Gaming: A Brief History of Props · 4:53am Sep 20th, 2017
Inspired by Ponky's Blog about games.
The first 'real' game that I ever played (outside the realm of "educational video games") was Wing Commander. I remember getting it for my birthday when I was 6. I was a little Star Wars fan, and my parents spotted this game about 'flying spaceships and fighting aliens' and thought it looked like something I'd enjoy. We had a PC, which ran DOS with a Windows 3.1 launch option, and my dad used it for writing. He'd taught me some of the basics, but I'd learned most of my computer knowledge from my older cousin, Matt. He and I bonded over video games, growing up. We were both huge nerds, and we loved playing "hotseat mode" on games like Jazz Jackrabbit and Crystal Caves - you got one life, and when you died you'd swap out.
Anyway, Wing Commander was the first game that I got that was not just some educational game. Wing Commander was a super difficult space flight simulator with a cool Science Fiction setting. You were fighting for the Human race against the warlike Kilrathe. Each mission gave branching paths and options that changed the course of the war, for better or worse. It was a game that you could lose, even if you survived every mission. Your fellow pilots had character and they fought and reacted differently to situations, the missions were dynamic (for certain values of "dynamic") and presented you with difficult choices, and failure carried weight. I lost the game a dozen times before I finally achieved the best possible ending (yes, there were multiple endings! Chris Roberts is a genius). It had replay value, the story branched, and the graphics were quite excellent for the time. It was quite intense, and I loved it. It really laid down the idea that a good game should have complexity to the storyline, and set me up for disappointment in a lot of games' stories (or lack thereof). I played DOOM a year or so later, after it was determined that we could handle some "bloody pixels", and while I had a lot of fun with it, it never had the same appeal as Wing Commander.
And that's what brought me to King's Quest.
My grandma was the person that really introduced me to gaming, and encouraged my parents to pick up a computer. She had all sorts of neat games. Little puzzle games, skill games, and then there were her favorite games: Sierra Adventure Games. They had a title all their own, because they were really the leaders of the adventure game industry at the time. In King's Quest, you played as Graham, a knight who was seeking to save his kingdom and earn the crown. King's Quest was a game about being witty and thinking outside the box. It challenged you with puzzles with non-obvious solutions, and wrapped the puzzles in these incredible fantasy worlds where myths were real. Dragons, princesses, unicorns, vampires, all these archetypes... but the series always went beyond expectations. The Dragon was often a transformed peasant, the princess was sometimes an ugly troll in disguise, and the unicorn was exceptionally dangerous unless you fed it apples first.
It challenged your preconceived notions, forced you to look at things differently, and the solutions to the puzzles were almost never violent, but ones based in a compassionate outlook. The game also had a great sense of humor and wit to it. They were incredible. You had to type in words to play the game, entering commands as you marched around these pixelated landscapes, and my grandma taught me how to type and write using these games. We played them for hours together. Spatial reasoning, wordplay, puns, silly ideas that turned out to be actual puzzle solutions, it was all in there, and it taught me so much. There were 7 games (plus an eighth game, Mask Of Eternity, which was a hack-and-slash game), and my grandma and I played all of them together, following King Graham on his series of quests that took him from a knight, to a king, to a father. He gained a family, and you even play as his children in a few of the games. They all had intertwined stories, and each game built off the last.
These games shaped me. Their humor and wit, the complex stories and characters, the twists and surprises, are all things that I like to emulate now in my writing. They taught me to look for non-obvious solutions to problems, to see beyond appearance to the truth of things, and have compassion for the people and creatures around me.
Recently, the Kings' Quest series received a true series of sequels, in the style of Telltale's new Adventure Gaming push. The Odd Gentlemen built the world of Kings Quest with the flare and beauty that new games can bring, and they poured their love for the series and genuine understanding of the games into these sequels. The new games have a setting that hit close to home, though. In the new games, King Graham is an elderly man with grandchildren, and he is sickly and frail. The game takes place as a series of bedtime stories, with a bed-ridden Graham playing narrator to his grandchildren, and vignettes in-between each chapter of the game shows his declining health as he desperately tries to bestow the wisdom he's gained on his grandchildren, teaching them important values through his stories.
I have cried, playing these games, because it is very much a similar situation with my Grandma and I. We've played them concurrently, calling one-another and giving hints to puzzles and trading our experiences. It has been an experience of a different kind, though, because often it has been I that has provided the help and guidance to help her through the difficult games. Grandma is sharp, but not as she once was, and the new games incorporate difficult puzzles that require some modern gaming skills to complete, but she's persevered with my help through each chapter. We would commiserate over lunches over the state of our games and where we'd gotten to. It's been a beautiful reversal of my time as a child, and further cemented my deep and abiding love for games and gaming.
My takeaway from this: grandma isn't dead yet and thats mostly good, also games.
What entry of King's Quest do you recommend for first-timers?
4673360
Good question. There are remakes of a lot of the original games, some of them really incredible. AGD Interactive remade King's Quest 1, 2, and 3 with updated graphics that are a near-match of King's Quest 4 and 5 in terms of quality and style. They're free, as they are fan-projects, and each game probably should only take about 3 to 6 hours to complete if you're going in blind and without a guide, with KQ3 being the longest with probably about 6 hours of game play if you don't use a guide. There's some obtuse stuff in there, so be prepared to have to look up some hints, they are tricky games.
My favorite King's Quest game, by far, is 5, but I'd highly recommend playing in order with the remakes guiding your entry into the series. You can find almost all of the King's Quest games for free online.
Gah, I love this, Props! Thanks for joining in the conversation!
That is so mindblowingly cool to me that you played video games with your grandma. I don't have much experience with text adventure games... I've watched Dan Avidan play Space Quest I and III, and I myself quite enjoyed Peasant's Quest on HomestarRunner.com back in the day. I love the way you wrote about it here; you captured that unique feeling it gives you, the way a child's mind can take only so many pixels and turn them into a veritable adventure of epic and diverse proportions.
Bravo, you lucky dog. Bravo! A nice chapter in the gaming origins of Props.
I had a funny experience with the Wing Commander games. My first computer was an older 486 that played the game just fine, but I had to sell that computer. When i built a Pentium, I was like, yay, I can play Wing Commander again!
Launch, explode, what the buck?
Seems the old version I had used the system clock to set framerate, and going from a 486 at 25 mhz to a Pentium class processor running at 120 mhz had rendered the game unplayable. This was later fixed with a re-release.
4673896
Ha! Yup, I had a similar issue with Privateer.
Oh, man. I forget which Space Quest I played. It was the one where you woke up on a garbage ship.
I remember playing King's Quest for hours and hours.
Also, another one that was just like those, but set in the Gold Rush? I remember selling stuff and taking a ship to Panama, then getting eaten by a swarm of ants when I couldn't type "jump" fast enough. That one was terrible, because you could get like four hours into a playthrough, and die because you didn't do something at the very beginning of the game! And you had no indication what it was that you missed!
Oh, and when you started up the game, it had a question that you had to look up in those giant paper volumes that came with the game. It wouldn't start the game without the correct answer. That was their version of a "product key." What a pain.
4673986
Ha! Yes, old school copy protection.