My personal gaming history: Playing King's Quest at school

I'm likely a bit older than most of you and while that means that I will likely see a real life "game over" screen before you do, I have also been alive for nearly the entirety of video games' existence. I have been there every step of the way from Pong to the crazy almost lifelike stuff that we have today.

In the beginning, the idea of RPG's was something that most programmers and enthusiasts such as D&D people, could only dream of bringing to a screen because there simply wasn't enough storage space on anything at the time. When computers started to be something that people would own, right around the mid 80's, RPG's started to come to life and even though they were very basic, we loved them a lot.

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Back then the pictures on the box were always going to look a bunch better than the games actually did and this was very very true for all early systems especially the Atari 2600. King's Quest though, of which there were many editions, was something very different from anything that most of us ever played before. It was a very difficult puzzle using the keyboard to enter certain things in order to progress. Sure you used the directional buttons as well but this was mostly just to navigate to other screens. The computers didn't have the power to really have any sort of great movement in these screens and a lot of what was going on was kind of left up to your imagination.

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Game company "Sierra" was pretty innovative for the time period and if the above screen looks like something that someone made in MS Paint, you probably aren't too far off in such an assumption. Things were very basic back then and I enjoy how they tell you that a "hard disk" is required. I have no idea how large (small) our drives were back then because I was just a kid so I didn't ask, but I would imagine that you probably didn't know anyone with even a gigabyte of storage in those days.

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_{This is actually from KQ2, notice the graphical updates?}

In King's Quest, which would bore the life out of most people these days but we found wildly entertaining in the 80's, you wandered from area to area, picking up whatever you could and then trying to figure out what the hell you are meant to do with it. There were certain key words that you would use in the command prompt such as "use" and then you would have to use a certain item. At times it would recognize what you asked it to do but for the most part it wouldn't understand because well, it was looking for very precise things for you to type in for it to do anything at all.

There were clues all over the place and you needed to pay attention because they would be useful later. Many of the things that you would find were just by dumb luck such as a tree that contains a bird's egg in it that looks quite similar to the rest of the trees. you really just had to try everything because when you type "climb tree" next to any other tree in this game, nothing would happen, except for this on.

Dying didn't have any sort of lasting consequence but there was no such thing as saving a game at least in the ones that I played. Despite its visual basic-ness we were enthralled, and the few of us in the middle school that befriended the teacher that had a computer in his classroom would really look forward to coming back to talk to him about ideas that we had for what could be done with various items that had been found. There was only one way to do the things right so when one of us would come up with an answer you were a bit of a hero for a little while.

You need to also keep in mind that this was the 80's. When we got stuck we couldn't just look up the answer online so you were just stuck until someone figured it out or spoke to someone face-to-face that knew what the deal was. Sierra may have produced walkthrough books but I never saw any of them.

It would be many years before I would have a computer at home because they were insanely expensive back in the mid 80's and my paper-route money wouldn't even come close to covering it. I find it amusing that schools would purchase these machines for "educational purposes" and everyone, including the teachers, immediately put games on them and used them for little else.

I don't think you should watch all of that but if you skip ahead a few minutes past the opening credits you can see how little we required of our games in order to get some enjoyment out of them.

I think that these games, as simplistic as they were, was the start of my lifelong love for RPG's. It was also a start of a minor addiction because I wasn't really paying attention in my classes anymore, I was instead going through my notes on King's Quest and trying to come up with a solution like a good little 9-year old detective.

Sierra went through a lot of changes being acquired by a bunch of different companies including Activision. It is currently the property of Microsoft and as far as I know they aren't really doing anything with it. I'm pretty sure games like this, even with modern graphics would fail badly in today's environment, but there was a time when we were super excited to let our imagination do most of the graphics for us.