Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist

1993 · Point-and-Click Adventure · PC/DOS

About Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist

Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist (1993) is Al Lowe and Josh Mandel's comic Western adventure for Sierra, in which a former gunslinger turned pharmacist uncovers a plot to take over the town of Coarsegold.

Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist in Depth

In the 1880s, Freddy Pharkas gave up gunslinging after Kenny the Kid shot off one of his ears, and now runs the pharmacy in Coarsegold, California, the real town where Sierra had its headquarters. Businesses are being bought up or their owners scared away, and the slimy Sheriff Checkum P. Shift is no help. Narrated by the old-timer Whittlin' Willy, the cast includes Freddy's sidekick Srini, the drunken Doc Gillespie, cafe owner Helen Back, banker P.H. Balance, schoolmarm Penelope Primm and Madame Ovaree, while Kenny the Kid is a cartoon of Sierra president Ken Williams. Freddy must deal with horses with explosive flatulence, a snail stampede, a diarrhoea epidemic and a fire, before taking up his guns again.

The game runs on Sierra's SCI1.1 engine under both MS-DOS and Windows 3.1, with 256-colour hand-drawn art, scaling sprites and a point-and-click interface. Its manual, The Modern Day Book of Health and Hygiene, parodies 19th-century medical texts and acts as copy protection: Freddy must make up prescriptions from its recipes, measuring out chemicals with his lab equipment. A wrong prescription sends the customer back angry but does not end the game. The CD-ROM edition gave every character full speech, with Cam Clarke as Freddy.

Making Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist

Al Lowe conceived it in 1992 as a spoof Western, citing Blazing Saddles as a major inspiration, and co-designed and wrote it with Space Quest writer Josh Mandel, who directed and produced the floppy release at Sierra's Oakhurst studio in mid-1993. Charles Ardai of Computer Gaming World called it "the Blazing Saddles of computer games", funnier than Leisure Suit Larry and able to "make a jaded player laugh out loud frequently". Lowe said it sold over 150,000 copies in roughly a year, which prompted the CD-ROM edition, and lifetime sales reached 500,000, though it had a reputation as a failure inside Sierra. He felt it deserved a sequel, but by the time the numbers came in Mandel had moved on.

Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist Trivia

Al Lowe coined the word "farmer-cist" by accident while brainstorming with Roberta Williams.
Lowe said that at the time "there wasn't a single Western computer game" on the market.
Lowe and Mandel also wrote the comic ballad that opens the game.
Game Informer named it one of the best adventure games of all time in 2006.
Adventure Gamers ranked it the 78th-best adventure game in 2011.