The hero of Space Quest misses the start of his own adventure. Roger Wilco is a janitor on the spacelab Arcada, and when the piratical Sariens storm the ship, kill the crew and carry off its Star Generator, a device that can turn a dead planet into a new sun, he is asleep in a storage closet, “ducking your work as usual”, as Ahoy! put it. The player wakes him up and has to save the galaxy with a mop-cupboard hero. Sierra On-Line built six games round him between 1986 and 1995, and it made the names of the two staff who invented him, Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, the self-styled Two Guys from Andromeda.
Fast facts
- Publisher: Sierra On-Line; Space Quest V was developed at Sierra’s Dynamix studio.
- Designers: Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, the Two Guys from Andromeda.
- Hero: Roger Wilco, a janitor.
- Games: six, from The Sarien Encounter (1986) to The Spinal Frontier (1995), plus a 1991 remake of the first.
- Systems: Sierra’s AGI for the first two games, SCI from Space Quest III.
Star Quest
Sierra’s John Williams told the story in the company’s magazine in 1991. By 1985 two of the people working on the King’s Quest games, a programmer named Scott Murphy and his partner, the artist Mark Crowe, took Ken Williams their own design for “Star Quest”, a silly, off-the-wall science-fiction parody. The name was changed to Space Quest. Where King’s Quest was a treasure hunt, Williams wrote, Space Quest was “something of an interactive sci-fi sit-com”: Roger “stumbles from situation to situation, never quite in control”.
The designers put themselves on the box. Early copies of Space Quest had a photograph of Murphy and Crowe on the back, posing in front of Yosemite’s Half Dome. As Sierra’s newsletter pointed out in 1987, the picture was printed backwards: compare it with the Half Dome in Sierra’s own logo. The newsletter told owners they might have a collector’s item, since the box was about to be redesigned.
The Sarien Encounter
Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter came out in 1986 and ran on the system Sierra had built for King’s Quest: the player walked Roger round a three-dimensional scene with the keys, a joystick or a mouse and typed commands. The Amiga version, reviewed by Arnie Katz in Ahoy! in 1987, added pop-up text windows, a status line showing the score and a parser that understood compound sentences. Katz found some objects hard to name (“sessions of ‘guess the word’ disrupt the flow of the plot”) but called the game “involving, challenging, and sometimes even laugh-out-loud funny”, with a mood like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, “with a somewhat greater emphasis on humor”.
To win, Roger escapes the Arcada, crosses the desert planet Kerona and gets aboard the Sariens’ battle cruiser, the Deltaur. On the way, Computer Gaming World promised in 1987, the player could visit Droids R Us, the Oasis Bar and “Honest” Tiny’s Used Spaceship Lot, with a guest appearance by the Blues Brothers.
Most of all, Roger dies. Sierra’s adventures were known for sudden deaths, but in John Williams’s words Space Quest brought in “death by amusement”. Where a wrong move in King’s Quest might drop Graham into a river, Roger explodes “like an overfilled balloon” in one scene, and in another is crushed into a sphere and dribbled like a basketball.
The series
| Game | Year | What was new |
|---|---|---|
| Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter | 1986 | Roger saves the Star Generator from the Sariens |
| Space Quest II: Vohaul’s Revenge | 1987 | The villain Sludge Vohaul captures Roger and sentences him to hard labour in a mine |
| Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon | 1989 | Sierra’s new SCI system; Roger rescues the Two Guys from Andromeda |
| Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers | 1991 | 256-colour graphics, a pointer and icons in place of typing, and time travel through the series |
| Space Quest V: The Next Mutation | 1993 | A Star Trek parody, made by Mark Crowe at Dynamix |
| Space Quest 6: The Spinal Frontier | 1995 | Roger shrunk and sent inside a body |
Space Quest II reached Britain in early 1988 at £19.99 for the Atari ST, Amiga and PC. The Games Machine’s reviewer, Rob Steel, called it hilarious. Sierra sold an Apple IIGS version with digitised sound effects, among them Vohaul’s life-support system and his heartbeat.
Space Quest III and SCI
Space Quest III was meant for 1988. Sierra’s newsletter reported that the Two Guys held it back so that they could use SCI, the company’s new game system, with its higher graphics resolution. “We needed the new graphics resolution [of SCI] to design the dogfights in the game,” Murphy said. “We wanted to be competitive with Steven Spielberg.” The music came from Bob Siebenberg, the drummer of the band Supertramp, and his score won Computer Gaming World’s award for musical achievement.
The plot turned on its own authors. Sierra’s advertisements explained that the Two Guys from Andromeda, “bestselling designers of Space Quest and Space Quest II”, had been kidnapped by the pirates of Pestulon and held in the stronghold of ScumSoft, a company of “perverse perpetrators of petty mischief and putrid software”. Roger has to rescue them, or “his days as a popular adventure game character are definitely numbered”. The Atari ST version followed the PC one within ten days, and the first SCI game on the Amiga, this one, came out in October 1989.
Time Rippers
For Space Quest IV, Crowe and Murphy told Sierra’s magazine in 1990, they wanted “a darker version of Space Quest”: still silly, but “a little more grim”. Roger is hunted by the Sequel Police, assassins from the future sent to end “all this Space Quest nonsense”, and helped by the Time Rippers, rebels from the era of Space Quest XII, where Vohaul has returned and destroyed Roger’s home planet, Xenon. The game visits other episodes of the series, real and invented. It had painted backgrounds, animation taken from video of actors and, the designers said, Sierra’s first scrolling screens. Like King’s Quest V, it dropped the typed parser for icons and a pointer.
Asked whether this was the last Space Quest, Crowe said he would like to “design another project in between and come back to Space Quest fresh”. Murphy said fans always asked when the next one was coming out: “I even hear it from my mom.”
The Two Guys split
In 1991 Sierra’s own magazine reported that Crowe was leaving for Dynamix, the Sierra studio in Eugene, Oregon, and Space Quest V: The Next Mutation was made there, with Crowe as designer and without Murphy. Charles Ardai reviewed it for Computer Gaming World in 1993. The title was a near-pun on The Next Generation, Roger’s first starship command had an engineer who protests “I’m an engineer, not a doctor!”, and his nemesis was a Captain Quirk: “almost no scene … goes by without a Star Trek reference”. Roger could now fly his ship from planet to planet in his own order, which gave the player, Ardai wrote, “the feeling of being much more in control than in any of the previous Space Quest games”. He was less pleased by the game’s “unprecedented number of typos”.
Murphy came back for Space Quest 6: The Spinal Frontier. In Sierra’s magazine in 1995 he explained that he had become involved again while putting together a Space Quest collection. Much of the game takes place inside the body of a crewman, an idea he took from the film Fantastic Voyage, and it also sends up other games: a fighting game called “Stooge Fighter 3” and a cat-like commander borrowed from Wing Commander III. The Italian The Games Machine, previewing the game in 1994, said that Josh Mandel, a writer who had joined Sierra in 1990, had become its real author, so accounts of who designed it differ. Ardai, reviewing it in 1995, found the jokes hit-and-miss and the voice acting disappointing, although Gary Owens’s narration was good: the game was not “Space Quest at its best”.
Remakes, the lost seventh game and SpaceVenture
Sierra remade the first game with SCI in 1991, redrawn in 256 colours with hand-painted backgrounds and a new soundtrack, and remade Leisure Suit Larry the same way. A seventh game got as far as a promotional film, with Scott Murphy leading it, before Sierra’s new owners laid off much of its staff in 1999. Murphy, one of those let go, called the day “Chainsaw Monday”, and Space Quest 7 was never finished (see Sierra On-Line).
The Two Guys worked together again more than twenty years later. As Guys from Andromeda, Crowe and Murphy raised more than $500,000 on Kickstarter in 2012 for SpaceVenture, a comedy adventure about a space plumber, Ace Hardway. It was years late: it went on sale in Steam’s early-access programme on 1 April 2025, and the finished game followed on 23 December 2025.
Sources
- Arnie Katz, review of Space Quest (Amiga), Ahoy! issue 45, September 1987, pp. 54–55: the story, Roger asleep in a storage closet, the Arcada, Kerona and the Deltaur; the interface and parser; the Two Guys from Andromeda; “Star Wars” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.
- START (The ST Quarterly) vol. 1 no. 3, Winter 1986, “The 1986 Buyer’s Guide”: the Atari ST version, $49.95.
- Atari Explorer, January/February 1987, p. 70: Space Quest Chapter 1: The Sarien Encounter for the Atari ST, by Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe.
- Computer Gaming World issue 35, March 1987, p. 58: new-product note on The Sarien Encounter (Droids R Us, the Oasis Bar, “Honest” Tiny’s, the Blues Brothers).
- The Sierra Newsletter (InterAction) vol. 1 no. 2, 1987: the reversed photograph of Murphy and Crowe on the box.
- Rob Steel, review of Space Quest II: Vohaul’s Revenge, The Games Machine issue 4, March 1988, p. 67: prices and formats.
- The Sierra Newsletter (InterAction) vol. 1 no. 4, 1988, p. 2: Space Quest III delayed for SCI, Bob Siebenberg, Murphy’s quotation; the Apple IIGS Space Quest II.
- Sierra advertisement for Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon, COMPUTE! issue 109, June 1989, p. 96: the Two Guys kidnapped, ScumSoft.
- The Sierra Newsletter (InterAction) vol. 2 no. 1, Spring 1989: Space Quest III on the Atari ST within ten days of the PC version.
- CU Amiga-64, October 1989, p. 75: Space Quest III on the Amiga at the end of October; the Two Guys held by ScumSoft.
- Sierra News Magazine (InterAction) vol. 3 no. 3, Fall 1990, pp. 8–9: Space Quest IV preview (the Sequel Police, the Time Rippers, Space Quest XII, scrolling screens, Siebenberg’s award, Crowe’s and Murphy’s comments).
- Sierra News Magazine (InterAction) vol. 4 no. 1, Spring 1991: Space Quest IV compared with Heart of China; the 256-colour remake of Space Quest I; Ken Williams’s column on the icon interface in King’s Quest V and Space Quest IV.
- John Williams on the first games of Sierra’s series, Sierra/Dynamix News Magazine (InterAction) vol. 4 no. 2, Summer 1991, p. 16: “Star Quest”, Murphy and Crowe in 1985, the sit-com, “death by amusement”; the rumour column in the same issue: Crowe’s move to Dynamix in Eugene.
- InterAction, Winter 1992: Space Quest V due in early 1993.
- Charles Ardai, review of Space Quest V: The Next Mutation, Computer Gaming World issue 107, June 1993, p. 112: designer Mark Crowe, Sierra/Dynamix; the Star Trek parody; the interface; the typos.
- “The Spinal Frontier: a visit with Scott Murphy”, InterAction, Spring 1995: the Two Guys’ separation, the collection, Fantastic Voyage, “Stooge Fighter 3” and Wing Commander III.
- Preview of Space Quest 6, The Games Machine (Italy) issue 68, October 1994, p. 53: Josh Mandel.
- Charles Ardai, review of Space Quest 6: The Spinal Frontier, Computer Gaming World issue 135, October 1995, p. 170.
- Zero issue 33, July 1992: Sierra advertisement for the VGA remakes of Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry.
- “Firmenhistorie: Sierra”, PC Player (Germany), July 2000, pp. 85–88: Space Quest 7, its promotional film and Scott Murphy’s “Chainsaw Monday”.
- Wikipedia, “Space Quest” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): release years of the six games, including 1987 for Space Quest II. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Quest
- “Two Guys from Andromeda launch SpaceVenture”, A2Central, January 2026 (web, secondary): the 2012 Kickstarter and its total, the April 2025 early-access release and the December 2025 full release. https://a2central.com/2026/01/spaceventure/
- SpaceVenture, Steam store page (web, secondary): developer Guys from Andromeda; early access from 1 April 2025, release 23 December 2025. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1374960/SpaceVenture/