I spent hundreds of hours playing the SCI-era Sierra adventures. King’s Quest IV was the first game I played on my first computer, a Hyundai-made XT clone.
I’ll die on the hill that dead-end game states and “just in case” save game histories were a critical part of the magic.
And the games were never the same when the text prompts were replaced by point & click.
I'm probably quite a bit older than you, but +1 for King's Quest.
The first time I ever loaded a game was on my dad's IBM PC XT when he wasn't around. He had those old slide-out floppy disk drawers. One of them was labeled "games". I had watched him put floppies into the disk drive and switch on the computer. One day he was out and I cheekily decided to try out his computer without permission. I must have been around six years old.
I opened the games drawer and pulled out a floppy of King's Quest I, put it into the drive, and switched on the PC (with glorious CGA graphics). It loaded successfully. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do anything in that game and the first eureka moment was when I was standing in a field and typed "pick up carrot".
The most notable takeaway from that experience was, I thought there was a real world running inside the computer and from that day the only thing I really wanted to do was mess with computers. I played all the king's quest games, KQ4 (The Perils of Rosella) came quite a bit later, and I loved it.
Lol, eerily similar experience, late 80s in eastern Europe. My dad had a 286 for work. I saw him start t a weird version of space invaders in possibly COBOL of all places. So when he was at work I had to figure out how to navigate to right folder, load up what I guess must've been like an online interpreter environment, load up the program, and execute it. But oh the satisfaction! The pride! The feeling of conquering the machine and puzzle! Following that I was on space quest rails more than king quest but what an experience - even if it were on black and white Hercules graphics. Being in east Europe all games were pirated. No manual, no details, foreign language. Playing mean streets without knowing the coordinates for places. And eventually spending first hour of dune 2 terrified of my trike falling off the island into the space chasm... Which turned out to be fog of war not a hole :)
I do think Kids These Days (tm) are being done a disservice by how opaquely polished computing environments have become. It's hard to learn about what is going on when everything is abstracted away and the guardrails work so hard to keep you inside the walled garden.
It's gotten to the point where cloud services and search interfaces are being pushed so hard that the actual filesystem is a mystery to people at a high school/college level.
My experience was so identical to yours, except replace Kings Quest 1 with Kings Quest 3, and replace “pick up carrot” with “kick cat”. Other than that I could have written this post myself.
This comment just made my day. What I didn't mention in my initial comment is that when people ask me, even today, "how did you get into computing and programming" that is the story I tell them. Of course, there's hell of a lot more to it, but that's mostly where it started. (That and my mom teaching me Logo on some ancient Apple machine)
It was Space Quest 1 for my family and friends. "Insert disk into computer"? "Insert disk into drive"? "Use computer to read disk"? Nope, turns out the magic words were "Insert disk into slot".
Now, imagine the same problem, but for a kid who didn't really have a lot of exposure to English in his daily life.
I both loved and feared those moments in early adventure games: all good, moving on with the story and then... am I an idiot? Is this part of the game puzzle, or I have to iterate all the dictionary words again?
I learned English playing Leisure Suit Larry when I was about 6, with a dictionary next to me, painstakingly translating everything. This turned into a lifelong love of adventure games, with the Space Quest games being an especially fond memory.
This was also how I learned the difference between ‘make knife sharp’ and ‘sharpen knife’, or ‘put can in bag’ versus ‘put can in bag’ (the latter of which actually worked if I recall correctly, with Larry stuffing the spray can and then dying, which frustrated me to no end for ages.
I always kinda thought that this is more in the style of what an educational game should be like, exploring with aids and the tasks being somewhat unforgiving, at least that worked really well for me.
And that will teach me to proof read, if I recall correctly then this was Larry 3 and it accepted both putting an air sick bag inside a spray can and the can inside the bag, the latter being the correct answer. It has been more than 2 decades since I last played the old Sierra games, so I might be misremembering, but it was all part of a really worrying suitcase bomb disposal puzzle near the end.
Don’t ask me how Larry stuffed the bag inside the can, but there was the same animation and everything. I remember being extremely frustrated with that, since the Sierra games are otherwise quite flexible in terms of accepting input. This was also why it was useful for learning English, since you could tell it things like ‘look item’ rather than requiring it to be “look at item’ and so on.
So I really loathed those cases where you had to be super precise, since they felt immediately off compared to the rest of the game.
Regardless good times, I think the best Sierra game of that era is Space Quest 3, which had some decent puzzles, a fun story and a hero I really liked.
The central puzzle of Space Quest 3’s first “act”—how to repair the hyperdrive on your crashed ship—has to be one of the best designed and most satisfying to complete in any game of any era.
I’m not sure which is more frustrating: adventure games where you have to find the right command phrasing or games where you have to find the one magic pixel.
The limited grammar of these early adventure games had such a strong impact on me that I write my to-do lists now using the standard “VERB [ADJECTIVE] NOUN” grammar, as if I’m the character in my own game. :)
Note how "VERB.NOUN"/"ACTION.ACTIONABLE" is functional programming while "NOUN.VERB" is OOP. After 18+ years in the industry I still find the functional style more fluild: DO THIS, JUMP THAT, SEE HERE, etc. :-)
Now I see that it's the games that did this to me!
I learned to spell by playing KQ1 and SQ1. Well, playing the games and having parents whom I could ask questions like "how do you spell 'search body'".
It's not just kids without exposure to English who struggled with typed English interfaces!
On the brighter side: I lived through that period when the games transitioned from text-based interfaces to point-and-click ones. What a relief that was!
I understand the nostalgia for Infocom games of people like Jimmy Maher - I also have a soft spot for beautiful and polished writing, but this definitely was a way forward for games in general.
I think the next evolution on it was classic JRPGs, like Dragon Quest/Warrior. There was still tons of dialogue, but the point-and-click was replaced by speak-to-everyone-and-try-stuff. It was still mostly linear, but it felt more interactive than just finding the right screen region.
I hated the transition to point and click, because it turned into "hunt for the right pixel" -- with text based games you generally only needed to be in the vicinity of the object you were trying to manipulate.
Absolutely, but precision was also a bit of a problem for the text based games. I remember Space Quest was the king of this, requiring frequent saving to make it past certain sections where a single accidental button press could cause you to fall off a ledge or step on something that just killed you.
If you, say have a movement disorder, this happens all too often.
Still I have so many great memories of Sierra’s games from my childhood that I can’t bring myself to hate all the foibles.
My favourite pixel hunter was and still is Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis :-)
Can't imagine myself playing that kind of game again but back then this semi-serious and comfortably safe (no real danger and no sierra deadends as well) gameplay felt right for the 7-8 year old.
Yeah, the pixel thing... Not as bad as most parser-based games but still.
But did the industry find a better way to tell a story without resorting to action-packed gameplay? I mean, Grim Fandango kind of slow story supplemented by visuals?
No offense to Grim Fandango, which is a great game, but for Sierra-style adventures, I don’t want to be told a story. I don’t want to feel like I’m moving on tracks through a ride, flipping a switch or solving a puzzle to keep the train moving.
Like the best interactive fiction, in classic Sierra games you’re interacting with the developers’ world to create the story. Free-form text input is key to this distinction. Play-throughs of richly written games like The Colonel’s Bequest are much more rewarding because your character isn’t limited to exploring the world via “look/talk/touch/use”.
Well, some of that free range kind of feeling can be achieved by introducing local non-linearity into the game, i.e. make certains parts of the game independent of each other.
Then, as the player progresses to the next episode the non-linearity would become a single step to the next episode, without any cross-episode interdependencies. Most well-designed adventure games have this branch-narrow-branch-narrow structure, where bottlenecks make sure the player is ready to proceed to the next level.
What was no very good about Sierra-style design is that they did introduce this non-linearity but there were often inter-episode links introduced. (e.g. "had to pick up this item a couple of episodes back it's late now"). So resorting to walkthroughs was the only way to avoid this kind of meaningless backtracking. It a very shady way to lengthen gameplay time!
I agree, though in the better games (most of them, I would say) this kind of thing was a) hard to get yourself stuck in if you were making a careful play-through and/or b) not fatal, only costing you the "best" ending or some final score points.
The best games (again, I'd cite The Colonel's Bequest) had numerous game-stage dependent side-quests and optional puzzles or secrets that made for rich replay value.
Overall, I wouldn't undersell the value of the possibility of failure & the frisson it provides over a carefully guard-railed world.
There's certainly an aggressively evil way to structure games like this. The first that comes to mind is Infocom's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but it's hard to escape the impression that the sadism towards the player was meant to be part of its charm.
You often had to take notice of the terms they used, and be sure to use those terms. That's why looking around was so important. In some ways those text interfaces were similar to crossword puzzles. They made you think, even as you described what you wanted to do.
The point-and-click UI was less frustrating, but there was also something lost compared to the text commands.
It would be sort of interesting to put GPT-4 in front or something so it could determine if you were trying to do a valid action and then translate it to the correct command.
Oh my... I called one of the helplines that existed at the time and asked for the solution to a puzzle in one of the LucasArts Indiana Jones adventures.
Yep, I'm sure it's nostalgia, but AGI/SCI have a special place in my heart. I played King's Quest 3 a few months ago through to the end and it was everything I'd hoped it would be.
I really wish someone would point AI at this problem and generate a whole bunch of AGI/SCI games. SierraGPT.
Those kinds of text interfaces for games would be a perfect use for the kind of AI we have right now. It drove me nuts when I'd try 10 versions of the same thing to find whatever noun or verb the programmer thought I should be using. They were also unforgiving when it came to bad spelling which didn't help.
I was grateful for the move to point and click adventure games. Pixel hunting was honestly less frustrating.
I remember those "just in case" saves. Sierra loved those 'death screens' I especially liked the Space Quest ones - reload, restart, quit.
In hindsight, they're annoying, and IMHO kind of bad game design. Getting to the end, and finding out that to win the game, you needed some random item from level 1, and now you have to go back and do it all over again..
Agreed. Infocom games were initially my introduction to text based adventures on an Atari 800XL, then moved to Sierra upon getting a 386xl. I started w/ Leisure Suit Larry 3, then played a variety of Space Quests, Hero Quests/Quest for Glories, King Quests, Police Quests. I also bemoaned the move to point and click.
Despite having an original Nintendo (w/ Rob!), those text based Sierra games were the highlight of my game playing youth. There was a perfect blend of imagination, interaction, frustration, that just felt so intimate.
I got my ass handed to me by my dad when he found out I had been playing LSL3 at a friends house. Speaking of the LSL series, we had mastered the whole "how old are you" quiz at the beginning of LSL1, and had photocopies of the bizarre copy protection solutions for 2 and 3. I think I enjoyed LSL2 the most, the one on the cruise ship.
I’ll die on the hill that dead-end game states and “just in case” save game histories were a critical part of the magic.
And the games were never the same when the text prompts were replaced by point & click.
Maybe I just hate the feeling I’m on rails.