The ’80s Videogames That Built Castles From Words—And Changed My Life

Sierra/Screenshot:WIRED

Sierra adventure games changed my life. They’re probably the reason I’m a professional writer.

The first time I played a Sierra game was in 1988, when I was 7 years old. My family had just purchased our first computer, the Apple IIgs. I inserted the first of several 5.25-inch floppy disks labeled King’s Quest into a bulky external drive, flipped the “on” switch, and waited as the computer whirred loudly to life. Suddenly, I was a green-capped adventurer standing outside a medieval castle, its flags flapping in the wind, a text parser waiting silently for my command.

“LOOK,” I wrote.

Although the genre ruled the computer gaming world in the ’80s, by the late ’90s adventure games had gone the way of Sunday comics pages and radio plays, fading in both relevance and commercial appeal. As the year 2000 approached, they were eclipsed by first-person shooters and action titles like Quake and Tomb Raider. Sierra spent the next decade pinballing lamely between mergers and acquisitions, its Half Dome logo the fading sigil of a once noble house.

Then last week, Activision made a startling announcement: the second-largest games publisher in the world was resurrecting Sierra as a new label for indie games. One of the first titles on its slate? A brand new King’s Quest.

As a professional entertainment writer, I tend to react to media announcements with a certain cynical optimism, even when it pertains to something I love. But when I heard Sierra was coming back? I freaked out.

Later, I tried to figure out why I’d had such an unusually strong, emotional reaction to the news. Was it simple nostalgia, the phantom pangs of my earliest, indelible experiences with videogames, or something more? I called my mom, the woman who’d patiently driven me to the electronics store over and over to buy games like Space Quest, Police Quest and Gabriel Knight, and let me spend hours tapping from screen to screen while other parents complained about videogames “rotting your mind.”

“It wasn’t shooting things, like in most arcade games,” said my mom, after asked why I liked Sierra games so goddamn much. “It was a story. The images weren’t always sophisticated, but it was more about the journey. It was about the quest.”

For a young, book-obsessed nerd, the Sierra adventure was the first time that videogames had ever felt simultaneously like both reading and writing, halfway between listening to a story and telling it. Sierra games spanned genres, just like books did: sci-fi, historical fiction, detective tales, police procedurals, murder mysteries, even bawdy adult comedies were all on offer.

But suddenly I was more than a passive page-turner; I was an ingenious explorer. There was a transfer of power that felt intoxicating: rather than being locked in an amusement park ride and propelled inexorably down the track of the story, I got to jump out and wander through alien spaceships, Wild West saloons, and fantastical kingdoms lined with brilliant purple seas. I was hooked. I spent hours tapping from screen to screen, typing commands and hearing the narrator answer, a call and response that felt intimate, powerful, even authorial.

At their heart, adventure games were always about the words.

Sierra/Screenshot:WIRED

As children, my brother and I quickly worked out a system for navigating Sir Graham through the bright, candy-colored fantasy world of Daventry: He controlled the joystick, while I sat at the keyboard, typing commands like KISS FROG into the text parser. He was in charge of the action, and I was in charge of the words. It was a division of labor that mirrored not only our relative strengths, but the way we had understood games until that point: as either visual action games or interactive text adventures like Zork. But King’s Quest was a fusion of the two, something that felt like the best of both worlds.

Perhaps the most frequently used action in most adventure games was LOOK, a command that could generate sometimes lavish descriptions of fairytale islands, haunted forests, and idyllic meadows. A Sierra adventure was an alchemy of words, pictures and movement that built castles not only with pixels but narrative description. The oceans of these distant worlds might have been rendered in only 16 simple colors, but through the eyes of the narrator, they lapped at glittering white sands in countless shades of azure.

Interacting with the world wasn’t just a way to accrue points or provoke action; it was an invitation for the narrative to unfold, a literary summons. The black bar of the text parser often felt like magic: Say the right words in the right place at the right time, and you could solve any puzzle, open any door.

Sierra/Screenshot:WIRED

Like many early games, however, the difficulty level on Sierra adventures occasionally approached “insane;” the Rumplestiltskin puzzle in King’s Quest and cat hair moustache debacle of Gabriel Knight remain legendary for their absurdity.

And where LucasArts games were humane, even merciful in their refusal to kill, Sierra games were more than happy to let you die for even the slightest misstep. Tap slightly to the right with your hero’s blocky pixel feet on a narrow path—especially on the 2-D trompe l’oeil staircases of earlier games—and tumble instantly to your doom. Games like Police Quest, Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist and Quest for Glory would sentence you to instant death (sometimes, jokingly) for innpredictable crimes such taking a shower, inhaling horse flatulence, even picking your nose.

It’s easy to romanticize the difficulty and limitations of the games we loved in retrospect (“in my day, we had to change floppy disks every time we walked two screens to the left, and we liked it!”) and even now some players debate whether Sierra’s masochistic tendencies were a bug or a feature. Rather than a merciful deity, Sierra games were ruled by an unforgiving Old Testament god. But like many people raised from a young age in a certain faith, I still worshipped them anyway.

Here too, however, the literary quality of the games gave them something that made the hair-pulling puzzles feel as endurable as the clever ones; you didn’t just want to claim the glory of defeating the final boss; you wanted to know how the story was going to end.

Space Quest I. Sierra/Screenshot:WIRED

While the earliest adventure games may never be quite as appealing for modern converts, by the 1990s the genre looked very different: the text parser replaced by a point-and-click, richer VGA graphics, voice casts and exponentially more innovative stories and art direction. Some of the greatest masterworks of the genre, like Grim Fandango and The Last Express, appeared just as the genre began its commercial decline, dooming their brilliance to cult obscurity.

Perhaps the most ominous portent for the death of adventure games was King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, a charmless attempt to add RPG combat to the legendary franchise and recapture the interest of gamers with what Sierra co-founder Ken Williams called “less pretentious” gameplay. But by 1997, even Williams had proclaimed that “the traditional adventure game is dead.” His reasoning, as told to Sierra’s in-house Interaction magazine, was even more telling:

What’s the use of creating these super-serious, overly literary, and downright studious games when the major audience that will play them played a Nintendo or a Sega last year? These folks are used to playing games where the correct answer to any problem might be jumping over something, hitting it with a hammer, or maybe even shooting it with a big bazooka. Why hassle through all the literary pretense when most of today’s gamers just want to blow something up.

Much debate followed about whether adventure games died off in the manner of an evolutionary dead end, or “committed suicide” through their inability to keep up with the changing tastes of gamers. But reports of their death were, in one sense, exaggerated: a small but vibrant online fanbase remained determined to keep them alive, not only through ROMs and (unsuccessful) save-our-game campaigns, but fan-created versions that updated or even reinvented the games they loved.

In recent years, the passionate fan attachment to games has even sparked a small revival, not only with “spiritual successors” like SpaceVenture —an in-no-way-copyright-infringing game by the Space Quest creators about a different space janitor—but new episodic series of beloved LucasArts adventure games like Monkey Island and Sam & Max from Telltale Games.

At one point, Telltale even had its own King’s Quest reboot in the works, until the overwhelming success of The Walking Dead left King Graham sidelined yet again.