A year before IBM announced its home computer, the PCjr, it gave Sierra On-Line a prototype and asked for a game that would show off the machine’s colour graphics. Sierra spent 18 months and, by its own account, more than $700,000 on the answer. In King’s Quest the player did not just read about a place and look at a picture of it. You walked a small knight, Sir Graham, around a kingdom drawn in 16 colours. He could swim, climb trees and step behind a rock so that his legs disappeared. K-Power, meeting the game at the Consumer Electronics Show in early 1984, called it “an amazing breakthrough in computer adventures because of its 3-D effects”.
Fast facts
- Developer: Sierra On-Line, Coarsegold, California.
- Designer: Roberta Williams.
- First release: 1984, on the IBM PCjr, marketed by IBM; Sierra sold its own versions for the IBM PC, Apple IIe and IIc and the Tandy 1000, at $49 each.
- System: Sierra’s AGI (Adventure Game Interpreter) for the first three games; SCI (Sierra Creative Interpreter) from King’s Quest IV in 1988.
- Series: eight games from 1984 to 1998, then an episodic King’s Quest from 2015.
Made for the PCjr
Sierra already had a connection with IBM, which had licensed its earlier colour adventure The Wizard and the Princess as Adventure in Serenia. According to Wireframe, IBM asked for an enhanced version for the PCjr, but Roberta Williams wanted to add animation, and a straightforward port turned into a new game.
In February 1985 COMPUTE!’s columnist Donald B. Trivette rang Sierra to find out how the game worked, and his article is the fullest period account of how it was built. Roberta Williams, who had already designed five adventure games, wrote a story out of familiar tales, the Billy Goats Gruff and Hansel and Gretel among them. Sir Graham (spelt “Grahame” in the article) must find three lost treasures for the king of Daventry, meeting on the way a troll under a bridge, a goat, a witch and a beanstalk. A team of six programmers and artists built it.
The kingdom is 80 screens, which Sierra called rooms: 48 outdoor scenes in a grid six scenes deep and eight wide that wraps round at the edges, and 32 interiors of caves and houses. Nobody stored the pictures themselves. Artists drew each scene on paper and traced it on a graphics tablet, which recorded the drawing as a list of instructions, and the game redrew the room line by line and filled in the colour each time the player walked in. The castle, the most detailed scene, took 2,400 bytes of instructions; the simplest took 470. A PCjr needed about four seconds to draw a room, and Trivette found it entertaining to watch.
Behind each picture sat an invisible second layer. Lines drawn with the same tablet marked where Graham could and could not walk, and every object in a room carried a priority from 1 to 15, low near the top of the screen and high near the bottom. As Graham moved, his own priority changed with his position, and the program compared the numbers to decide what to draw over what. That is how he could pass in front of a tree and then behind it. The program kept four save areas for animated objects, so a room could hold no more than four moving things at once, Graham included. Trivette noticed that the magic beans could only be planted in about half the rooms for this reason.
The rules of each room were written in a scripting language of Sierra’s own, which COMPUTE! called the Game Adaptation Language and Sierra later called AGI, the Adventure Game Interpreter. The program looped through statements that worked, Trivette wrote, “sort of like a group of IF-THEN statements in BASIC”; one room had 180 lines of them, including the logic that moved a wandering goat from one screen to the next. The player still typed commands such as “take carrot” into a line at the bottom of the screen, while steering Graham with a joystick or the cursor keys.
The PCjr fails, the Tandy 1000 arrives
The PCjr did not sell. John Williams, looking back in Sierra’s tenth-anniversary magazine in 1990, called it “IBM’s disastrous PCjr computer” and said Sierra “felt like the only company in history that had bet on IBM and lost”. Sierra kept the rights to its PCjr software, and Tandy’s answer to the PCjr, the Tandy 1000, could run it. With “better than 8000” Radio Shack and Tandy shops to sell through, King’s Quest found a new market, and it helped pull Sierra through the lean years after the home computer crash (see Sierra On-Line). Versions for the Amiga and the Atari ST followed, and Parker Brothers published one for Sega’s Master System.
The series
Sales and fan letters persuaded Roberta Williams to write a sequel, and the games became a family saga.
| Game | Year | What was new |
|---|---|---|
| King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne | 1985 | King Graham seeks a wife and finds Valanice, locked in a tower by the witch Hagatha; Al Lowe wrote the music |
| King’s Quest III: To Heir Is Human | 1986 | The player is Gwydion, a boy who turns out to be Graham’s lost son Alexander |
| King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella | 1988 | Graham’s daughter Rosella as the hero; Sierra’s first SCI game |
| King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! | 1990 | VGA graphics, and a pointer and icons in place of the typed parser |
| King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow | 1992 | Several endings, depending on what the player does |
| King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride | 1994 | Hand-drawn animation in a cleaner, Disney-like style; Valanice and Rosella as heroes |
| King’s Quest VIII: Mask of Eternity | 1998 | A 3D action-adventure with a new hero, Connor |
King’s Quest IV and SCI
King’s Quest IV was the game on which Sierra bet its new system. Sierra’s engineers replaced AGI with SCI, the Sierra Creative Interpreter, a general-purpose object-oriented language in which the designers could write a game’s behaviour themselves instead of waiting for it to be added to the engine. Sierra previewed the opening cartoon at the June 1988 Consumer Electronics Show in a private cinema, on a 386 PC with a Roland MT-32 playing an orchestral score, and John Williams remembered a woman in the audience crying as King Graham collapsed. The game was nowhere near finished. Al Lowe told Wireframe that in late August 1988 he was asked to look at it: “Roberta doesn’t think it’s going to be done in a month.” His answer was that it would not be done in a year, and Sierra put every other game on hold while the whole company programmed King’s Quest IV for 30 days. It shipped that year. For owners of older machines Sierra also sold an AGI version, which in John Williams’s words “paled by comparison”.
Pointing instead of typing
From King’s Quest V the player pointed and clicked instead of typing. According to Wireframe, the change came after Roberta Williams watched her own mother struggle to play her games. Ken Williams expected hate mail, but in Sierra’s magazine in the spring of 1991 he reported a mostly positive reception, and in the same issue a parent described a disabled son finishing his first King’s Quest with a modified mouse.
Sierra’s games let the player die, and a wrong move could end King’s Quest on the spot: Wireframe describes a knight whose single wrong step meant an untimely death. Lori Cole of Sierra defended death as a plot element at the Computer Game Developers’ Conference in 1991, against Ron Gilbert of Lucasfilm Games; the Sierra entry covers that debate.
Later history
Ken and Roberta Williams sold Sierra to CUC International in 1996, and King’s Quest VIII: Mask of Eternity was made under the new owners. Roberta Williams stayed to finish it, and later described its making as “an involuntary team effort”. It was built on an engine from Sierra’s Dynamix studio, which the team eventually took over and finished itself, and the game ended the Williamses’ part in the series.
Activision, which inherited Sierra, announced a new King’s Quest in August 2014, made by the small studio The Odd Gentlemen. It came out in episodes from 2015, both a sequel and a retelling of the old games that began with how Graham became king, and its art director, Evan Cagle, told Wireframe that the team’s main concern was making sure “the Williamses felt we had done their property justice”. The last episode appeared in 2016.
Sources
- Donald B. Trivette, “Inside King’s Quest”, COMPUTE! issue 57, February 1985, pp. 136–139: IBM’s commission and prototype PCjr, 18 months, six programmers and artists, more than $700,000; the 80 rooms and their layout; the graphics tablet, drawing instructions, 2,400 and 470 bytes, four seconds per room; priorities 1 to 15 and the walk lines; the four save areas and the beans; the Game Adaptation Language and the goat; versions, prices and 128K.
- K-Power vol. 1 no. 3, April 1984, p. 43: King’s Quest at the Consumer Electronics Show and the “3-D effects”.
- K-Power vol. 1 no. 7, October 1984, p. 60: review of the IBM PC version, $49.95, with an Apple II version to follow.
- Electronic Games, October 1984, p. 39: “the first in a new generation of adventures”.
- Sierra News Magazine (InterAction) vol. 3 no. 2, Summer 1990, pp. 10–12: John Williams, “Ten years: history of Sierra On-Line, Inc.” (the PCjr and the Tandy 1000, AGL, AGI and SCI, King’s Quest IV at the June 1988 CES and its AGI version).
- Jack Yarwood, “Once upon a time: the epic history of King’s Quest”, Wireframe issue 46, December 2020, pp. 28–33: Adventure in Serenia and IBM’s request for a PCjr game; AGI; the characters of II to IV and Al Lowe’s music; SCI and Jeff Stephenson; Al Lowe on the 30 days of King’s Quest IV; the parser replaced from King’s Quest V; King’s Quest VI’s endings; King’s Quest VII’s art; the sale to CUC, Mask of Eternity and the Dynamix engine; the 2014 announcement and The Odd Gentlemen.
- Digital Press issue 22, November 1994, p. 24: Master System list, King’s Quest published by Parker Brothers.
- AmigaWorld vol. 2 no. 2, March 1986, p. 49: King’s Quest among the adventure games available for the Amiga.
- Atari ST User vol. 4 no. 3, May 1989, p. 83: hints for King’s Quest III on the ST.
- Wikipedia, “King’s Quest” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): release years of King’s Quest VII (1994) and VIII (1998), and the 2015 game’s final episode in 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Quest