Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero

About Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero

Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero (1989), first released as Hero's Quest, is the Coles' Sierra adventure with role-playing statistics, offering three character classes and an open valley to save from the ogress Baba Yaga.

Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero in Depth

In the valley barony of Spielburg, the ogress Baba Yaga has cursed the land and the baron who tried to drive her out. His daughter has vanished, his son has been turned into a bear, and monsters and brigands roam the valley. The hero, a fresh graduate of the Famous Adventurer's Correspondence School, named and chosen by the player, battles brigands and kobolds, finds lost items and spell ingredients and helps a dryad, a hermit and furry creatures called Meeps, meeting recurring characters such as the wizard Erasmus and his familiar Fenrus. The game is open-ended, with quests solvable in any order; the best ending frees the baronet, thwarts Baba Yaga and frees the baron's daughter Elsa, who has been cursed into the brigand leader, before the hero leaves on a magic carpet for Shapeir.

Billed as "three games in one", it was the first Sierra game to offer a choice of class, Fighter, Magic User or Thief, which shapes starting equipment, solutions and quests, though skills from other classes can be learned. Time passes between day and night, the hero must eat and rest, and skills rise through use rather than levels, so casting spells raises magic and fighting, training or even cleaning the baron's stables builds strength, vitality and agility. The original used a text parser; the 1992 remake is point-and-click.

Making Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero

Corey Cole and Lori Ann Cole designed it for Sierra On-Line on MS-DOS, aiming for a game "as much about story as it was about combat and exploration", drawn from various folklore sources, though many planned features were cut to finish in time. Amiga, Atari ST and PC-9801 ports followed. It sold 130,000 copies in its first year and over 250,000 in its first few years, one of Sierra's fastest sellers according to Corey Cole, and is credited as genre-defining for its mix of adventure and role-playing. Computer Gaming World's Scorpia called it "a definite winner", and the magazine named it Adventure Game of the Year for 1990, later ranking it 15th among the most innovative computer games. The 1992 VGA remake used SCI1.1, dialogue menus, hand-drawn scanned art and clay-model stop-motion fights; Compute! called it "a must-buy", and Macworld named it the best role-playing game of 1994, calling it "a kinder, gentler form of role-playing game". It began the Quest for Glory series, continuing with Trial by Fire.