I was feeling so smug in the summer of 1985, having just procured a Commodore 64 computer and the requisite 1541 Disk Drive, as I was finally able to play state-of-the-art computer games. And oh, those games flowed that summer - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Adventure Construction Set, Nine Princes in Amber, and on and on.
However, I was quickly shown that I was not really state of the art, as a few games had emerged that required more computing power. One such game that looked really good but was out of reach was King's Quest for the emerging IBM PCjr and other more powerful computers. It didn't slow me down too much, though, as the Commodore 64 was at the height of its popularity and was getting all sorts of great new games.
I try to complete at least one game from each decade every year, so this year I choose King's Quest for my 1980s game, and found it available for dirt cheap on Good Old Games. I broke out a pencil and paper, too, as these games did not hold your hand nor have built-in mapping.
King's Quest has the player control a character by using the mouse to point and click at places on the screen to move. The player also types in commands like GET DAGGER to interact with items and things on the screen. The game world is pretty big for the time, with over 50 screens to explore.
Remembering that era fondly, and knowing what was possible in gaming at the time, allowed me to be blown away by the graphics in 2023 as I would have been in 1985. Each screen in King's Quest is gorgeous, bright, colorful, and memorable. The screens connect in all four compass directions and wrap around if one keeps going in a certain direction.
Gameplay is exploration and experimentation, and my first task was to map out the world as much as I could, and pick up any items I found. I was a few days into my playthrough when I noticed the command bar at the top of the screen, which showed me there was a jump command and a swim command that one could enter on the keyboard. That was a game changer, as the jump command especially was crucial to beating the game and the swim command kept me from drowning and allowed me to cut across lakes. Some rivers, however, cannot be crossed by swimming.
The puzzles were good, too, with some having multiple solutions. The game has a score number, based on actions and acquisitions, so the solution the player chooses might not be the best one. Using a treasure to bribe the troll to cross the bridge might work, but at the loss of the points one gained by picking up that treasure. Finding the better solution will save those points.
Once the trial and error of exploring the world was done, it was a matter of figuring out which item to use when and where to get to the ending with the most points. The actual quest the king gives sends the player looking for three treasures. One was pretty easy, the second required the only use of the jump command I found, and the last one required trying out a new text command that had not come up before.
King's Quest is a fantastic game with great gameplay and gorgeous graphics that took the old school text adventure with a graphic background and, using the mouse control as well as text commands in 1985, set the pace for the genre throughout the rest of the 80s and into the 1990s. I will definitely look at more King's Quest games down the road when I am getting that point-and-click adventure itch.
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