King's Quest

1984 · Adventure · PC/DOS

Overview

King's Quest (1984) is Roberta Williams' Sierra adventure for the IBM PCjr, the first graphic adventure with a hero players walk around an animated world.

Deep Dive

King's Quest: Quest for the Crown sends Sir Graham across the kingdom of Daventry to recover three stolen treasures and earn the throne. Players type commands into a parser but walk Graham freely around each screen, a first for graphic adventures, and the world is full of hazards that can end the game in an instant. IBM commissioned it to show off the PCjr; the computer flopped, but the game launched Sierra's most successful series, which ran to eight instalments.

Developer Story

King's Quest was designed by Roberta Williams at Sierra On-Line in 1984. It was created as a showcase for IBM's PCjr computer and was the first graphical adventure game with an animated protagonist who moved around the screen. Williams had designed Mystery House (1980) with her husband Ken, one of the first graphical text adventures. King's Quest transformed adventure games from text parsers into visual worlds and launched Sierra's most successful franchise.

Did You Know?

King's Quest was commissioned by IBM as a showcase for the PCjr — a computer that failed commercially, while the game it spawned became a decade-long franchise.
Characters could be killed by falling into pits, being eaten by a dragon, or dozens of other hazards — adventure game deaths were Roberta Williams' signature.
Williams and her husband Ken founded Sierra On-Line in their living room in 1979, building one of the most important game companies of the 1980s.
The King's Quest series ran to eight games, with the eighth released in 1998 — a 14-year franchise spawned from an IBM showcase demo.

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