King's Quest: Quest for the Crown

King's Quest: Quest for the Crown
Developer(s)	Sierra On-Line
Publisher(s)	IBM, Sierra On-Line
Engine	AGI
Platform(s)	PCjr, Tandy 1000, Amiga, Apple II, Apple IIGS, Atari ST, Macintosh, MS-DOS, Sega Master System
Release date(s)	May 10, 1984 (Original) September 19, 1990 (Enhanced)
Genre(s)	Adventure
Mode(s)	Single-player

King's Quest: Quest for the Crown is a 1984 computer game, originally published for the IBM PCjr simply as King's Quest. The story and the general design of the game was developed by Roberta Williams. Williams was the chief designer of all official releases of King's Quest, working with the series all the way through to the last official release, King's Quest: Mask of Eternity. The game was originally released simply as King's Quest, the subtitle "Quest for the Crown" was added to the game box in the 5th rerelease (1987), but did not appear in the game itself. The 1990 remake was renamed King's Quest 1: Quest for the Crown (King's Quest I on the box).

Story

The Kingdom of Daventry is in serious trouble because its precious magical items have been stolen: a mirror that tells the future, a shield that protects its wearer against danger, and a chest that is always filled with gold. King Edward the Benevolent (who has no other heir) sends his bravest knight, Sir Graham, to retrieve them. If he succeeds, he will become the next king.

User interface

King's Quest featured interactive graphics that were an enormous leap over the mostly un-animated 'rooms' of previous graphical interactive fiction. Prior to King's Quest, the typical adventure game presented the player a pre-drawn scene, accompanied by a text description. The player's interaction with the game consisted entirely of typing commands into the game's parser, then reading the parser's response, as the on-screen graphics rarely changed (except when the player moved to a new location.) As the first adventure game to integrate graphical animation into the player's view of game world, King's Quest shifted the focus away from the static scenery, to the player's character, which was now animated on-screen. As the player used the keyboard to explore the game world, the on-screen character, King Graham, was animated walking to the chosen destination. There were animation sequences for most player-world interactions reachable through the normal course of exploration. For example, there were different animation sequences showing King Graham picking up objects from the ground, opening doors, and wading through water. Depth perspective was simulated as well; Graham could walk behind objects, causing his character to be 'hidden' from view, or walk in front of them, obscuring the object. This attention to graphical animation, while commonplace in arcade-action games, earned King's Quest the distinction as the first "3D-animated" adventure game.

King's Quest was innovative in its use [1] of 16-color graphics on the PC, PCjr and Tandy 1000; even CGA owners could enjoy the 16-color graphics by using a composite color monitor or television, thanks to programmers exploiting the inaccuracies of composite NTSC chroma decoding [2][3][4]. Selecting 'RGB mode' at the title screen would instead result in the usual CGA graphics mode limited to a 4 colors [5]. In this mode, dithering was employed to simulate extra colors.

The game relied primarily on textual input as its interface. Critics often say that this way of interacting with games is time-consuming and frustrating, however, others would argue that it requires more thought on the part of the player.[6]

Game world

The fantasy world of Daventry consists of an 8×6 cyclic array of screens (or rooms) that make up the outdoor world in which the player can navigate freely (except for the screen South of the East end of the castle, which must be reached by special means), plus thirty or so additional screens for indoor and underground places (as well as a smaller world in the clouds).

Development history

Developed throughout 1983 and released in 1984 by IBM as a demonstration product for their IBM PCjr, King's Quest was the first Sierra Entertainment game to use the Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI) engine. (However, the AGI engine wasn't known as such until King's Quest II.)

In an era where it was common for computer games to be written by a single person over a matter of weeks, King’s Quest was one of the most ambitious, risky, and costly projects of its time. In addition to Williams, six full-time programmers worked for 18 months to complete the game at a cost of more than $700,000. Notably, King's Quest was the first adventure game to have animated characters instead of static pictures.

Due to the PCjr’s poor reception, King's Quest did not sell very well. A year later, Sierra released versions for the Tandy 1000 and standard PCs, which at last made the game a success. The game was rereleased for DOS (the original was on a self-booting disk) in 1987 using Sierra's updated AGI V3 engine. It was also ported to the Amiga and Atari ST at the same time, and eventually to the Sega Master System.

King's Quest Original

Identical places in the AGI (left, 1984–1987) and "Enhanced" SCI (right, 1990) versions of the game

• 1st release (1984, IBM PCjr) - The original IBM-branded release for the PCjr. Came with a full keyboard overlay template.
• 2nd release (1984, IBM PCjr) - A minor update to the original packaging. Includes a smaller function key template.
• 3rd release (1984, Tandy) - A version for the Tandy 1000.
• 4th release (1984, PC, Apple) - Versions for the standard IBM PC and Apple II.
• 5th release (1987, PC) - A full re-release adding support for the Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) and Hercules Graphics Adapter (HGC). Ran under DOS, unlike the 1984 releases, which booted directly at startup. It was with this release that the sub-title Quest for the Crown was used on the box for the first time.

King's Quest I: Quest for the Crown Remake

King's Quest I: Quest for the Crown was a 1990 remake of King's Quest; This release is the "Enhanced" version of King's Quest. It uses the Sierra's Creative Interpreter (SCI) engine, the same engine used in titles such as King's Quest IV; while it still used 16-color graphics, it featured twice the resolution as well as music card support instead of the PC speaker.

The game is not a 1:1 remake. The story was expanded upon (mainly in the cutscenes and conversations) and made more linear. There is a set order to finding the three treasures. The first two can be done in any order, but the last treasure is always the shield. Many of the character roles were expanded slightly to include more speech, and more characters were added. Some of the puzzle solutions were altered and some removed. The changes lead to the distribution of points being different in both games (though both add up to a total of 158). Some item locations were changed; the pebbles for example are found near the river in the original, but near a lake in ther remake. Some locations were completely revamped (the stairs in the mountain were replaced with catwalks). The soundtrack was also expanded and included better musical queues when different characters appeared or action ensued.

The project was described by some as 'destroying a classic', and was compared to the controversial practice of colorizing classic black and white movies.^[1] There are two different box variations for this release. One that used the same box as the 1987 AGI original and a box created specifically for the remake.

King's Quest Collection

Both versions of King's Quest I have been released in assorted collections beginning with the King's Quest 15th Anniversery Collector's Edition (1994), followed by the King's Quest Collection (1995), the King's Quest Collection Series and Roberta Williams Anthology (1997). The 2006 collection lacked the original AGI version of King's Quest, and contained only the SCI remake. This version was released on Steam in 2009.

King's Quest 1 for the Sega Master System

There also exists a version of King's Quest: Quest for the Crown for the Sega Master System (1989), which uses its own engine, with an verb/noun interface(similar to early Lucasarts titles). It has original graphics and was published by Parker Brothers. The game is based on the original King's Quest and shares the puzzles and point list of that game. It is non-linear and the three treasures can be collected in any order like the original PC version. Game saves were done through passwords.

Unreleased

• The "Enhanced" version of King's Quest: Quest for the Crown was announced for the Atari ST line of computers and later canceled.^[2] It is not known if a beta version exists or how far into development the game was, although it was announced via Sierra Online's magazine, Sierra News Magazine, in spring 1991. Sierra News Magazine also informed owners to send disk #1 or the front cover of the manual along with a check or money order for $20 to upgrade their copy to the enhanced version.

Fan remake

• In 2001, the group AGD Interactive released an unofficial remake based on Sierra's 1990 version, under a fan license from Vivendi Universal, updating the graphics to use VGA colors, dropping the parser in favor of an interface that mimics that of King's Quest V and VI, as well as adding full speech for all characters of the game. The latter is especially noteworthy in that even though it is an unofficial, fan-made project, the game's protagonist Sir Graham is voiced by Josh Mandel, who also spoke the part in Sierra's official CD-ROM full-speech versions of King's Quest V and VI.
• In 2003 they released Version 3.0, which added translation pack support, bug fixes, optimized music and speech packs.
• In January 2009, AGD Interactive released Version 4.0 of the game, under the fan license from Vivendi Universal. The graphics, animations and voice-acting was redone and improved dramatically, including corrections to a long list of problems compiled from fan feedback.

References

External links

• The History of KQ1 at Adventure Classic Gaming
• AGDI Remake
• Original Soundtrack
• King's Quest at MobyGames
• King's Quest review at Adventure Gamers
• King's Quest I AGI Technical Help on the Sierra Help Pages
• King's Quest I SCI Technical Help on the Sierra Help Pages