Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers

About Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers

Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers (1991) is Sierra's comic adventure in which the janitor Roger Wilco leaps between past and future Space Quest games to stop the reborn Sludge Vohaul.

Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers in Depth

Heading home to Xenon after Space Quest III, Roger Wilco is cornered in a bar by androids working for Sludge Vohaul, the villain of Space Quest II, now reborn in the future and bent on revenge. Two soldiers save him and push him through a rift in time to a ruined future Xenon, which the game labels Space Quest XII: Vohaul's Revenge II, where Vohaul's digitised mind has infected the planet's supercomputer and enslaved its people. Roger steals a time machine and visits Space Quest X: Latex Babes of Estros, a parody of Infocom's Leather Goddesses of Phobos, where he meets his future ex-girlfriend, as well as a trip back to Space Quest I. Defeating Vohaul, he learns that the soldier who rescued him is his son from the future.

It was the first Space Quest with a point-and-click interface, like King's Quest V, offering icons to look, talk, use and, mostly for jokes, taste and smell. As in earlier Sierra games, deadly situations must be dealt with quickly to avoid a game over. Graphics were hand-painted in 256 colours and animated with motion capture. A mall arcade on Estros holds Ms. Astro Chicken: Flight of the Pullet, a sequel of sorts to Space Quest III's Astro Chicken and a nod to Ms. Pac-Man, in which a flying chicken drops eggs on squirrels, hunters and dogs until the cabinet explodes.

Making Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers

Sierra released it on floppy disks in March 1991 for MS-DOS and Mac OS. Designers Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe preferred to keep the text parser, believing it added depth, but Ken Williams and creative director Bill Davis asked them to adopt point-and-click and management overruled them to keep Sierra's modern games consistent. It cost far more than earlier Space Quests but was a commercial success, praised for its humour, voice cast and presentation. Charles Ardai of Computer Gaming World wrote that "there are better adventure games than Space Quest IV [but] there are few games that are more entertaining", calling the CD version "the perfect multimedia game". The Amiga release was less well received. Space Quest V followed in 1993.