old gaming experience was adding your own meaning and imagination to things. You had to invent a part of the game in your mind and that made certain games become a very personal experience. I too miss that time.

Thank you for sharing, 8 years later. Hope you're doing well!!!!

Indeed!

+vwestlife For some reason, the box kind of reminded me of the Office 2007 box. About the only similarities though are that they are both made of plastic. :P

Lots of software came in teeny boxes those days ... Then blew up into full-sized, damn-near-empty boxes so they wouldn't seem "cheap". Then disappeared like the dodo.

Some of them had cartridges in them, so that's not too far off

Stephan Sanderson I mean hey, you never know until you try!

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

I cannot tell you how much people loved this kind of innuendo back then

Implying that it's possible at a different location xD

Eat witch blob

*> eat king somewhere else*

eat queen while king watches.

@@kaitsurugi3280 Maybe you should take the king to a Motorhead concert? For some reason I feel like regiophagia would be encouraged there...

Didn't really matter because you still got something from his ass even if you didn't guess it right.

Same here. I learned how to play greensleaves on guitar many years later and couldn't figure out how i knew that song. It was from King's Quest. The game stands up well over time. The billy goats goatee is epic.

sinephase Ha, I did the same at my call center job... also beat Jill of the Jungle there.

It always fascinates me- it seems playing PC games in the 80s required a lot more technical computing knowledge.

Let me explain, “we” refers to me and my friends which obviously excludes you. And no, “we” (friends and me) didn’t have commodore since it was not so popular “here”’(my country). By 1988 AMIGA and ATARI ST was popular and “we” (the friends and me version) preferred over everything else.We (friends and me) also went for a common system to exchange games.

i played Peasant's Quest waaaaaay before i knew this was a thing. lmao i was like "dang this looks super similar!"

Scarfulhu Never trust a bad Graham, guy.

Magus Marquillin Graham's hips don't lie. Or do they?

Scarfulhu Magus Marquillin *Grahame

Scarfulhu I wanna see an adventure game with IBM Cover Grahame in it. Silvery armor, shield, sword and red eyes like a mofo!! Someone, get on that.

Crownicsz mte

gamers are a more evolved breed.

Suff Norgh Thanks! I hope to do a Tech Tales on the story of Sierra, at the very least.

***** too bad he never got to see it.

***** It's funny you mention those; I remembered them so much, that I made a parody ad out of one for our rpg/adventure game, Quest For Infamy, last year. Loved those old ads - they obviously stuck with me.

Really!?

Aaron Anon Indeed! Different bulbs did the trick.

***** Also, "kill king", followed by "eat king".

Dr Ivo Robotnik You'll never get away with this, Robuttnik! >:U

***** Whoops I posted the same thing XD

SUPERTRIP™ The Apple IIGS port has most of it's style, plus some extra style all of it's own.

+SUPERTRIP™ I know what you mean. The first King's Quest game me and my family ever owned was this exact same "grey box" game for the PCjr. Our nostalgia for the game included those special sounds it had for the characters and the environments. The Quest for the Crown version, even though it looks exactly like the PCjr version (excluding the CPU environment construction) there is absolutely no sounds to enjoy. Only music for the title screen and after you died.

barth82 This is really weird! I've been collecting game box art online and at nearly the same time you commented on this 9 month old comment, I pulled up the PCJr version of this game! Cue the twilight zone 8}.

barth82 Anyway, your lucky you grew up with the right computer in this case, I grew up with MS DOS and played the silent bleepy versions of AGI games - as I think most Sierra fans did. I still loved them, but it wasn't until the last few years I discovered the AppleIIGS emulation and saw just how atmospheric these games had been designed.

SUPERTRIP™ Not true. The Commodore Amiga and Atari ST both received identical ports of these games, even though both computers were capable of producing graphics that were ahead of their time.

PFBM Yes.

PFBM Naw - The new Windows BSOD is different. And sad :(

PFBM Non-fullscreen masterrace woo

PFBM I'm on a 5:4 screen so the black bars on the top and bottom killed it.

There is something so special (at least for me) about this blue screen that most people may not notice. The King Edward and inventory "Blue Screen" was pleasant to look at "and" listen to. If you listen closely (it probably only happens if the PCjr is running the game) you hear two special humming sounds. One is for the text materializing on the screen, and the other is for the blue screen display. It starts with the text "writing hum" and then switches to a different hum after it finishes writing the text. Ahhh, so soothing. I also love the river sounds in this game. It may just sound like TV static to some people, but I can tell that the developers meant for it to sound like water currents. Something about that stuff really draws me in.

+LanIost Well, as LGR himself says, the IBM PC and PCjr versions were a complete commercial failure, because people played their computer games on C64 and Apple II. The game didn't really succeed until the Tandy 1000 and Apple 2C came out. Not that I'm surprised. Poor box art + computer not really considered a gaming platform = fail. However, this is just another example of how sheer dumb luck can play a role in people's lives. If the Tandy 1000 and Apple 2C hadn't come out until AFTER Sierra closed down, an entire era of graphical adventure games wouldn't have happened at all.

Dentenshi Reignhart Have you played our game, Quest for Infamy?

Dentenshi Reignhart And how about: Heroine's Quest? Tale of Two Kingdoms? The AGDI Kings Quest remakes? Their Quest for Glory 2 remake? Peasants Quest? Mages Initiation is on the way. As is Order of the Throne. Isn't that right Infamous Quests ?