King's Quest

Sierra On-Line · Since 1984

Sierra On-Line's flagship adventure game series defined the graphical adventure game genre, pioneering animated characters in a three-dimensional space before adventure games had established visual conventions.

King's Quest: Quest for the Crown (1984) was commissioned by IBM as a demonstration program for its PCjr computer — a graphic adventure game that moved an animated character through a fully depicted fantasy world. Designer Roberta Williams created a fairy-tale world drawn from European folklore where players navigated a knight named Graham through a kingdom, solving puzzles by collecting items and interacting with characters. The game's animated protagonist in a scrollable world was a significant departure from the static or text-based adventure games that preceded it. Sierra's adventure game engine — the Adventure Game Interpreter — powered King's Quest through its eighth entry and dozens of other Sierra series: Space Quest, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and Quest for Glory all used variants of the same engine. The parser system, which accepted typed commands, demanded creative problem-solving from players who had to determine not just what to do but which verb Sierra's vocabulary accepted for the intended action. Sierra's willingness to include unwinnable states and player deaths — handled with often-humorous death messages — distinguished its design philosophy from LucasArts' more player-protective approach. King's Quest III (1986) and King's Quest V (1990) represent different peaks of the series: the third for its narrative twist (revealing the protagonist Gwydion's true identity), the fifth for its VGA graphics that established the visual standard for adventure games of the early 1990s. The franchise's eight entries sold millions of copies and made Roberta Williams one of the most commercially successful game designers of her era.