In 1991, at the Computer Game Developers’ Conference, two adventure designers argued about whether the player should be allowed to die. Ron Gilbert, who had just made The Secret of Monkey Island at Lucasfilm Games, said that “Death is Bad Drama”. Lori Cole, co-designer of Sierra’s Quest for Glory series, proposed “Death as a Dynamic Plot Element”. The question divided the two companies. Sierra’s games killed their heroes often and in many different ways. Lucasfilm’s had almost stopped.
Sierra: death as part of the game
Death was in Sierra’s games from the start. Ken Williams remembered his wife Roberta describing her first game, Mystery House, over dinner at a steak restaurant soon after they had bought an Apple II for Christmas 1979. The player would be trapped overnight in a house with seven other people, one of them a killer. “People around us in the restaurant started staring as she depicted for me how each of her characters would die. I was a bit embarrassed, but she caught my attention.”
In King’s Quest (1984), as Wireframe put it, Sir Graham’s adventure took him into a dragon’s lair, a witch’s den and the path of an ogre, “with a single wrong move resulting in the knight’s untimely demise”. Space Quest made the deaths into jokes, which its co-designer John Williams called “death by amusement”: in one scene the hero, Roger Wilco, explodes “like an overfilled balloon”. Players learned to save before anything risky. In 1988 a Space Quest player wrote to Sierra’s own newsletter: “I think you need to stress the point to ‘save the game’ often. After dying over and over again at various times I was almost ready to forget the game.” He kept playing, he said, and “learned the ‘save game’ lesson the hard way”.
Lucasfilm: rules against dying
At Lucasfilm Games, Ron Gilbert used Sierra’s games as examples of what not to do. His colleague David Fox told Edge that Gilbert would gather the designers round a computer to show them how those games punished players: in one, picking up a piece of broken mirror killed the hero, and “you’d bleed to death”. Fox said Gilbert saw this as “sadistic behaviour on the part of the programmers”. Lucasfilm’s own Maniac Mansion (1987) did not meet the standard either. Compared with Monkey Island, Gilbert admitted, “there are a lot more places where you die and the game can end in a no-win state. Those were lessons learned.”
In 1989 he wrote the lessons down in an article for The Journal of Computer Game Design, “Why Adventure Games Suck”. Computer Gaming World printed an abstract in April 1990. Its argument was that a story needs the player’s “suspension of disbelief”, and that this “disappears every time the player has to restore a saved game or ends up pounding his or her head on the desk in frustration”. The third of his rules, “Live and learn”, was about death:
It is a morale problem when players can only learn by “dying” and having to reboot. Although danger is inherent in drama, note that danger should be survivable if the player is clever enough.
The rule kept danger and removed the need to die in order to learn. Another rule dealt with the dead end, a game that can no longer be finished: players “should not have to pick up every item they see and add it to their inventory because it might help with a later puzzle”.
Lucasfilm’s games of 1990 followed the rules. Reviewing Brian Moriarty’s Loom for CU Amiga, Tony Dillon wrote that the game “has been designed in such a way that you can never get stuck in a situation. Also you can’t die, and that’s an achievement for which Lucasfilm should feel proud.” He also named the cost: “experienced adventurers may find it too simple”. In The Secret of Monkey Island Guybrush Threepwood can die in only one place, an underwater puzzle; The Amiga Book calls it “the only place where Guybrush can die”. Gilbert’s own summary, as that book quotes him, was plainer than his rules: “I got sick of playing adventure games where you died when you did anything wrong.”
The 1991 debate
At the conference, Computer Gaming World reported, Gilbert argued that the death of the protagonist “destroys the ‘suspended disbelief’ necessary to make a story believable and engaging”, and that players whose characters entered danger would be “scared enough, even if they know they won’t die”. He compared it with Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars films and was heckled by Lawrence Schick, designer of Sword of the Samurai: “Irrelevant. We’re talking different media!” Cole argued that without the possibility of death “personal involvement” goes missing: “The game becomes mere amusement, because the player is not committed to performing at that higher plane where adrenaline flows and there is an emotional stake in the game.”
The magazine noted that “both debaters conceded that their positions were not absolute”. Gilbert did not object to death “when it serves an integral part of the drama”. Cole disapproved of death “so capricious that the player cannot develop an affinity for his/her character”.
Afterwards
The companies kept their positions. Lucasfilm, renamed LucasArts, went on making adventures in which the player could neither die nor get stuck; PC Player noted both in its 1995 review of Full Throttle. Sierra’s Quest games kept their deaths.
Sources
- Computer Gaming World issue 70, April 1990, p. 42: abstract of Ron Gilbert’s “Why Adventure Games Suck” (suspension of disbelief; rule 3, “Live and learn”; the “I forgot to pick it up” rule).
- Computer Gaming World issue 83, June 1991, pp. 44–45: report on the Computer Game Developers’ Conference (“Live or Let Die — The Computer Adventure Game Question”; Gilbert, Cole and Lawrence Schick).
- Edge issue 151, July 2005, pp. 94–98, “The making of… Maniac Mansion”: David Fox on Gilbert demonstrating Sierra’s games (the broken mirror; “sadistic behaviour”); Gilbert on deaths in Maniac Mansion and “lessons learned”.
- InterAction (Sierra) vol. 6 no. 2, Summer 1993: Ken Williams on the history of the adventure game (the Apple II, the steak dinner and Roberta Williams describing Mystery House).
- Jack Yarwood, “Once upon a time: the epic history of King’s Quest”, Wireframe issue 46, December 2020, p. 29: Sir Graham and “a single wrong move”.
- The Sierra Newsletter (later InterAction) vol. 1 no. 4, Winter 1988: reader’s letter on Space Quest and saving the game.
- Sierra/Dynamix News Magazine (InterAction) vol. 4 no. 2, Summer 1991, p. 16: John Williams on Space Quest and “death by amusement”.
- CU Amiga, October 1990: Loom review by Tony Dillon.
- The Amiga Book, first revised edition (Imagine Publishing), p. 91: The Secret of Monkey Island (the underwater puzzle as “the only place where Guybrush can die”; Gilbert quoted).
- PC Player (Germany), July 1995: Full Throttle review (no deaths or dead ends).