Space Quest V: Roger Wilco – The Next Mutation

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

About Space Quest V: Roger Wilco – The Next Mutation

Space Quest V: Roger Wilco – The Next Mutation (1993) is Dynamix's Star Trek spoof in which janitor Roger Wilco finally becomes a captain, of a garbage scow, and uncovers a mutagenic plot.

Space Quest V: Roger Wilco – The Next Mutation in Depth

After Space Quest IV, janitor Roger Wilco enrols at StarCon Academy hoping to captain his own ship. He makes an enemy of the toupee-wearing Captain Raems T. Quirk, a blatant spoof of James T. Kirk, commander of StarCon's prize ship, the SCS Goliath, and cheats his way through an aptitude test. Ambassador Beatrice Wankmeister, the woman Roger's future son told him he would marry, arrives to investigate toxic dumping across the galaxy, and Quirk takes the job. Roger, meanwhile, gets his own command: the SCS Eureka, a garbage scow that works like a giant vacuum cleaner.

With his crew, including chief engineer Cliffy, a spoof of Scotty, Roger collects rubbish, adopts a facehugger as a pet, outwits WD40, a homicidal gynoid sent by the company that pursued him in Space Quest III, and captures her cloaking device. He breaks Cliffy out of a bar's brig after a brawl with the Goliath's crew, and on a barren planet finds colonists turned into mutants, with a canister from a genetics company dumped nearby. The game parodies Star Trek's ships, crews and episodes, along with films such as Alien and The Fly. Computer Gaming World's Charles Ardai found it both funny and suspenseful, praising its "first-rate" graphics and sound and dialogue "written with a dry wit and a sense of character".

Making Space Quest V: Roger Wilco – The Next Mutation

Mark Crowe had moved to Dynamix after Space Quest IV, so the fifth game was developed there and released by Sierra On-Line for MS-DOS on 5 February 1993. It was the only Space Quest, and Sierra's second game after Leisure Suit Larry 5, to carry real-world sponsorship, and Sierra gave it away to customers signing up with Sprint. Critics welcomed it as a fun addition to the series, Ardai concluding that "even the most demanding Wilcophiles will be pleased". Space Quest 6 followed in 1995.

Space Quest V: Roger Wilco – The Next Mutation Trivia

It was the first Space Quest designed by Mark Crowe alone, without Scott Murphy.
It was the first Space Quest made outside Sierra, by sister company Dynamix.
It was sponsored by Sprint, whose logo appears after transmissions and on a billboard.
A character mocks MCI's "Friends & Aliens" plan.
Unlike Space Quest IV, it had no voiced version.