In this episode, we’re going to talk about some of the other adventure games published by Sierra from Coktel Vision and Dynamix including the Gobliiins games, the Inca games, The Adventures of Willy Beamish, Rise of the Dragon and Funny Bone Interactive’s Stay Tooned! Sean will take you on an expedition through games you’ve probably never played. He’s Sean Jordan, and he is your Great Game Guide!

-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 7: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 5

Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.

You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)

And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!

-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.

Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)

Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!

--------------------------------------------------

SOURCES:

https://www.sierragamers.com/Heart-of-China/

“Inca People” song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdskBQ5uS-Q

--------------------------------------------------

Coming up in this episode –

We’re talk about Sierra’s educational adventure games including the Dr. Brain series, the EcoQuest games and Pepper’s Adventures in Time, and then we’re going to take a look at what Dynamix was up to with The Adventures of Willy Beamish and Rise of the Dragon and also what Coktel Vision added to adventure gaming with the Inca games, The Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble, Gobliiins and more.  

I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Consider this the B-side to last week’s episode of more familiar Sierra games from the 1990s, because we’re gonna cover some titles you may have seen or played as well as some you may even not be aware of!

When people think Sierra On-Line, they tend to think first of games with “Quest” in the title – King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, Quest for Glory, Conquest of Camelot, The Colonel’s Bequest, and, of course, Leisure Suit Larry, which doesn’t have quest in the title, but promises a titillating view of some body parts that at least rhyme with quest.

But I covered Leisure Suit Larry and many of those other titles in last week’s episode, and so it seems only fitting that we cover the opposite end of the spectrum now by starting out with the Sierra Discovery titles, an edutainment line that started life in the 1990s and which were geared more generally towards children. Many of these games featured an animated style that helped to sharpen the studio’s skills as graphical adventure games progressed from the painted realism of the early 1990s to the cartoonish buffoonery of the mid to late 1990s.

One of the most notable series is the quadrilogy of Dr. Brain games created by Corey Cole, which began in 1991 with Castle of Dr. Brain and eventually spawned the Island, Lost Mind and Time Warp of Dr. Brain between 1992 and 1996. The Dr. Brain games were marketed as part of the Sierra Discovery edutainment series due to their puzzles and allusions to science and math, but beyond the first one, which was the only entry in the series in which Corey Cole was involved, I don’t find any of these particularly special or worth recommending today. 

Sierra also produced two remakes of Roberta Williams’s Mixed-Up Mother Goose and a sequel called Mixed-Up Fairy Tales designed by Lori Ann Cole under the Discovery era. We’ve covered the original AGI version of Mixed-Up Mother Goose already, but I’ll note that the 1991 version came with digitized speech on both the floppy and CD-ROM edition and fully ported the game’s action to the point and click system common to the SCI1 games, though there are some differences between the two versions in terms of gameplay as well as some changes from the original. There’s also the 1995 Mixed-Up Mother Goose Deluxe, which looks and plays like an adventure game storybook and offers Super VGA graphics and lots of well-produced music to entertain the little ones, though it has some pretty awful voice acting. I actually prefer the 1991 version to it.

But Mixed-Up Fairy Tales only got one version, and it’s actually quite a good game for what it is. When it starts, you choose your gender and appearance from some pre-selected avatars and begin wandering around a fairy tale village where, as you might expect from the title, things need to be set right so you can help various fairy tale characters from the tales of Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, Jack and the Beanstalk and the animals who intend to become the Bremen Town Musicians complete their stories. The game looks great and has a wonderful soundtrack of arrangements from classical music. If you have an hour or two to kill with a little one and don’t mind reading the text to them, it’s a decent time.

The Sierra Discovery series had a few other games as well. The 1992 game Quarky & Quaysoo's Turbo Science was produced by Jeff Tunnell Productions. If you don’t know who Jeff Tunnell is, by the way, he was one of the co-founders of Dynamix, which we’ll talk about in a bit, and he broke off in 1990 to form his own development studio, which created games like The Incredible Machine, Sid & Al’s Incredible Toons and 3-D Ultra Pinball. His team also made three graphical adventure games we’ll cover in more detail when we talk about Dynamix later in this episode.

Quarky & Quaysoo's Turbo Science is about two space creatures who race around with other aliens using science to help their vehicles gain an edge. The game’s broken up into animated screens where you answer quiz questions about various science-related events before you hop in your vehicle and move on to the next checkpoint. It’s well-animated and mildly fun for an educational title, but a bit tedious due to all the pop-ups with science questions you need to answer to advance. What’s most notable about this game is its emphasis on strategy, which is a bit unusual for an adventure game – it actually rewards skillful play and encourages players to learn to answer questions correctly so they can beef up their racing gear earlier on in the game.

1993’s Pepper's Adventures in Time is a more conventional point and click adventure game with a red-haired girl named Pepper traveling to different eras in time to save her dog, Lockjaw. While it doesn’t feature voice acting, the game’s dialogue is presented in cartoon bubbles. This game is actually a legitimately decent adventure that’s mildly educational but also quite funny, perhaps because it was designed by many of Sierra’s all-stars, including Bill Davis, Mark Seibert, Jane Jensen, Josh Mandel, Gano Haine and Lorelai Shannon, who’d all worked on many of the Sierra games most people know today. The game’s graphics and animation are also wonderful, very much portrayed in the same quirky style of the Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network shows of the 1990s. If you’re a fan of the Hoagie section of LucasArt’s Day of the Tentacle where you get to interact with the founding fathers of the United States, you will love this game. It even has a scene with Benjamin Franklin and a mad scientist character named Uncle Fred!

Sierra Discovery’s EcoQuest series is also worthwhile, less an educational series than a product of the sort of preachy environmentalism of the early 1990s that spawned things like Free Willy and Captain Planet and the Planeteers.

The first game, 1991’s EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus, was created by Bill Davis and designed by Gano Haine and Jane Jensen, and it’s an easy point and click adventure where a ten-year-old boy named Adam Greene befriends a distressed dolphin named Delphineus, who happens to be able to speak perfect English for some reason. The two eventually head out on a journey to the undersea kingdom of Eluria in search of a whale king named Cetus, with Adam learning about underwater ecosystems and pollution and marine conservation along the way.

The 1992 sequel, which is simply titled Lost Secret of the Rainforest, was this time led by Gano Haine and features a slightly older Adam now able to speak to all sorts of animals – and y’know, that was probably how they should have played things in the first game, just making Adam a Dr. Doolittle type from the start.

This time, Adam’s on the ground above, exploring tropical rainforests in search of some medicine to help a distressed tribe. I personally think this game’s a little more interesting than the first EcoQuest, but also guilty of the white savior narrative you often see with stories about indigenous tribes. It also gets a little Indiana Jones-ish towards the end when you start exploring ruins. I’d recommend giving this one a try if you haven’t, because it is a fun and worthwhile adventure that’s not nearly as preachy as you might assume.

But a word of warning - if you like voice acting in your adventure games, only the first EcoQuest got an upgrade to a multimedia talkie edition.

Alongside Sierra’s edutainment series, the publisher was also busy localizing games from the French publisher Coktel Vision that also had a strong appeal to children. Ken Williams had already had Sierra localize some Japanese action titles like Thexder, Silpheed, Sorcerian and Zeliard from Game Arts, but the Coktel Vision games were a better fit for the publisher because many of them were adventure games. In fact, with the exception of the educational series Adibou and a few of their earlier games, Sierra published almost everything Coktel Vision developed from 1990 through 1996 and even decided to purchase them, with a sale closing in 1993. Coktel Vision remained a part of Sierra throughout the 1990s, and while I won’t bore you again with the convoluted history lesson of late 1990s mergers and acquisitions in software publishing that eventually knocked Sierra out of business, let’s just say that by the early 2000s, Coktel Vision was a shadow of its former self.

But in the 1990s, it was still a popular and exciting European studio that produced some really interesting games, many of which were directed by Muriel Tramis, who’s often known as “The Roberta Williams of France.” We talked about her in the previous episode of this show, but we didn’t get to her most famous series, co-created with the artist Pierre Gilhodes: Gobliiins, which currently just released its sixth installment, by the way, but which debuted in Europe in 1991 and saw its first three games come out in 1992 through 1994 in North America through Sierra.

The premise of the original game is that you control three goblins – which is why the game’s title has three I’s in the word Gobliiins – and solve puzzles to locate some magic components so you can stop an evil wizard and rescue your king. This is not a traditional adventure game, because it’s broken up into single-screen levels, but the point and click interface makes it really feel like one. Each of your three goblins has a different power and personality, and the result is a game that feels like a cross between Lemmings and The Lost Vikings. It’s really fun and original, and I highly recommend it today!

The second game, Gobliins 2: The Prince Buffoon, only has two I’s in its name because you only control two goblins this time around. This one feels more like an actual adventure game because you pick up items and move between screens to accomplish goals. The third game, Goblins 3, has one I in its name because – guess what? Just one goblin this time around! But Sierra for some dumb reason decided to call it Goblins Quest 3. Instead of controlling multiple goblins this time around, your lone character recruits sidekicks to help out with different tasks.

Coktel Vision is long gone, but Gobliiins lives on thanks to Pierre Gilhodes. The more recent games from 2009, 2023 and yes, this year, 2026 all feature the same art style and characters as well as the goofy pseudo-speak gibberish the characters make when they talk. The fourth and fifth chapters both have three I’s in their name, so they take after the style of the original game. And the sixth chapter, which has two I’s in its name, is a direct sequel to Gobliins 2 and certainly the best-looking game in the series thanks to some really gorgeous painted artwork and awesome animations.

I’m so glad these games are still a thing, and I’m also glad I got a chance to explain their odd naming convention to listeners who actually might care about it!

Coktel Vision also produced another game series in a cartoony style called Playtoons. There were five of these, all released between 1994 and 1995, and while they are really more like living storybooks and aren’t adventure games in the traditional sense, their big idea was that players could create animations from assets included in the stories they owned. Unfortunately, the fifth game never got released outside of Europe, and I don’t think the other four sold very well based on the scant information I’ve been able to find on them. Each of the games has such a distinctive European look that they’re not nearly as interesting as something like Sid & Al’s Incredible Toons, which was definitely better tuned to the sensibilities of an American audience.

Likewise, I don’t think Coktel Vision found too much success in North America with The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the  Schnibble, a 1994 point and click adventure game directed by Muriel Tramis and once again featuring the visual style of Pierre Gilhodes. This game is sometimes presumed to be a part of the Gobliiins series, but it’s actually a standalone game set in its own continuity.

So in The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the  Schnibble, you play as Woodruff, a wild man who wakes up outside the house of Professor Azimuth having forgotten pretty much everything, including why he’s disturbed to find a button from a missing teddy bear, why society is prejudiced against creatures called “boozooks” and why he can’t remember the meaning of the word “schnibble.” He also has forgotten – or perhaps never learned – how to read, so none of the local literature or signage around town can help him. Oh, and he doesn’t have any shoes, which is a problem he has to solve almost immediately in the game to progress.

And so Woodruff has to get his bearings by wandering around and talking to people, many of whom are self-absorbed and who speak cryptically about the Schnibble, which to some is a force for good that makes the world a better place, but to a sad boozook seems to be some sort of messiah and to a cult of believers seems to be a roaming beast who punishes the unrighteous.

If you haven’t picked up on it already, this game involves a lot of made up words to keep straight in your head, including “tobozon,” which is a sort of tablet-like device where you can input nonsensical strings of words to see recordings of things like a message from Professor Azimuth or the local news. The game even makes fun of how odd all of this is with a brief cutscene where one of the game’s animators is sitting near his computer, reading the script and questioning what he’s being asked to depict. This sort of fourth wall breaking is par for the course in this game, and if you’re the sort of person who loves to see characters doing zany stuff for no reason, hear fart noises when you trigger actions or battle villains with on the nose names like BigWig., you’ll enjoy this adventure. It has a simple point and click interface with a context-sensitive cursor and it’s well-illustrated and animated, with some really distinctive graphics and surprisingly decent voice acting for the era. Many of the puzzles involve making use of the game’s strange vocabulary to use the tobozon or compel other characters to act.

Unfortunately for gamers of the 1990s, The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the  Schnibble was probably a little too out there to be a hit. It’s not nearly as accessible as Sierra’s mainstream games and its French sensibilities made it a little too offbeat. The localization team also neglected to translate some of the captions into English, which means you absolutely must play it with the audio on. I think modern gamers who are more used to playing indie games from all over the world will probably find it a little more palatable, but it’s definitely a weird one that you have to go into with an open mind. I’d suggest playing the  Gobliiins games first.

But if your sensibilities are a little more in the realm of American animation, Sierra also published an adventure game in 1996 by Funny Bone Interactive called Stay Tooned!. It opens up with an FMV sequence that leads to a television where you take control of the remote and have to change channels to watch several different shows ranging from old cartoons to parodies of things you might recognize like “Whinefeld” or “The XXX Files” or “Steven Seagull’s In the Line of Danger.” But what eventually happens is that you stumble on a cartoon where the characters break out of the TV, and their escape cartoonizes the world around you, including your apartment building. A blue cartoon cat named Chisel swipes your remote, and you have to retrieve it in order to zap Chisel, his pink twin sister Pixel and the other toons like the neurotic cat Fiddle, the easily irritated bulldog Schmooze, the cheerfully aggravating dog Scoops, the mad scientist Dr. Pickles, the purple gelatinous Dad joke-spouting creature known as The Glob and a bunch of German accented-critters known as the Uberbugs back into their world.

Stay Tooned! is an absolutely wild adventure that’s full of arcade action sequences and other odd events and happenings. But it’s also not a conventional point and click adventure game because you don’t control a character onscreen. It’s more like a twisted, cartoony version of one of the MacVenture games by way of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. It’s the sort of game where Pixel the cat may steal your cursor, where the toons will lock you up in the Wild West jail cell you thought you were going to put them in or where Chisel the cat will ask if you want to play catch, toss a lit bomb at you and then, when you manage to toss it back and blow up an entire floor of your building, a cow dressed up like Smokey the Bear will pop up and say, “Only Moo Can Prevent Hallway Fires.”

And yes, that is an actual sequence in the game.

You’ll also encounter the game’s lead programmer Ben Howard, who occasionally shows up in the game in video clips. He first appears at the beginning to give you tips on how to play, but you’ll also find him in secret areas or breaking the fourth wall whenever it’s funny.

I love Stay Tooned!, and I cannot believe this game has lingered in obscurity for decades now. It’s filled with great gags, fun minigames and interesting moments I absolutely would have loved back in the 1990s when I was watching Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain and Freakazoid! on TV and it’s really incredible that this game got overlooked.

As with many of the other late 90s Sierra games, I think it would have benefitted from being available on a console system.

Sadly, the only way to play it today is the same way you’d play most of the games featured in this episode – by getting Windows to cooperate or finding an emulator capable of running it.

Let’s go back to Coktel Vision for a moment and talk about one of their most visually distinctive and ambitious series of games: Inca, which had two parts released in 1992 and 1993 in Europe and published in North America by Sierra in the years that followed. This series is about as high concept as it gets, taking the quest for the fabled city of El Dorado into space and pitting the Inca against the Spanish in a battle across the stars, complete with starships that look like Spanish galleons and Incan Tumi tools, Spaniard warriors wearing 16th century metal armor and Nazca lines decorating everything.

While these games were definitely an acquired taste in the 1990s due to their fusion of adventure game and Wing Commander-style arcade action mechanics, they have an impressive combination of full-motion video and gameplay that kind of feels unlike anything else you’ve ever played. The first game is definitely the better of the two, putting you in control of an Incan warrior named El Dorado who has to gather the Time, Energy and Matter gems to battle Aguirre, the commander of the Spanish army. The game of course includes a lot of Incan artwork and locations like Machu Pichu, but you also have to interact with the Mayans at one point in the game for some reason. Oh, and Inca has several mazes to navigate, though they’re thankfully made more fun by shooting gallery sequences where you blast digitized sprites of actors in Spanish army costumes.

The sequel is definitely ambitious and has such a crazy story I’m not even going to attempt to explain it. While I prefer the first game, I love them both and definitely recommend them.

I also want to mention that the both games’ CD-ROM edition soundtracks are incredibly good, and there’s even a soft rock song called “Inca People” by J.M. Marrier that really deserves to be played more. But the second game definitely is let down by a less sophisticated use of full-motion video and some really hammy voice acting.

Coktel Vision created a similar, but less interesting, game in 1995 called The Last Dynasty, but it’s less of an adventure game and more of a space sim with full motion video sequences that occasionally give way to first person puzzle solving. The story is sort of like a low-rent take on the movie The Last Starfighter, where a wannabe astronaut named Mel Raauq and his friend Dok make contact with some aliens and wind up taking control of a spaceship and fighting the forces of the galactic tyrant Lord Iron. It’s not a bad game at all, but it’s also not nearly as memorable as either Inca game.

As for more traditional adventure games, Ween: The Prophecy is another early 90s Coktel Vision game Sierra localized for North America by dropping the name of the adventure’s main character, “Ween,” from the title. It’s a distinctive-looking game with great graphics and gameplay reminiscent of the second Gobliiins adventure where puzzles are fairly sequential, but its sensibilities are different enough from Sierra adventures that it isn’t for everyone. I’d even caution fans of The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble about this one, because it’s not nearly as engaging as that adventure.

The main complaint seems to be that the game’s scant on story and heavy on inventory and object-placement puzzles, which is true, but it also has a strange, dreamlike atmosphere that includes some peculiar sequences where costumed characters show up onscreen in FMV sequences and speak to you. If you enjoy adventure games that are willing to go to weird places, Ween: The Prophecy might be a good one to try.

A less polarizing game is the 1993 adventure Lost in Time, which was developed by Muriel Tramis and released in two parts in Europe due to its size. And while this game has many redeeming qualities, I’m going to warn you right away that talkie edition has some occasionally atrocious voice acting in its North American version where it sounds like the same handful of people voiced all the characters.

The premise of Lost in Time is that a woman named Doralice [SJ1] is mysteriously sent back in time from 1992 to 1840 to explore a wooden ship that in her time was a shipwreck. Aboard the vessel, she encounters several different characters who gradually help her to understand what is happening. I don’t want to say too much more because the story works best if you know very little about it going in, but suffice it to say that this is a tale involving time travelers and Doralice has a connection to them somehow. This isn’t too much of a giveaway, because the game’s box is subtitled, “He plotted your doom centuries before you were born.”

The game is played in the first person and uses intercut animated sequences in smaller overlay panes to communicate movement, but it does have an inconsistent visual style due to some scenes being pre-rendered and others being hand-painted. The game’s characters are digitized sprites of actual actors, and the game will also occasionally cut away to a view of Doralice’s eyes as she investigates or speaks. It’s a neat trick that probably allowed the development team to conserve resources during a time when games needed to be able to fit on floppy disks, but the version most people in North America might have played is probably the CD-ROM edition, which didn’t have the same constraints.

One interesting facet of Lost in Time is that it evokes some of the same themes from Muriel Tramis’s earlier adventures, including themes about slavery and indigenous peoples. This game in particular has some interesting relationships between characters of different ethnic backgrounds, and Doralice herself is dark-skinned and has an indefinite racial identity. In the 1990s, this was incredibly progressive, and that may be one reason Doralice looks like a white woman and most of the other characters are also white on the game’s North American box. In Europe, the box art features the ship upon which the game begins.

Muriel Tramis’s last adventure game published by Sierra was 1996’s Urban Runner, and it’s a tremendously interesting full motion video game featuring rooftop parkour chase sequence like you might see in the 2008 first person platformer Mirror’s Edge… at least at the beginning of the game. But the running hinted at by the game’s title and interface ends pretty quickly, and unfortunately, the excitement of the introduction sequence quickly gives way to  a more conventional adventure game where the tension evaporates as your character, Max, tries to clear his name from a murder he’s been mistaken for committing.

This eventually leads to uncovering a conspiracy that also threatens Adda, a woman who’s connected to a drug trafficking ring Max was initially investigating. And as plots go… Urban Runner doesn’t have the best one. After you escape the initial chase, it turns into a fairly nonsensical detective story that feels like it was rewritten several times to go along with the footage the development team was able to actually get from a far more ambitious film shoot that didn’t quite work out. Given that Urban Runner ran famously over budget and had to be a major hit to even break even, I’m probably not too far off in my assessment there, and this is a game with basic cable sensibilities, unconvincing acting, incoherent camera angles and a very bland narration by Max that’s delivered at a rapid speed but a flat inflection that makes it sound like the actor is just trying to get through his lines.

And I should mention – the main actor is Brandon Massey, who also stars in Police Quest: Open Season. Oddly, most of the dialogue in the game isn’t spoken during the filmed scenes but is overdubbed, and there are even scenes where the actors are pretending to speak but there are no actual lines of dialogue.

The game’s puzzles, for better or for worse, are largely simple and easy to understand inventory puzzles, and there’s even a hint system if you get stuck. Unlike Coktel Vision’s other games, most puzzles don’t require a lot of lateral thinking. Unfortunately, a few of them are time-based, which means you have to put up with some aggravation here and there. I’m not really sure it’s worth it, because Urban Runner’s story doesn’t pan out too well and the choice of endings are both ridiculously anticlimactic and barely changes what happens.

As you might guess, I recommend Urban Runner more as a curiosity than a great game. Unlike a lot of other Muriel Tramis games, it’s missing the sense of social justice that gives most of her other adventures more of an edge. It’s a pretty sad outcome because it cost so much to make that Coktel Vision shifted to exclusively making educational games from that point forward.

Unlike Sierra’s Roberta Williams, who had a hit with Phantasmagoria the year before, the “Roberta Williams of France” had gambled on full motion video adventures and lost.

And I want to be clear in saying I take no joy in that statement, because Muriel Tramis is an important creator who not only helped build Coktel Vision into one of France’s greatest game publishers in the 80s and 90s, but who also revolutionized European adventure games and educational software. She is often recognized as the first black woman who designed a video game, and she’s championed both women and black creators throughout her career and was even the first woman in France to be appointed a Knight of the Legion of Honour back in 2018.

So let’s celebrate her for what she’s done. She’s truly one of the greats.

 

In 1984, Jeff Tunnell and Damon Slye founded a software developer in Oregon to create a Battlezone-style game for the Apple II called Stellar 7. This development studio, Dynamix, would go on to create many groundbreaking games throughout the 1980s that used 3D polygonal engines and digitized graphics and sound in ways that were well ahead of the curve. In addition to a sequel to Stellar 7 called Arcticfox, some of their 1980s games included The Train: Escape to Normandy, Caveman Ughlympics, MechWarrior, Deathtrack, Project Firestart, David Wolf: Secret Agent and the fantastic arcade action-style combat flight sim, A-10 Tank Killer.

But Dynamix was still just getting warmed up when they were acquired by Sierra On-Line in 1990, because the games they’re really known for today include classics like The Incredible Machine, Red Baron, the Front Page Sports games, the Metaltech, Earthsiege, Starsiege and Tribes games and 3-D Ultra Pinball,

Dynamix wasn’t really known for adventure games, but under Sierra, the studio released five of them. One game, Space Quest V: Roger Wilco – The Next Mutation, was covered in our previous episode. But the other four are all definitely worth talking about as well, especially since two of them were quite popular and most really hold up today.

One of those games is Rise of the Dragon, a cyberpunk adventure game that’s so clearly inspired by Blade Runner that the main character is literally named William “Blade” Hunter. In the Sega CD talkie version of the game, he’s voiced by Cam Clarke, a voice actor I’ve mentioned before because, among other characters, he’s the guy who voiced Leonardo in the original Ninja Turtles TV show as well as Liquid Snake in Metal Gear Solid. It’s a little jarring to hear him in this game trying to be a hard-boiled detective, but I’ve gotta say, Sega CD cyberpunk adventure game fans of the early 1990s were sure lucky to have this game and Snatcher available on the same console. My parents would have killed me if I’d brought either of them home.

The original version of the game, though, was on DOS, and it’s actually quite a good-looking version that makes use of a limited color palette and lightly animated cinematic-style scenes to convey a sense of the same sort of dystopian mid-21st century Los Angeles the movie Blade Runner brought to life. The graphics are painted and drawn in the style of an underground graphic novel, and as the title suggests, the game involves a world in which Asian corporations and gangs have become quite prominent in society, which is kind of a defining quality of the cyberpunk genre. Instead of replicants, Blade hunts drug dealers who are mutating citizens of LA with a substance called MTZ, and while I don’t want to spoil the game’s surprise ending, I will say that this plot element means the title is far more literal than you might realize!

One of the most interesting things about Rise of the Dragon is that the game will occasionally break into action sequences where Blade has shootouts with armed foes. These are definitely the weak spot of the game due to their clunky controls, but they’re skippable in the computer versions. On the Sega CD, you do get better controls, but the arcade sequences are also mandatory.

Rise of the Dragon was very influential for its time because it played quite differently from other point and click adventures. It’s largely played in the first person and mouse-driven, much like the MacVenture games, but it also features dialogue trees and an internal clock that governs characters’ actions. The game’s story was surprisingly mature for its time and really felt like it was trying to deliver a more grounded, plot-driven adventure than the lighter fare seen in many Sierra and LucasArts games. Playing it today, it’s a little less impressive because so many of its ideas were integrated into the genre over the 1990s, but I still do recommend it – it’s one of my favorite games of that era.

Dynamix followed Rise of the Dragon up with the Indiana Jones-styled game Heart of China, and perhaps because we already had a great Indiana Jones adventure game when Heart of China debuted in 1991 and another on the way the following year, the game just feels less exciting than Rise of the Dragon overall. But it’s still a fun and worthwhile adventure game, and I do recommend it as one of those games you probably missed but still ought to play.

The plot, which is told through an opening cinematic featuring digitized characters, involves the kidnapping of a girl named Kate Lomax by an evil warlord named Li Deng who is holding her in a fortress in Chengdu. As the former World War I fighter pilot Jake Masters – but everyone, including the game’s dialogue window, calls him Lucky - you have to head to Hong Kong, rescue Kate and get her back to her father in Paris to collect your reward money, but the longer you take, the smaller that reward is. Your journey takes you through Mongolia, Nepal and Istanbul as the story twists and turns, and your willingness to build a relationship between the three characters and your negotiation skills has an impact on the story overall.

One of the interesting things about Heart of China is that you also play portions of the game as the ex-ninja Zhao Chi and as Kate once she’s been set free. And yes, I know that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have a Chinese character also be an ex-ninja. Chalk that up to ninjas just being really popular in 1991.

Heart of China also has a couple of arcade action sequences – one where you drive a tank down a polygonal 3D landscape with bitmapped trees and another where you have a side-scrolling duel on top of the Orient Express train cars. Both are pretty intuitive and fun but also, mercifully, skippable.

The other interesting thing about Heart of China is that the game has a number of endings. I haven’t seen an exact count, but I know that beyond the deaths, there are at least five mentioned in the official hint book, including one where Kate leaves Lucky in Istanbul to marry a princess while she returns home. The game will even tell you where the plot is branching so you can go back and try different things out.

I hope I’ve at least whetted your appetite for this underrated adventure game. I will say that it’s not the most culturally sensitive game I’ve ever played, but I also didn’t find any parts where it was playing on racist 1930s movie serial stereotypes quite the same way the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom did, so that’s a plus.

But enough of the real world. Let’s move on to the tale of a cartoonish young boy who likes to skateboard, play video games, torment babysitters and annoy his teachers and principal. He’s got two sisters, a terrifying bully, and a loyal pet and, of course, a tree house to hang out in with his friends.

And I know, I know, you’re thinking, “Did Bart Simpson get his own adventure game?” But nope, we’re talking about The Adventures of Willy Beamish, a point and click adventure game from 1991 that definitely has a lot of Simpsons-style humor and takes some clear inspiration from that show, but also channels the same sorts of creative, imaginative mischief you’ll find in the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes, which was also very popular at the time.

The premise of the game is that Willy, who’s 9 years old, is a master of the Nintari video game console and desperately wants to participate in an upcoming video game championship, but his low grades and the loss of his father’s job at a public relations agency results in him not only losing access to his video games, but also not having enough money to pay the $2,500 registration fee. And no amount of chores Willy can do on his summer vacation will get him anywhere close to earning that money.

Fortunately, Willy has some hope. A local company called Tootsweet that runs an artificial sweetener factory in town is having a frog jumping contest, and Willy happens to have a loyal frog named Horny who’s not just his pet, but also his best friend. Horny can easily jump 15 feet when he has the right motivation, but give him some flies and a Slam Dunk Cola and he can even beat the champion Turbofrog!

Things are soon looking up for Willy’s dad Gordon, too, because he gets a job managing PR for Tootsweet. But what he doesn’t realize is that the company’s president, Leona Humpford, is planning to set Gordon up to take the fall for a plumber’s strike she’s crookedly arranged with union leader Louis Stoole. The strike will eventually result in causing the local sewers to overflow and pollute the town, a crisis Leona plans to turn to her advantage since she also owns the town’s sludge processing plant, which the game suggests produces the actual raw ingredients for the sweetener. Oh, and Leona’s also behind the frog jumping contest, which is a ruse to gather all the tastiest frogs in town so she can enjoy some frog legs. This lady’s evil!

The story’s good and filled with great characters, but what’s actually most memorable about the game is how it looks and plays like a cartoon. Sure, it’s not quite as sophisticated as some of the later games from the 1990s in its animation, but it has a strong sense of art design that really make the town of Frumpton and its inhabitants feel believable.

Playing the game all the way through is like enjoying a lengthy feature film where the kid is smarter than the adults, but also rather innocent in the face of the bleak, toxic adult world that are threatening to crush his hopes and dreams. You know the main character’s going to prevail, but where you’re also excited to see what sorts of hijnks and misadventures he’s going to get into next, whether it’s trying not to push his little sister too high on the swing, battling a babysitter who turns into a bat, befriending Japanese tourists who are secretly a clan of ninja or literally flushing a giant toilet to dispose of the bad guys and save his father from being ruined.

The original 1991 release is a fantastic game on its own, but Sierra eventually released a talkie edition on CD-ROM and a Sega CD port that has some extra features. I will say that the voice acting is hit or miss, but the talkie version adds in additional animations for the characters as they’re speaking, so it feels more like a cartoon as a result.

If you have yet to play The Adventures of Willy Beamish, you need to play it immediately. It’s a classic and one of my all-time favorite games.

I’ve got one more Dynamix adventure to mention, and it’s quite different because it wasn’t developed by Jeff Tunnell Productions. It’s a 1996 adaptation of the Arthur C. Clarke novels Rendezvous with Rama and Rama II, with the latter novel’s co-author, Gentry Lee, serving as the game’s designer and writer. As you might recall, this was actually the second game based on this particular novel series – the first came out in 1984 and was developed by Telarium.

The premise of Rama is that an alien cylindrical object has entered the solar system and the authorities on Earth, having used up all the Greek and Roman pantheon names, have turned to Hindu deities and named this object Rama. The game follows the plot of the second novel much more than the first, and how that hits you really depends on whether you liked the second novel – many Clarke fans were divided on it. But I will say that both Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee appear in this game in some of the full motion video scenes, and it’s pretty cool to see a famous author interacting with his own creation and encouraging the player.

As for how the game plays, it’s more in the style of Myst with some full motion video sequences featuring actors mostly at the beginning of the game. Once you actually make it aboard Rama, it’s pretty much just a series of puzzles to solve and occasional bits of story. How engaged you remain depends on how much you care about exploring the ship and solving logical puzzles and math problems. There are a couple of events that occur to give the story a sense of urgency, but honestly, puzzle-solving’s the main objective here.

Sadly, the game hints at a sequel – Arthur C. Clarke himself even mentions it in the game’s final scene – but Dynamix never got a chance to make it. Sierra thought the game was going to be a huge hit and really miscalculated how interested people still were in adventure games in 1996. They should have paid attention to the commercial failure of another science fiction adventure game based on a famous writer’s work, 1995’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, which we’ll cover in the next episode.

And even more  sadly, Dynamix didn’t make any more adventure games after Rama. Most of their output after that was just sequels and expansions, with their only hits being Starsiege: Tribes in 1998 and its sequel in 2001. Sadly, the latter game was also one of their last, because Dynamix was fully shut down in August of that year and several of the core team went on to found a new development studio in Eugene called GarageGames, which would spend the next 20 years supporting its Torque game engine and working on commercial simulators and educational software.

 

We’ve reached the end of the road for Sierra and its development studios, and I’d like to close out this episode by mentioning that while I’m not sure Sierra would have fared too well in the 2000s as everything shifted to 3D, the games industry was definitely a far less interesting place without Sierra taking big risks and trying new things. As toxic and difficult as the Sierra workplace could be at times, the people who worked there often talk about it as being one of the best jobs they ever had, and the creative freedom many of the designers at Sierra were able to obtain from Ken Williams despite his primary focus on making a lot of money was pretty remarkable for the time.

It’s pretty much an established fact that the point and click adventure game genre died in North America by around 2002, and it’s only because gamers in Germany and Eastern Europe developed such a strong love for solving puzzles and playing through adventures that the genre was ever able to make a comeback about 10 years later. Sure, people credit DoubleFine for its famous Kickstarter campaign that brought us Broken Age, and Telltale Games did a lot to try to keep adventure gaming evolving as a genre. But the fact that we have so many commercially viable point and click games today isn’t due to nostalgia or a steady stream of remakes and reboots of older titles; it’s because there’s an appetite for new adventure games that these hardcore genre fans helped to create.

But before we can talk about all those modern adventures, we still need to cover the games we haven’t talked about from the 1990s.

After all, there were plenty of other 90s adventure game developers of note, and I owe you an update about what Steve Mertetzky was up to at Legend Entertainment and Boffo Games during that decade making games like Spellcasting and The Space Bar. And we also need to talk about the efforts of developers and publishers like Westwood Associates, Interplay, Adeline Software International, Humongous Games, Activision, Revolution Software, Cryo, Perfect Entertainment and MicroProse!

And then we’ll turn our focus to the multimedia era of the mid to late 1990s and the transition to FMV and full-3D adventures in the declining days of the genre, covering titles like Myst, The Longest Journey, Burn:Cycle, Chronomaster, The Journeyman Project, The 7th Guest, Blade Runner, The Last Express, Black Dahlia and The Neverhood. And of course we have an obligation to accept Douglas Adam’s invitation to take a trip on the Starship Titanic.

Then we’ll finally close by touching on the 21st century contributions of studios like Telltale Games, Double Fine, Daedalic Entertainment, Amanita Designs, Wadjet Eye Games and Quantic Dream. We’ll cover all of that and more in our next few episodes!

If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.

And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!

I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore!

 

THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRY

Before I let you go every week, I close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.

This week, I want to recommend Is This Seat Taken?, a 2025 puzzle game by Poti Poti Studio SL that started out on Android and received a port to the PC by Wholesome Games Presents. And this game is wholesome, because it involves helping a bunch of little anthropomorphic shapes find seats in a variety of social situations like movie theaters, diners, train cars and stadiums while also indulging their picky preferences. Some don’t want to shower, and others don’t want to sit next to people who smell bad. Some want to be near their kids, and others want to be anywhere but beside a kid. Some want to make lots of noise and have fun while others want to be quiet and read a book. And the game’s all about optimizing these situations in visual logic puzzles that are quite fun to solve and occasionally even challenging, though never in a rage-inducing way.

The game’s just $10 on Steam, the Switch eShop and mobile stores and it’s worth every penny. It’s fun on any platform and well worth a few hours of your time!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com

In this episode, we’re going to keep talking about Sierra On-Line and some of their other big games in the 1990s, including Leisure Suit Larry, Space Quest 4-6, King’s Quest 6-8, Gabriel Knight, Freddy Pharkas, Torrin’s Passage, Phantasmagoria, Shivers and more! Enjoy your adventure through adventure gaming with Sean Jordan, your Great Game Guide!

(NOTE: Blast this cold! Sean will get his voice back soon.)

-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 6: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 4

Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.

You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)

And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!

-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.

Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)

Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!

--------------------------------------------------

SOURCES:

https://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/234/

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-20-year-estrangement-of-the-two-guys-from-andromeda

https://www.filfre.net/2025/04/the-end-of-sierra-as-we-knew-it-part-1-the-acquisition/

https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-sierra-and-a-disgraced-cop-made-the-most-reactionary-game-of-the-90s/

https://policequest.fandom.com/wiki/Criticism_and_controversies#Police_Quest_IV

https://policequest.fandom.com/wiki/Video_Vigilante

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/freddy-pharkas-frontier-pharmacist/

https://allowe.com/games/fpfp/about-freddy.html

http://www.eufrasio.com/resume/

https://kingsquest.fandom.com/wiki/Daventry_Suite

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/tla3z/comment/c4nl8ew/

https://gkpages.altervista.org/Interviews/DesignerDiaries_04.html

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/LighthouseTheDarkBeing

--------------------------------------------------

We’re going to cover the rest of the Sierra SCI games including the Leisure Suit Larry and Space Quest series and even Police Quest IV: Open Season. We’ll also talk about Roberta Williams continuing to push the adventure game genre forward with King’s Quest VI, VII and Mask of Eternity and Phantasmagoria. We’ll cover Jane Jensen’s rise to prominence as an adventure game master with the Gabriel Knight games, explore Al Lowe and Josh Mandel’s collaborations on Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist and Torrin’s Passage and even touch on the Shivers series of horror games the far more obscure Lighthouse: The Dark Being.

It’s gonna be an epic adventure through the 1990s, and I’m happy to take you through it! I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Let’s delve back into the golden era of 1990s adventure games you probably have heard of, as well as a few you possibly haven’t!

As we discussed a few of episodes again, Sierra’s reputation for adventure game excellence went well beyond the family-friendly King’s Quest, the grounded-in-reality Police Quest, the science fiction silliness of Space Quest or the fantasy adventuring of Quest for Glory. In fact, one of Sierra’s most popular series, Leisure Suit Larry, was aimed at adults, and while it was far from the only raunchy software out there – Infocom’s Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Free Spirit Software’s Sex Vixens from Space, Coktel Vision’s Emanuelle and Megatech Software’s Cobra Mission: Panic in the Cobra City and Metal & Lace and Knights of Xentar are just some of the many examples of games released for various computer platforms that didn’t require players to put on a trenchcoat and dark glasses and buy the games in a seedy location in the bad part of town so the neighbors wouldn’t see.

Leisure Suit Larry was smutty, sure, but it was also relatively tame. In most of the games, you had to work pretty hard to see any actual sex, and the nudity was so pixelated even in the Super VGA games that it wasn’t too titillating. I’d argue what made the series so successful was that it was loaded with humor that would make adults laugh out loud but sail right over the heads of the kids who snuck into their parents’ bedrooms to try to play it. Even Larry’s continued insistence on wearing a leisure suit was such a dated reference by the 1990s that the subtext of gold medallions, disco dancing and flop sweat being masked by stinky cologne were all lost on those who hadn’t lived through the 1970s – myself included, because I only lived in that decade for a couple of months.

We discussed the first Leisure Suit Larry game when we talked about Sierra’s original Advanced Game Interpreter, or AGI engine games, but the next two games, released in 1988 and 1989, received an upgrade to the Sierra Creative Interpreter, or SCI0 engine, for both better graphics and some gameplay enhancement. In fact, if you complete the original Leisure Suit Larry and seduce the final woman, Eve, in the penthouse hot tub, Ken Williams walks onscreen after the fireworks go off and tells you all about the soon to be released sequel, which he admits they haven’t made up a name for yet.

But that sequel is actually quite different from the original night out in Lost Wages.

Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places), fakes out players with an intro that makes them think Larry Laffer has found a lasting relationship with Eve as he mows her lawn in his trademark leisure suit. She pulls into the driveway and doesn’t know who he is, kicking him to the curb and releasing her Scottish terrier, Brutus, to stand guard. After he takes a whizz on Larry’s leg (with Larry remarking that this dog looks familiar!), the game moves into its actual story, which is…

…kind of a spy/intrigue story? Really? In an odd twist, Larry wins a million dollars in the lottery, then also wins a spot on a dating show and is accidentally selected as the winner by the empty-headed, but very beautiful, Bachelorette Barbara Bimbo. They’re supposed to go on an all expenses paid month-long cruise together about the U.S.S. Love Tub in the South Pacific. Larry’s dumb luck has never been greater.

But Barbie turns out to be a little more cunning than her TV appearance suggested. She fakes being sick and sends her horny mother on the trip instead. Larry escapes from the ship and winds up on at an island resort that’s crawling with KGB agents. As it happens, Larry accidentally picked up some microfilm they’re searching for.

Larry eventually evades them by sneaking off the island on a plane, landing on the island of Nontoonyt and crossing paths with the evil Dr. Nonookee, who’s also searching for the microfilm and who’s also hypnotized all of the native women to serve him without question. And by the way, if you’re paying attention to those puns, here’s another one – this is a virgin island, by which the game literally means all the girls are saving themselves for marriage. And when Larry meets the girl of his dreams, a topless princess named Kalalau, he has to earn the right to marry her by impressing Chief Keneewauwau, a man who looks suspiciously like Ken Williams from the original game.

As big of a loser as Larry is, things go right for him in the end. He accidentally kills Dr. Nonookee, frees the island and gets married to Kalalau and we get to see them naked and running on a beach while Larry, feeling younger than ever, gets a happy ending in every sense of the phrase.

It doesn’t last, though, and we find out why in the third game, Leisure Suit Larry III: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals. Five years later, the island’s become a commercialized tourist trap full of condos and resorts. Chief Keneewauwau is now Chairman Kenneth and Kalalau has realized she’s in love with someone named Bobbi, who Larry soon finds out isn’t another man, but a woman. She announces that by the customs of the island, they’re now divorced. Even worse, Chairman Kenneth fires him since he’s no longer part of the family.

His pride stung and his job now over, Larry struts around the island in his trademark leisure suit, getting into a series of raunchy misadventures. And in many ways, this game is a return to form, because the second game actually penalizes you for flirting with women and tones down a lot of the more overt sexual humor, while this game almost immediately features nudity, sex on the beach and an enormously gifted statue Larry manages to pawn off on a tourist who loves to spend her money on stupid things.

But then there’s a curveball, and it’s a big one. See, there was this character in the second game named Polyester Patty who was part of Dr. Nonookee’s hypnotized harem. Five years later, she’s a jazz pianist performing under the name Passionate Patti, and for some reason, she falls for Larry, but accidentally lets it slip that she’s still in a relationship with someone else. While a crestfallen Larry takes off, you take control of Passionate Patti and have to go find him, using your feminine wiles (and most of your underwear) to track him down.

The game ends with Larry and Patti being captured by Amazonian Lesbian cannibals and imprisoned in a village. Al Lowe must have realized he wrote himself into a corner with this twist, because the pair open up the background, literally fall out of the game and wind up in Coarsegold, California on the Sierra backlot where games like Space Quest II, Police Quest and King’s Quest IV are being made using practical effects and soundstages.

Roberta Williams even gets annoyed as Larry and Patti walk on set and ruin a shot of Rosella inside the mouth of a whale. But she’s intrigued as Larry tells her he’s had some adventures of his own, and he winds up working for Sierra, staying at the Williams’ lake house and coding his adventures in Lost Wages into a computer while a topless Patti sits beside him.

Once again, Larry gets a happy ending as he turns from former software salesman into software developer, and there’s even a fan theory that he’s coding the SCI1 remake of his first adventure, which debuted in 1991 using King’s Quest V’s SCI1 engine icon system and featured far more stunning 256-color VGA graphics with more alluring portraits of all the girls from his first adventure.

And the remake also looks quite similar in style to the over-the-top cartoonishness of Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work, released the same year.

Before you ask, no, there is no Leisure Suit Larry 4. Like I said, Al Lowe knew he’d written himself into a corner and recognized that it was far funnier to make the missing floppies for the fourth game a running joke and a plot point in the fifth one. He’s also said at different points that there was a fourth game in the works for the online service The Sierra Network and it never came to be. Either way, the absence of Leisure Suit Larry 4 became one of the longest-running jokes in adventure gaming, and the series refers to it constantly.

And Leisure Suit Larry 5 advances the story to a point where Larry has amnesia because of the missing floppy disks from the fourth game and is working for an adult films producer and is sent out to record secret footage of three women who are going to appear on television on America’s Sexiest Home Videos. Meanwhile, Passionate Patti is working for the FBI as an undercover agent investigating the music industry. Their two independent adventures eventually dovetail and bring them together as national heroes as they meet President George H.W. Bush and have dinner at the White House.

Leisure Suit Larry 5 marks a high point for the series because it’s the first game in which neither Larry nor Patti can die, and there’s also no way to find yourself in an unwinnable situation. The game’s really more about humorous storytelling than puzzle-solving. As such, it’s a great game to play if you just want to check the series out, because it fits the modern sensibilities of what point and click adventure games are far better than the earlier, text-driven titles.

I wish I could say the same for the next game, 1993’s Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out!. It’s fairly easy, but it’s also a return to some of the earlier ideas of the series, like cheap deaths and goofy inventory-based puzzles. Passionate Patti is nowhere to be seen, and there are no other characters to play as besides Larry. It also has a rather jarring visual style because Larry himself continues to look like a cartoon character, but the girls and environments look more realistic, as if they were digitized from photos and paintings.

But more than anything, the formula just starts to feel a little tired, and the addition of Super VGA graphics and voice acting don’t help with that, though I will say Sierra at least hired professional voice actors instead of whomever was in the office that day.

Leisure Suit Larry 7: Love For Sail debuted in 1996 and takes a completely different approach, depicting everything in the luscious animation style similar to Ralph Bakshi’s smutty 1992 film Cool World. If you’ve seen that movie, its inspiration is clear, right down to naming all of the female characters after celebrities with sex puns for names, like Drew Barringmore and *ugh* Jamie Lee Coitus and *retch* Dewmi Moore.

If you want to play a saucy cartoon show, this is your game. But this is also where the series feels like it’s straining its premise to its limits. What’s more, it ends with a post-credits scene where the cruise ship on which the game takes place gets abducted by aliens while Larry’s in the middle of some nasty cartoon sex with the voluptuous Captain Thygh. Thank goodness we never got Leisure Suit Larry Explores Uranus, one of the proposed titles for the game, which was apparently in development as a full 3D adventure.

But the creative mind behind the Leisure Suit Larry games did make a couple more that I think are much better – a Wild West comedy in the style of Blazing Saddles and an animated adventure game that feels like a spiritual sequel to The Black Cauldron.

Al Lowe is a pretty funny guy, and if you ever hear him in interviews, he comes across as one of those people who likes to laugh as much as he likes to make other people laugh. So it’s no surprise that when he got a little bored with the Leisure Suit Larry schtick, he turned to some classic sources of humorous inspiration and decided he’d really like to do something set in the Old West in the style of Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles. After making a pitch to Roberta Williams that included accidentally saying the word “farmer-cist,” he realized that a pharmacist might make for a great adventure game character.

And so he partnered with Josh Mandel and wrote a lengthy backstory for his new character they turned into an introductory ballad you get to hear in the game about a retired gunslinger with a silver ear, a high S.A.T. score and penchant for pharmacology – and I won’t torture you with my singing again, I promise.

But I will say that the ballad is the perfect way to kick off Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist, one of the funniest and most fun adventure games I’ve ever played. The story opens in Coarsegold, California, where Freddy is running a pharmacy but is also troubleshooting various problems like overly flatulent horses, diarrhea outbreaks and a snail stampede, often using his knowledge of chemistry. Playing on old western tropes, Freddy has an Indian sidekick – East Indian, as in from India – and also a schoolteacher love interest named Penelope Primm. And of course he has an arch-rival, Kenny the Kid, a caricature of Ken Williams who was the outlaw responsible for shooting off Freddy’s ear. There’s even a cameo from Leisure Suit Larry’s grandpappy and several other nods to Sierra games.

Because graphical adventure games aren’t great at being action games but are wonderful at having gamers solve puzzles, the setup for Freddy Pharkas is actually quite brilliant. The game forces you to spend time mixing together concoctions and is able to introduce real danger without allowing Freddy to just pull out a gun to solve his problems. And even when Freddy does return to gunslinging and gets a rematch later in the game, it doesn’t go well and he still has to use his wits to survive the final act’s surprising twists and turns.

If you play the game today, chances are good you’ll be playing the CD-ROM talkie edition, and it’s a great version because it includes voice acting from some seasoned pros like Cam Clarke, Kath Soucie, Lewis Arquette, Michael Gough, Neil Ross, Susan Silo and Nicholas Guest, among others. Al Lowe himself performed the musical numbers at the beginning and end of the game. But the talkie edition is actually inferior to the original disk-based version in terms of the actual script for the game, and some of the gags and hints are removed from the CD-ROM edition.

The year after Freddy Pharkas debuted, Al Lowe worked on a very different game called Torrin’s Passage, this time designed to be a family-friendly affair that had plenty of cartoon gags for the little ones and some wink and nod jokes for the adults. The animation in the game is probably its stand-out feature, and with good reason – James G. Murphy designed the characters before leaving Sierra for Pixar to become a lead animator there, and he partnered with Sierra’s talented animation director Al Eufrasio, who also worked on games like Leisure Suit Larry: Love For Sail, Space Quest 6 and King’s Quest 7.

Torrin’s Passage reminds me a lot of Al Lowe’s earlier 1980s Disney games for Sierra including The Black Cauldron and Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood, which he designed and programmed, as well as Mickey’s Space Adventure, which Roberta Williams designed and for which Al Lowe composed the music. While it’s far more sophisticated and obviously a lot better-looking than any of these games, featuring lavish animation, an icon-driven interface and a deeper storyline, it still has a simplicity to it that really seems to be more focused on telling an entertaining story than providing a tough adventure. That’s not to say there aren’t some puzzles that need solving, and I suspect this game was probably a bit much for younger children in that regard. But as Sierra games go, the puzzles are at least straightforward and don’t require too much lateral thinking, and the game has a built-in hint system.

Whenever I play Torrin’s Passage, I tend to think of the 1983 laserdisc game Dragon’s Lair, because this game’s animation style is cut from the same cloth as Don Bluth’s lavish fantasy adventure. Torrin is an extremely well-animated blond-haired young man with a purple and green pet named Boogle who follows him around and helps him solve puzzles. Many of the characters in the game look like they’re straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon show, and the interesting series of worlds in which the game takes place, which consists of five different realms nested within each other, add a lot of variety to the gameplay. If you’ve missed this one, you definitely should play it.

But as fun as Torrin’s Passage is, it never quite achieved the same status of some of Sierra’s other games, and this may be because the game’s box art shows a bunch of crystals on the front instead of selling the kid-friendly, cartoony vibe, and it may also be because Al Lowe’s name was so synonymous with smut that adults were hesitant to try to play the game with their kids. It exists in a weird place, then – not quite childish enough for children, not quite adult enough for grown-ups, and not marketed well enough to crowd the family around a computer to play together. It might have done better as a console game for a system like the PlayStation, but Sierra never really got into making those.

And that’s a real shame, because after King’s Quest V got a port to the NES, Sierra missed a big opportunity to port the next three King’s Quest games to a multimedia console, where they would have likely found a wider audience. The 1992 sequel King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow would have made a great console game on a platform like the 3DO or the Sega CD because it utilized a more streamlined approach to King’s Quest V’s point and click icon-based system.

It’s also, of all the King’s Quest games, probably the best-known for its storytelling, and this has a lot to do with the fact that Roberta Williams partnered with an up-and-coming writer at Sierra named Jane Jensen. The storyline in King’s Quest VI picks up right after King’s Quest V and involves Prince Alexander striking out for the Land of the Green Isles to find Princess Cassima, whom he discovers is being forced to marry the evil Vizier Abdul Alhazred who’s running the kingdom now. If this sounds a little like the 1989 game Prince of Persia’s setup, or even like Disney’s Aladdin, which also came out in 1992, yep, the whole Arabian Nights motif was having a moment during that time, and remember that Sierra had also made Conquests of Camelot and Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire prior to this game, both of which featured Middle-Eastern settings. But the further you get into King’s Quest VI, the more It abandons this setting in favor of some other traditions like Alice in Wonderland, Greek mythology and European fairy tales, and this patchwork approach to fantasy is actually to the game’s benefit because it helps the story to feel more structured.

One of the most interesting aspects of King’s Quest VI is that the production team used motion capture of filmed, costumed actors as reference for the game’s sprites and animations. The backgrounds are also hand-painted and quite visually lush. The result is one of the best-looking point and click adventure games of the era, and the 1993 CD-ROM version is even better thanks to professional voice acting and a rendered introductory sequence video. Sierra even followed Disney’s lead and released a soft rock power ballad single called “Girl in the Tower” they tried to get played on radio stations by encouraging fans to call in and request it. By today’s standards, it’s totally cheesy, but this was a pretty bold move for a game publisher in the 1990s and yet another great example of how Sierra thought outside the box.

As Jane Jensen went on to work on her most famous Sierra game, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, Roberta Williams took further inspiration from Disney and decided to make her next King’s Quest game in the style of the animated films Disney was producing at the time, complete with musical numbers. And so King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride upped the production as it brought back Princess Rosella and her mother, Queen Valanice, to star in a game together. The result was a game that was both visually stunning for its time but also not quite sophisticated enough to resemble the Disney films it was imitating. Much like Torrin’s Passage, the animation has more of a Don Bluth characteristic to it, but because Queen Valanice is a little too regal for cartoon antics and Rosella is drawn like a Disney Princess, the cartoony fun doesn’t translate to the characters quite as well as it does for Torrin.

Even so, the animation is well-implemented in many places. Early in the game, Rosella gets transformed into a troll, and this actually allows for a lot more slapstick and exaggeration, which are far-better suited to the animation style. And the villainess enchantress Malicia is perfect for this game since animation allows her swirling robes and magical abilities to make her look quite fearsome and dynamic. Valanice also encounters many characters who are depicted beautifully in animation, such as the Fates, a headless horseman, a city of trolls, a ghostly horse, the goddess Ceres and King Oberon and Queen Titania.

And that last couple of names – another power couple, this time, from mythology! – ought to tip you off that King’s Quest VII is not just steeped in fairy tales, but literally is one, complete with the handsome prince and the true love’s kiss at the end. That is, of course, assuming you don’t get the bad ending where the prince dies.

But King’s Quest VII is also a logical conclusion to the series, both in terms of the story it’s telling and the way it evolves the gameplay to use a contextual cursor and a graphic interface that shows inventory items along the bottom of the screen. There are chapters and checkpoints and screens that actually pan as you move rather than staying static. And curiously, King Graham never makes an appearance – this is truly Rosella and Valanice’s story to tell, providing an exciting epilogue to everything that’s come before it.

Unfortunately, it’s also not the last King’s Quest games in the original series, though it is the last to feature Graham and his royal family as playable characters. In the 1998 love it or hate it game King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, Sierra decided to render the adventure in full 3D using a game engine Dynamix had originally built for the Red Baron flight sims. I’ll give Roberta Williams some credit – this game was ambitious, and the transition to 3D is very different from what you see in games like Grim Fandango or Escape from Monkey Island because Mask of Eternity plays more like a 3D action RPG with a clunky point and click interface than a traditional fixed camera point and click adventure. There’s even a first person perspective mode and a combat system.

I don’t really want to get into the story of this one, because it’s about a brand new character named Connor who’s a peasant, but also somehow a knight of Daventry who’s forced to save the kingdom from an evil magician – and you know, I guess that’s kind of Graham’s origin story too, but it feels a lot less believable in a more sophisticated game from the late 1990s. Anyhow, Connor has to restore the Mask of Eternity, which is broken by an Arch-Archon named Lucreto at the beginning of the game and turns everyone to stone.

There are some really heavy Biblical undertones to this story that are kind of out of place for a King’s Quest game – Lucreto is basically Lucifer, there’s an altar in an area called Paradise Lost and Connor basically equips himself with spiritual armor and a fiery sword and even gains immortality from a stand-in for the holy grail. I’m guessing this was more about Roberta Williams pulling ideas from European medieval folklore than anything evangelical, but it all strikes a different tone from the normal King’s Quest games, especially since the game plays so differently.

There are conflicting reports about how successful Mask of Eternity was as a game, but I remember it being quite polarizing among people who actually played it. The low-poly models, janky combat and aggravating camera definitely make it hard to love today, and given that it has almost nothing to do with the other games in the series besides some superficial connections, I’d suggest skipping it, though I do recommend the game’s soundtrack, which even inspired a musical sequel multi-movement composition by Donald M. Wilson called the “Daventry Suite,” which Sierra touted as “the first musical work of extended scope to be inspired by a computer game.” I’m not sure that’s actually true – Japan has a long tradition of audio dramas and rearrangements and covers and such to accompany its games, but it’s definitely interesting. I unfortunately haven’t been able to find a recording of it.

Those who want a more traditional King’s Quest sequel might enjoy the fan game The Silver Lining by Phoenix Online Studios, which currently has four of its five parts available online – though I wouldn’t hold out for the final part, since it’s been over 15 years since part 4 came out. But if you love the earlier King’s Quest games, you’ll enjoy seeing the game open with Rosella and Edgar’s wedding as they convene in the Land of the Green Isles alongside Alexander and Cassima as well as King Graham and Queen Valanice. Unfortunately, tragedy strikes, and game allows you to play as King Graham, who dons his traditional adventurer’s garb and tries to find a way to revive his children, who have been cursed into a magical coma. For a fan game, it’s really well-done, complete with voice acting and cinematics as well as some great music.

Activision also produced a remake of King’s Quest released in 2015 as an episodic adventure game. This game has no involvement from Roberta Williams and was developed by The Odd Gentlemen, an indie game developer behind games you’ve probably never heard of like The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, Slap Happy Sam, Wayward Manor and Flea Symphony. This reboot takes a lot of liberties with the original canon and reinterprets the stories of King’s Quest’s first, second, third and fifth games.

It’s a good and interesting take on the material written by The Odd Gentlemen’s Matt Kobra and Lindsey Rostal, but I’m unsure of who it’s really for. It’s a little too referential to the original series for new fans and a little too different for existing fans to fully sink into.

But if you want to hear Christopher Lloyd and Josh Keaton take turns playing Graham and other familiar voice actors like Wallace Shawn, Fred Tatasciore, Kath Soucie, Zelda Williams, Kevin Michael Richardson and Tom Kenney playing roles in a King’s Quest game, this is the one for you!

I think it’s clear that Sierra has a profound influence on me as a gamer in the 1990s, but so did a show running on TV at the time that has since become a comedy classic: The Simpsons, which was still in its golden years then. In one episode, the animation studio behind Itchy & Scratchy decides to introduce a new character, Poochie, who sucks up so much energy in his debut that Bart’s friend Millhouse grows agitated and starts asking, “When are they going to get to the fireworks factory?”

If you’re feeling that way now, knowing that we still have some pretty incredible Sierra games to cover, you can rest easy, because it’s finally time to talk about Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers, one of my favorite games of all time and definitely my favorite Sierra game, especially in its CD-ROM talkie version.

If you recall from one of our earlier episodes, Space Quest III ends with Roger Wilco dropping off the Two Guys From Andromeda off with Ken Williams to work at Sierra while he returns to space for more adventures. And like Al Lowe with the Leisure Suit Larry series, creators Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe had more or less written themselves into a corner with that ending. And so Space Quest IV opens with a scene where Roger is sitting in a bar, regaling the patrons with his adventures, when two robots members of the Time Police, armed with rifles and clad in fascist-friendly black outfits, storm inside and arrest him. They reveal they’ve been sent by Sludge Vohaul, the enemy from Space Quest II: Vohaul’s Revenge, and that they’re there to kill Roger and prevent him from stopping Vohaul’s domination of the universe.

But before they can execute him, a group of freedom fighters called the Time Rippers save Roger and send him through a time portal. He wakes up in Space Quest XII: Vohaul’s Revenge II, and discovers that he has to steal a time machine from the Time Police and travel through time to find a way to stop Vohaul’s return. If you can’t already guess, the game’s full of meta-style jokes as Roger journeys to other games in his timeline like Space Quest X – Latex Babes of Estros and even Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter in its original AGI glory. And you never actually get to play as him in Space Quest IV – that game only appears in the intro and the credits.

Beyond being hysterically funny in places and offering strange diversions like going to the mall, working at Monolith Burger and playing the arcade game Mrs. Astro Chicken, Space Quest IV’s talkie edition is perhaps best-known for its narration by Gary Owens, the famous announcer from the classic comedy show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and many other radio and television programs, including voicing the original iteration of Hannah Barbera’s Space Ghost. Sierra had many of its own staff provide the voices of characters in the game, but the cheesy voice acting adds considerable charm since Space Quest IV plays it all for laughs.

It’s strange, then, that Space Quest V: The Next Mutation, never got a talkie version. Part of this might be because Sierra delegated the development to the financially-troubled Dynamix, with Mark Crowe leading the time minus Scott Murphy. In this game, Roger applies to Starcon Academy hoping to become a starship captain in the mold of Star Trek, but after he cheats his way through his exams, his dreams are somewhat tempered when he’s given command of a garbage scow called the SCS Eureka. As Space Quest games go, it’s actually one of the funniest of the bunch, really mining all that Star Trek humor and also giving Roger a pet facehugger like you might see in Aliens. It also advances one of the plot twists from Space Quest IV, introducing Roger to Beatrice, the buxom blond woman whom he’s been told will one day be his wife, though this plotline is entirely dropped in the next game.

And if you play Space Quest 6: The Spinal Frontier immediately after you finish part V, you may even find it a little frustrating because the game essentially resets the plot by demoting Roger back to the status of space janitor and introducing a new love interest named Stellar Santiago, a character whom Roger ultimately has to enter in miniaturized form to destroy some evil nanobots. Santiago is a definite downgrade from Beatrice as love interests go – she has no charisma as a character and plays a fairly insignificant role in the story despite her body serving as a plot device. But this is also because Space Quest 6, in general, isn’t nearly as funny as the previous games, which is a shame, because it’s probably the best-looking graphically thanks to a cartoony style, Super VGA graphics and lots and lots of sight gags involving crazy aliens and hidden references. It also has a stronger voice cast of professional actors this time around, with Gary Owens returning to narrate.

Behind the scenes, what happened was that Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe had parted ways as development partners and while Mark Crowe was at Dynamix in Eugene, Oregon, Murphy remained at Sierra’s Oakhurst facility, but he was busy working on Police Quest: Open Season when Sierra decided to begin development on Space Quest 6. Josh Mandel took over as the lead designer and Scott Murphy was placed in a consulting role. But then Josh Mandel left Sierra as things began deteriorating there and Scott Murphy had to finish the game.

I want to add that Scott Murphy has always come across as a terribly nice guy, as has Josh Mandel, and I suspect the issue with Space Quest 6 was less about Mark Crowe’s lack of involvement and more about the game just not quite coming together creatively due to all the internal friction at Sierra. Scott Murphy has described Space Quest 6 as an “abortion” in an infamously candid 2006 interview he gave to Adventure Classic Gaming and also said, in the same interview, that his friend and Sierra co-worker Doug Oldfield contributed a lot to the humor of the series without much credit. He also indicates that Sierra colleague Leslie Balfour helped him out a lot during the final years, including during his fruitless time spent working on Space Quest 7 before the infamous “Chainsaw Monday” event in 1999 resulted in most of Sierra’s staff being fired.

I think that part of what helped Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe have such a fruitful partnership on their first four games was the fact that they creating the games they wanted to play while working in an increasing pressure cooker at Sierra in which their creative input was not nearly important to Ken Williams as his business interests. They were also getting a chance to work on the Space Quest games as a respite from their other assignments, which they clearly weren’t as passionate about. As they grew apart, they lost their ability to find that common ground. In fact, when the Two Guys From Andromeda got back together in 2012 to work on their Kickstarter game SpaceVenture, their partnership became strained again, and the game ultimately took 13 years to finally see release.

Full disclosure, by the way – I was a backer on that project and… let’s just say I’m glad they finally got it finished so we can put an end to that whole saga.

But as we close out talking about Space Quest, I want to mention that one thing that’s come across in many ex-Sierra employee interviews is how Ken Williams and the Sierra management often treated their intellectual properties outside of Roberta Williams’s projects as second-rate and less worthy of investment and promotion. Ken’s dream was never to run a thriving game developer – it was to make a lot of money. This is something that’s parodied all the time in Sierra’s games similar to the way that Saturday Night Live alums love to heckle Lorne Michaels. I’ve also mentioned before that Ken Williams often comes across as someone who made business decisions that didn’t make a lot of sense to his staff, and one of the series where things really got out of control was Police Quest.

Police Quest: Open Season, also known as Police Quest IV, was made after retired California Highway Patrol officer Jim Walls departed from Sierra in 1991. I’ve never seen a published reason why Jim Walls left, but it seems to be a situation where he felt it was the right thing to do. And so Ken Williams saw the opportunity to put the name of a different police consultant on the box. To the chagrin of many of his employees, he chose Daryl F. Gates, the former LAPD police chief who’d been in charge during the 1991 riots that led to the savage beating of Rodney King, a black motorist. The violence was videotaped and broadcast around the world, leading to a major scandal that took Gates and many other police officers in the LAPD down.

But I don’t want to suggest Daryl Gates was a victim of circumstance. There are few figures in policing who are more controversial or impactful. He was a reactionary leader who helped transform policing into what it is today, greatly expanding the police force, establishing the first SWAT team, running the extremely controversial and racist Operation Hammer in the 1980s, creating gang infiltration units called CRASH that were frequently accused of illegal tactics and racial profiling, and also helping to create the frankly useless DARE program to further sow hysteria and fear about the war on drugs.

And that’s just the short list. Suffice it to say that by 1992, when Ken Williams decided to bring Daryl Gates on and publicize his role at Sierra, he was one of the most polarizing people in the state of California. And his name was not only emblazoned on the box for Police Quest: Open Season and the publicity materials, but Gates himself appears as a character in the game.

I really don’t have much to say about this title as an adventure game. It’s a step down from Police Quest III in design, set in LA instead of the fictional town of Lytton and featuring digitized graphics and full motion video instead of the painted and animated graphics of the earlier games. It also has some tremendously hammy acting, homophobia and transphobia, a literal Nazi as a character and absolutely racist portrayals of Korean convenience store owners who speak in broken English and what the game portrays as no-good black people from the ghetto who are always criminals and speak in the caricature of street speak once known as “Ebonics.”

Yikes. There’s a word I haven’t thought about in 30 years.

I don’t want to suggest the other Police Quest games were any better in this way, and they all have their cringey moments, but here’s the thing – even Daryl Gates, perhaps realizing how bad the optics were given his reputation for oppressing communities of color, distanced himself from the worst elements of Open Season and blamed it on Sierra’s writers, which means much of the blame for the game’s worst elements was shifted to Tammy Dargan, the director and chief writer for the game and a former producer for America’s Most Wanted. She in turn in a 1994 article in Vibe magazine blamed the script on her purported reference guide for how black people talked in the 1990s, Fab Five Freddy’s rap dictionary Fresh Fly Flavor, a claim to which I’m sure Fab Five Freddy raised an eyebrow.

Cultural racism is a shameful, shameful thing.

Some people say that criticisms of the racism in Police Quest: Open Season are overblown, so I’ll leave it to you to decide for yourself. But this was the last adventure game in the series; the next four Police Quest games were spin-offs based around SWAT teams and included an FMV simulator, an isometric tactical strategy game and two Rainbow Six-style tactical shooters. These games definitely fit Daryl Gates’s reputation for representing the police as a force that needed to use paramilitary-style violence to keep the streets safe, and while I do like the third and fourth game as tactical shooters, they’re still problematic for advancing the idea that police need to be armed like soldiers and ready to shoot to kill the moment they see a gun.

Now that we’ve descended into the darkness, we might as well continue with Sierra’s actual line of paranormal and horror adventure games.

I’ve name-checked Jane Jansen quite a bit in this episode, but let’s give her a proper introduction now with the game she’s best-known for creating: 1993’s Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. And I don’t think I’m going too far in saying this is considered to be one of the best, if not the best, of all of Sierra’s adventure games, and perhaps even for the entire point and click genre. At the time, it was only a modest seller, but over time, it’s developed a reputation for being one of the greatest horror games ever made as well as for having one of the best voice casts of all time in the CD-ROM edition, with well-known actors Tim Curry, Leah Remini, Mark Hamill, Michael Dorn all playing major roles alongside a number of talented voice actors and character actors.

The premise of the game is that Gabriel Knight is a horror novelist and bookstore owner in New Orleans who starts investigating a series of serial killings that are being called the “Voodoo Murders.” Gabriel’s friend, Detective Frank Mosely, thinks the voodoo stuff is all hype, but Gabriel believes there’s something more to it and along with his loyal assistant Grace Nakimura, he investigates further and starts talking to local voodoo experts. When one of those experts winds up dead, Gabriel finds himself on the actual trail of a supernatural killer who has a mysterious connection to the past… and to Gabriel’s ancestors.

I don’t want to spoil any of the plot because I want you to play this game, but suffice it to say that this game winds up going deep into exploring the occult, the mythology around the practice of voodoo and a secret society of supernatural hunters known as “Schattenjägers” or Shadow Hunters, who protect the material world from the evil forces of the spiritual one. And though Jane Jensen his cited the 1987 movie Angel Heart as an inspiration for the game, the game goes well beyond that premise and reflects not just a great adventure, but a fantastic story told well through the conventions of adventure gaming.

The gameplay itself is typical illustrated point and click adventure game fare, but it has a distinctive look and feel due to many scenes that are shown at isometric angles or in comic book style cutscenes. The game was known for its gory sequences and voodoo rituals, and if there had been an ESRB rating system then, it would have been rated “M” for certain.

The 1995 sequel, The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery, is a completely different creature because it’s done in a multimedia style with actual sets and digitized actors, making it look much more like the Tex Murphy games. The story moves to Munich, Germany, where Gabriel is studying his heritage. When a local little girl is murdered by a wolf, Gabriel is asked to investigate if it might actually be a werewolf, and he contacts Grace in New Orleans and asks her to join him on a new investigation. During the game, you get to play as both characters, this time played by onscreen actors who supply their own voices and animations.

While this significant change in style, setting and plot might sound like the makings of a disaster, this sequel is regarded by most fans as being just as good as the original if not even better. I personally prefer the first game, but it’s Jane Jensen’s strong writing and design that ensure both games are truly great. And did I mention that her husband, Robert Holmes, wrote the music for these games? That’s right – they’re yet another power couple from Sierra, and they’ve since partnered on some other games Jane Jensen has made like Gray Matter and Moebius: Empire Rising.

The duo also worked together on the third Gabriel Knight game, Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, released in 1999, and this one is notable not only for being a full 3D game built in a custom 3D engine, but also bringing back Tim Curry as the voice of Gabriel Knight, though he sounds a lot less excited to be here in this installment. Though the other characters from the first game have new voice actors, this is yet another top-notch slate of voice actors and character actors who bring the game to life.

Not that Gabriel Knight 3 needs it – this is the rare adventure game that survives the transition to 3D and which elevates not just the storytelling, but the puzzle-solving by getting past the constraints of more traditional SCI-style games. One of the most famous elements of the game is the Le Serpent Rouge puzzle, which involves a poem broken into fourteen segments. Grace Nakimura has to decipher riddles within this poem and then solve additional puzzles that are revealed through solutions and additional information. It reminds me a lot of the Macintosh classic puzzle game The Fool’s Errand, which also uses interlocking zodiac-themed puzzles to reveal bigger and better mysteries, and I’d love to see more modern adventure games apply this level of depth, complexity and puzzle-solving satisfaction.

Unfortunately, Gabriel Knight 3 was also the final adventure game from Sierra, and it’s often considered a swansong for the genre since adventure games pretty much died in the years that followed. As we know two and a half decades later, the point and click adventure has made a pretty incredible comeback, but at the time, this game was seen as one of the best, last gasps of a dying era.

So, with Jane Jensen as the shining star of Sierra in the 1990s, you might wonder what happened to Roberta Williams when she wasn’t working on King’s Quest. The answer is that she’d returned to the roots of where it’d all began for her career as an adventure game designer – by having players venture into yet another house filled with mystery. This time, the game was called Phantasmagoria, a multimedia game spanning seven CDs and featuring footage compiled from dozens of hours of filmed footage captured over several months in front of a blue screen, which is one of the reasons the game looks so phony and unbelievable compared to its sequel, which was filmed on actual sets.

I want to mention before we start talking about these games that I am not a fan of Phantasmagoria for a very simple reason – it’s incredibly boring, punctuated with lots of terrible comedy and cheesy excuses for horror. Imagine playing a point-and-click adventure game where you spend 90% of your time walking around and looking at things in a giant, empty house while spooky soap opera music is playing but nothing actually happens, and that’s what you get with this game. Groundbreaking for its time? Sure. But fun to play today? I wouldn’t recommend it.

The premise of Phantasmagoria is that a mystery novelist named Adrienne Delaney and her photographer husband Don Gordon move into an abandoned mansion in New England that was once owned by a magician named Zoltan Carnovasch, known by his stage name of “Carno.” In the introduction, Adrienne has a nightmare filled with horrific torture devices and wakes up in bed with her husband, who consoles her and has sex with her. You might think this is going to set the tone for an interesting adult-oriented game, but no, Adrienne is going to spend a good chunk of the game just wandering around and pining for Don, who decides he’s going to set up a dark room photo lab in one area of the mansion.

And Don… *sigh*. He’s just this unlikable guy from start to finish, at first sort of seeming like an empty-headed companion who’s just kind of self-interested but gradually getting crazier and crazier the longer the game goes on, eventually going full-on Joker in the game’s final act. It’s not his fault; it turns out he’s under the influence of a demon sealed away in the mansion that Carno once summoned with black magic. Because, you know, a stage magician would totally be practicing actual magic and not just performing stage illusions. But it turns out Carno murdered all five of his wives when he was alive, and as Adrienne begins seeing visions of each of them, she’ll stumble across some rather silly and unconvincing horror sequences where she sees how each wife met their end in some silly, contrived way, like being force fed entrails through a funnel. There’s also a famous scene where she’s laying on a bed and a bunch of hands reach up out of the mattress to grab her, one of the few effects in the game that actually looks like it was done practically, but which is also sort of silly.

The big conceit of Phantasmagoria was that it was going to show the way to a brand new fusion of Hollywood film-making and adventure gaming. Unfortunately, the game’s just so limited in so many ways that it doesn’t really work in execution as well as it should. For example, though the story takes place across multiple days, Adrienne is always wearing the same outfit unless she’s in a self-contained cutscene. Why? Because Roberta Williams designed the game so that Adrienne could wander around the mansion in a non-linear way, which would have made different outfits impractical on a digitized sprite. Another problem is that the mansion and area around it is mostly made up of pre-rendered backgrounds that are lit differently than the blue-screen actors, so Adrienne’s movements through the mansion don’t look remotely believable. And then there’s the fact that the camera is constantly switching perspectives to suit what could be filmed, making a lot of that movement jarring.

Compared to some of the other point and click-style games of the era that used digitized actors in pre-rendered scenery, like The 7th Guest and Tex Murphy and Blade Runner and heck, even Gabriel Knight 2, Phantasmagoria just feels like an awkward evolutionary dead-end in the genre. Most games that wanted to do what this one does would wind up doing it in 3D, and for those that wanted to continue to use full motion video, the 1996 sequel, Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh, did everything much better, which is not a compliment to Roberta Williams since she was not involved in its design.

In fact, it was designed by Lorelai Shannon, a longtime Sierra writer who’d largely worked in the background at Sierra as a writer and designer, but who’s since become known for her horror novels and short stories.

OK, so let me say here that I am not necessarily in line with other adventure game fans when I say Phantasmagoria’s sequel is the better game, because it’s more of an interactive movie with some light point and click elements than a true point and click adventure. But let me tick off the list of why I like it better:

* The story is much better written and actually goes into to the dark, psychological themes that help shape a good, adult-oriented horror story

* The game has a far more mature outlook on sexuality, including an entire sequence set in a BDSM club as well as characters who are openly gay, bisexual or polyamorous

* The acting is actually decent, and while I’d say it’s more cable TV or VHS horror film than feature film quality, the actors do a good job of creating believable characters

* The twists in the story are actual, pull the rug out from under you twists that materially change your understanding of the game and its characters

* The tone of the story is far less Stephen King’s The Shining and much more in line with the unsettling extradimensional horror, open sexuality and body mutilation of Clive Barker, who Lorelei Shannon cited as an influence

I won’t say a lot about the story itself beyond the fact that you start off as a corporate office worker named Curtis Craig who is very uncomfortable in his own skin and who is regularly having strange visions or seeing odd things. Curtis has to navigate an office romance while he sees another co-worker on the side, make sense of bizarre emails he’s receiving and deal with the fallout of the mysterious death of an unlikable colleague who was killed in Curtis’s cubicle.

I will say that the game finishes in a very different place that it starts, and if you can see it through to the end – not an easy feat, because it explores a lot of topics related to trauma and exploitation so shocking it was censored in some parts of the world – you will be surprised where this story takes you. The “puzzle of flesh” hinted at by the title is pretty much unguessable. I dare you to play the game to the end to find out what it’s really about.

Provided you’re at least 18, of course. This game’s about as hard an “M-rating” as anything I’ve played.

I want to briefly mention three other adventure games Sierra published in the 1990s that really don’t get much attention. The first two are Shivers and its sequel, Shivers II: Harvest of Souls. Both games are in the style of Myst or The 7th Guest and played in the first-person perspective as an unnamed protagonist. Both are also heavy on puzzles and atmosphere, and both are also fairly nonlinear in terms of how you play through them. Surprisingly, this series was also built in Sierra’s SCI engine despite feeling quite different from just about every other game built in it aside from Phantasmagoria II.

I also want to mention both Shivers games have interesting music. The first game has one of the most unsettling scores I’ve ever come across in an adventure game, written by Guy Whitmore, and the second has more of that but also includes a set of gothic hard rock style songs by a fictional band called Trip Cyclone that are good enough to listen to without even playing the games, though you absolutely should, because both Shivers games are decent adventures if you enjoy paranoia and puzzle-solving in equal measures.

The other game I wanted to mention is the 1996 release Lighthouse: The Dark Being, another spooky first person adventure in the style of Myst. It’s definitely not a top-tier title; the graphics have that mid-1990s pre-rendered look and the story is mostly told through notes and the puzzles are often of the object and lever manipulation variety. But I actually think it has a decent setup and story about a scientist who accidentally opens a portal to a pocket universe that’s a reflection of our own and which has an interdimensional traveler known as the dark being within it. For reasons the game eventually explains, the Dark Being has come into our world to kidnap the scientist’s baby daughter Amanda. It’s up to you, as the neighbor who stumbles in on all of this, to head into the parallel dimension and set things right.

As a Myst clone, it’s a perfectly acceptable game, and it feels like it was Sierra’s attempt to try to break into that market just in case their other more ambitious adventure games didn’t pay off. The game was designed by Jon Bock, who’d worked on many Sierra games in the 1990s as an artist and animator and it honestly shows a lot of good design sensibilities in terms of its atmosphere, environmental design and mechanical creations you encounter. There’s even a sequence where you get to fly in a glider and another where you get to drive a train car! The game even has multiple endings that I’m sure very few people saw, because the downside, more than anything, is the absurd difficulty, which was so bad Sierra had to issue several patches to make it easier.

If you get a chance to play this one, give it a shot. It’s not so bad with a walkthrough, and I think it’s a better game than people gave it credit for at the time.

Beyond Sierra’s horror games, there was some true horror going on behind the scenes as well as Ken Williams got scammed by a sale in 1996 to Walter Forbes’s CUC International under the false promises that Forbes was creating a super-publisher that would include LucasArts, Broderbund and Blizzard Entertainment’s owners, the educational software company Davidson & Associates. In the end, only Davidson was part of the deal, and management strife between the two units ultimately led to the Williamses losing control of their company.

Despite the fact that Sierra has some strong publishing plays including the release of Valve’s Half-Life in 1997, Homeworld in 1999 and the late 1990s online gaming platform WON.net, for which I wrote some paid freelance articles way back in the day, Sierra ultimately turned into a publishing label, got acquired by a new conglomerate called Vivendi Universal, and struggled for years, despite some successes, before closing down operations in 2004 and becoming little more than a publishing brand name from that point forward.

Their brand and IPs ultimately wound up under Activision Blizzard in 2008 and now, those IPs that didn’t get sold off during that acquisition are owned by Activision Blizzard’s new owner, Microsoft.

But there were a few other pillars of Sierra’s 1990s output that we haven’t covered yet, including Sierra’s educational Discovery line. Another is Dynamix, which created adventure games like The Adventures of Willy Beamish, Rise of the Dragon and Heart of China. And the other is Coktel Vision, the creators of the Gobliiins games, the Inca games, and several adventures by Muriel Tramis, the French Roberta Williams, which include The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble, Lost in Time and Urban Runner.

I also want to talk a little bit about another Sierra title no one seems to remember called Stay Tooned, which is a pun on the word “cartoon,” by the way. I was planning to include those here, but I’m going to save those for our next episode so we can give these lesser-known titles the attention they deserve.

Being the 1990s, there were plenty of other adventure game developers of note, so after that, I’ll talk a little bit about what Steve Mertetzky was up to at Legend Entertainment and Boffo Games making games like Spellcasting and The Space Bar. And we also need to talk about the efforts of developers and publishers like Westwood Associates, Interplay, Adeline Software International, Humongous Games, Activision, Revolution Software, Cryo, Perfect Entertainment and MicroProse!

And of course we have an obligation to accept Douglas Adam’s invitation to take a trip on the Starship Titanic.

And then we’ll turn our focus to the multimedia era of the mid to late 1990s and the transition to FMV and full-3D adventures in the declining days of the genre, covering titles like Myst, The Longest Journey, Burn:Cycle, Chronomaster, The Journeyman Project, The 7th Guest, Blade Runner, The Last Express and The Neverhood.

Finally we’ll close by touching on the 21st century contributions of studios like Telltale Games, Double Fine, Daedalic Entertainment, Amanita Designs, Wadjet Eye Games and Quantic Dream. We’ll cover all of that and more in our next few episodes!

If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.

And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!

I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore!

THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRY

Before I let you go every week, I close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.

This week, I want to recommend The Trolley Solution, a goofy little point and click indie game by the developer byDanDans which is based on the thought experiment originally proposed by Phillippa Foot about whether or not you should pull a lever if a trolley is going to murder a bunch of people if you do nothing. Thanks to a great scene in the show The Good Place, I feel like the idea’s pretty well-known today, but this game takes it a step further by not only adding in a total of 20 increasingly silly scenarios, but also adding in 20 strange minigames and wild stuff like a dating simulator where you play as a Japanese schoolgirl who’s fallen in love with a trolley.

If you’ve ever wanted to do things like play a trolley-themed idle clicker or play a literal on-rails shooter or grind your way around a train track by treating the trolley like a skateboard, this is the game for you. The game’s far more comedic than philosophical, and I like that there’s even a meta-gag that requires you to pull a metaphorical level to buy the DLC (which barely adds to the total cost of the game if you use Steam’s bundle feature) to access a minigame. The DLC provides some additional content as well, so it’s worth the negligible cost, but I have to admire the idea for its comedic value and also for making the player truly put their money on the line.

For $10 plus another buck or so for the DLC, The Trolley Solution is a great experience for a few fun hours. I do recommend playing it with a mouse rather than a gamepad or touchscreen, particularly if you’re going to play on the Steam Deck, and it’s a lot of fun to play with a group of people just to laugh at the silliness together.

Especially that dating sim, which even has multiple endings to enjoy!

Thanks for reading The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com

In this episode, Sean details tons of other 1980s and early 1990s adventure games LucasFilm Games/LucasArts and Sierra On-Line. Even better, this episode helps to trace how this run of games helped shape the standards of the point and click genre! He’s Sean Jordan, and he is your Great Game Guide!

(And yes, Sean still has a cold, so pardon his creaky voice, nasally tones, bad singing and the sounds of sniffling here and there!)

-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 5: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 3

Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.

You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)

And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!

-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.

Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)

Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!

--------------------------------------------------

SOURCES:

LOOM Audio Drama

The Dagger of Amon Ra: Why Almost No One Solves This Game: https://adventuregamehotspot.com/feature/5349/why-almost-no-one-solves-this-game

https://mixnmojo.com/features/sitefeatures/LucasArts-Secret-History-11-The-Dig/5

https://www.adventure-treff.de/Interviews/11754-chris-jones

https://kotaku.com/relooted-review-heist-game-steam-game-pass-2000667754

--------------------------------------------------

Coming up in this episode –

We’re going to continue our survey of late 1980s adventure games by talking about LucasFilm Games and the development of the SCUMM engine. We’ll cover Ron Gilbert’s no-death, always winnable philosophy that would make their 1990s games the most popular alternative to Sierra On-Line’s adventures. And speaking of Sierra, we’re going to talk about some of the early games powered by their SCI engine that eventually would cement many of the standard mechanics of the point and click genre. And we’ll touch on how one of Sierra’s earliest SCI engine games, made by yet another awesome power couple, would show just how far adventure games could go as players embarked on a Quest for Glory!

I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Let’s delve into the golden era of late 80s and early 1990s adventure games you probably have heard of, as well as a few you possibly haven’t!

If you were to ask the average person on the street what comes to mind when they hear the name George Lucas or the word “LucasFilm,” chances are good they’re going to mention Star Wars or maybe Indiana Jones. But if you were to ask a gamer the same question, particularly if they’re an old-school gamer like myself, you’d probably also hear about adventure games like Maniac Mansion, Sam & Max Hit the Road, The Secret of Monkey Island or Grim Fandango.

But LucasFilm Games, which changed its name to LucasArts in late 1991, created a whole lot more than just adventure games and Star Wars games. In fact, its first batch of games, which include Ballblazer, Rescue on Fractalus!, Koronis Rift and The Eidolon, were all 3D action titles, and while Ballblazer is a surreal competitive splitscreen game set on a flat checkerboard plane, the latter three of those games all used a novel fractal-based game engine that allowed players to explore large environments despite the fact that the games were running on mere 8-bit computer hardware.

LucasFilm Games also was known for building simulators, including the naval hydrofoil sim PHM Pegasus in 1986, the naval fleet simulator Strike Fleet in 1988 and the World War II Pacific Theatre flight simulator Battlehawks 1942, which was developed by Lawrence Holland’s development studio Totally Games and which led to a series of flight sims that included Their Finest Hour, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe and, of course, the later Star Wars: X-Wing and TIE Fighter games.

But as I said, LucasFilm Games and LucasArts are probably best-known today for adventure games, and that takes us back to 1986 when two similar-looking, but very different-playing, games were in development.

Our story begins with yet another Jim Hensen fantasy property, this time one that mixed live action with puppets to create an interesting feature film about a teenager who has to venture through a gigantic maze to defeat Jareth the Goblin King, a character famously played by David Bowie. The film is, of course, the 1986 movie Labyrinth, and LucasFilm Games’s Labyrinth: The Computer Game is a loose adaptation of it, allowing players to select their own gender and work their way through the labyrinth using a word wheel that allows them to select which commands they’d like to input. The game was directed by David Fox, a LucasFilm Games veteran who’d go on to make several other graphical adventure games.

There is really nothing quite like Labyrinth: The Computer Game – it begins as a text adventure game where you go to the movies and settle in as Jareth appears onscreen, calls you out by whatever name you selected and explains that he and his goblins have been watching you and are challenging you to find his castle in the center of the labyrinth or be trapped in the game. He even gives you a time limit of 13 hours, and the action morphs into a side-scrolling adventure.

The game itself is mildly confusing at first but gets easier if you take some time to map things out. The side-scrolling hallways have doors you can open with corridors that lead to other sections that have items laying on the ground. Once you recognize that this is truly just a graphical representation of the same basic design of a text-based adventure game, Labyrinth: The Computer Game gets much easier. The game’s word wheels also make your range of actions simple to understand, and there’s really no way to fail beyond getting stuck in a dungeon you can’t get out of. Even though this game was designed for the Commodore 64, it has relatively good graphics for its time, and it owes a lot of its design and style to another 1986 LucasFilm Games title called Habitat designed by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer.

I don’t want to get too deep into discussing Habitat in this episode because it’s not an adventure game, but rather a sort of graphical take on a multi-user dungeon that focused on social interactions between players who were using the QuantumLink online service. But it was also a bit more sophisticated than Labyrinth because it utilized a point and click GUI driven by a joystick-controlled cursor with four available commands. The game allowed players to not only create their own avatar and complete quests but actually acquire a house and a pet and exist within a persistent world where players themselves created the rules.

We’ll talk about Habitat another time. But for now, I want to focus on one of the most important games LucasFilm Games released in the 1980s, a classic adventure called Maniac Mansion, created by a team led by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick.

In Maniac Mansion, you play as a guy named Dave who is infiltrating the Edison mansion to rescue Sandy, your kidnapped girlfriend. But unlike most adventure games, Dave can select two friends to accompany him, and each of the six selectable friends have skills and motivations that ultimately determine how the game’s puzzles have to be solved and what ending you will see.

One of the most famous elements of the game is the creepy Dr. Fred Edison’s two sentient tentacle henchmen, the friendly green one and the more hostile purple one. But the mansion is also populated by Dr. Edison’s family members, including Nurse Edna, his son Weird Ed and even a mummy by the name of Dead Cousin Ted. There’s also a mysterious meteor that seems to be influencing Dr. Fred and even a surprisingly chill piece of greenery simply known as Chuck the Plant.

The genius of Maniac Mansion is that the game uses a graphical user interface where players move a cursor around with a joystick to select words from a grid and then apply them to specific areas on the screen. While Maniac Mansion wasn’t the first adventure game to use a graphical user interface, the system works so well that it allows the game to run on simpler 8-bit hardware like the Commodore 64, Apple II and even the Nintendo Entertainment System while also scaling up quite well to mouse-driven 16-bit and 32-bit systems with a more graphically impressive enhanced edition.

This game engine, known as the SCUMM engine because it’s the “Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion,” became so well-known that one of the most popular adventure game interpreters today is known as SCUMMVM, primarily because it was first used to make LucasFilm and the later LucasArts adventure games playable on modern computer hardware.

The SCUMM engine led to several more games in the 1980s, but none of them are quite like Maniac Mansion in offering multiple storylines and characters to choose from. Maniac Mansion is also atypical in that the player characters can die under certain circumstances, particularly if players are cruel enough to put Weird Ed’s beloved hamster in the microwave and then bring Ed into the kitchen to show him.

Oddly, Maniac Mansion even got its own 1990 TV show on the religiously-themed cable outlet The Family Channel with a writing team led by Eugene Levy, who’s a lot more famous today than he was then. The show has almost nothing to do with the game, though, and even though I personally found it pretty dull when I watched it in the 1990s, it made it for three seasons with 66 episodes, ending right around the time the game’s sequel, Day of the Tentacle, debuted.

But moving on to other SCUMM engine games, let’s talk about the less familiar Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, a 1988 graphical adventure from David Fox that follows the adventures of the tabloid journalist Zak McKracken as he travels around the globe in search of parts needed to neutralize dumbifying devices that evil aliens are using to make humans stupider through a nefarious plot involving telephones. Zak is eventually accompanied by three other characters named Annie, Melissa and Leslie, and they head to all the places you’d expect – the Bermuda Triangle, Stonehenge, the Egyptian Pyramid and even the face on Mars.

As intriguing as Zak McKracken may sound – and it is a good game well worth playing! – it’s not quite as polished as Maniac Mansion and is both known for having a more linear story and for having some frustrating parts that truly feel like they’re there to pad the game out. The game was intended to launch a series, and several fan sequels have since continued its story. One of these fan sequels even got professionally published in Germany in 2008 as Zak McKracken: Between Time and Space, though it wasn’t officially licensed.

After Zak McKracken, LucasFilm Games moved on to use the SCUMM engine to create another movie tie-in game with 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure, which had to be differentiated from another game released the same year that was more of an arcade action adaptation. This one was designed by David Fox, Noah Falstein and Ron Gilbert, and after it, David Fox moved on to other things.

While this Indiana Jones adventure follows the plot of the feature film fairly closely, it also deviates in many places and requires you to solve some puzzles crafted specifically for the game that aren’t made easier by being familiar with the film. Unlike most LucasFilm and LucasArts adventures, there are also a number of arcade action sequences that require players to master some additional control schemes.

One of the most innovative ideas in the game is a point system called the IQ or “Indy Quotient” system, which allows Indy to find some different ways to solve puzzles by earning points by taking actions in line with his character. The game also introduces some nice lighter moments that would go on to influence other LucasArts adventures down the road. One of the most familiar gags is when Indy tries to talk his way past a Nazi guard by saying, “I’m selling these fine leather jackets.” If you pay attention during later LucasArts games, you’ll see this line reappear.

Of course, this game is often seen as the warm-up act for 1991’s Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, which I maintain is still the true 4th chapter in the Indiana Jones saga and which is way better than either of the official Steven Spielberg films that have come out since. This one was designed by Noah Falstein and Hal Barwood, and it was not only one of the first games to use the LucasArts branding, but also among the first CD-ROM talkie games released by the publisher, with Doug Lee playing the role of Indiana Jones alongside a very talented voice cast that helped set the standard for the voice acting LucasArts games would become known for.

The Fate of Atlantis is similar to The Last Crusade in how it looks and plays, but it uses a three-tiered approach to allowing players to experience the game the way they’d like to play it with a Teams Path where Indy is joined by a partner name Sophia Hapgood, a Wits Path where the puzzles are harder and a Fists Path where Indy can fight more often. The story itself revolves around a race to beat the Nazis to the lost city of Atlantis in the year 1939 and to prevent the evil Nazi Klaus Kerner and his associate Dr. Hans Ubermann from unlocking the power to make men into gods.

Perhaps the most famous LucasFilm Games adventure aside from Indiana Jones, and certainly the most successful in terms of the series it inspired, is The Secret of Monkey Island, a 1990 point and click adventure that was created by Ron Gilbert and co-designed with Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer. If you haven’t played it – and you absolutely should, because it’s a true classic! – it’s the story of a wimpy but optimistic adventurer named Guybrush Threepwood who visits the Caribbean port on Mêlée Island on a quest to become a mighty pirate. He eventually runs afoul of the evil ghost pirate LeChuck and has to travel to the mysterious Monkey Island to save Governor Elaine Marley, whom LeChuck desperately wants to marry, and Guybrush eventually does in later games.

The Secret of Monkey Island is known for its incredible sense of humor and its reliance on clever mechanics like insult sword fighting to replace the often frustrating arcade action sequences too many graphical adventures were relying upon to pad out their gameplay. The game also implemented a new philosophy that Ron Gilbert had articulated in a 1989 essay called “Why Adventure Games Suck” that argued for getting rid of deaths, eliminating the need for forced saves and eliminating situations where players could not progress due to forgetting to pick up a needed item now gated off by the game.

Suffice it to say that Ron Gilbert’s philosophy is present in most adventure games today because so many modern designers were heavily inspired by the accessibility of the LucasArts games compared to the frustrating dead ends found in Sierra titles and games from other developers.

So, in The Secret of Monkey Island, the gameplay allowed Guybrush to escape death in almost every scenario by ramping up the cartoon violence and making the pirates in the game more silly than fearsome. Guybrush also receives the quality of being able to hold his breath for ten minutes so he can solve one puzzle where he’s stranded underwater without any stress on the player – though stubbornly waiting out the clock can result in Guybrush’s demise! There’s also one other point in the game where Guybrush can fall off a panoramic peak, only for the typical “restart, load the last save or quit” prompt to give way to Guybrush announcing he was saved by a rubber tree below.

The Secret of Monkey Island is one of those games that absolutely lives up to everything you’ve ever heard about it. It’s well-designed, hysterically funny, genuinely fun to play and filled with well-designed puzzles that aren’t overly tricky but which force you to think a little bit. The highlight of the game is a sequence where Guybrush has to learn how to swordfight and you expect the game to move into an arcade sequence along the lines of Sid Meier’s Pirates!, but once Guybrush actually finds the Swordmaster and learns to fight, he finds out that sword fighting is really won by having a sharp wit, not a sharp blade. For example, the first insult he learns, “You fight like a dairy farmer!” is countered with the phrase, “How appropriate. You fight like a cow.” And so Guybrush has to go around Mêlée Island and swap insults with other swarthy pirates to find the right lines to attack or defend. It’s an absolutely awesome way to make an adventure game feel like a true adventure and to bypass the need for lousy arcade sequences that were infesting the genre at the time.

One of the other memorable moments in The Secret of Monkey Island takes place in the SCUMM Bar on Mêlée Island where Guybrush sees a pirate named Cobb wearing a button that says “Ask Me About Loom.” If he does, the pirate says:

You mean the latest masterpiece of fantasy storytelling from Lucasfilm’s™ Brian Moriarty™? Why it’s an extraordinary adventure with an interface of magic, stunning high-resolution, 3D landscapes, sophisticated score and musical effects. Not to mention the detailed animation and special effects, elegant point ‘n’ click control of characters, objects, and magic spells. Beat the rush! Go out and buy Loom™ today!

The character Cobb, by the way, also appears in Loom, and in that game, he actually dies when he sees the face of your player character, Bobbin Threadbare, who wears a hood to keep other characters he encounters from having the same fate. But this little advertorial moment in The Secret of Monkey Island is not only a great way to make fun of the product placement in media that was already becoming a big problem in the late 1980s, but also to remind players that yeah, if you enjoy Guybrush Threepwood’s adventures, you might like Loom as well.

And Loom is a really good game, even if it’s not a very funny one. It was designed by Brian Moriarty after he left Infocom and features one of the most unique stories I’ve ever seen in a video game. The premise is that you are a Weaver who can manipulate reality by playing sequences of four musical notes on your distaff, a spinning tool that in this game is carried around like a walking stick and capable of casting spells called drafts. Unlike most LucasFilm Games and LucasArts adventures, Loom has a serious story with a lot of lore backing up its world and characters, and this is shared with the player through a 30-minute audio drama that was originally included on a cassette tape in the game box.

The gameplay of Loom is quite unusual because you don’t use any sort of parser and there are no dialogue trees. You click where you want Bobbin to go and meet up with characters who talk with you but primarily give you information about things you need to know to progress. Most of the game’s action involves clicking on certain objects and then attempting to manipulate them with your drafts. Some drafts can even be played backwards so you can create an opposite effect with them – for example, the draft to open things can be played backwards to close them, and the draft to turn straw into gold can be played backwards to turn gold into straw. A few drafts are also the same backwards and forwards so they never have a counter effect.

To add some challenge to the game, the drafts are different every time you play, and you also sometimes learn them before Bobbin has advanced enough to be able to use them, which means it’s a good idea to keep a notepad handy.

Loom is not a terribly long game, but it is a very memorable one with incredible realms to visit and some truly distinctive characters. As graphical adventure games go, it’s one of a kind and well worth playing today. Many players today prefer the 1992 Talkie edition with voiced lines as well as a rewritten audio drama prologue. But there is something special about the original disk-based version as well.

We might as well continue talking about LucasArts, because their next few games helped to set a standard for what adventure games could be. The talkie editions of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Loom were successful enough that LucasArts continued to create fully voiced CD-ROM versions of many of its adventures to come, but Maniac Mansion, Zak McCracken and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade didn’t receive any talkie editions, and the first two Monkey Island games didn’t get them until much later.

Speaking of Monkey Island, its 1991 sequel Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge brought back the trio of Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer for an even more irreverent trip through the Caribbean, this time tasking Guybrush with searching for the secret treasure known as “Big Whoop.” A series of misadventures lead to the ghost pirate LeChuck being resurrected as a zombie, and Guybrush learns that whatever Big Whoop actually is, it’ll give him the ability to be free of LeChuck for good. And after even more misadventures, including the game’s very famous loogie-spitting contest on Booty Island, Guybrush learns the truth about Big Whoop in one of the most surprising endings ever to grace an adventure game.

In fact, it’s so stunning and literally game-changing that when LucasArts decided to make a sequel without Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman or Tim Schafer in 1997 called The Curse of Monkey Island, the new development team had to contrive a scenario to get Guybrush and LeChuck back into the Caribbean rivalry players had gotten used to, and the series proceeded from there, largely retconning the whole Big Whoop plotline to fit the new direction. I do want to say that I actually like the third, fourth and fifth games a lot and they have some of the funniest moments in the entire series. But Ron Gilbert’s development studio Terrible Toybox ultimately did get to conclude the series his way in 2022 with Return to Monkey Island, tying up lots of loose ends, including, as it happens, what the secret of Monkey Island actually is.

I’ll give you a hint – it’s not the friends we made along the way. But it might as well be, because both Ron Gilbert and Guybrush Threepwood are smart enough to know that any revelation is bound to be a letdown, and the game doesn’t mind making that point as it literally closes up and turns the lights off on Guyrbush’s pirate adventures.

But let’s go back to the 1990s, when some of the Monkey Island 2 staff broke off to create their own adventure games. Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman took the helm on a sequel to Maniac Mansion, and they upped the ante on cartoon graphics and wild chicanery while also reducing the playable characters down to three pre-selected college students – the nerdy Bernard Bernoulli from the original game, his neurotic friend Laverne and his roadie buddy Hoagie. The game begins with the Purple Tentacle drinking some toxic sludge and sprouting arms, a unibrow, and a desire to take over the world.

The Green Tentacle, terrified of this turn of events, convinces Bernard and his friends to head to the Edison mansion to put a stop to the Purple Tentacle’s machinations. But when they arrive, they discover the Purple Tentacle has escaped, and Dr. Fred reasons the only way to stop him is to send the three friends back in time one day to prevent any of these strange events from happening.

Unfortunately, he cheaped out on the diamond powering the time machine, and Hoagie is sent 200 years into the past while Laverne is sent 200 years into the future. Bernard is stuck in the present day, and he and his friends have to work together to stop the coming Day of the Tentacle.

While I originally played the disk-based version of this game without the voice acting, Day of the Tentacle was one of LucasArt’s gold-standard titles for excellent voice work. Every character has a strong personality and sounds like they’re voiced by a professional actor instead of the programmer from the next cubicle over like the early Sierra talkies did, and the game plays like a living cartoon show with heavily stylized graphics, wonderfully funny moments and a lot of time travel shenanigans. We didn’t have Adult Swim in 1993, but we did have Day of the Tentacle, and it perfectly delivered that exact flavor of irreverent, adult-oriented humor.

But LucasArts had another ace up its sleeve, the 1993 adventure game Sam & Max Hit the Road led by Sean Clark and Mike Stemmle and based on the comics by Steve Purcell, an artist who’d contributed heavily to the Monkey Island games and also had his characters appear in cameos in earlier LucasFilm and LucasArts games as well as in fun full-color strips in the LucasArts magazine The Adventurer, which was included inside game boxes.

Sam and Max are the anthropomorphic dog and psychotic rabbity thing who form the Freelance Police, a questionably legal pseudo-detective agency dispatched to solve weird crimes and interact with the stranger elements of society. In their debut adventure game, Sam and Max are investigating the case of a missing frozen sasquatch named Bruno and Trixie the Giraffe-Necked Girl, who’s disappeared from a carnival freak show with him.

But the pair run into a British country music sensation named Conroy Bumpus who seems to be suspiciously trying to track down a sasquatch to add to his collection of taxidermied animals. Sam and Max have to jump in their DeSoto and travel all over the US to track Bruno down, visiting landmarks such as the world’s largest ball of twine, Frog Rock, the Gator Golf swamp, the Mystery Vortex, the Mt. Rushmore bungie jumping experience and dinosaur tar pits, a bigfoot convention, and, of course, various Snuckey’s locations, based on the once-common Stuckey’s chain of gas stations and tchotchke stores.

Perhaps one of the most revolutionary aspects of Sam & Max is that it ditches the array of words used in previous SCUMM engine games to instead replace the actions with icons similar to those seen in the Sierra game, though with their own twist – the use icon, which shows a hand squeezing the classic children’s toy known as the “Martian Popping Thing,” also allows you to pick up Max and use him to unleash chaos at key points in the game. The game also enjoys mocking the player for selecting actions that don’t make any sense, including a sequence where Sam will start crying and Max will scold the player if they repeatedly try to pick up something Sam says can’t be picked up.

Sam & Max Hit the Road is again one of those games that’s enhanced by its talkie version – the characters are perfectly voiced by Bill Farmer and Nick Jameson. One of the standout moments in the talkie version is a song called “King of the Creatures” performed by Conroy Bumpus in his thick Liverpool accent. Around him, the stuffed heads of all the animals he’s killed and collected sing along, and I love this verse in particular:

Happy to be King of the Creatures!

I’m proud to be the Lord of the Odd!

I love collecting things with grotesque features!

It makes me feel like some Chaldean God.

That is Steve Purcell’s style of humor at its finest, and it’s one of the reasons why Sam & Max Hit the Road is one of my favorite games of all time.

Beyond the adventuring itself, the game also has a ton of minigames that are actually fun because they’re completely optional. There’s a Whack-a-Mole game, a Highway Surfing game, a dress-up doll game, a Battleship-style board game called Car Bomb and even a paint by numbers coloring book. Beyond Whack-a-Mole, which has a small bearing on the story, these games are really just an opportunity to spend more time with the characters, and that’s welcome given that LucasArts never produced its planned sequel and the games that eventually did get made, while certainly tons of fun, have their own vibe.

I’ll also take a moment to note that yes, Steve Purcell also worked with Nelvana to make an animated Saturday morning cartoon show in 1995 called The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police also based on his comics. Sadly, it’s just not as fun as the game itself, and it’s hard to explain why the pair doesn’t translate as well to a kid’s cartoon despite sometimes literally adapting the same comics the game was based off of. Ah well.

But let’s take a break from the cartoon antics of these 1993 adventures, because another LucasArts adventure game I want to get to is The Dig, an ambitious and serious science fiction adventure pitched to LucasFilm Games in 1989 by, of all people, Steven Spielberg. And while it’s far from a perfect game, it is at least a distinctive one that’s notable for starring Terminator 2: Judgment Day’s Robert Patrick as well as prolific voice actors like Steven Blum and David Lodge.

The Dig begins with an asteroid nicknamed “Attila” heading towards Earth on a doomsday collision course, so a five-person astronaut crew is sent up to intercept it and plant bombs to divert its course. After the bomb goes off, three of the astronauts discover Attila is hollow and drop down inside. But the asteroid transforms into a space pod and rockets away from Earth, taking them with it. They emerge on an alien world that seems to be devoid of life, but upon exploring it, they discover some mysterious crystals and the remains of an alien life form, both of which play heavily into the story.

It’s a good-looking game, making great use of rendered videos and a Super VGA resolution to show off some cool alien vistas, some of which were apparently designed by the movie special effects studio Industrial Light & Magic. The music is also one of its more notable features, composed by Michael Land and offering a sweeping orchestral-style score to add a sense of wonder to the gameplay.

The Dig took LucasArts over five years to develop, and Ender’s Game author Orson Scott Card was tapped to write the dialogue while Brian Moriarty, following his time working on Loom, worked built a team to restart the game after development stalled. But when he left the company, Sean Clark, fresh off Sam & Max, agreed to take over as project leader. The Dig was an entirely different type of adventure, however, and with Steven Spielberg’s name attached to the project, Clark and the development team found themselves under a significant amount of pressure to not only get the game completed, but also to ensure it lived up to the standard of previous SCUMM engine games.

And whether or not it does is a matter of taste. I personally find The Dig pretty dull. The dialogue is atrocious and overwritten, and the story is almost completely humorless and way too invested in a story that I don’t feel pays off as well as it should. One of the most aggravating aspects involves the lack of agency you have as a player – your character, Commander Boston Low, interacts with the world through a streamlined point and click system that selects actions for him, and there are events that occur in the game that proceed regardless of your choices. On the other hand, there are many adventure game fans who consider it a well-crafted exploration adventure that’s second only to Cyan’s Myst, a game we’ll cover in a future episode.

My advice? Play The Dig for yourself and see what you think.

Now that we’ve gotten most of the LucasArts catalog out of the way – and don’t worry, we’ll talk about Full Throttle and Grim Fandango in a future installment! - it’s time to turn our attention back to Sierra On-Line, who, as we discussed in previous episodes, really set the standard for point and click adventure games with King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Grow Yonder!, a game powered by its SCI1 engine. Sierra’s clever use of a tilted perspective to offer screens with three-dimensional depth, an icon system with many different actions and puzzles that could be communicated through visuals, dialogue and fine details led to a winning formula still largely in use today.

And this allowed for a better player experience, too, because the days of trying to figure out what commands the text parser would accept gave way to the more intuitive – though occasionally still frustrating – task of trying to figure out what you could interact with onscreen.

The AGI games Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards and Police Quest all received VGA remakes in the SCI1 engine to make them play more like King’s Quest V, and those became the preferred versions of the games. But curiously, none of the King’s Quest games got the same treatment under Sierra – only King’s Quest V, VI and VII were developed under the new icon-driven system, while King’s Quest VIII went for a context-sensitive cursor.

After King’s Quest IV and prior to King’s Quest V, Roberta Williams created a very different kind of game in the SCI0 engine called The Colonel’s Bequest, first released in 1989 and offering players the chance to solve a mystery as Laura Bow, a journalism student at Tulane University in the 1920s who has a penchant for solving mysteries since her father is a detective. The game’s story, much like the much earlier Mystery House, is inspired by Agatha Christie-style mysteries, and the unfolding plot involves a cast of characters who all have different motivations for murder as Colonel Henri Dijon – yeah, that’s a mustard reference - gathers his relatives to share his will. Laura Bow is caught up in the drama as a bystander and has to wander around the old sugar plantation searching for clues and listening for characters to give away their hidden motivations as they respond to a clock that governs the game’s progression.

Unfortunately, The Colonel’s Bequest is built around a text parser and is only available with 16-color EGA graphics, and so many modern players prefer its 1992 sequel, The Dagger of Amon Ra. Roberta Williams had minimal involvement in this title – it was designed by Bruce Balfour instead - but it’s actually the better of the two games, taking place in a museum where an Egyptian artifact has been stolen and Laura Bow is tasked with writing an article about it. Of course, being a great detective, she can’t help but get wrapped up in the surprisingly complex plot, and she not only has to find the dagger, but navigate romantic interests, solve some murders and uncover an ancient mystery involving an Egyptian cult.

The Dagger of Amon Ra is a great-looking game thanks to its 256-color VGA graphics and museum setting, and its point and click icon system does a great job of allowing you to interact with the game world without getting too frustrated. Even so, the game starts off slow and has a lot of talking to get through before you actually get to go adventuring, and the talkie version of the game has some absolutely amateurish voice acting from Sierra employees who were clearly called in to record some lines.

The Dagger of Amon Ra has another problem, too, in that it’s pretty much impossible to solve the mystery using logic alone. You either need to consult a walkthrough or play it multiple times to gather all of the information needed to successfully solve the crimes. While this isn’t such a big deal in a time where you can simply consult the internet for help, it can lessen your enjoyment a bit if you prefer to go old-school and solve things on your own with limited hints.

Sierra released another SCI0 game in 1990 called Codename: ICEMAN, designed by Jim Walls in between Police Quest games. Like The Colonel’s Bequest, it’s built around a text parser, but instead of being a murder mystery, it’s a more of a secret agent sort of experience that mostly takes place aboard a submarine, with a bookend story about a whirlwind romance in Tahiti leading to a mission in Tunisia to rescue an Ambassador from a terrorist group being sponsored by the KGB.

Honestly, I can take or leave Codename: ICEMAN as an adventure game, because it’s so focused on unexciting tasks like piloting a submarine and decoding messages and playing dice games that it’s just kinda dull overall. Your mileage may vary.

Fortunately, Sierra had some better games in that rough transition between the SCI0 and SCI1 engine. Under producer Guruka Singh Khalsa, Sierra On-Line also created another series led by a female creator, this time a writer named Christy Marx who partnered with her husband Peter Ledger, who largely focused on the art while she handled the design.

And together, they created an intriguing game about history, mythology and the pursuit of a legendary relic that Indiana Jones was also looking for around that time.

The holy grail.

Christy Marx has worked on many games since those days at Sierra, but she’s also well-known for her work on comic books and animation. If you watched cartoons in the 1980s and 90s and early 2000s, you probably saw something she wrote, since she worked on shows like G.I. Joe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Spider-Man, Dino-Riders, Bucky O’Hare and the Toad Wars!, Mighty Max, ReBoot, that terrible Daktstalkers cartoon and X-Men Evolution. She also worked with J. Michael Stracynski on some his syndicated live-action shows like Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future and Babylon 5. Oh, and did I mention she was the creator of Jem, that series about the glam-rock band that’s truly outrageous? And that she was also the creator of the Conan the Adventurer cartoon and synonymous with both Conan and Red Sonja as a comic book writer?

Peter Ledger, in the meantime, worked in film, comics and television as an illustrator and painter, and he is probably most closely associated with the work he did helping colorize and revive the Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge comics that would later inspire the cartoon show DuckTales and with the work he did for Marvel Comics. But he also created the early logo and some concept art for Babylon 5 and worked with his wife on some independent graphic novels like The Sisterhood of Steel.

Together, these two created a very impressive game for Sierra, a surprisingly grounded foray into the legendary King Arthur called Conquests of Camelot: The Search for the Grail, a peculiar fusion of myth and legend that sent the king of Camelot to investigate stories about a mysterious relic left behind by Jospeh of Arimathea and to locate the missing knights of the Round Table, Lancelot and Galahad. Though the first half of the game takes place in England and includes several stories more familiar to those who know the Arthurian legends, the second half of the game sends Arthur off to Palestine and has him explore both Gaza and Jerusalem. One of the odder aspects of the game is that Arthur’s destiny is shaped by several gods from different traditions, including Jesus Christ, Mithras, Cernunnos, Fatima and Aphrodite. The end of the game suggests that these non-Christian deities are losing their power over mankind and that only Christ’s power remains once the quest is completed. Suffice it to say that this is a game deeply steeped in myth and legend beyond just the Arthurian tales, and there’s even one puzzle where you need to know some pretty detailed information about Greek mythology to advance.

OK, so before I continue let’s pause here and talk about a couple of terms I keep mentioning and that we talked about in our previous episodes on Sierra – the SCI0 and SCI1 game engine.

From 1984 to 1989, many of Sierra’s adventure games were made with its Adventure Game Interpreter engine, also known as AGI. It’s what powered their earliest games like King’s Quest and Space Quest and Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry. But starting with King’s Quest IV in 1988, Sierra adventures were built with a new tool called the Sierra Creative Interpreter, or SCI engine. The earliest version is today called the SCI0, and it also powered games like Space Quest III, the 2nd and 3rd Leisure Suit Larry and The Colonel’s Bequest, and the biggest differences between it and the next version, which we call SCI1 today, is that the SCI0 games had 16-color EGA graphics and limited use of an optional mouse cursor to go along with a text parser that still had you typing in your commands.

Conquests of Camelot was an SCI0 game as well, and the text parser is probably its biggest drawback. The game’s graphics look great and the world itself is rendered splendidly, but getting around it requires a lot of figuring out where to go on the screen and what command you need to type in. In the earlier AGI adventures from Sierra, it’s a little easier to discern what you can do in the game because the simpler graphics make it more obvious. It’s much more challenging when the graphics provide more detail.

Fortunately, Christy Marx got a second chance with Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood, an SCI1 point and click adventure game in the style of King’s Quest V released in 1991 in splendid 256 color VGA. While this game’s a bit simpler in scope, it’s also a little easier to play and understand since the entirety of it takes place in England and you don’t have to guess at the right words to use to solve the puzzles. And whereas Conquests of Camelot features arcade-style minigames like jousting and swordfighting, Conquests of the Longbow features archery, quarterstaff duels and Nine Men’s Morris. My only real complaint about this game is that Peter Ledger didn’t return to do the artwork, though the game still looks good.

Of course, speaking of power couples in adventure gaming, there’s yet another duo that I haven’t yet mentioned in detail, and that’s Corey and Lori Ann Cole, the husband and wife team who created a game for Sierra called Hero’s Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero? in 1989.

Hero’s Quest was an interesting proposition from the get-go, offering players a fantasy role-playing experience built within Sierra’s early version of the SCI engine. This name made sense given the King’s Quest, Space Quest and Police Quest games Sierra On-Line already had available. Unfortunately, there was also a fantasy board game being marketed by Milton Bradley called Hero Quest at the same time, and so Sierra was forced to rebrand the series as Quest for Glory in the sequels that would follow as well as the game’s eventual VGA point and click remake.

To keep things simple, I’m just going to call the game Hero’s Quest, because there are some differences, the biggest of which is of course the text parser. The game begins by asking you to select a character class: you can be a fighter, a magic user or a thief, each of whom will have a slightly different adventure as you explore the barony of Spielburg. The fighter tends to carve the most straightforward path while the magic user gets to play through a challenge called the Mage’s Maze and the Thief can actually break into places and steal things, though it’s a good idea to do so under the authority of the Thieves’ Guild.

Unlike just about every other point and click adventure game ever made, you also have to assign skill points to your character to boost your chances of success at the tasks you want to accomplish, and you can even import your character into the other Quest for Glory games and earn the benefit of playing as a Paladin from the third game onwards.

But what’s particularly great about Hero’s Quest is the game’s balance of folklore, puzzling and good old fashioned humor. The original game is pretty much Shrek before Shrek was a thing, lampooning old fairy tale tropes but also taking them seriously enough to tell a meaningful story. This is even more pronounced in the VGA remake, Quest For Glory I, because the graphics and gameplay feel so similar to King’s Quest V, but also have this sense of playfulness and fun that Lori and Corey Cole have become well-known for injecting into all of their games.

While we’re talking about Quest For Glory, I might as well mention what happens in the sequels, which came out in 1990, 1992, 1993 and 1998.

The second game, subtitled Trial By Fire, takes the hero into the Arabian Nights-themed city of Shapeir, once again allowing you to play through the three paths of Fighter, Magic User or Thief, but giving the Magic User the opportunity to become a full-fledged Wizard and the Fighter to join the Eternal Order of Fighters. This game is also probably the least popular of the bunch because it was never remade in the later SCI point and click style and requires a text parser. Fortunately, a group of fans at a developer now known as AGD Interactive made a VGA-style point and click remake of this game (as well as the first three King’s Quest games) using Adventure Games Studio, and it even supports importing and exporting characters.

And that’s good, because in Quest for Glory III: Wages of War, the Liontaur Paladin Rakeesh will allow those who’ve played the previous game to play the Paladin class as well as the other three. This time, you’re thrust into a setting based on African folklore, which includes some Egyptian elements as well – you can actually visit this world’s Egypt during your travels! The game was designed natively for the SCI1 point and click engine and has 256-color VGA graphics from the start, making it quite a step up from the second game’s 16-color palette. But Quest For Glory III is a love it or hate it entry because it involves a lot more fighting than the others, uses an overworld map instead of a continuous game world and has a story that isn’t quite as satisfying as the others. The game feels like a filler episode because it actually is – the Coles originally intended to make the third chapter the dark one, and then opted to save that story for the fourth game instead.

Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness wasn’t initially regarded as being the best game in the series because it was so buggy and ran so poorly on many PCs of the day, but it has since become beloved as perhaps the only game in the series to rival the original. It’s also by far the darkest and most serious, featuring Slavic folklore this time around and bringing back the villains from the first and second games as they attempt to awaken a Cthonic Eldritch Horror-style monster.

Sierra’s disk-based release was so broken and buggy that it’s essentially forgotten today; the CD-ROM version is the one you’ll find in compilations, and it noticeably includes voice acting from big-name talent like John Rhys-Davies, Bill Farmer and, in her first credited video game voice acting gig, Jennifer Hale. But the production isn’t quite up to the level of the LucasArts games from the same era, and some of the voice acting doesn’t match the actual lines the characters speak in the game.

Nearly four years after the CD-ROM release of the fourth game, Sierra released the fifth and final game, Quest For Glory V: Dragon Fire, developed by Yosemite Entertainment and published under the imprint of Sierra FX. This time, the Hero is sent to a realm based on Greek and Roman culture, and while the Coles say this game was always intended to be the conclusion to the saga, it departs so much from the other games it really feels like a sequel made by a completely different team, despite Lori Ann Cole’s direction.

Rather than talk about all the reasons I don’t prefer Quest for Glory V as much as the others, I’ll just note that the modern packs on GOG and Steam include all five games and you can try it for yourself and see what you think. As with so many games that take a significant deviation from their original design, your mileage may vary. As for me, I much prefer the Coles’ more recent 2018 game, Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, which feels a lot like the Quest for Glory series overall. I also recommend the 2013 game Heroine’s Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok by Crystal Shard, a completely free title that feels like Quest for Glory in the realm of Norse mythology.

I realized while I was writing this script that there’s just no way we can talk about all of the Sierra SCI games in this level of depth without this episode getting way too long. So we’ll save the rest for next week. But I want to close this episode by talking a little bit about Sierra and Lucas’s incredible influence on the adventure games we play today, because pretty much every modern traditional point and click adventure game embodies the philosophies of those two studios by following a few rules.

1. Pretty much everything is driven by a graphical interface with little to no text input beyond an odd puzzle or a specific mechanic like a keypad or an in-game database to search

2. An always-winnable design, with deaths often being reversible or taking you back to a checkpoint rather than a restore or new game screen

3. Inventory items that can’t be permanently lost, missed or consumed before the puzzle they’re needed for it completed

4. Hints being integrated into the game itself, often suggested by NPCs, dialogue or in-game text

5. A segmented puzzle design with maps gating off areas that aren’t relevant for now and focusing you on a smaller set of screens so you can more easily discern what needs to happen next

There are definitely other influences – many games infuse a healthy sense of humor and puzzles that require some lateral thinking, for example – but there’s no question that modern point and click adventure games tend to feel a lot like the games from the first half of the 1990s and a lot less like the cel-animated, full motion video, digitized sprites and partial or full-3D adventures that were more common in the late 90s and early 21st century.

A lot of this is due to the fact that one of the main tools for writing adventure games today – the open-source Adventure Game Studio created by Chris Jones – started out as a tool to allow players to replicate games like Space Quest IV and the SCI remake of Quest for Glory I. By the way, this Chris Jones is a British software developer not related to the Chris Jones from Access Software who became known for playing Tex Murphy.

But Adventure Game Studio has definitely preserved the style of these older games and in many ways, pruned the genre to follow those mechanics and design ideas and to avoid some of the ideas of what were intended to be more evolutionary for the genre in games like Phantasmagoria, The 7th Guest, Gabriel Knight 3, King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity and Syberia, among others.

But the earlier 90s style also proved to be really accessible to gamers of all ages and nationalities because it required more of a visual pixel hunt than puzzling out how to solve the mystery of which string of words the parser might accept. This also simplified design to some degree because the developers didn’t have to put the parser through the paces – they instead had to try to figure out what sorts of actions might warrant a click and how the game world could evolve in what it revealed to players as the storyline progressed.

Some critics have, quite rightfully, accused the graphical adventure games of this era of dumbing down the actual adventures and focusing more on presentation elements and linear storytelling rather than encouraging players to experience a story driven by their imagination. I do get this criticism. If you just compare King’s Quest IV to King’s Quest V, for example, the adventures of Rosella require so much more thought and care than Graham’s wanderings in part 5. In Rosella’s journeys, you have to outthink the game world and find ways to get it to respond to you, which feels very personal. But in Graham’s graphically splendid adventure, you just have to keep clicking on the screen until you can find an icon or item that will allow you to do something.

These 1990s graphical adventure games also don’t require the same level of exploration in the game world because they tend to close things off to a few screens at a time. Space Quest IV, as we’ll talk about in our next episode, is a great example of both a strong game design for keeping you focused on a few things at a time but also a quite limited one that has to rely heavily on humor and theme to make up for the fact that you really only get to do what the game wants you to do at any given moment. When you compare this to earlier graphical adventures like King’s Quest or Police Quest or Quest for Glory or to the designs of the often massive text-based adventures, the thrill of exploring a more open world is lost, and even seemingly open games like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis or Sam & Max Hit the Road really mask how small they are by creating the illusion of distance between screens.

One more evolution during this era, for better or worse, is the shift away from danger and excitement through deaths and arcade sequences and the increased focus on staying constrained within the game’s adventure mechanics. This led to many traditional adventure games becoming less realistic and more cartoony since it allowed characters to ensure more implausible physical violence, but that also limited their appeal since their cartoonish qualities felt more like games for children than adults.

Incidentally, this vestige carries over even into today – I remember a scene in the excellent modern adventure game Unavowed where a battle between a dryad and a djinn is undercut by the fact that the game doesn’t actually have any action mechanics, resulting in the same sequence of events happening over and over until you solve a puzzle. There’s another part where a giant merman is chasing your boat and the way to defeat him is to figure out how to lower a pole so a sword-wielding character can walk out and poke him. I want to say again - I love this game, but moments like that do take you out of the story for a bit, and it’s due to the genre limitations more than anything else.

Speaking of games like Unavowed, I’m really excited to get to those in a future episode of the Great Game Guide, but we’ve still got more 1990s Sierra games to talk about as we explore the topic of adventure gaming, and we’re going to do that in our next episode.

First, we’re going to continue our look at other graphical adventure games made by Sierra using the SCI engine and we’ll explore what Leisure Suit Larry and Space Quest’s Roger Wilco got up to along with talking about the rise of Jane Jensen, Al Lowe and Josh Mandel’s other games like Freddy Pharkas and Torrin’s Passage, Roberta Williams’s forays into full motion video and Sierra’s interesting attempts at creating animated games that looked like living cartoons!

Then, we’ll turn our focus to other developers like Dynamix, Westwood Associates, Interplay, Adeline Software International, Humongous Games, Activision, Revolution Software, Cryo, Perfect Entertainment and MicroProse! I’ll also talk a little bit about what Steve Mertetzky was up to at Legend Entertainment and Boffo Games and Douglas Adam’s invitation to take a trip on the Starship Titanic.

Next, we’ll turn our focus to the multimedia era of the mid to late 1990s and the transition to FMV and full-3D adventures in the declining days of the genre, covering titles like Myst, The Longest Journey, Burn:Cycle, Chronomaster, The Journeyman Project, The 7th Guest, Blade Runner, The Last Express and The Neverhood.

Finally we’ll close by touching on the 21st century contributions of studios like Telltale Games, Double Fine, Daedalic Entertainment, Amanita Designs, Wadjet Eye Games and Quantic Dream. We’ll cover all of that and more in our next few episodes!

If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.

And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!

I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore!

THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRY

Before I let you go every week, I’m close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.

This week, I want to recommend Relooted, a parkour platform game from the South African studio Nyamakop that is quite honestly one of the coolest games I’ve played in awhile. The premise is that you’re a parkour runner named Nomali who’s been recruited into a crew focused on repatriating artifacts that have been stolen through colonialism and which are now housed in museums in private displays so they don’t have to be returned to the cultures they were plundered from. Your job is to plan a series a heists, work out your exit strategy, grab the loot and then run to your escape point before you’re chased down.

The game isn’t quite set in the real world – the developer describes it as “African-futurist” – but it does involve real world artifacts, and it’s happy to give you detailed info about where they’re from and why they’re important to the cultures they were taken from. Talk about a perfect game for Black History Month, but also a subversive way to remind the world that yeah, colonialism sucks and we still have a lot of work to undo its influence on many cultures around the world and to give them back the records of their own history.

I’ve seen a lot of hate directed at this game and also some surprisingly tone-deaf reviews written by white people like myself who want to criticize this indie game for what they consider to be a so-so story amidst a promising premise.

I personally feel this is the wrong way to handle a game that is literally about white people telling the story of black people around the world, and so I’ll instead quote the great headline from a review by Ash Parrish on Kotaku: “Relooted is a big black middle finger to history controlled by white people.” I couldn’t say it better myself.

We need more games like this. We need more people to tell their stories through games so the rest of us can have a chance to understand what it’s like to feel what they feel and to experience what they experience. But I want to be clear – I am not recommending Relooted just because of that. I’ve played it, and it’s indeed a very good game that I had a blast with. It reminds me a lot of the 2D version of Mirror’s Edge, which was itself borrowing many things from Prince of Persia. But there are also some cool ideas from other 2D platformers thrown in to keep things fast and fun. I personally get some of the feelings of games like Gunpoint and Mark of the Ninja when I’m playing this one, and I love it.

So be sure to try out Relooted. It’s just $15 on Steam and well worth it! And even if it’s not your cup of tea, you’ll be supporting a great South African game studio that I hope will continue to make more games in the years to come.

SOURCES:

LOOM Audio Drama

The Dagger of Amon Ra: Why Almost No One Solves This Game: https://adventuregamehotspot.com/feature/5349/why-almost-no-one-solves-this-game

https://mixnmojo.com/features/sitefeatures/LucasArts-Secret-History-11-The-Dig/5

https://www.adventure-treff.de/Interviews/11754-chris-jones

https://kotaku.com/relooted-review-heist-game-steam-game-pass-2000667754

Thanks for reading The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com

In this episode, Sean details tons of other 1980s adventure games from North America, Europe and Japan, from Transylvania to Tass Times in Tonetown to Mewilo to the MacVenture games and more! He’s Sean Jordan, and he is your Great Game Guide!(And yes, Sean has a cold, so pardon his creaky voice and the sounds of sniffling here and there!)

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Season 1, Episode 4: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 2

Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.

You can contact Sean via Substack @greatestgames (https://greatestgames.substack.com) or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)

And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.

Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)

Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!

--------------------------------------------------SOURCES:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/06/heirs-of-infocom-where-interactive-fiction-authors-and-games-stand-today/

https://www.filfre.net/tag/berlyn/

https://www.mobygames.com/game/90/tass-times-in-tonetown/

https://dn710309.ca.archive.org/0/items/Tonetown_Times_Newspaper_HQ/Tonetown_Times_Newspaper_HQ.pdf

https://www.theverge.com/2013/10/1/4791566/timothy-learys-neuromancer-video-game-could-have-been-incredible

https://advgamer.blogspot.com/2013/04/game-31-mean-streets-introduction.html

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/beyond-shadowgate-2024/

https://shadowgate.fandom.com/wiki/Before_Shadowgate_(Worlds_of_Power)

Before Shadowgate: https://web.archive.org/web/20010819174552/http://www.shadowgate.com/circle/novella.html

https://obscuritory.com/essay/muriel-tramis-interview/Coming up in this episode –

We’re going to step away from Sierra On-Line for a bit and take a look at some of the other graphical adventure games that came out alongside theirs in the 1980s and early 1990s, including adventures from Penguin Software, Accolade, Konami, Riverhill Soft, Denton Designs, Artech, Coktel Vision, Ultrasoft, ICOM Simulations, Interplay, Access Software, Activision and Cyan.

I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Let’s delve into adventure games you might be less familiar with that helped to shape the point and click genre we recognize today!

What is an adventure game, and what separates it from other genres of gaming? I don’t mean to ask this question in some sort of navel-gazey way where we explore all the possible definitions of the term and then wind up pretty much agreeing that an adventure game is what we thought it was all along. In the 1980s, role-playing games and adventure games as we think of them today were both marketed as adventure games, and it took years before people started recognizing those two types of games as being not just mechanically different, but as having a different kind of appeal to different kinds of players.

While we’re at it, let’s ask ourselves – what truly separates a text-based adventure game from a true graphical one? You might say, “graphics!”, but as I’ve discussed in our earlier episodes, it was pretty fashionable in the mid-80s to create or remake text-based adventures with some static illustrations to help make the games more marketable, even if the illustrations didn’t add much to the gameplay. On the other hand, Roberta Williams’s Hi-Res Adventures were proto-graphical adventure games because the games were built around your being able to see what was happening onscreen in a way that illustrated text adventures like The Hobbit or Amazon or The Pawn or even Infocom’s graphically splendid late 80s adaptation of James Clavell’s Shogun were not.

You might also say “a text parser,” but it wasn’t until the 1990s that most adventure games had ditched the text parser and started to adopt mouse-driven inputs. You can blame King’s Quest V for really popularizing icon-driven point and click gameplay. It wasn’t the first game to offer it, but it was so popular with both gamers and critics that it pushed the genre forward. At least, mostly. We’ll talk about some of the most stubborn holdouts, like Legend Entertainment, in another episode.

I would argue that what makes a graphical adventure game truly different from a text-based adventure is more of a feel than a list of features. Text-based adventures tend to draw your attention to the actual text that the developer authored, and that’s where you’re going to find all of the cues you need to advance through the game. Even illustrated text-based adventures can be played competently without graphics. The pictures don’t add anything meaningful to the gameplay.

But graphical adventure games rely on you responding to the visual cues onscreen and often don’t describe those details effectively in the text descriptions. In the earliest graphical adventure games, like Mystery House, the graphics help to set the mood and create an atmosphere for the game that isn’t left entirely up to your imagination to fill in.

I can actually offer a really good example of this from a game we haven’t talked about yet, one from 1982 that was written by a high school student named Antonio Antiochia, who created a text-based adventure centered around horror movie monsters like a vampire and a werewolf and a goblin and a witch and even space aliens. He submitted his work to a guy named Mark Pelczarski, who’d started a publisher called Penguin Software and, along with another developer named Jon Niedfeldt, created a program called The Graphics Magician for the Apple II. It was based on an earlier program called Magic Paintbrush Pelczarski had written, and similar to the graphics drawing routines Ken Williams wrote for Sierra, this program broke images down into vectors that could be drawn onscreen and filled in rather than trying to store entire finished graphic files.

Pelczarski told Antiochia to illustrate the game, and this smart decision led to an adventure that was able to more effectively set a mood that fit its theme of attempting to rescue a princess named Sabrina before dawn, when she would die. But one of the most distinctive aspects of the game was a werewolf who’d stalk you mercilessly around the map, showing up onscreen in a fear-inducing silhouette.

Unlike Sierra’s Hi-Res Adventures or Scott Adam’s Graphic Adventure series, the artwork for Transylvania didn’t feel like a hodge-podge of assorted images. Its artwork had a certain cohesive style that, while still amateurish by today’s standards, made the game come to life in a way that a lot of other adventures didn’t. If you remember that game I talked about a couple of episodes back called Vampire’s Castle, a pure text adventure with a frustratingly limited parser and terse descriptions of things? Transylvania did what that game was trying to do, but correctly.

In fact, it was good enough to be ported pretty widely to many different home computer standards and also to receive a 1985 sequel called The Crimson Crown, which leans even more heavily into its graphics, and a 1990 sequel called Transylvania III: Vanquish the Night, a quite underrated game that might have been more popular if it hadn’t continued to use a text parser.

But it wasn’t the only adventure game from Penguin Software, which would eventually change its name to Polarsoft. In 1983, the publisher also launched a sword and sorcery-style fantasy adventure called The Quest, a game that looks like an RPG from its packaging and theme, but which is really just a text-based adventure. You don’t even get a sword until late in the game!

And in The Quest, we see the difference between what Transylvania pulled off and what an illustrated text adventure game looks like, because this one’s just a series of trails and paths with some occasional scenes you’ll come across, but not really much to look at. Even so, the illustrations later in the adventure do help to communicate ideas that go beyond the text, like showing off skeletons or warning signs… or a sexy gal named Lisa inside a rather modern-looking house who’s a nice change from the seemingly endless tunnels you have to travel through after you meet her and together discover some Aztec-style ruins.

I don’t really recommend The Quest, by the way. But if you want to play something sort of like it, a 1982 game from Ultrasoft called The Mask of the Sun used its graphics to get you off boring walking trails and instead depict the idea of driving in a jeep between different locations on the map. This game’s notable for featuring some rudimentary animation and also some occasional sound effects, both of which were rare in adventure games of this era.

One of the neater scenes involves assembling a jaguar statue, only to have it transform into an actual jaguar in front of you and then saunter off. Another involves stepping into a dark room where the graphics vanish and the text describes that you hear the sounds of snakes nearby. Suddenly, a snake appears in the darkness onscreen! It’s a fun way to add some drama to what would otherwise just be fairly unexciting text.

If you happen to enjoy The Mask of the Sun, Ultrasoft also made a sequel set in Asia called The Serpent’s Star where you have to track down the city of Kara-Koram in Tibet.

Let’s take a moment now to talk about some early graphical adventures in other parts of the world. In the UK, a company called Legend released a very interesting 1983 title for the ZX Spectrum called Valhalla that anticipated a lot of the ideas Roberta Williams would use in King’s Quest a year later. I doubt she ever saw this game – I wasn’t even aware of it myself until recently! – but it’s basically a sidescrolling adventure game where you wander around locations in Asgard, Midgard, Hell and Valheim in search of six treasures and type commands into a text parser. It’s nowhere near as sophisticated as King’s Quest in terms of movement or puzzles, but it’s definitely one of the earliest adventure games that can’t rely on text alone and absolutely requires graphics to portray what’s happening onscreen.

Another UK-only adventure game from the ZX Spectrum was the 1984 game Tir Na Nog by Gargoyle Games. This one’s pretty wild, featuring the Celtic mythological hero Cuchulainn, which means there’s plenty of action. The gameplay involves a lot of sidescrolling movement down paths that occasionally have a crossroads allowing you to move up or down or into doorways. But it’s an adventure game at heart, requiring you to solve rather cryptic puzzles to advance. It’s also quite well-animated, using parallax scrolling to add a sense of depth and a detailed walking animation to give Cuchulainn some presence in the very visual game world he inhabits. I recommend this one if you’re willing to give ZX Spectrum games a try, and the 1985 prequel, Dun Darach, is even better.

Moving to the other side of the world, let’s look at Japan, where Yuji Horii created an interesting game called Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken or Portopia Serial Murder Case for the Sharp X1 in 1983. If you’ve ever played a Japanese adventure game, this one will feel very familiar because the graphics are shown in a small pane while there’s a text scroll on the bottom half of the screen to provide clues and dialogue and some menu options on the right hand side. In fact, this style of gameplay got so popular that it not only became the template for other Japanese adventure games, but also Yuji Horii’s far more famous role-playing game, Dragon Quest, which came out the next year.

What’s interesting about Portopia Serial Murder Case is that it was designed around the same basic philosophy Roberta Williams developed for King’s Quest about creating a more non-linear adventure with some scripted scenes to make the gameplay feel like you were moving through a series of vignettes you stumbled upon rather than being forced to follow a pre-scripted path. Given that Japanese gamers were primarily familiar with Mystery House and a handful of other illustrated text adventures, it’s fascinating to see how the genre evolved into both crime-solving mysteries like Portopia Serial Murder Case as well as more varied fantasy fare.

One of the earlier Japanese adventures, Hudson Soft’s 1984 game Salad no Kuni no Tomato-hime, better known in North America as Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom, started life as a rather bizarre illustrated text adventure that only accepted English commands before getting ported to the Famicom in the menu-driven style Portopia Serial Murder Case had established.

But you’ve really got to see the original to believe it – the artwork is absolutely gorgeous considering the simplicity of the graphics hardware of the day, and the decision to use fruit and vegetables becomes clear since they can be depicted with expressive faces while also having simple enough shapes that they can be rendered clearly onscreen. The thing I find most impressive is how dramatically each screen depicts things as boring as buildings or pathways – always from interesting angles showcasing great use of 3-point perspective and making nearly every moment of the game visually striking.

These early 80s efforts were nothing compared to what was coming a few years later, however, and as computer game graphics became more sophisticated, so did the adventure games that were incorporating them.

In our previous episode, I described Ken and Roberta Williams as one of gaming’s first power couples. But of course, they’re not the only couple to have ever worked together on a game, and another couple who was involved in the creation of adventure games was Michael and Muffy McClung Berlyn.

A little bit of background on Michael Berlyn – he was a writer and novelist who started out at Sentient Software before moving to Infocom as an implementor and writing Suspended, Infidel and Cutthroats and also joining the team to create Infocom’s one of a kind digital board game Fooblitzky, a dismal flop of a cool idea which we’ll talk about in a future episode. Michael soon bounced around between large publishers like Activision, Electronic Arts, Accolade and even created a game you probably have heard of called Bubsy in: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind, an animal mascot platformer we will also talk about in a later episode. Muffy assisted Michael on several of his games as a writer and contributor, but most of the games she’s credited on aren’t titles that are widely familiar today, including Oo-Topos, Altered Destiny and Dr. Dumont’s Wild P.A.R.T.I..

After awhile, Michael burned out on making console games and tried to start a new publisher called Cascade Mountain Publishing to focus on interactive fiction. It made it just a couple of years, and he and his wife largely vanished from game development before emerging making mobile interactive story games for casual audiences under the label Flexible Tales. These titles included The Art of Murder, A Taste for Murder, Reconstructing Remy, Ogg! and the wonderfully-named Grok the Monkey, also known as Carnival of Death. Unfortunately, all of those mobile games have been delisted and I could barely find any information about them in my research.

I also sadly must say that Michael Berlyn passed away from cancer in 2023.

But let’s go back to the 1980s, where Michael and Muffy were younger game developers also teaching creative writing at Harvard. According to an interview Michael gave to a MobyGames contributor, the two liked to play on Harvard’s motto, “Veritas,” which means truth in Latin, by saying “very tass” to agree with something as being true. Their students picked up on it and started using it to describe things that were hip or cool.

That’s part of the origin story behind their 1986 adventure game Tass Times in Tonetown, a graphical adventure game that started out under the working title Ennio: The Legend Begins, referencing the hip dog in the game who is a pet named Spot in our reality but a celebrity journalist named “Ennio the Legend” in the alternate reality of Tonetown. And as the manual’s opening poem asks, “are you tass? Are you tone?” And even if you’re not, you might find this adventure to be a quirky favorite, because it really is quite different from anything else from the mid-80s, or the decades that came after, really. The included 4-page Tonetown Times newspaper definitely gives you a feel for this intriguing alternate reality.

One of the interesting aspects of Tass Times in Tonetown is that it uses a graphical interface to accompany its text parser, and you can navigate the game with a joystick or mouse and type in occasional commands instead of relying entirely on the parser. The game’s bold graphics, fun fashions and bizarre characters add a lot of charm to the adventure, and the images are even lightly animated, which was not common for games of the era.

While this game clearly falls in the realm of “cult classic” rather than “major hit,” Michael and Muffy got another shot at taking players into a different reality at Accolade with Altered Destiny. It’s a 1990 graphical adventure game that looks quite similar to Space Quest III, but which involves a modern day human named P.J. Barrett getting sucked into a portal in his TV and wandering around a strange new world called Daltere, eventually learning he has to find the Jewel of Light to save the galaxy from an evil alien. Unfortunately, Altered Destiny also featured a text parser in a year where gamers were getting more used to mouse-driven commands thanks to adventure game publishers such as Sierra On-Line and LucasFilm Games. It’s an interesting, but also clunky, adventure game to play today.

Michael also worked on another adventure game series at Accolade that began with Les Manley in: Search for the King, a Leisure Suit Larry-style adventure game that’s very funny, but which was likewise hampered by its text parser. The 1991 sequel, Les Manley in: Lost in L.A. adopted the point and click style of the Sierra games but also went for inserting mostly cringey digitized graphics in close-ups instead of character animations to suit the game’s otherwise traditional point and click style. It’s kind of jarring.

Speaking of Accolade, the company wasn’t always chasing Sierra’s lead, and one of their more innovative adventure games by Distinctive Software, called Accolade’s Comics, came out in 1987 with the promise of allowing players to play a branching story starring Secret Agent Steve Keene, Thrillseeker! At the beginning of the game, you’re given the choice to investigate what’s happening with some strange fire hydrants spontaneously reproducing around town or visit Vienna in search of a professor who’s gone missing. The game is presented in comic strip form and you choose Steve Keene’s dialogue choices to shape the story. While the game was designed for 8-bit computers and the graphics are low-resolution, the cartoony charm does make this one an adventure worth experiencing, even if the story itself is largely a framing device for a bunch of so-so minigames.

Activision released an interesting graphical adventure game in 1986 called Portal and no, it’s not the one you’re thinking of, but instead something more akin to what we’d call a “walking simulator” today written by Rob Swigart, who’s also since made a novelization of the game available. The premise is actually pretty neat – you’re a human astronaut who’s been away from Earth for 100 years and you return to find everything’s gone wrong in your absence. Tapping into a global network, you and your helpful AI companion Homer try to uncover clues to figure out where humanity went. It’s a truly interesting game that’s well worth experiencing.

Another Activision adventure from this era that’s quite unique is called Hacker, a game that famously shipped without a manual and challenged players to figure things out for themselves. It simulates breaking into a remote computer terminal and eventually stumbling on a global conspiracy that requires you to take control of autonomous robotic drones to travel through a subterranean tunnel between cities so you can locate contacts and gather evidence to foil the conspirators. This game came out in 1985, and a sequel, Hacker II: The Doomsday Papers, followed in 1986. I recommend them both.

If you recall our previous episode about text-based adventure games being adapted into bookware, you might wonder when the first true graphical adventure games based on books debuted. One of the earliest was Interplay’s adaptation of William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, which was intended to tie into a film adaptation that never happened. Interplay got the rights after a prior attempt by psychologist and psychedelics enthusiast Dr. Timothy Leary fell through. Interplay’s version wasn’t nearly as ambitious as what Leary had in mind, but it did turn out to be a competent point and click adventure game where players used a cursor to click on icons and environmental elements, all while a Devo song called “Some Things Never Change” plays in the background.

By today’s standards, Neuromancer doesn’t look anything like a cyberpunk game beyond its forays into Cyberspace. It’s brightly colored, the characters speak in cartoon bubbles and the main character, Chase, often has a smile on his face as he explores Chiba City. The razorgirl Molly Millions, a major character in the book, doesn’t make any appearance in the game, and you also never travel around the world or get into any of the crazy intrigue that occurs in the book.

Even so, it’s long been one of the only visual adaptations of the famous novel, and until the Apple TV show comes out at some point in the future, it’s one of the only ways to experience the story without just reading the book, which you absolutely should, by the way.

And I’m looking forward to a future episode where we can talk about the cyberpunk genre in a lot more detail.

But now, let’s transition over to the Macintosh, where a developer called Cyan published a game through Activision called The Manhole using the Mac’s HyperTalk programming language. It’s a whimsical adventure for children quite similar to, but not explicitly based upon, Alice in Wonderland. It’s also the sort of mouse-driven experience where you click on the screen to make everything happen – there’s no parser, and beyond some cartoon dialogue bubbles or labels on things, very little text. It’s also a splendid-looking title with gorgeous graphics even in its original black and white version. Cyan followed it up with a couple of other kid-friendly adventures called Cosmic Osmo in 1989 and Spelunx and the Caves of Mr. Seudo in 1991, but if you know this developer by name, it’s probably because of their 1993 smash hit, Myst, which became a turning point for graphical adventure games. We’ll talk about it in our next episode as we explore the influence of multimedia gaming on the genre.

I want to mention one more 80s adventure game from North American developers, and it’s Mean Streets, a 1989 release from Access Software starring a detective named Tex Murphy, who’d go on to star in a number of games, including a sort-of remake in 1998 called Tex Murphy: Overseer. Mean Streets definitely takes some cues from Blade Runner and has a dystopian cyberpunk vibe, but it leans a little more heavily into the tropes of hard-boiled detective fiction as you roam around San Francisco in the year 2033. The game was originally intended to be a story-driven follow-up to Access Software’s 1987 space flight sim adventure hybrid Echelon, but it turned into more of a pure adventure, fusing hand-drawn and digitized graphics to tell its story. Fortunately, these were a little more convincing than those in games like the Les Manley sequel.

As the series evolved, writer Chris Jones, who also stars as Tex Murphy in the games, took more and more of a role in designing them as traditional adventures and ditching the elements derived from Echelon. The 1992 sequel, Martian Memorandum, added in digitized video, something that would become a staple of this series as it became one of the showcases for multimedia gaming.

Again, we’ll cover that in our next episode. But for now, let’s turn our attention back overseas for some other adventure games from the late 1980s.

In 1980, author Umberto Eco published an Italian-language novel called The Name of the Rose, a fantastic murder mystery set in the medieval era that included elements of Catholicism, monastic life, semiotics and classic literature. The book received a 1986 Hollywood film adaptation starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater, but it did a poor job of translating the cerebral story and also completely changed the ending. As usual, the book is better than the movie, and I’d recommend the novel to anyone who enjoys literature for its ability to provoke you to think.

I mention this because as we talk about European adventure games, we can turn to 1987, when the Spanish publisher Opera Soft released a game called La Abadia del Crimen, which means The Abbey of Crime, and it was pretty clearly an adaptation of The Name of the Rose in all but name. As it happens, Opera Soft couldn’t get the rights to the book, so they had to change the story enough to keep the game original. Even so, this surprisingly strong isometric adventure managed to be one of the jewels in the crown of the Spanish software scene during a time now referred to as the Golden Era of Spanish Software between 1983 and 1992. Sadly, the game has never been officially released in English and is only playable in English with a fan patch. Fortunately, it’s not too hard to find one, and it’s entirely worth your trouble.

Another isometric adventure game from the same era is 1988’s Where Time Stood Still, a truly remarkable game from Denton Designs in the UK where a family and their plane’s pilot crash in a strange prehistoric land and have to try to survive a harrowing journey to safety. Part of what makes the game so interesting is that it’s possible for some of your characters to die, limiting your options in dealing with hazards or the people you encounter. The limited graphics also allow the game to make strong use of its black and white classic movie vibe – an effect Denton Designs had used in their 1986 isometric adventure The Great Escape, but which fits this game’s atmosphere so much better.

Over in France, the publisher Infogrames created a two-part adventure game series for the MSX called Passengers on the Wind, based on the comic book series by Francois Bourgeon. I’ve never read the comics myself, but the games are supposed to follow their seafaring historical fiction plot very closely, and they also replicate the look of comic books with paneled artwork, speech bubbles and a graphical interface. The 1986 original game involves a seaward journey to Africa from Brittany, France during the time of the French Revolution and allows players to take on the roles of many different characters. The 1987 sequel has the crew land in Western Africa and further explores the dynamics of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

On that note, I also don’t want to forget the French studio Coktel Vision, which in 1986 hired a game designer named Muriel Tramis, widely acknowledged not only as the first black female game developer, but also as the Roberta Williams of France. Her first game, Méwilo debuted in 1987 and told a story about the town of Saint-Pierre on the Caribbean island of Martinique the day before a volcano would erupt and destroy the town. This game had particular relevance to Muriel Tramis because it’s set on the island her family is from, but the story also puts you in the shoes of a paranormal investigator who’s looking for a zombie that’s reputed to be the spirit of a slavemaster. Unfortunately, the game was only released in French and German, and many of her other games from the 1980s only came out in French. One that did make it to the US is 1989’s Emmanuelle: A Game of Eroticism, which is based on the erotic 1974 novel that’s been the inspiration for plenty of pornography, but the game itself was not well-received because it’s told from the perspective of the man trying to seduce the book’s sexually liberated female rather than from the female’s point of view. Another of her erotic games, Geisha, debuted in 1990 and got a multinational release as well, but it’s not a game I’d recommend.

We’ll talk more about Muriel Tramis when we get to the 1990s, because she’s also the driving force behind the family-friendly Gobliiins series and the cartoony adventure The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble, both of which were published outside of France by Sierra On-Line.

Another French developer who was making adventure games in the late 1980s was Exxos, a label of ERE Informatique known for some really strange and surreal games like Captain Blood and Purple Saturn Day. They’d later go on to reform as Cryo Interactive, but as Exxos, they released a strange point and click adventure game through Infogrames called Kult: The Temple of Flying Saucers, but released in the United States as Chamber of the Mutant Sci-Fi Priestess. This game is incredibly bizarre, taking a lot of design cues from the artwork of H.R. Giger and featuring a disembodied fetus in the upper corner of the screen and an action menu that resembles some sort of alien creature. Oh, and you also get to fight lizardman aliens. It’s definitely a trip.

In 1989, the similarly French publisher Ubisoft published developer Computer Dream’s cyberpunk spaceport game B.A.T., which means Bureau of Astral Troubleshooters. It’s a really good-looking adventure game where the action is presented in graphic novel-style frames, and while there’s plenty of text to read, the game itself involves clicking rather than attempting to type commands into a text parser. The first game’s a tad on the short side, though, and it’s really the 1992 sequel, B.A.T. II – The Koshan Conspiracy, that delivers on the promise the first game shows.

And one more French developer worth mentioning from 1989 is Delphine International, who released the absolutely visually striking time travel game Future Wars: Adventures in Time, an interesting but way too short adventure that is most famous today for the involvement of Eric Chahi, who’d go on to create Another World, also known as Out of This World, in 1991. But Delphine got to make a more high-profile adventure game in the meantime, 1990s’ 007: James Bond - The Stealth Affair, which tells an original story about Ian Fleming’s classic spy but delivers a point and click adventure game experience as good as anything else that was on the market that year.

Delphine followed this game up with 1991’s Cruise for a Corpse, a game that feels like it might have started as an Agatha Christie adaptation before being retooled as an original game. Even so, it’s a gorgeous point and click adventure and offers a compelling mystery to solve, and that leads us to another subgenre of graphical adventure games we haven’t really talked about yet: murder mysteries.

In 1983, Free Fall Associates released a crime-solving game through Electronic Arts called Murder on the Zinderneuf where you play as a detective trying to solve a crime aboard a dirigible where fifteen different passengers are suspects. Every single time you play, the clues change, as does the identity of the killer and his or her motive, and it’s up to you to try to figure out how to get the right information in time to accuse the killer before the Zinderneuf lands.

This basic concept is more or less the structure for many mystery games, though as the years went on, the mysteries tended to cement the identity of the killer and make the gameplay more linear as a result. This of course allowed for more sophisticated puzzles, but it also meant that the games lost a lot of their replay value.

Killed Until Dead is one of the games that held onto the idea of randomizing the details. It debuted in 1986 developed by Artech and released through Accolade and, I must admit, has a gripping yet absolutely silly title. But the game also doesn’t take itself seriously. The premise is that five mystery writers have checked in to your hotel and you have to catch one who intends to murder another one before the deed actually happens. You do this by conducting incredibly intrusive surveillance with listening devices, cameras and room sweeps. Even so, the game itself is a lot of fun and involves some pretty serious logic puzzles to solve.

Interplay’s Borrowed Time, released through Activision in 1985, takes the opposite approach of providing a linear mystery you solve by visiting suspects at the right times in the right places. The game is basically a text adventure with an added graphical user interface on top, and it’s built on the text parser from the game Mindshadow, but the graphics go a little beyond just illustrating the plot, providing animations and even some details that you can’t get from the text alone, particularly when it comes to hidden objects.

The Scoop is a 1987 point and click adventure from Dale Disharoon and Telarium based on a novella by the London Detection Club, a group of writers that included Agatha Christie as a member. The game’s actually about a reporter, not a detective, who’s trying to save the newspaper The Daily Courier from going out of business and has to solve a series of crimes resulting in two murders. The game’s somewhat aggravating because it requires you to be in the right places at the right times to hear characters in the game world give needed information, but modern players who are used to roguelikes will have no trouble restarting the game over and over to get the details right.

Murder on the Mississippi is a 1986 mystery adventure game from Activision that’s basically a parody of Agatha Christie’s novel Death on the Nile. Instead of traveling in Egypt, you’re heading up the Mississippi River on a steamship from St. Louis to New Orleans. As Sir Charles Foxworth, you have three days to solve the murder. The game plays a little differently from other adventure games because you control it with a joystick instead of the keyboard, and this led the game to be ported to some Japanese systems and the Famicom. Unfortunately, the Japanese versions are so bad this game is well-known as a kusoge, or “crappy game.” The American version, however, is quite playable, and even fun, particularly on the Commodore 64.

Speaking of Japan, let’s turn our attention for a moment to Riverhill Soft’s Murder Club, also known in Japan as the first game in the J.B. Harold series. The premise of the game is that you’re a private detective who has to go around and talk to people to gather evidence to locate the murderer of a rich man. If you’ve played modern visual novel-style mysteries like the Ace Attorney games, you’ll have a pretty good understanding of how this game’s menu-driven dialogue trees and opportunities for action work – you can question witnesses, review old cases, examine evidence and even visit the crime lab. In Japan, this game led to several sequels that even culminated in a fully digitized multimedia game in 1994.

Another Japanese game in a similar vein is Hideo Kojima’s Snatcher, which also uses the menu-driven interface Japanese adventure games have tended to utilize since Portopia Serial Murder Case, but which takes place in a cyberpunk world that’s more or less Blade Runner with some different names for things, like JUNKER Runner for Blade Runner and Snatcher for Replicant. Snatcher is not only a fun mystery game with some unexpected bursts of action, but also features the cute Metal Gear mk. II mech as your constant companion. Kojima’s 1994 adventure game Policenauts is similar mechanically, but entirely different in terms of tone and structure.

One more game I want to mention from outside the US is The Detective, a 1986 UK Commodore 64 game by Argus Press Software where you control Inspector Snide of Scotland Yard. Your job is to investigate the mansion of Angus MacFungus, who’s recently been murdered. Similar to Murder on the Mississippi, the game’s joystick-driven with a menu that pops up when actions are available. Though it’s an isometric game, the graphics are quite cartoony and distinctive, quite similar in style to Maniac Mansion, but with more of a British flair. As the game progresses, more murders happen, and you have to solve the case before time runs out. But part of the fun is understanding how the NPCs move around the mansion and how you can use secret passages to shorten your time traveling around it.

Surprisingly, the 1980s didn’t have a lot of Sherlock Holmes games, something that would become a staple in the 1990s multimedia era. Infocom and Challenge’s 1988 Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels was a text adventure, and the 1986 Commodore 64 game 221 B Baker St. was a board game adaptation. Bantam Software did create a 1985 Macintosh game called Sherlock Holmes in “Another Bow”, but it’s so easy it’s not worth recommending.

Beyond everything we’ve discussed, the 1980s also had a great run of mystery games on the Macintosh, so good that they’re today referred to as the “MacVenture” games. And if hearing about them gives you a sense of Déjà vu, you know what’s coming next.

You don’t have to be super familiar with the history of the Apple Macintosh to know that the computer was released in 1984 following a very famous advertisement playing up the whole “let’s tear down Big Brother with our hip new computer” idea. The Apple Macintosh was one of the first mainstream personal computers to be driven by a graphical user interface, and though it was certainly a niche machine that appealed to a certain type of computer user, the clean graphics, windowed environments and mouse-driven interface made the Mac a lot less intimidating to a casual user than a typical keyboard-driven command-line computer.

But one thing the Macintosh is also famous for is its lack of games, though that notion is a little overblown. According to MobyGames, the Mac had about 300 games released between 1984 and 1989 and close to 2000 games released in the 1990s. A lot of these were ports, of course, and even the Mac’s own exclusives tended to get ported to more popular platforms where they could sell better.

In 1985, a little developer in Wheeling, Illinois called ICOM Simulations created one of the Mac’s first truly great games, a graphical adventure game called Déjà Vu: A Nightmare Comes True. The game takes place in Chicago in the 1940s and puts you in the shoes of a gumshoe with a bad case of amnesia who has to clear his own name from a murder for which he’s been framed.

It’s quite different from many other graphical adventure games of the era because you have to find an antidote to cure your memory loss and fill in gaps in the backstory. Failing to take the antidote on time can actually cause you to lose your mind entirely and wind up in a mental hospital, and it’s easy to wind up in that state when you get out on the streets and start getting hassled by a time-wasting mugger. Déjà Vu is definitely a game where even knowing the exact sequence of required events won’t necessarily get you through the adventure without having to reload or start over, and Déjà Vu is also rather infamous for killing your character suddenly and without much warning.

But the other thing about Déjà Vu that’s notable is that everything is entirely cursor-driven. There is no text to type in and you can interact with objects in the game world directly by clicking or double-clicking on them, depending upon which version you’re playing. This interface design made sense on the Mac with its including mouse, but it also allowed the game to be ported to other platforms like the Commodore 64 and even the Nintendo Entertainment System, where the cursor could be moved around with a joystick or d-pad instead of a mouse. Déjà Vu is so well-designed as an adventure game that even on these less graphically-intensive 8-bit platforms, the game plays well and remains fun. In fact, I’d hazard to say far more people have played the slightly sanitized NES version than the Macintosh original.

ICOM’s next game debuted in 1986, but instead of offering another hard-boiled detective story, this game, Uninvited, has you survive a car accident and go searching for your missing sibling at a nearby mansion that’s noticeably decrepit and almost certainly haunted. As the game progresses, it becomes clear that the place was once the home of a powerful sorcerer whose evil apprentice trapped the souls of many of the people who lived there. And if you somehow survive all the danger but don’t complete the game within a proscribed set of moves, you, too, will become one of its undead residents.

Uninvited is often considered the lesser of the MacVenture games because it’s tremendously difficult and requires players to piece together cryptic clues found around the mansion to solve puzzles. You also have to locate the lengthy magic phrases used to cast spells and type them in to use them. It’s also the one case where the NES port is probably the best version to play because it gets rid of the time limit, offers clearer hints and lets you select spells from your inventory, among other changes.

ICOM Simulations followed this one up with a far more popular adventure in 1987 called Shadowgate, and while it is similar to Uninvited since you’re exploring a Warlock’s castle this time around, the setting is more clearly grounded in a medieval fantasy world and you’re a more traditional hero-king saving the day than a hapless adventurer trying to piece things together. Unlike Uninvited’s move limit, Shadowgate has a finite number of torches you can use, and once you’re out of them you stumble in the darkness and break your neck.

Shadowgate’s most defining quality, however, is how gleefully it kills you. This is a game where you will die a lot and the game will take seemingly delight in describing your demise. In fact, some of the game’s darker elements managed to sneak past Nintendo of America’s censors, so even the NES version retains a lot of the horror-infused flavor of the original, and it’s definitely the best-known and most popular version today. Even so, there’s a certain charm to playing the game on the Mac because the black and white graphics add to the horror, and the game’s balance of battling monsters, solving puzzles and collecting the three pieces of the Staff of Ages needed to stop the Warlock Lord make for a compelling adventure that feels a bit like an RPG even if it’s more firmly rooted in traditional adventure game mechanics.

Shadowgate was so popular it inspired a 1993 TurboGrafxCD sequel exclusive to North America called Beyond Shadowgate, but it is very different, looking and playing much more like a Sierra-style adventure game with more cartoonish graphics. This is not to be confused, by the way, with a 2024 game published by Zojoi that plays much more like the NES port of the original and which is based on a sequel design document by the game’s co-creator, Dave Marsh, that was never used. It takes place a few decades after Shadowgate and stars a hero named Del who’s trapped in the castle.

There’s also a 1999 sequel called Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers developed by Infinite Ventures for the Nintendo 64 that also stars a hero named Del, but this story takes place centuries later and has a far more fleshed-out storyline that involves stopping an evil apprentice from resurrecting the Warlock Lord.

And there’s even a prequel novel! If you recall in an earlier episode, I mentioned Seth Godin’s “Worlds of Power” youth novel series written by the fictitious author F.X. Nine. Most of these books are really terrible, but the book Before Shadowgate actually had some input from the original developers, Dave Marsh and Karl Roelofs. No need to track the book down, though – Infinite Ventures released it freely on their website and you can check the show notes if you’d like to give it a read!

ICOM Simulations’ final MacVenture game definitely feels like history repeating itself, because it’s the 1988 sequel Deja Vu II: Lost in Las Vegas. But this time, the action moves out of Chicago and doesn’t involve an amnesia storyline. It’s instead a more conventional private eye type of story where you have to find a way to track down some missing mob money before a hitman decides you’re out of time and ends the game for you. It’s not quite as memorable as the original game and feels like a more conventional graphic adventure game in many ways, but it’s also notable for some rather obtuse puzzles that practically require you to consult a walkthrough.

After the MacVenture series, ICOM Simulations largely moved on to making games for the TurboGrafx-16 and TurboGrafxCD as well as creating the Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective multimedia series for the PC that shifted their focus from graphical adventure gaming to the flashier, but less interesting, full motion video adventures. They also developed some Looney Tunes Super Nintendo games through Sunsoft before they got acquired by Viacom and started cranking out games based on cable television IPs like Rocko’s Modern Life, Aaahh!! Real Monsters and MTV’s Beavis and Butt-Head.

ICOM’s last great game before this shift was, quite fittingly, a full-motion video adventure in the style of Shadowgate but also based on a popular IP at the time. It was called Dracula Unleashed, and we’ll definitely cover it when we talk about multimedia adventure games in a future episode.

But for now, we really need to finish out the 1980s by talking about LucasFilm Games and the advent of Sierra On-Line’s SCI interpreter, which led to the modern style of point and click adventure games we still play today and which allowed some other power couples and female creators beyond Roberta Williams to make some truly great graphical adventure games!

And we’ll cover that, and more, in our next episode!

If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.

And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!

I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore!

THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRY

Before I let you go every week, I close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.

This week, I want to recommend Rosewater, a point and click adventure game from Grundislav Games and designed by Francisco Gonzalez. The premise of the game is that you’re a writer named Harley Leger who’s taken a newspaper job in the frontier town of Rosewater. Your first assignment is to cover a Wild West frontier show being performed in town by Gentleman Jake Ackerman, a quick-witted Buffalo Bill-type who can talk himself into trouble as quickly as he can talk himself out of it. He’s also relying pretty heavily on his young assistant, Danny Luo, to do the actual trick shooting and cowboy stuff.

Later on, you head out on a treasure hunt and soon stumble onto a plot involving an errant scientist who’s behind some wild technology that feels like an offshoot of Rosewater’s predecessor, the 2019 steampunk adventure Lamplight City. And this is where the game gets interesting, because you begin acquiring other allies and soon embark on a road trip where you begin playing through vignettes that can last a few minutes or involve a far deeper encounter. Over time, you get to know all of your allies far better as Harley learns more about their backstories, and there are many points where you have to make choices in the game that impact the outcome of those relationships.

Though Rosewater takes place in the fictional world of Vespuccia, its reflection of our own Wild Western frontier is interesting because it offers some critique of the dynamics of the day through both a historical and modern lens. There are ne’er do wells who try to scam you, freedom fighters who are trying to hold onto their land, native tribes who are trying to balance kindness and caution, and even a religious cult that’s trying to make a better life for its people by covering up a dark secret. Once you reach the city of El Presidio and move into the endgame, Rosewater makes you feel like the journey you’ve been on has been more than just a sequence of events, but a true adventure across a wild land where anything can happen.

It reminds me a lot of the Sierra On-Line games Gold Rush! and the Conquests of Camelot and Conquests of the Longbow games, and that’s high praise, because I love those games and wish there were more adventures like them.

Rosewater is worth the $20 asking price – it’s a surprisingly lengthy game with great voice acting, a memorable story and distinctive artwork – but as of this writing, I’ve seen it on sale as low as $15 on Steam and GOG. That’s a great value, and you can often even find it bundled with Lamplight City, another tremendously worthwhile game that of course has some intersection with this one. Be sure to play them both!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1226670/Rosewater/

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com

In this episode, Sean details the history of On-Line Systems and Ken and Roberta Williams's development of the Hi-Res Adventures that gave birth to the genre of graphical adventure games! He's Sean Jordan, and he is your Great Game Guide!

-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 3: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 1Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack @greatestgames (https://greatestgames.substack.com) or BlueSky @greatestgames.substack.com

And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean's free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music "The Great Game Guide Theme" written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)

Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He'd love to hear from you!

--------------------------------------------------

Coming up in this episode –

We’re going to dive into graphical adventure games by taking a look at the early adventure games by Roberta and Ken Williams, talk about the evolution of adventure games from text parsers to point and click experiences and highlight a few of the lesser-known 1980s graphical adventure games you should definitely check out!

I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Let’s see what one of computer gaming’s earliest showcase genres has in store!

I grew up as a PC gamer, largely because my parents made my brothers and I skip out on the Nintendo Entertainment System when it arrived and PC games were all we had to play. We did have an Atari 2600 when I was really young, but when our TV started going on the fritz, my dad blamed it on the Atari and that was pretty much the end of console gaming in our house. And my dad was so adamantly against the slop on TV that he got rid of cable on our family television and we were pretty much restricted to watching what was on the local networks or whatever we could find on VHS – PG-rated, of course.

For a lot of people, this would have probably been a good signal to go outside, get some fresh air, explore the world around them. And I did! But we lived in the Midwest where it got way too cold in the winter and way too warm in July, so there were many days that we were stuck indoors, trying to find something to do. And since our computer time was limited to just a half an hour each per day, we’d usually burn through that before lunchtime.

Being a PC gamer, one of the genres my brothers and I played a lot were adventure games, and it might have had a shaping influence on how we all think, because when I was a teenager, my brother and I figured out how to utilize an old RGB monitor to essentially become a TV, at least one we could watch VHS tapes on thanks to a VCR we’d hooked up that could play video through the composite video input and sound through some external speakers. But the VCR had a coaxial cable input, and that meant we could hook up a video game console – an absolutely perfect plan, because we had friends who were getting tired of their Super Nintendos and Sega Genesises and willing to sell them to us or even give them to us, and they worked great with that RGB monitor.

What was particularly interesting about this workaround was that my parents didn’t fight us on it. We weren’t taking up the TV downstairs and preventing them from watching whatever they wanted, we weren’t doing anything that might harm the TV and we weren’t monopolizing the computer. Somehow, we’d solved this really illogical, arbitrary puzzle, and the reward was getting to graduate from being exclusively PC gamers to getting to be console gamers as well.

I’ve had many situations in my life that are just like that, and I credit adventure games for teaching me to think outside the box. And for me, the adventures that were the most gripping weren’t the text-based games we covered over the last two episodes. It was the graphical ones where you didn’t just have to imagine what was happening around you from a bunch of text, but you could actually see things depicted on the screen and interact with the game world directly.

The first adventure games I recall actually seeing were the trio of King’s Quest III, Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, and that’s because at the base exchange on the Air Force Base I lived on, those three games were running on a non-playable demo loop on the computers in the electronics department. I was captivated by them because each game featured its own world in which the characters could freely move around in what seemed like three dimensions due to the perspective, pick things up and talk to other characters. That might not seem like a big deal today, but in the mid-1980s, when a lot of games were sidescrollers or overhead action games with single button inputs, the difference was incredible.

And what’s more, I liked fantasy, and I liked science fiction, so King’s Quest and Space Quest were right up my alley. As for Leisure Suit Larry… dancing with girls in a disco – eh, not so much for a kid in the first grade. But I remember being really curious what a “lounge lizard” was and, being only six or seven at the time, I had a pretty literal understanding of what that might mean. It wasn’t until I was a little older, hit puberty and the themes of Leisure Suit Larry were suddenly very interesting to me that I had the wisdom and maturity to understand figurative language.

And sleaze, which Leisure Suit Larry delighted in, though I maintain to this day that the game’s not nearly as filthy as people made it out to be and that it was actually a parody of all those truly sleazy XXX adult games and graphics disks you’d see advertised in computer magazines. If you know the history of Leisure Suit Larry, you know I’m not far off the mark, either, because it’s actually both a parody and a remake of an earlier 1981 text-only adventure game called Softporn Adventure published by a company called On-Line Systems.

The game was written by Charles Benton in BASIC for the Apple II, and Benton happened to meet an enterprising software publisher at a trade show who eventually decided to help him reach a wider audience. The game’s box art features a now-infamous cover where three nude women are sitting in a hot tub sipping champagne while a mustachioed waiter stands behind them with a tray and bottle. Just the hint of sex and nudity in a computer game was shocking enough for the 1980s, a time where the Moral Majority was in full force trying to censor anything even remotely provocative, but there’s an even more interesting detail about this cover. Two of the women, on the left, worked for On-Line Systems. Their names are Diane Siegel and Susan Davis. But the third woman, sitting alone on the right, has long brown hair and bangs, and it’s not only her home in which the photo for this cover was taken, but also her influence that led to the rise of graphical adventure games as one of the genres through which video game stories could be told.

Her name is Roberta Williams, and she and her husband, Ken Williams, had co-founded On-Line Systems two years before this version of Softporn Adventure debuted. While they’d started the company to write business software, they’d also used it to publish Roberta’s hobby project, a game called Mystery House, in 1980.

It kicked off a series called Hi-Res Adventures that would become the very foundation for graphical adventure games not just in the United States, but around the world.

I don’t know if you saw it in early 2023, but a company nobody had heard of called Cygnus Entertainment released a game called Colossal Cave that offered a full 3D remake of Will Crowther and Don Wood’s Adventure … and with graphics, of course, since the original game didn’t have those. You can even play it in VR if you want, which is a pretty amazing option given that the game it’s based on is now 50 years old.

The Steam page lists Colossal Cave as being “by the award winning designer of King’s Quest and Phantasmagoria”, and no, that’s not a fake-out. This remake was directed by Roberta Williams, creator of both of those games, and Cygnus Entertainment is co-owned by her and her husband, Ken.

And it makes sense that they’d put out a visual reimagining of Colossal Cave Adventure, because as Roberta Williams says herself, this is the game that inspired her to become a game developer.

And by the way, this leads me to want to add a little bit of detail to the story of the creation of Adventure, because I was not aware until I watched Roberta William’s video about the origins of Colossal Cave Adventure that Will Crowther had originally mapped the caves in the Mammoth cave system with his wife, Particia. In fact, it was Patricia who first discovered the passageway linking the Mammoth Cave to the nearby Flint Cave system, and the two worked together to digitize their maps on a teletype terminal they had at home connected to the PDP-1 at Will’s workplace.

So, why does Will get so much credit for mapping the caves? It’s probably because the two separated before he wrote the game that made his exploration of them famous. But it just goes to show, behind every major accomplishment made by a man, there’s usually a woman who deserves more credit.

That’s never been the case with Ken and Roberta Williams, though. They’re gaming’s first true power couple and they are absolutely fascinating people who had a powerful shaping effect on the modern video game industry, particularly in the United States and Japan, but also in Germany and Eastern Europe, where point and click adventure games never really fell out of fashion like they did in most of the rest of the world.

You could make a whole movie about them, and in fact, someone is – later this year, there will be a documentary film called The Legends of Adventure: The Story of Sierra On-Line coming out for which, I’m happy to say, I was a proud Kickstarter backer.

Maybe one day, they’ll inspire a biopic about their young lives together as a business-minded programmer and a wildly creative game designer trying to get away from it all and make amazing computer games they sell in ziplocked baggies from their home at the foot of the Sierra mountains.

But to those of us who’ve been following PC gaming for awhile, the story of how Ken and Roberta founded On-Line Systems and then pivoted to Sierra On-Line is pretty well-known because they were both so willing to give interviews during the 1980s and 90s and also published their own company magazine. What’s more, a lot of the people who were there and worked with them have also given lots of interviews, so we have a pretty clear picture today of what working at Sierra was like.

But let’s back up to 1979, when Ken Williams discovered a game called Colossal Cave Adventure and introduced it to his wife, Roberta. They were both captivated by the game, and Roberta started searching for others like it. She tried out other games like Scott Adam’s Adventureland, but both she and Ken felt the experience could be improved with graphics.

Unfortunately, the microcomputers of the day weren’t very good at displaying detailed graphics for a few important reasons. One of these was storage – the cassettes and disks of the day were low-density and had very serious limitations when it came to storing both images and programs. Another was the graphics hardware itself on home computer platforms, which was still quite primitive, and also not standardized. And then there was also the issue of memory – some platforms required games to loaded entirely into RAM before they could be played because the storage media were too slow to read from during the game itself. This was particularly a problem with cassette tapes.

But Roberta and Ken recognized that the Apple II was capable of displaying hand-drawn graphics in conjunction with a tool called VersaWriter that allowed users to trace physical images place on a drawing board and digitize the tracing in medium or hi-resolution formats.

This is an important detail, because the games this husband and wife duo were about to create would come to be known as the Hi-Res Adventures. And even though the games are laughably low-resolution by today’s standards, in 1980, computer graphics of any sort were still a very novel idea, particularly on home PC.

But the VersaWriter had a big limitation, and that was that the out of the box software was only used for digitizing images, not actually using them. So Ken Williams had to write software to allow the Apple II to display them, and he also rewrote the scanning software to improve upon it.

And when Roberta created seventy drawings for the game she was writing, he had to additionally write software to compress and display them, which meant reinterpreting the lines in the graphics like vectors with coordinates.

This led to an effect that became common in the Hi-Res Adventures of seeing the computer draw each scene whenever you’d enter a room, which slowed the action down considerably from the faster pace of text-based adventure games. This slowdown but which became even more tedious when subsequent entries in the series added color graphics that had to be filled in once the objects were drawn.

But we won’t focus on how clunky Mystery House feels today because in 1980, it was a revolutionary title, allowing players to explore a Victorian mansion populated by seven other people, each of whom would get killed one by one by the murderer in their midst. Roberta Williams took inspiration from the Agatha Christie novel And Then There Were None, a style of mystery we’d today call a thriller because it involves a hidden murderer picking off people one by one while the others try to solve the case.

I also need to pause here and add that Christie’s book is not one I’d recommend to modern readers unless you’re clear-eyed that the book was originally called Ten Little [N-Word]s and that it’s built around the 19th century minstrel song of the same name. Some versions changed the theme to Ten Little Indians, which is not any better, or Ten Little Soldiers, which helps to sanitize it somewhat, but the book is steeped in cultural racism that isn’t so easily sanitized.

Fortunately, Mystery House doesn’t have any of those problems, and Roberta Williams also took inspiration from the board game Clue – or Cluedo, if you’re from outside the United States – to make the gameplay comprehensible to players.

The result is an adventure game that is tremendously interesting for its time because it’s able to evoke a sense of ratcheting terror as you begin finding bodies and messages from the killer around the house. Eventually, you can find and confront the killer and escape, which is good because no one else survives the story. But if there’s one thing to knock Mystery House for, it’s that the game is brief – so much so that once you figure out the correct range of actions you can complete it in under 15 minutes.

Even so, Mystery House was a showcase title for the Apple II in 1980, and if you were in the United States, that was where you were going to play it. Ken and Roberta Williams were surprised to discover that there was an audience for it, and the game sold thousands of copies. Not bad for a hobby game that only took them about a month to code.

This also gave Roberta Williams the opportunity to work on a follow-up that could be bigger and better, and we’ll get to that in a moment. But before we do, I want to offer a few comments about Mystery House that might help those who weren’t around during the early days of computing – and hey, I was a wee babe myself – to understand just how foundational of a game it is.

First of all, I want you to think about just how many games you’ve played that involve exploring a house or village full of unfolding horrors and trying to solve puzzles while you also evade bad guys. I can name a few just off the top of my head – Alone in the Dark. Resident Evil. Silent Hill. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. Gone Home. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. What Remains of Edith Finch. All of these games owe a tremendous debt to Mystery House for establishing the rules and format of their gameplay.

And lest you think I’m overstating the importance of Mystery House, there’s one place where the game was widely ported, and that was in Japan. And this is a rather important detail, because Mystery House was huge there, both in its original form and also in a pseudo-remake by Micro Cabin in 1982 that simplified the story, a sequel by Micro Cabin called Mystery House II and a remake in 1983 by a developer called Starcraft that included redrawn graphics. Because Japanese computers tended to have higher-resolution display capabilities to display Japanese written characters, graphical adventures were a natural fit for the various platforms in Japan and were widely played by the emerging game developers and computer programmers who were part of Japan’s young PC gaming industry.

Second, I want to point out that Mystery House was quite different from the many text-based adventures that would emerge in the early 1980s because the gameplay was dependent upon those graphics to create atmosphere and tension. Most text-based games that included graphics could easily be played without them. But in Mystery House, the text descriptions alone were not very evocative of the action and the game probably wouldn’t have been very much fun without the opportunity it granted to see the house from a first-person perspective and to stumble across visual representations of in-game items, freshly dug graves and, of course, dead bodies.

Finally, Mystery House helped adventure gaming break free of the more open treasure-hunting framework of Will Crowther’s Adventure and add some direction to the gameplay with a more linear story to experience. This turned out to be both a good and bad thing for the genre, and if there’s one thing graphical adventure games are particularly well-known for even today, it’s what a lousy value they are once you known the solutions to their puzzles. They tend to be far easier to solve than text-based adventure games and often have to add in serious padding like scripted sequences, cheap deaths, arcade action minigames and lots and lots of dialogue to ensure the games can’t be completed in 15 minutes like Mystery House can be.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, and before we start talking about all the games Ken and Roberta Williams would eventually become known for, we need to talk about another Hi Res Adventure that would form the scaffolding for their far more famous series about King Graham’s adventures in Daventry.

Before Graham could take his first King’s Quest, Roberta Williams had a story to tell about a wizard and a princess.

Roberta Williams grew up loving fairy tales and fantasy storytelling, and it’s fitting that her next game after Mystery House turned out to be an adventure in the kingdom of Serenia, a world of myth and magic where players took on the role of a wandering hero tasked by King George to rescue Princess Priscilla from the castle of the evil wizard Harlin.

If some of these details sound familiar, it’s because Roberta Williams would later recycle some of this plot, and even the entire land of Serenia, in her later and more famous adventure game series, King’s Quest. But whereas King’s Quest was a fairly impressive game graphically for its time, this earlier title, initially known as Wizard and the Princess, is quite a bit less so.

I don’t want to pick on the game’s artwork, because the game’s from 1980 and was produced in a manner similar to Mystery House where hand-drawn pictures were digitally traced, but I don’t think it’s unfair to say that they are crude. The biggest difference is that they’re also in color, which was accomplished on the Apple II original using a process called dithering to display a broader palette of colors onscreen. For 1980, having full-color graphics in an adventure game was pretty revolutionary, even if the graphics themselves weren’t particularly impressive, and when you consider that the competition included games like Zork and the Adventureland series, Ken and Roberta Williams definitely looked like they were on the cutting edge, and there’s no question that they pushed the graphical adventure genre forward.

But one problem with Wizard and the Princess was that the game was amazingly challenging despite its seeming accessibility, designed for more advanced adventure gamers rather than people just starting out. I personally don’t recommend it without a walkthrough because there are puzzles you will absolutely not solve on your own without beating your head against the wall, including one part where you have to enter a specific word that isn’t obvious and which requires some serious magical thinking to divine. Roberta Williams would pull something even more baffling with an infamous puzzle in King’s Quest in 1985, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

The challenge was high enough that Ken and Roberta added another entry to their Hi-Res Adventures line, making it part 0 in their series. This game, Mission Asteroid, offered new players a more linear storyline with straightforward puzzles to solve as they attempted to launch a rocket to intercept and blow up an asteroid heading towards Earth. While not a terribly compelling game on its own, it completed the initial triad of Hi-Res Adventures and gave On-Line Systems some breathing room to start working on something bigger and better.

Here’s where things get interesting. Roberta Williams got to work on a six month project that would eventually take up most of 1981 and include an additional 10-person development team to help her build her most ambitious game yet – a six-disk, $99 adventure game with 1300 locations to visit and a dedicated telephone help line to offer hints.

This game, Time Zone, was technically the fifth game in the Hi-Res Adventures series, but, for whatever reason, dropped that branding on the actual box. It was also an enormous flop of an adventure. $99 in 1982 was about $350 in today’s dollars, and even worse, Time Zone was incredibly tedious.

Having well over a thousand locations to visit while using a text parser built for two word verb and noun commands, and the thrill of using a time machine to visit other periods in history wasn’t quite as exciting as it sounded.

The illustrations were also still quite cartoony and crude – better than Wizard and the Princess, to be sure, but not anywhere near the level of other graphical adventure games that it was meant to compete with, like Ultrasoft’s The Mask of the Sun, Penguin Software’s spooky Transylvania or even Scott Adams’s Graphic Adventure line that added graphics to his text-based adventures.

“But what about the other Hi-Res Adventure games that came before Time Zone?” you may be wondering. Neither was developed by Roberta Williams, so they tend to be forgotten. #3 in the series was called Cranston Manor, a graphical adaptation of an earlier Atari 8-bit text adventure written by Larry Ledden. The full-color artwork adds a little value to the game, and it actually looks better than the art in any of Roberta Williams’s Hi-Res Adventures, but the gameplay is still based on that simplistic Adventure trope of plundering a game world of an arbitrary number of treasures – in this case, a rich man’s mansion.

Hi-Res Adventure #4 was created by Bob Davis, a liquor store employee from Oakhurst who Ken Williams hired to not only create this game, but also later help out with Time Zone. Interestingly, the game is called Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, and if you know anything about Greek and Roman mythology, the title’s already problematic because it’s a hodge-podge of names and myths from different traditions. The cover art also shows Ulysses riding Pegasus which… no, that’s not how things went down. Maybe if Ulysses had met Pegasus, he wouldn’t have been stuck stranded at sea for ten years. Suffice it to say that this adventure isn’t too worried about staying true to its source material.

If you can let that all go, what you’ll find is a thoroughly average text adventure with graphics, not particularly special, but certainly playable. If you know your mythology, most of the puzzles aren’t too difficult, though there is a rather strange sequence where you have to lash your ship to a fjord and bribe a dragon to go away, which just feels like Ulysses has stepped into the Norse tradition somehow. There are also puzzles with magic words you have to figure out and an ocean that behaves like a maze. Definitely play it with a walkthrough if you try it out today.

The final Hi-Res Adventure game debuted in 1983, and of all of them, it’s the one I recommend you play today. It’s also the first title to use On-Line System’s new name, Sierra, in its branding, this time calling itself a SierraVenture.

The name of the game: The Dark Crystal, based on the feature film of the same name.

The movie The Dark Crystal came out in 1982 and was an ambitious dark fantasy film co-directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz that was notable for featuring only puppets and animatronics with no onscreen human actors. It’s a profoundly strange and visually striking film that today would be made easily with computer graphics, but then had to be done entirely with practical effects that pushed the talented puppeteers behind previous productions like The Muppet Show, The Muppet Movie and Sesame Street to their limits.

The story, which involves a young Gelfling boy named Jen setting out on a quest to heal an ancient crystal and stop the evil birdlike beings known as the Skeksis, is actually the weakest part of the film. Even so, it allows for an adventure that moves from strange location to even stranger location, eventually introducing a second Gelfling character named Kira and sending the two across the world riding on giant creatures called landstriders. It all leads to a terrifying castle where the Skeksis are about to gain ultimate power as three suns converge in the sky unless Jen and Kira can restore the crystal.

All of this makes for a pretty weird movie. But it also makes for a great adventure game, especially when that game depicts the considerable artistry of the film in each of its screens.

And that’s exactly what Ken and Roberta Williams elected to do with their adaptation of The Dark Crystal, a fairly linear and straightforward adaptation of the feature film that nonetheless looks and plays well because it relies so much on the movie’s story and assets. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the game improves upon the film’s story by cutting it down to its most important action and then makes smart use of the production art and filmed scenes to depict the best moments of the action.

It’s almost like playing an interactive storybook based on the movie, and because it wasn’t kid-friendly, Sierra even had Al Lowe recreate the game in a new version called Gelfling Adventure that debuted in 1984 as something that could be marketed towards schools. A more modern version of the game also exists on the website DarkCrystal.com with updated graphics and a simplified text parser that helps you to know which actions you can take at any point.

In about five minutes, you can experience the entire story, and that was a criticism at the time, too – for a game that spanned three disks and had such strong production values, it sure was short and easy.

But let’s talk about why this game is important for a moment. First of all, The Dark Crystal was one of the first licensed video games to ever exist, and certainly the first graphical adventure game built as an official tie-in to a feature film. When you compare it to other popular licensed titles of the day like Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back and E.T.: The Extraterrestrial on the Atari 2600, Sierra’s The Dark Crystal really stands out for capturing the look and feel of the film and truly immersing players into the movie’s world without taking major liberties with the characters or plot.

There’s also the fact that Sierra also recognized that it needed to make the game easier and more accessible for younger audiences led to a third style of Roberta Williams adventure games that Sierra would go on to publish for years: educational games for children, which she’d begin making just a few years later with her 1987 graphical adventure Mixed-Up Mother Goose. Combine that with her mysteries like The Colonel’s Bequest, The Dagger of Amon-Ra and Phantasmagoria and her long-running fantasy-based King’s Quest games and you get a tremendous and varied run of adventure games that demonstrate that, Time Zone aside, Roberta Williams absolutely knew her stuff when it came to adventure gaming.

But in 1983, nobody really understood the business of gaming that well, and Sierra made a lot of mistakes, one of which included The Dark Crystal. The problem wasn’t that the game was bad, but that it was dated by the standards of the day and not the big hit it needed to be. Trusting in the reputation of Jim Henson and the Hollywood film industry, Ken and Roberta had anticipated the game would be a big seller that would bring them the fledgling computer game industry broader exposure. And unfortunately, it just wasn’t the game to do that.

The bigger problem, however, was that Sierra had also gotten into the cartridge market for home computers, primarily for computer platforms like the VIC-20, Atari 8-bit and Apple II that were about to get absolutely slaughtered by the Commodore 64, which would become a dominant format in North America. Suddenly, they had a lot of expensive inventory they couldn’t sell and very little to offer in a world where game consoles were crashing and home computers were realigning. Sierra cut its staff down from 100 people to about 20-30 and Ken and Roberta had to find ways to keep the company afloat by taking out personal loans, including mortgaging their new $800,000 home.

During all of this there were discussions about how to keep Sierra solvent. One idea was for them to merge with Spinnaker Software, the educational software company responsible for many Apple II games you’d find in school computer labs. Spinnaker, as we know from a previous episode of this show, eventually did get into the text-based adventure gaming business along with Byron Preiss by establishing a label eventually known as Telarium, but Roberta Williams didn’t think much of them, and Ken Williams even says in his book that she protested that they were a joke of a publisher not taken seriously within the computer software industry and she opposed any merger with them.

I want to pause here and say that Sierra was one of many publishers that probably would have gone under in 1983 if it hadn’t gotten profoundly lucky with what happened next. When you read the company’s history, there are several times where it appears that Ken Williams may have made business decisions that led to costly detours or held the company back while Roberta, as the creative force, was the one who pushed the company forward. On the other hand, Roberta was also the person who had the most clout and who got the most support whenever she had a game to ship, an issue that did impact other creators at Sierra when they wanted their games to be more visible.

I personally think that Sierra needed both of their personalities to provide a sort of yin and yang to help them weather the constant storms Sierra would face during the many changes occurring in the world of microcomputers and home video game console systems. It’s really hard when you’re in a newer industry to anticipate where the future is heading because things change so quickly, and Sierra placed both good and bad bets along the way. In later interviews, Roberta has always said that while Ken is a great salesman and businessman, he’s also more trusting of other people than she is, and that did lead to situations where he made some business deals that he probably shouldn’t have, including one 15 years later that would wind up with the Williamses losing control of the business entirely.

But back in 1983, with no sustainable revenue and a lot of personal capital on the line, Sierra might have vanished if it hadn’t been for a fortunate side deal Ken Williams worked out with IBM to create software for their new PCJr platform, including a brand new adventure game that would be built around the idea of replayability and showcase a more dynamic, complex game world than the simple room to room adventure game designs driven by text interactions that Sierra had been utilizing. IBM had plenty of funding and wanted their new format to succeed, and so Sierra had enough runway to create something revolutionary and new. It took them 18 months to do it. And as I’m sure we all know, that’s exactly what they did.

The idea Ken and his associate Jeff Stephenson ultimately pitched was an adventure game that would de-emphasize text to the point that the parser would only be used for specific commands. The player would use arrow keys to walk around a game world made up of interconnected screens, and what would happen on those screens would be dynamic and different, with characters who’d wander around and action sequences that would occur. And the gameplay would be animated!

After some convincing back at Sierra, Roberta Williams decided to lead the team in designing this game, and Jeff Stephenson, with some guidance from Ken, wrote the tool called the Adventure Game Interpreter that would be used to program it. This new tool would once again use hand drawn graphics traced into a digital format and then drawn onscreen using vectors, allowing the game to make good use of precious disk space. But it would also feature a controllable playable character who could move left, right, up or down on each screen and be stopped by boundaries and objects that fit the scene.

The result was King’s Quest: Quest For the Crown, a fairy tale-inspired game where a knight named Sir Grahame – originally spelled with an e on the end - is tasked by King Edward with retrieving three hidden treasures from the land around the Kingdom of Daventry to resolve the disasters and hardship everyone’s facing.

After the PCjr original released in May of 1984, Sierra released several new versions that gradually expanded the backstory and made some changes to the storyline. Sir Graham lost the e at the end of his name, the King’s name was changed to King Edward the Benevolent and the quest was now about defeating an evil witch who had tricked the King and absconded to the nearby land of Cumberland with three treasures.

This is the version of the story most players will remember, particularly since it’s offset with several other villainous foes including a giant, a troll, an ogre, a dragon and a leprechaun king as well as an old gnome with an extremely difficult-to-guess name – and no, it’s not Rumpelstiltskin, but you do need to figure that much out to deduce his real name. There are also other creatures wandering around like birds, elves, goats and wolves.

Now, if you play classic King’s Quest today, you’ll probably be playing the MS-DOS remake from 1987 with EGA graphics or the 1990 remake in their newer Sierra Creative Interpreter, or SCI, engine. If you somehow manage to track down the old PCjr or Tandy 1000 version, you may be surprised at how much slower it is to play because the game has to drawn all the background graphics before allowing Graham to move around the screen. But even that version, when compared to other games of the era, stands out as being an incredibly groundbreaking game.

In 1984, seeing King’s Quest in action and comparing it to the games that had come before it was similar to seeing the jump between Nintendo’s Donkey Kong or Mario Bros. and the later Super Mario Bros.. It was a revelation of what games could become, and it was also the first graphical adventure game to establish a style fully dependent on the graphics not just to replace some of the text description, but to allow the player to navigate and interact with the game world.

King’s Quest is also where the most distinctive facet of the graphical adventure game genre – being in exactly the right spot to use an intended action – came into play. Skills that had been crucial for previous adventure games, like mapping and using inventory items as breadcrumbs, were not nearly as important in King’s Quest as they’d been in more abstract adventures of the imagination. But learning how the game world’s more dynamic elements responded to the player and understanding what the graphics were saying about where you could go and what you could do – those skills suddenly became quite crucial.

But for all its originality, King’s Quest was not an immediate hit because it was tied too closely to the PCjr. Fortunately, the game got a second life on the Tandy 1000 and became one of its showcase games. Sierra also ported the game to the Apple IIe and IIc, though players needed to upgrade their RAM to 128kb to play King’s Quest on the IIe, which could easily cost another $80-100 in the mid-1980s– at least a couple of hundred bucks in today’s dollars.

King’s Quest also made its way to the Amiga, the Atari ST, the Macintosh and even the Sega Master System. Interestingly, Sierra did not support the Commodore 64 with King’s Quest or any other game in the AGI series because the system didn’t have the graphical chops or memory needed to display the game properly. As a result, the Sierra adventure games were far more popular in North America than they were overseas, where they weren’t ported to many of the popular Japanese or European formats.

But in North America, they were the foundation of an entire series of games, not just including King’s Quest, but the aforementioned Space Quest and Police Quest and Quest for Glory and yes, Leisure Suit Larry, too.

Sierra knew it had a good thing going, and Roberta Williams and the development team began work on King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne, an ambitious sequel that had Graham, now king of Daventry, head to the land of Kolyma to rescue a woman named Valanice from a crystal tower. While the setup sounds very similar to Wizard and the Princess, the gameplay has a lot more going on, allowing Graham to encounter an evil witch and Dracula and Neptune and mermaids and the Big Bad Wolf and, of course, Little Red Riding Hood. and roam around a world that would change as he progressed through the story. Unlike the first King’s Quest, in which you can retrieve the three treasures in any order, King’s Quest II has a far more linear story that requires you to complete the puzzles in a more structured order.

This approach would continue to define the series, but King Graham himself would take some time off. King’s Quest III: To Heir Is Human would feature a boy named Gwydion in the land of Llewdor who would discover a startling connection to King Graham and head to Daventry to rescue Graham’s daughter, Princess Rosella, from a terrible three-headed dragon. And King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella continued that story as Rosella would embark on a quest to the land of Tamir to find a fruit to heal her dying father.

I don’t want to tell you any more than that because King’s Quest III and IV are really good adventures with some surprising plot twists and even some alternate endings in the case of the latter game. But I will say that when the news broke that King Graham might die and that his daughter would be the hero of King’s Quest IV as she worked to save him, gamers of the day were surprisingly on board with the premise, and the game had particularly strong appeal with female gamers, a vastly underserved market in the 1980s.

Rosella has also long been associated with Roberta Williams as a sort of self-insert into the universe, and while she doesn’t look too much like her creator, she certainly has many of the same qualities.

But even with Rosella’s adventure completed, Roberta Williams wasn’t done with King Graham. But before we get to King’s Quest V, which is where we’ll end this episode, I’d like to talk a little bit more about the other games that came out of Sierra’s AGI engine.

One of those games is The Black Cauldron, based on the 1985 Disney animated film of the same name, which is in turn based on elements of the first two books of Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. Roberta Williams and Al Lowe worked together on the design for the game, using the basic framework of King’s Quest along with a simplified input system that eliminated the text parser in favor of having players press function keys to conduct actions. The reason for this was to make the game easier for kids to play, but when you play The Black Cauldron today, it’s clear that this system is actually a rudimentary form of the same design philosophy that could come to typify point and click adventure games.

The Black Cauldron is one of my favorite early Sierra games because it makes great use of the artwork and setup of the film to deliver a surprisingly complex adventure with nonlinear elements and multiple endings depending upon how you choose to do things. The basic idea is that you, as the assistant pig-keeper Taran, are supposed to escort the magical pig Hen Wen to safety before she can be captured by the evil Horned King, who wants to use her power to find the Black Cauldron and create an undead army of cauldron-born.

In the course of the game, you can allow Hen Wen to be captured or you can be sneaky enough to get her into hiding with the aid of a fairy. In either event, you have to then go to the Horned King’s castle and locate a magic sword so you can swap it for the cauldron and destroy it. Along the way, you can meet the film’s other characters: Gurgi, Flewdudur Fflam and Princess Eilonwy.

Disney apparently didn’t like how nonlinear the game was or how the player could die and fought with Roberta Williams about the game’s design. Had it been obvious then that the film was about to be a huge flop, perhaps they wouldn’t have cared so much. Much like The Dark Crystal, I personally prefer the game to the movie.

Roberta Williams also channeled her love of fairy tales into a nursery rhyme-themed adventure game called Mixed-Up Mother Goose that released in 1987. The gameplay is extremely simple – you can move in four directions and pick up one item at a time by getting close to them until your character picks them up. You can also grab animal or human characters and take them with you on your quest to set right the mixed-up nursery rhymes. A sequel called Mixed-Up Fairy Tales debuted in 1991, though it and the later editions of Mixed-Up Mother Goose were built in the more sophisticated SCI engine.

Perhaps the most famous series alongside King’s Quest is the Space Quest series, created by Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, two Sierra staff members who’d worked together on The Black Cauldron before pitching their own game to Ken Williams. Space Quest starts out quite similarly to Steve Meretzky’s Planetfall, right down to having its hero, Roger Wilco, serve as an interstellar janitor, but the game quickly becomes its own thing as Roger, stranded on a desert planet, tries to find a way to get back into space to retrieve the Star Generator from evil aliens called the Sariens.

While the series is itself known for its numerous parodies of science fiction properties, particularly Star Wars and Star Trek, the original game is the most serious and straightforward, with the most famous scene being an alien bar you visit that makes allusions to the Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars while featuring acts such as the Blues Brothers, ZZ Top and an alien band, the latter of which is replaced by Madonna in the later SCI remake.

Space Quest came out in 1986, and Space Quest II: Vohaul’s Revenge followed in 1987, providing a popular but notably tougher experience. The series truly hit its stride in 1989 with Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon, an early SCI engine game that’s notable not just for its enhanced graphics and music, but also its storyline that allows Roger Wilco to rescue Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe – depicted in game as “The Two Guys From Andromeda” – from a company called ScumSoft that’s trying to flood the galaxy with awful games. The satire is strong in this game, particularly when you see cubicles full of programmers being whipped so they can churn out crappy games faster. Oh, and Roger ends the adventure by dropping the Two Guys from Andromeda off with Ken Williams, who gives them a job, but sends Roger packing.

We’ll talk about the other Space Quest games in our next episode.

Another AGI series that was quite prominent was Police Quest, which was created by a retired California Highway Patrol police officer named Jim Walls that Ken Williams had met. While Walls knew very little about computers or adventure games, he knew a lot about police procedure and he insisted on making a game that required players to do things by the book in order to advance. In the first game, 1987’s Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel, Officer Sonny Bonds starts out on traffic duty before he stumbles on a trail of clues that lead to a vicious drug ring run by a kingpin named Jesse Bains, “The Death Angel.”

This game has it all – a mystery to solve, romance, drama, murder, a shootout, a criminal underworld to explore and even a donut shop to visit. And it’s also so grounded in reality that some police departments reportedly even used it for training new officers.

1988’s sequel, Police Quest II: The Vengeance, Sonny Bonds joins the Homicide Department and has to work on tracking down Jesse Bains, who’s escaped from prison and who’s now seeking revenge on those who put him in there in the first place. It’s a bit less bogged down in procedural elements, but still quite grounded.

As for the other games in the series and the remake of the original, we’ll talk about those in a future episode.

The Manhunter games probably seem like they’re in the same vein as Police Quest, but no, no, they are definitely not. 1988’s Manhunter: New York opens in a dystopian New York City where aliens that look like floating eyeballs have taken over the world and have forced everyone to dress link monks and take a vow of silence. It’s a deeply weird game that not only involves evading the alien Orbs, but also tracking down and stopping a serial killer. The 1989 sequel, Manhunt: San Francisco, continues the story, but leaves things on a cliffhanger as the villain heads for London. That chapter never got made. As AGI games go, however, both of these are among the most advanced to run on Sierra’s then-aging game engine.

A lesser-known AGI game is the 1988 release Gold Rush!, a game I actually really like because it allows you to try out three different paths as you head out to California in search of gold in the year 1848. You can leave New York by stagecoach and cross the country, you can take a ship down to Panama, cross through the jungle and then hop on a different ship, or you can take a really long voyage and head down around Cape Horn at the tip of South America. While the game’s not perfect, it is fun.

And now our discussion brings us back to perhaps the most infamous of all of Sierra’s games from the mid-1980s – Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, Al Lowe’s extremely funny remake of Sierra’s earlier text adventure game Softporn Adventure by Chuck Benton, who’d since left Sierra for greener pastures. During Sierra’s days as On-Line Systems, Softporn Adventure had proven to be a good gamble, generating both positive and negative publicity and helping to boost sales during the few months the game was available.

But the main reason for remaking that game was that Sierra had lost their license with Disney, and Al Lowe saw some potential in updating it as a graphic adventure using the AGI engine. He joked that the design of Softporn Adventure was so dated it should be wearing a leisure suit, hence the ultimate concept of the remake.

Interestingly, Sierra also licensed the game to a Japanese developer called Starcraft, which made a parallel remake called Las Vegas. If you’re familiar with Leisure Suit Larry and play Las Vegas, you’ll find essentially the same basic storyline and puzzles, but with none of the charm of Al Lowe’s game, which is constantly poking fun at its loser of a protagonist, Larry Laffer, as he attempts to find love in the city of Lost Wages.

In many ways, Leisure Suit Larry is one of Sierra’s most impressive adventure games because it has no real sense of urgency to push the player forward beyond the desire to chat up women, includes many detours and tangents to the nebulous goal and allows players to die in many humorous ways, including Larry offing himself in despair if the game isn’t completed within seven hours. The game also includes a humorous quiz at the beginning to ensure players are old enough to play and even has a boss key that can be triggered to make the game display a fake graph, humorously depicting a bar chart of condom types. Unfortunately, the boss key also ends the game, so you’d better save often if you plan to use it to fool your boss into thinking you’re working.

The various sequels to Leisure Suit Larry as well as a VGA remake of the first game were all developed using the SCI engine, and though the series made it up to part 7 under Sierra, it also famously has no fourth chapter, creating an intriguing narrative cap between parts 3 and 5. We’ll definitely talk more about them all in a future episode.

Ken and Roberta Williams were major pioneers when it came to PC gaming, and Sierra On-Line’s 80s and 90s catalog is still beloved today because the adventure games they created starting with King’s Quest in 1984 really became something special and enduring.

And no game was more special than 1990’s King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Grow Yonder!, which finally ditched the text parser they’d been using since the beginning and fully embraced a mouse-driven, icon-based graphical interface to replace any hint of nouns or verbs. While this was not the first game to provide a point and click interface for adventure gaming, it’s the adventure that set the standard for the genre’s evolution in the 1990s to be driven by icons rather than lists of words.

This system became Sierra’s go-to for remakes of its aging AGI games like Space Quest, Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry as well as for its 1989 SCI game Hero’s Quest: So You Want to be a Hero, which was renamed Quest for Glory in its 1992 remake.

What’s more, fans have recreated the first three King’s Quest games, Space Quest II and Quest for Glory II in this point and click style as well. Competitors such as LucasArts, Access Software and Westwood Associates also followed suit and imitated this style of adventure gaming, and if you play a modern point and click adventure game today, chances are good it’s going to be most similar to the style of gameplay King’s Quest V established.

We’ll talk about that game and everything that came after it in our next episode as well as other adventure games not made by Sierra that pushed the genre forward in different ways.

If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.

And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!

I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore!

THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRY

Before I let you go every week, I’m close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.

This week, I want to recommend Wanderstop, a really incredible 3D adventure from 2025 by Ivy Road about making tea. And while this is described as a “narrative centric cozy game” on its Steam listing, it is really an adventure game at heart with very little action but a lot of puzzling out how to solve particular problems.

The premise of the game is that you’re a world-famous fighter named Alta who flees into the woods after losing a fight and breaking your undefeated streak. You’re searching for a master to get you back on your feet, but your sword gets so heavy you can barely hold it, and before long, you pass out, exhausted. A large, bald, gentle man named Boro saves you from the forest and brings you to his tea shop, Wanderstop, and asks you to stay and help him serve tea to other people who wander in from the forest. Because you can’t lift your sword and you’re too exhausted to travel back through the woods yourself, you begrudgingly agree.

At that point, the game shifts to a cycle of days where different people with different preferences will come in and you have to figure out how to make the right tea for them. You can grow different plants to get specific flavors, and in some cases, you can also be creative and try to meet their criteria with your own interpretations of what they want. Though this sounds like a concept for a time management game, there’s no timer in Wanderstop; beyond a couple of recipes that require a little bit of time between steps, you can take as much time as you want with just about anything you do.

Feel like gardening for awhile? You can do it. Would you rather tidy up the grounds and search for items that get left behind by guests? You can do that too. Would you rather take pictures of things and then plaster them up on the walls to decorate the shop? You can not only do it, but the game will give you plenty of opportunities to snap gorgeous photos thanks to its lovely graphics. There’s even a series of books to read, a group of penguin-like creatures called Pluffins to play with and lots of no-stakes conversations to be had.

The ultimate point of Wanderstop is to consider how you deal with being burned out, and when the game begins to draw to a close, it tries several times to gently discourage you from reaching the end because, if you’ve been paying attention to its message at all, rolling the credits isn’t your goal. It’s truly about being in the moment and thinking about your experiences not as a progression to win achievements or earn trophies, but the comforting zen of just doing things you enjoy without a purpose beyond the pleasure of the moment.

I also want to mention that the game’s soundtrack by Daniel “C418” Rosenfeld is lovely, and if you’re a fan of his other scores to games like Minecraft and Cookie Clicker, you’ll absolutely love this one too.

SOURCES:

https://www.company-histories.com/Sierra-OnLine-Inc-Company-History.html

https://www.atarimagazines.com/atariclassics/v2n3/looking_back.php

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1980s-roberta-williams-brought-graphic-adventure-games-home-180962160/

https://www.britannica.com/topic/And-Then-There-Were-None-novel

Robert Williams on the history of Colossal Cave Adventure (Youtube)

https://www.filfre.net/2012/06/time-zone/

Ken Williams’s book, Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Line

https://www.howtogeek.com/749864/gaming-when-you-should-be-working-the-history-of-the-boss-key/

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com

In this episode, Sean touches on Scott Adams's contributions to gaming before he heads across the Atlantic to look at the interactive fiction scene in Europe and the UK, covering developers like Digital Fantasia, Level 9 Computing, Magnetic Scrolls and DIY software like The Quill, Eamon, PAWS as well as modern interactive fiction!

He's Sean Jordan, and he is your Great Game Guide!

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Season 1, Episode 2: The Adventure of Imagination (Part 2)

Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.

You can contact Sean via Substack @greatestgames (https://greatestgames.substack.com) or BlueSky @greatestgames.substack.com (http://greatestgames.substack.com)

And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean's free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.

Music "The Great Game Guide Theme" written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)

Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He'd love to hear from you!

PIMANIA SONG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXk9VuPwGXwI

NTERACTIVE FICTION ARCHIVE: https://www.ifarchive.org/Other Show Notes and sources: At the episode post on Greatestgames.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com

In this episode, Sean dives deep into the inspiration for all adventure games - fittingly named Adventure! - and how a cave system in Kentucky helped an entire genre to blossom. But these games also didn't involve graphics... they took place entirely in players' imaginations!

He's Sean Jordan, and he is your Great Game Guide!

-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 1: The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played

Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.

You can contact Sean via Substack @greatestgames (https://greatestgames.substack.com) or BlueSky @greatestgames.substack.com

And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean's free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!

-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.

Music "The Great Game Guide Theme" written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)

Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He'd love to hear from you!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com

In this inaugural episode, Sean explains why yet another podcast about video games needs to exist, how searching for games you’ve never played can lead to some awesome discoveries and why his philosophy on gaming is a little bit different from everybody else’s.

He's Sean Jordan, and he is your Great Game Guide!

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Season 1, Episode 0: The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never PlayedEnjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack (@greatestgames) or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com).

And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean's free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!

-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music "The Great Game Guide Theme" written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)

Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He'd love to hear from you!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com