King's Quest: Quest for the Crown

"It’s because of this game that I can type 100 words per minute"

Sierra’s King’s Quest series has attained absolute classic status among PC gamers and continues to appear every so often each time Sierra releases one of their collectors’ editions. I played KQ1 as a young’un on my Tandy 1000 and I also own it as part of a King’s Quest package that includes all the titles from 1 to 6. Of course the game that started it all looks somewhat naïve and even primitive when held up to the beautiful-looking voice-acted point-and-click high point of the series, KQ6. But it isn’t just the nostalgia taking over when I say that King’s Quest is still a great adventure and a worthwhile game to invest some time in. Just as long as you acknowledge that it was produced in the early 1980s.

Keep in mind this was an era where 16 color graphics were a Very Big Deal, and the entire graphic adventure genre was still new. Commands were entered with the keyboard and processed by text parsers, some of which were better than others. Given that King’s Quest was on the frontier of these new techniques, we can forgive its simplicities, idiosyncrasies and occasional frustrations.

King’s Quest is set in the fantasy kingdom of Daventry, which has fallen on hard times. The land is being ravaged by monsters and its three most valuable artifacts have been stolen. King Edward is too old and frail to do anything about it and has no heir, so he calls his most trusted knight Graham to the throne room and sends him on a quest to retrieve the items and save the kingdom.

Controlling Graham as he travels through the kingdom is highly enjoyable. He’s a cute little guy in his red shirt and blue breeches, complete with a feathered cap like Robin Hood. Besides walking (at three possible speeds) he can jump and swim, which might not seem like a big deal but it was exciting back then, believe me. Back on the Tandy I used to control him with a joystick, which was a breeze, but these days the keyboard is probably the most practical way. It’s a shame though that the keyboard isn’t as precise, which will make simple things like climbing a beanstalk, walking up stairs or along the edge of a moat rather iffy. To keep from plunging to your death often, it might be advisable to use “slow” speed to navigate the more tricky areas.

The environment is broken up into a respectable number of “screens” that Graham can travel through, each rendered in a paint-by-numbers sort of way that was characteristic of all games of that time period. With only 16 colors to choose from, there is not a lot in the way of shading or subtlety. The majority of the open-air screens feature a lime green (a less polite person would probably classify it as “snot green”) bottom half to denote grass, with a light blue top half for sky. Scenery includes brown logs and trees textured with black and yellow lines, dark green foliage, and great blue ovals with white “ripples” to denote lakes and rivers. The effect is of a child’s coloring book: solid blocks of color that contrast starkly against each other with no shading to soften the edges. Primitive, yes, but not exactly painful on the eye either. There is a lightness and happy simplicity to the graphics that I find refreshing, unlike the slightly more advanced graphics in subsequent games that attempted shading but ended up making everything too black and spotty.

By typing commands with the keyboard, you can get Graham to perform all kinds of actions. He can pick up items (“get rock”), examine his surroundings (“look at house”) and interact with other beings (“talk to woman”). Yes, it’s because of games like this that I can type at 100+ words per minute. Even the two-finger-typist can’t help but build some serious speed when your very life often depends on performing a certain number of actions in a very small window of time—the time it takes for that ogre, rat or giant to reach you from the other side of the screen.

You will explore the kingdom virtually in silence, since there is no ingame music and very little in the way of sound effects. Various blips, bleeps and coarse computer generated noises accompany the occasional important event, but for the most part the only noise is the hum of your hard drive. (The sound of a Tandy hard-drive working as you move to another screen is almost like music, in its own way.) As for genuine music, a respectable rendition of Greensleeves plays at the opening screen, and there is also a little ditty for when you die (ripped off from Chopin, I believe.) Both are in the “solid wall of sound” tradition of early PC music, and it was prudent of the developers not to have this playing non-stop through the entire game. Still, it is a nice accent to have in small doses.

Daventry is a fairly clichéd place that borrows many of its situations, inhabitants and puzzles from European fairytales. The game assumes, somewhat unfairly, that certain stories are just part of the collective consciousness and don’t need to be elaborated upon. So for example, when you encounter a witch in a gingerbread house and she bends over her oven, you should know exactly what to do next. And when there’s a stubborn troll who won’t let you cross the bridge, and a goat in a pasture nearby, the rest should be obvious. And what do you do with a handful of magic beans? Well, duh! For those of us who grew up with these stories the answers are all second nature, but for those who weren’t, the solutions to puzzles may not present themselves quite so easily. Aside from this possible snag however, the challenge is quite manageable. In general the items that are supposed to be picked up and/or used will stand out and look unique from the background, and it's blatantly obvious that you're supposed to investigate the various caves, doors, houses and suspicious looking large holes in trees and logs.

The save and restore capabilities will come in handy, as it is quite easy to die: be it through falling accidentally, drowning, or being killed by various monsters. Some deaths are more ignoble than others, for example one of the puzzles calls for moving a rock out of the way to reveal a hole in the ground. If you happen to be standing south of the rock it will roll onto you and crush you. It is also possible to become stuck in the game; that is, reaching a point and then realizing that you’ve done something wrong along the way and can’t continue--another plug for the save feature. There is more than one way to solve several of the puzzles, which makes getting the maximum 158 points the first time around unlikely. It’s not that the game is full of secrets and hidden areas, but that some of the items you can find aren’t actually necessary to complete the game but bump up your points total anyway.

So there you have it. A light-weight adventure that makes up for with charm what it lacks in substance. If you consider yourself a serious PC gamer, this should be on your list of “games to play in my life at some point.” Maybe it doesn’t deserve to be at the top of that list anymore, but it’s still a nice little chunk of history to load up on a rainy day.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 09/28/02, Updated 05/06/03