So 'U' want to be a Hero

Last year I was privileged enough to do a short interview with veteran adventure/RPG game designer Corey Cole. Corey is one half of the husband/wife design duo behind the eternally beloved ‘Quest for Glory’ series, an adventure/RPG gaming thoroughbred, first developed by Sierra Online in the early 90’s and running up to the final chapter, ‘Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire’, in 1998.


Quest for Glory was a potent cocktail of several gaming flavours that make it stick in the hearts of many golden era adventure gamers, and it’s a series that turned Lori and Corey Cole into cult figures amongst the retro gaming scene. One part point and click adventure and one part roleplay stat building, add to the mix a charming sense of humor and a beautifully realized game world that’s just begging to be explored, and you have an idea of why Quest for Glory is so fondly remembered. Play through these classics today and you can feel the genuine love that was poured into each title by the creators.


Lori and Corey have had a sizeable break from video game development since Quest for Glory V in 1998, but they have never forgotten their fans. The duo have always kept themselves open and engaging to the fan base, even running a website ‘The School for Heroes’ which acts as a spiritual successor to the QFG series, and shares the spirit of adventure instilled in the games they brought to life.


Enter early 2012. Tim Shafer and Ron Gilbert, legendary Lucasarts adventure game designers from the same era as Lori and Corey, launch their Kickstarter project for a brand new point and click adventure game. An classic gaming renaissance ensues. ‘Crowdfunding’ is a term that didn’t originate from the website ‘Kickstarter’, but the site has put it on the lips of classic PC gaming fans the world over. Kickstarter essentially connects creators and fans with no middle man. Voluntary contributors can donate dollars towards project proposals, giving indie game development a model with which it can stand on its own two legs, and for game designers which earned their ‘cult’ status in the adventure gaming golden age of the late 80’s and throughout the 90’s, crowdfunding gives them a new means to do what they love.


Lori and Corey launched their Kickstarter project, ‘Hero-U: A Rogue to Redemption’ on October 19th of this year. Essentially it is a brand new fantasy roleplaying adventure, instilled with the same fun and humour of The Quest for Glory series. As of this post they only have a few days left on the project funding period. Corey was kind enough to answer a few questions for me during the home stretch towards the development future of their new game.



Me: What sparked your return to game design?

A perfect storm of;

1. The rise of crowdfunding for games.

2. The success of recent adventure game projects on Kickstarter.

3. We had already started back into games by doing contract design for outside projects.

4. Making contact with Andrew Goulding to lead the programming.

5. Getting past some family issues that were eating up our time, and

6. Dropping out of World of Warcraft, which was taking the rest of our time.

From the information you've released on Hero-U it really seems to share the ‘tongue-in-cheek’ tone of the Quest for Glory series. Would you say this game is connected to that universe or is it more of a spiritual successor?

Yes.  Or maybe it's "and" rather than "or". We can't make a new Quest for Glory (no license), but our brains are wired into that Universe, so inevitably similar things will creep into Hero-U. As for the humour, my brain is wired that way too.  I see absurdity all around me and usually feel the need to comment on it.

Hero-U definitely seems to have that classic adventure/RPG aesthetic. Are there any more modern gaming sensibilities that you are incorporating into the game?

Well, it's our game, and we love tabletop role-playing, and that's what the "classic adventure/RPG aesthetic" is all about. We're using Unity for a platform-independent experience, and we're taking advantage of the increased memory and processing speed of current PC's. But instead of using that for ever-more-detailed 3D graphics and millions of polygons, we're packing a lot of that power into the artificial intelligence, character, and story side of the game.  And nice graphics too.

Aside from Lori and yourself, are any more of the ‘old guard’ from the Sierra days involved with Hero-U?

Not directly, but we're all supporting each other's projects.  The Leisure Suit Larry, SpaceVenture, and Moebius projects have all promoted Hero-U recently, and we're sending people their way.  We all feel that building a bigger audience for modern adventure games is good for everyone – us and the players.

Crowd sourced funding is clearly ideal for veteran game designers with cult followings such as yourself. How is it different working independently without a publisher like Sierra behind you? Is there anything you miss about the traditional game development structure?

               

With a publisher, you propose a game, nothing happens for a while, then they either say "Yes" or "No" – with "No" much more common.  Even when they say "Yes", they might decide to cancel the project any time during development.  With crowd-funding, things are much more transparent.  You can see the momentum build.  But in a sense that also makes the process more stressful – Until the project passes its goal, you have to keep wondering, "Will we make it?"

As for working independently, we've done that before.  For the Shannara project, we set up an office in Oakhurst, and worked with artists around the world (as well as a few local ones). Most of our contact with Legend Entertainment was remote.

Hero-U will be similar. Even though we don't have a publisher breathing down our necks, and we know that funding won't be cancelled, we have to answer to our backers. We will have complete transparency about the process and progress, and we will pay close attention to suggestions from the people who supported our new game from the beginning.

What has changed about game development since you last worked on a Quest for Glory title?

It's split into two paths. On the one, AAA titles have gotten completely ridiculous. They have teams of hundreds, spend years developing a game, spend tens of millions of dollars on development, and that much or more on promotion. The top games sell millions of copies, and most of the rest lose money.

We saw the beginnings of that with Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire. I think it started with a $1.5 million budget and an 18-month development cycle. It ended up taking more than twice the time and three times the original budget, as we kept developing new 3D technology, trying and eliminating MMO functionality, and so on. Much of the expense was necessary, and much was... well, "wasted" is too strong a term, since we learned a lot from every experiment.

On the other path are the indie games. Many are made by young developers living with their parents, and most are on total shoestring budgets. Our budget for Hero-U looks more like an indie than an AAA budget, but we will be making at least an "A" level of game. It's too small to interest a traditional publisher, but it's a big ask for fans to support.      

I think there's a strong need for "in-between" games costing between $100K and $1M to develop. Players want a smooth, attractive game experience, and they don't necessarily need vast 3D worlds and finely tuned multiplayer automatic weapon fire in those games. I want to see more mid-range, high-quality games, particularly ones that explore different genres and game styles than the big blockbuster titles.

Where did the concept for Hero-U begin? Did you have a story you wanted tell and built mechanics around it or vice versa?

Ah, origin stories.  "In the beginning..."

Ok, you could point to lots of antecedents. Lori was a schoolteacher before she became a game designer. Our "Fantasy Guild" (homebrew rules system that led to the Quest for Glory skill and spell system) campaign featured "The School of Harad Knox". We had a "correspondence school for adventurers" in Quest for Glory.

               

But more recently, the idea of the school came from a young adult novel Lori started on with Mishell Baker.  They created the How To Be A Hero site to support it. Later, I worked with Lori on the successor site, www.theschoolforheroes.com.  Hero-U is our project to make the school more game-like and available to many more players.  We upgraded to a "University" to make the game feel more adult.

Which aspect of Hero-U are you most excited for your fans to experience?

Exploring the catacombs, and the trickiness-based tactical combat, is going to be a lot of fun. But the main thing that Hero-U offers is more subtle. Everyone will experience the story differently as the result of their decisions. The game will feel as though we tailored it for each individual player. In a sense, we're doing just that.

This isn't some generic throw-away story to act as an excuse for the game play.  The story and characters are a major part of what makes the game.  Players will immerse themselves and become part of the story.

Where do the development rights to Quest for Glory lie now days? Could you have branded Hero-U as a new QFG title, or were you more interested in keeping some distance from that series due to game design changes in Hero-U?

Activision owns the Quest for Glory rights since the acquired Sierra. We could not do a new (or remade) Quest for Glory game without first obtaining a license. We've heard from three companies that have tried to get that license, but could not get an answer from Activision. The last word was that Activision executives are deciding on a future policy for their adventure game titles. They might reactivate them in-house, license them out, sell the rights, or continue to sit on them.

               

Earlier this year, Activision authorized www.gog.com to sell a collection with all five Quest for Glory games, plus the original EGA version of QfG1.  We no longer get royalties from the games, but we're delighted that they're back "in print" and that new players can experience our games.

                

Since we could not do a Quest for Glory game, we are not trying to make a clone of one. Certain things are common, such as the mix of adventure and role-playing, the strong emphasis on characters and story, etc. If you look at it that way, I guess you would say that Atlas Shrugged is to Moby Dick. J  As with novels, the computer adventure game genre allows for a wide variety of stories and styles.

                

Of course, we're closer to Quest for Glory than those examples. All Stephen King novels feel as though they came from the same pen.  Hero-U is set in Marete, our world's analogue of Crete, a location last seen in Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire. There are reasons for the setting, but we probably could have placed the school in Iberia with similar results. We set it on Marete as a nod to our fans and because we "know" that area inside-out from previous game research.

                

But we have a different type of story to tell this time. Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption is all about a particular Rogue, Shawn O'Conner, and his search for redemption... or power.  We let the player choose his path. It's a coming-of-age story, and your character will change dramatically during the course of it.  Nominally, Quest for Glory 1 was also a coming-of-age story, but the Hero really didn't change much other than in stats and skills. Shawn will experience real character growth in the player's hands.

In terms of your plans for Hero-U, do you think this game will be the first in a series, or are there other gaming projects you’re interested in pursuing after this one?

                

We want to make it the beginning of a series. Your actions in one game will affect the next, but you will play a different character in each story. The second game revolves around a female Wizard with a completely different background, motivations, and personality from Shawn.

How do you feel about the current independent game development movement?

                

It's exciting. The challenge is for all of these indie games to get noticed. There is also an issue in that a lot of them are what a professional developer would consider throw-away prototypes. They may be unfinished, unpolished, or just plain bad. It can be really hard to tell the difference.

                

Maybe what we need is an objective (probably with some subjective points) game rating system. Two excellent blogs (http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/ and http://advgamer.blogspot.com/) are devoted to exhaustively analysing classic RPG's and adventure games respectively. We need something like that for current games.

Most of the game trade press either prints press releases as though they were articles, or has intimate carnal relations with the games from the biggest publishers and the largest advertising and slush fund budgets. You can get a good anecdotal idea of some current games from less biased sites such as http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/, but it's necessarily incomplete.

              

I'd like to see an independent site with a huge database of games classified by multiple different criteria, and with lots of fan and critic ratings.  I guess http://www.mobygames.com/ comes closest among the sites I've seen, but they could use a lot more ratings and reviews. I'm also not sure how much attention they pay to indie games from small developers.  Few players = few ratings.

You’ve previously stated that you’re interested in making more thoughtful, challenging and less violent gameplay mechanics. Is Hero-U a good representation of this?

Yes. Combat is turn-based, so there is no twitch action in the game. Even Quest for Glory had real-time combat, and some players found it frustrating. We do have combat, but it's presented as a puzzle or problem, rather than a violent fight. Hero-U is suspenseful, not gory. And the story is about becoming a Hero, or consciously choosing to do non-Heroic things. We reward thoughtful actions and good decisions.

Many classic adventure game designers are jumping back into development via crowd sourcing like Kickstarter. Who else from the Sierra Online days would you like to see launch a new project, or which classic series would you love to see revived?

                

Well, it would be great to see Ron Gilbert make a new game. Of course, he's working with Tim Shafer on Double Fine Adventure, so that may fulfil that goal.

                

We had a pretty small cadre of Sierra designers, and most of them have already had successful Kickstarters – Al Lowe, Josh Mandel, Scott Murphy, Mark Crowe, and Jane Jensen. The obvious missing one is Roberta Williams. You never know though – She has always had the story-teller's itch and might decide to make a comeback.

                

Jim Walls is in his 70's, and probably not interested in making more games. That pretty much covers the Sierra designers most people have heard of.

If there are younger gamers reading this, that might not have ever played your classic adventure/RPG’s, how would you convince them to get behind the Hero-U Kickstarter?

                

Ask them, "Did you love Harry Potter? Or Lord of the Rings? How about Brave?" We're making a story telling game that combines that type of heroism and fantasy elements. Like "The Hobbit", Shawn O'Conner is a relatively unimportant person until he finds himself thrust into the midst of adventure and given the chance to be a Hero or a scoundrel.

                

Hero-U is unlike most current games, in that our focus is not on violent action or fast reflexes. It's like reading a good book or playing a board game with friends – Slower-paced, but just as much drama and suspense. Humor too, because good dramas are better with some humor in between the tension.

Do you have a launch window in mind for Hero-U?

                

There should be some tall enough buildings in San Francisco if the Kickstarter fails... Oh, you mean for the game!  We're targeting October 2013. Our smaller budget means we should be able to get the game out in less than a year; in fact we almost have to do that unless we get additional funding during development. The goal is to make the game relatively modest in scope – All of the action takes place in the school and catacombs – but gigantic in story, characterization, and depth of game play.

Hero-U's funding period ends November 20th. If you're reading this and you love classic adventure/roleplay gaming you can make your pledge on the Hero-U Kickstarter page right now.

Interview with Corey Cole

A man that for any serious classic adventure gaming aficionado needs no introduction, Corey Cole, co-creator of the Quest for Glory series, agreed to do an interview with me recently. Corey was a chief programmer throughout the series and co-designed the games with his wife, Lori.

How did you get started at Sierra and how was is working there?

A friend we knew through science fiction conventions did contract animation work for Sierra. She had been in a meeting in which Ken Williams said he wanted an “expert tournament-level dungeonmaster” to create a new RPG for Sierra. Carolly thought of us and arranged a phone interview with Ken. When he asked, “Why should I hire you instead of some other designer?” I mentioned that I was an experienced programmer currently working on an Atari ST project. He immediately invited me to interview... not as a game designer, but as a programmer. After I had been at Sierra about six months, they talked to Lori about designing the game.

Your game was unlike any previous Sierra adventure in that it was an adventure/rpg hybrid. Was there any trouble getting Sierra to green light that project?

Our champion was Guruka Singh Khalsa, Sierra’s first producer. He was hired based on things he had written as a fan. During a green light meeting including us and Guruka, Ken said, “I really don’t understand this game.” Guruka said something like, “It’s going to be a major hit,” and Ken left the meeting saying, “I like this game. It’s going to be a major hit.” It’s possible that Sierra might have cancelled the first game without that support; we’ll never know.

What would you say were your main influences for Quest for Glory?

The combat and skill development system was based on a paper RPG Lori and I ran (“Fantasy Guild”, unpublished). It took a lot of ideas from “Arizona D&D”, a D&D variant Lori had played in Phoenix. Computer game influences included Wizardry and maybe Rogue and Dungeonmaster (to a very small degree). My mantra was to simulate the experience of playing in a paper D&D game with an excellent dungeon master. I also talked about combining the best parts of computer RPG’s and adventure games. Since Sierra’s tools were optimized for adventure games, that made sense.

Do you play current any current rpg's? Have computer rpg's gone in a direction you expected?

I play World of Warcraft to the level of addiction. I haven’t played any recent computer RPG’s. We still get together with friends a few times a year to play AD&D 2^nd edition, but I’m finding it less involving than I used to... I’ve replaced it with WoW. When people ask if we’ve thought about doing a Quest for Glory MMO, the answer is of course, “Yes,” but at this point we really feel that WoW is the MMO we would have hoped to make – It really exceeds expectations.

What do you think it would take to spark an adventure game renaissance?

Hard to say. Players are different today and much less patient. In the early CRPG days, players had to make their own maps on graph paper. Nobody would stand that today, but other aspects of adventures are almost as painful. The worst, in my mind, are puzzles that can only be solved by reading a walkthrough on the Internet. People used to buy hint books for this, but to me it’s just bad game design. So a start would be well designed, less frustrating games.

I understand that Telltale Games is doing very well with their games, so maybe there already is a renaissance. On the other hand, I can’t even solve their games without occasional Web searches. WoW has some similar issues with tough dungeon and raid encounters, but they’ve steadily made most of the quests easier and more accessible to average (and below average) players. Some people complain about this dumbing down the game, but I find it refreshing. I *like* being able to zip through a quest line and not have to spend hours searching for the right object or character to complete it. I hate “hunt the pixel” game mechanics and “try to read the designer’s mind” puzzles. We tried to fill Quest for Glory with reasonable, solvable puzzles... although I understand many players found the puzzles very difficult, so perhaps we made mistakes there too.

Would a re-imagining or sequel to the series interest you today? What would stay the same and what would you 'modernize'?

I don’t think it could get funded. What would be the business model that would attract a publisher or enough funding to make a high quality game? Certainly the graphics should be updated to modern standard... and that probably means 3D. I think we could make the combat more interesting, but at the same time I would probably reduce the amount of it. It would probably be a Web based game. I’d like to do an MMO, but that’s completely daunting, and I think that WoW and similar games have already addressed that space very well.

I’d actually see more point to doing a new Castle of Dr. Brain, probably for handhelds or Web based. I tried to push a project like that to Sierra, but management didn’t think a “brain game” would do well on consoles. That’s been disproved; the question is whether there is still room for such a game. I think there is. Of course, a Quest for Glory remake targeted at modern consoles could be a great idea also. I think there is a vast untapped market out there of people who want more intelligent games and less death and destruction. The question is whether there is a good way to find that audience and get them to try the game so they might buy it.

Fighter, magic user or thief?

I’m a Magic User by nature, but I also think the Thief game play is really fun and interesting. We didn’t do as much with Warriors as we might have – They were basically designed for people who wanted more straightforward game play. I like the way WoW has essentially given “spells” to Warriors, so they have as many options as other classes. In WoW, I play everything; my two main characters currently are a Night Elf Druid – I mostly play as a bear “tank” and occasionally as a healer – and an Undead Magic User. At level 80, I had a vast stable of characters of every role and most classes. No Warlock or Hunter, mostly because they seemed a little redundant with my Mage.

Which game of the series are you most happy with?

QG2, followed closely by QG4. Despite the occasional game crashing bugs (mostly caused by a memory leak we never fixed), my favorite is Quest for Glory 2: Trial By Fire. I think the setting was unique, the puzzles were good, and the storyline really carries through. The city mazes accomplished what we wanted – making the cities feel large and complex – but were too frustrating for players. The combat system works fairly well, with a good mix of simplicity and tactics.

Quest for Glory 3: Wages of War (or “Seekers of the Lost City”, since we had a copyright problem with the original name) probably has the best story line and most original setting. It’s a little light on puzzles. QG4: Shadows of Darkness was very buggy out the door, but most of the major bugs were fixed for the CD version. The voice acting on it (with John Rhys-Davies as the narrator) is fantastic. We also pulled off the atmosphere very well in that one. Young Frankenstein was an inspiration for the mixture of Gothic horror and comedy.

QG1: So You Want to Be a Hero (originally “Hero’s Quest”) gets an honorable mention for originality, as it set up the series and was the first real RPG / Adventure Game hybrid. Finally, QG5: Dragon Fire is the most epic game in the series. The artwork is gorgeous and the scope of the game – area to explore, quests, and story – is huge, yet I think very consistent and enjoyable. That’s hard to pull off with “huge”. And of course there is Chance Thomas’s fabulous sound track. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel the voice acting was up to par; some of the performances are too cartoony and over the top.

Actually music deserves its own mention, as we got fantastic compositions for all of the games – Mark Seibert developed a memorable theme for the first game. Mark also directed the music for Castle of Dr. Brain, which I think is amazing. Chris Braymen, Aubrey Hodges, and Rudy Helm also contributed some wonderful music to the series. Lori still likes to listen to Aubrey’s tracks while doing artwork, and we all had Chris’s QG2 harem theme on continuous loop for quite a while, especially while finalizing the design on QG2.

What is your name? What is your favourite colour? What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow? Were you or Lori the Monty Python fan?

I sometimes post as Erasmus, but there’s a lot of competition for that name. Zartan is another one I use sometimes; it’s just a gaming handle I used to use for early BBS roleplaying. Lori uses Fenrus (I think even in the games, we sometimes called him Fenrus and sometimes Fenris). Purple, of course. Or royal blue. Lori’s is teal/aquamarine. As for the swallow, I’d need a lot more data on species, size, and environmental conditions. Otherwise, the best I could give you would be a rough average (which I’d look up on the Web). Yes. I was the Firesign Theater fan.

Quest for Glory is an undeniable cult classic. Have you had any encounters with over enthusiastic (or scary) fans?

No. Sometimes they demand a bit much. We’re either slow with such responses, or never get to them. But in general, our fans are fantastic. They appreciate our work, and let us know about it (which feels really good), without demanding too much of our time. Of course, we voluntarily sink a huge number of hours every week into www.theschoolforheroes.com, which is sort of our interactive follow-up to the games, but has morphed into a more serious site on being a real-life hero and living a successful and productive life.

The biggest problems we had weren’t with fans, but with people who complained about things that weren’t really in the games. For example, a Wiccan complained about the stereotypical portrayal of witches in Baba Yaga. Of course, she isn’t a witch, but an Ogress, and she’s lifted straight from Russian fairy tales, on which we based her appearance, the chicken-footed hut, and the laser-eyed skulls (ok, that might have been a *slight* variation) on the fence. Another complaint came from a woman who felt we were anti-Jewish because the villain used a six-pointed star for his rituals. She didn’t bother to read up on the Seal of Solomon or the other research on which we based that.

The one that really floored us was the complaint about the black people in the opening scene of QG3 using poor English usage and strong accents. We based Uhura’s accent on a Jamaican co-worker from my first job in Vancouver. We wanted people to have strong personalities, so we did that with memorable accents. Stereotyping? Maybe, but that’s what you have to do in the limited conditions of a game or film. But what really got us was that we were the first people to come out with a game with strong black role models, and that really made use of an East African setting... but instead of being applauded, we were criticized for the way we did it. That woman should have been our champion, not our critic! Uhura, of course, was inspired by Star Trek, but particularly by a Star Trek filk song with the words, “My name in Swahili means ‘freedom’.”

Do you have any funny/interesting development stories?

Well, we had a lot of fun with some of the incidental jokes and cameos. Many of them were contributed by team members rather than scripted by Lori or me. “Silly Clowns Mode” in QG2 was there because Brian Hughes commented that a lot of business applications had non-functional menu items intended for later expansions. The original idea was to have a menu item that did absolutely nothing, but at some point we decided to use it by changing the silliness level of parts of the game. Brian also collaborated with Kenn Nishiuye to create the Saurus Repair shop at a dead end in the alleyways. We really wanted to keep it in the game, but had to cut it when we exceeded our disk space budget. That scene was revived by AGDI in their fan-developed QG2 VGA remake. I loved producing the voice recording for QG4. All of the actors were terrific to work with, especially John Rhys-Davies even after he discovered he had about five times as much material to record as he’d anticipated when he signed the contract. (He renegotiated and got some additional money, but it was still pretty small considering his stature, talent, and the amount of work he had to do.) One of the best moments was trying to decide on voices for Hans, Franz, and Ivan. Two of the actors wanted to “do Jack Nicholson”, and I decided that their versions were just far enough apart to use them both. They also adlibbed some very funny lines, as you can tell if you compare the screen text with the voices in their scenes. The best parts of development were when we really got everyone on the team pulling together to make something work great. Those became harder as the teams got larger, and spread out throughout the building, in the later games.

When you look back at your time building the Quest for Glory series do you think of that period fondly or is developing games more stressful than the uninitiated might realize?

Yes. It was an amazing opportunity for us, and it was a *lot* of work. We pulled many 60-hour and longer weeks during all of the games. QG5 was by far the worst in amount of unpaid overtime and sheer number of months spent in crunch mode, but I think we came out with a very good game that might have been weaker without the extra work. QG4 was frustrating, because the team was really burned out by the end of the project and it Sierra shipped it months too early. It needed much more QA, bug fix, and tuning time. Fortunately, Sierra management recognized the problem. While we were working on recording voices for the CD version, they assigned one of the programmers full-time to fixing bugs. That he spent almost a year at that, and the game still has a few serious flaws, is a testament to how much work remained undone before the first release.

Lori’s “favorite” anecdote about the stress of working on Quest for Glory was when Sierra installed a security system to get into each section of the building. One day she showed up at work and spent about five minutes trying to remember her access code to get in. Finally someone (breaking company rules) opened the door and let her in. This was during QG2 development, and we wrote some of the stress and paranoia of the time into the game script (including using anagrams of several of the managers as villains – Ad Avis, Khaveen, and al Skurva). It’s not that they were bad people, but the challenge of mixing a very creative process with trying to run a profitable business caused some very stressful moments.

Thanks for your time.

A gaming legend...

I recently did an interview with Quest for Glory creator Corey Cole. The man is a classic PC gaming legend. I geeked out when he replied to my e-mail. I was raised on Lori and Corey Cole games. You can find the interview here.

A Quest for Glory

I enjoyed writing about Hero's Quest in my last post so much that I decided to Dosbox my old Quest for Glory games. Then I enjoyed playing them so much I decided to start a blog about it. I plan on playing through the whole series with the same character and writing down some thoughts about the whole experience along the way. It will hopefully be interesting if you're into retro adventure games like me. Once I work my way through QFG I might try some other classics and put my thoughts down about them. Whatever happens I can't wait to get stuck into these awesome old games.

Game (and name) changin'

Since the day dad first brought home our first personal computer - a two colour lump of metal, plastic and cutting edge silicone, with a CGA monitor and no hard drive (it need a boot up floppy), I have had a love for PC games. In particular PC adventure games. They are an artform almost lost to time, except for the few adventure games that have managed to endure today such as Telltales Sam 'n Max and Monkey Island series. The classic adventure game, which had their golden age in the late eighties and early nineties, were a magical mix with less emphasis on action and more on puzzle solving and story and characters. Many video game enthusiasts who grew up in that era of gaming have fond memories for the early Sega and Nintendo consoles and characters like Mario, Sonic and Chun Li, but what turns my nostalgia dial up to eleven are classic Sierra and Lucasarts adventure games and characters like King Graham, Roger Wilco and Guybrush Threpwood. The adventure game was more cinematic (for it's time) and told stories and developed characters. My childhood imagination may have been inferring more onto these old games than I now know, but back then these games were magical to me and I spent countless hours solving their puzzles and quests. I think this trend towards games that have strong storytelling has carried right into my modern gaming habits. Although I enjoy the odd Modern Warfare 2 match my favourite games of the current generation are all story strong such as Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age and Bioshock.


If I had to pick a single classic adventure game that solidified my life long love of video games I would have to choose the original Hero's Quest: So You Want to be a Hero. This game blended adventure gaming with roleplaying in a way that captured my imagination back in 1989 when it was first released. First you picked a character class from fighter, thief and magic user (thief was my favourite), and assign some stats to some D&D like attributes and skills such as strength, stamina, magic use, stealth etc. and then you were thrust into a fantasy adventure game world set in a forested valley filled with monsters, magic and interesting puzzles. 'Ahead of it's time' is definitely one way I would describe Hero's Quest. I'm not aware of an earlier game that blended RPG and adventure so well. This game had multiple ways to solve it's puzzles based on your characters abilities, had multiple endings and even a night and day cycle. Designed by adventure gaming legend Lori Anne Cole and developed and published by Sierra using their SCI scripting engine, Hero's quest is a classic genre hybrid. However after the games initial release Milton Bradley, the board gaming company, began legal action against Sierra on the grounds of naming infringement of their board game, also called Hero's Quest. Subsequently Sierra re-released their game under the new name of Quest for Glory. I owned the original 5 1/4 inch floppy boxed version of the game called the original Hero's Quest. The game world was light hearted and had a great sense of humor throughout with Monty Python references (to gain entry to the wizards house his gargoyle would make you answer three questions such as "What is your name? What is your quest? What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?") and some slapstick moments. Although the 16 colour EGA graphics are basic by modern standards they were injected with nice details and some charming art design. The plot boiled down to your character entering the game on his own personal quest for adventure and glory and with the ultimate goal of becoming a hero. Soon you were fighting goblins and brigands, rescuing the local land baron's children and defeating the evil witch, Baba Yaga. If you were so inclined you could enter the game's town at night and rob the residents blind in some hilarious (well, hilarious when you're 9) burglary scenes. I'm sure you could solve this game in two or three hours nowdays if you knew what you were doing but as a kid I played this thing to death. I knew this game inside out and finished it with all three classes. The game was filled with great characters like the shady misanthrope's down at the local thieves guild, an eccentric old wizard with a pet talking rat, a weird little guy that lived up near the waterfall and Yorik, a crazy court jester. The game had several sequels and one of the great features was that you could carry your character from the end of each game into the start of the next one, character stats and all. I managed to get my hero, Gunther, all the way to Quest for Glory IV. Each iteration of the series saw your hero travel to a new game world. Part 2 was an Arabian nights style desert setting, part 3 was a fantasy African savanna and jungle and 4 was a dark Eastern Europe themed world with werewolves and gypsy's. This game was such an influence on my gaming evolution. This type of adventure/RPG hybrid led me on to play games like Baldur's Gate, Knights of the Old Republic and even World of Warcraft to some degree. The elements of character building, exploration and adventure were formulated with golden age games like Hero's quest and it's a shame to me that although characters like Mario and Link have their place in modern gaming Hero's Quest and games like it from that primal era are almost forgotten by all but the faithful few classic adventure gamers. I wish I could be carrying my original hero back from '89 into a new Quest for Glory adventure on current generation systems but I think the old Sierra adventure franchises are lost to time. They are not hard to find online, however, and there is talk of iphone ports for some of these old games so maybe they will never be entirely forgotten. If you are so inclined you should grab an old adventure game of yesteryear from the interweb and get stuck into some classic gaming goodness.