The Inside View

Little more than a decade old, the earliest adventure games already seem like quaint relics from a bygone era. Ken Williams takes a look at where the genre came from and where it is going.

Founders of Sierra On-Line and the graphic adventure game: Ken and Roberta Williams Our company, Sierra On-Line, Inc., specializes in producing a type of game commonly known as "The Adventure Game." They include: King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry. This article is a look back at the history of the adventure game, an overview of some of the new directions we'll be taking adventure games this year, and then I'll be asking your help with defining the next generation of games. History of the Adventure Game You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully. >SOUTH You have walked up a hill, still in the forest. The road slopes back down the other side of the hill. There is a building in the distance. >GO BUILDING You are inside a building, a well house for a large spring. This is the beginning of the game that so captured my wife, Roberta, that she could not sleep for days while exploring the caves beneath the well. The year was 1979. I was programming an income tax program on a mainframe computer that was 3,000 miles from my Los Angeles home. To access the computer, I had a teletype machine. It was really just a typewriter with a modem and a printer communicating at 110 BPS; but, it allowed me to get my work done. Although the teletype was at home solely for work, that didn't stop me from exploring the mainframe for anything else interesting to do. I will always remember the thrill of discovery when I saw listed something called Adventure and typed it just to see what would happen. Back typed the computer, "You are standing . . ," Within minutes I was calling over Roberta to show her my discovery. No work got done that night. I don't recall there being any directions to the game. It quickly became obvious that it wanted me to type one- or twoword sentences, usually a verb and a noun. When we encountered a bird, FEED BIRD became obvious. Encountering a stream, how could we resist to ENTER STREAM? "...THE END." Uh oh! What now? Three weeks had passed in what seemed three minutes. I searched every directory on the mainframe computer for another similar game, but with no luck. I did find some background information on the game, though. It had been programmed by a couple of hackers named Crowther and Woods at MIT. Why the game was programmed and whether they would ever program another was—and continues to be—a mystery. Roberta and I were not alone in our fascination with this new style of game. In Florida, Scott and Alexis Adams, another couple, had not only been consumed by Adventure, but decided to do something about it. They formed the company Adventure International with the goal of creating more adventure games. Personal computers were just getting started. Most people think of the Apple II as the first personal computer, but, there were several other computers before the Apple. Radio Shack had a major success in 1979 with the TRS-80. At the time, personal computers didn't have floppy disk drives, so when Scott and Alexis set out to program their own games, they had to type the programs into the TRS-80's memory and then save them on an audio cassette tape. By late 1979, Scott had already programmed five new adventure games for the TRS-80. All right!!! I borrowed a TRS-80 from work and Roberta and I started enjoying Scott's work. Scon really didn't change the style of game from what had been done in the original adventure. You still typed in two-word sentences and the computer typed back your location. The plot had changed but the game was the same. Roberta loved the games but wondered if they wouldn't be better if, instead of a textual description, there could be a picture. Instead of reading "You are standing in front of a house," why not just show a picture of the house? Anyone who knows Roberta will tell you that, once she sets her mind to something, it's sure to happen. "Roberta loved the games but wondered ifthey wouldn't be better if, instead ofa textual description, there could be a picture. Instead ofreading "You are standing in front ofa house, " why notjust show a picture ofthe house?" The Apple II was starting to catch up to the TRS-80. I wanted my own personal computer to start programming a FORTRAN compiler. Roberta thought I should help her program her vision of an adventure game with graphics. Our gift to each other for Christmas 1979 was an Apple II computer. For only $2,000, 1 was able to buy 64K of memory, a floppy disk drive which held almost 85K (!) of data and a monochrome monitor. Roberta then bought me dinner at a local steak place and proceeded to describe her game idea. There would be a haunted house. You would be trapped overnight with seven other people, one of whom INTEH4C770W Magazine would be a killer. Roberta wanted pictures of every room of the house and would write the story and draw the pictures, if I would write the program. As Roberta talked, she grew more and more excited. Her voice rose in volume. People around us in the restaurant started staring as she depicted for me how each of her characters would die. I was a bit embarrassed, but she caught my attention. lor a television show recently, I got to play a little of the game she described that night, Mystery House. The pictures are black-and-white outlines resembling the drawings a six-year-old child might make on a chalk board given only a few minutes while the teacher was out of the room. Game play was unchanged from the original Adventure; but, now you could see where you were. The picture even changed, based on what you typed. For instance, if you were looking at the front of the house and said OPEN DOOR, the picture would be completely redrawn with the front door now open. By typing GO DOOR, you would be trapped within the house and the fun would begin. This is where the graphic adventure started and yes, these were considered sophisticated graphics. Driving from store to store, Roberta and I sold Mystery House ourselves. We even called Scott Adams and started selling his games, too, as well as our own. Covering the West Coast was easy in those days. You could stop at every computer store west of the Rockies and only have to leave your car eight times. I doubt Crowther and Woods ever realized that they were creating a whole industry. Another company was born out of MIT at the same time, Infocom. While Roberta and I were expanding the definition of an adventure game to include graphics, Infocom was working on improving how you communicated with the game. Instead of simple expressions like OPEN MAILBOX, you could suddenly type in more complex sentences, like OPEN THE MAILBOX AND LOOK INSIDE. TAKE EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE BLUE FEATHER. Infocom hit the big time with games like Zork, Suspended, and Wish Bringer. Thanks to their great game design, the intelligence of their text parser, and packaging innovation, they took the industry by storm. It is tough to believe now, but at one point in 1983, eight of the personal computer industry's Summer 1993 hottest selling games were all-text adventures by Infocom. Adventure games had gone in two directions. Infocom had done so well with the all-text game that Scott Adams had not been able to compete and left the business. Gamers liked our graphics, but even we had to admit that Infocom had us beat in several areas. Our graphics used so much of the computer's memory that we simply could not do games with the kind of depth of Infocom's. Then, IBM invented the PC jr. Infocom's success in 1983 and some dumb mistakes at our end (making video game cartridges) almost sent us the way of Scott and Alexis' company. Two things saved us. Infocom decided to enter the business software market with a database program called Corner Stone. They lost so much money on it that everyone I knew took to referring to it as Tomb Stone. Infocom and Sierra were in such deep financial trouble that both of our companies were for sale to just about anyone who could cover our debts. Infocom was sold to Activision, but never turned around their lost momentum and ultimately went bankrupt. We, on the other hand, received some very important visitors from Florida: IBM. "We're coming out with a new computer," the group from IBM said. "It is being designed for the home and will have graphic and sound capabilities unheard of in this industry. We are looking for a game which will show the world how great this computer is and which will show off its new features at their best. We are willing to fund the development, feature the product in our television advertising, and pay royalties." You can imagine how excited Roberta and I were. We were borrowing on our credit cards to make house payments, and here was a chance to create the next major evolution of gaming with IBM's money. The catch was that it really had to break new ground. IBM wanted something truly revolutionary. Roberta and I disagree over who came up with the name King's Quest. However, there is no disagreement that everyone who saw her design was blown away. No one believed we could actually program her game. She was asking for a fully animated world with characters that could walk anywhere, even around trees; music (with multiple instruments) that would play at all times; and sound effects. IBM's new machine had a powerful 16-bit processor and an unheard of 256K of memory. We would be able to perform miracles. Over a year later, King's Quest started selling and was immediately the industry's hottest game. No other game series has been as steadily successful as King's Quest—even now, almost ten years later. From 1984 through 1989, there were only minor changes in the technology underlying adventure games. Graphics not better and the stories underlying the games improved dramatically. The musical scores also became a lot more professional. For King's Quest IV, Sierra even went to Hollywood to hire composer William Goldstein to perform the score. Many players reported being brought to tears by Bill's soundtrack during King Graham's collapse at the opening of the game. In 1989, ten years after playing Adventure, Roberta decided it was time to switch how one communicates with an adventure game. Too frequently players were wasting time trying to figure out what we called something rather than just enjoying the game. If there was a trunk in a room, we would try to recognize a player typing in LOOK IN THE TRUNK, OPEN CHEST, OPEN CASE, etc. But, invariably "Roberta wanted to find a way to make the playersfeel more a part ofthe story by allowing them to manipulate objects in the world directly. In real life, ifyou want to open a chest, youjust reach over and open it. That became her goal." someone would become frustrated because the computer couldn't understand something they felt was completely rational, like LIFT THE LID OF THE BOX. Roberta wanted to find a way to make the players feel more a part of the story by allowing them to manipulate objects in the world directly. In real life, if you want to open a chest, you just reach over and open it. That became her goal. King's Quest V, released in 1990, was the first to show off the no-typing interface and became Sierra's first game to sell a half-million copies. The first-ever true multimedia game to be shipped on CD-ROM was Sierra's adventure game Mixed-lip Mother Coose. We started development in 1988 but didn't ship until 1990. It is much trickier to develop for CD than we had thought it would be. Although you have 600 megabytes of data storage, many CDROM drives are as slow as a floppy disk drive. Our toughest challenge was the slow seek time of CD-ROM drives. When we wanted a character to speak, there would be an unpredictable delay of one-third to a full second while the CD-ROM "seeked" for the speech data. Our other big problem was trying to synchronize the lips of our animated characters with the speech coming off the CD. There was no way I wanted our products to ship looking like poorly dubbed movies. We even hired a top Hollywood animator in the hopes that we could solve this problem. "Mystery House was designed, written, and illustrated by Roberta, while Iprogrammed it in the evenings. In all, it took about three months. On the other hand, King's Quest VI CD lists around 50 names in the credits, some whom have spent the last two years on Kings Quest VI. " Finally, in 1992 I solved the problem by the only other means left to me. A small Seattle-based educational software company named Bright Star had spent nearly a decade wrestling with lip synching. Their chief techic, Elon Gasper, a genius ex-college professor specializing in linguistics, was building an earlyreading product called Alphabet Blocks. It featured a talking monkey. Bananas, and a jack-in-the-box named Jack. They look incredibly life-like when they talk. Elon's studies had demonstrated the increased comprehension that comes from watching someone's lips while they talk (rather than just listening), and wanted to create a program that would both show and tell children the correct pronunciation for a word. It took me about five seconds to decide to merge our companies. You may wonder why something as seemingly unimportant as the lips of a video game character so consumed me. My goal for the adventure game is simple: To make you forget that you are playing a game. Any detail, no matter how small, that makes you remember that you are playing a game is unacceptable. I want the game to feel so real that you begin to believe that you really are the character in the story. Randomly flapping lips and poorly acted voices detract from the experience. Producing CD-ROM-based adventure games turned out to be a bigger project than we ever expected. Mystery House was designed, written, and illustrated by Roberta, while I programmed it in the evenings. In all, it took about three months. On the other hand, King's Quest VI CD lists around 50 names in the credits, some of whom have spent the last two years on King's Quest VI. To do the voices for Kings Quest VI CD, we went to Hollywood and used professional voice talent, like Robby Benson, to do the voice of Prince Alexander. Robby was the voice of Beast in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. The voice actors were shocked; an average film script contains only 100 pages of double-spaced dialog. Since there isn't really one set plot, our adventure game script consumed over 700 pages. It became a major project just to calm the angry actors down. How, they asked, could it be that their character would fall off a cliff in one scene and be back happily walking along the path for the very next line of dialog? Since our very first adventure, we have continually worked to improve the graphics in our games. Hardware has advanced from black-and-white, to 4-color CGA, to 1 6 color EGA, to the current 256 color VGA. As the number of colors, screen resolution, processor speed, and system memory all increase, so does the effort required to create state-of-the-art game graphics. There is more graphic data in the CD-ROM version of King's Quest VI than in all the prior King's Quest games put together, including the CD version of King's Quest V and the floppy version of King's Quest VI. King's Quest VI CD is our first game to use high resolution graphics for the user interface and for the character close-ups. Combined with Bright Star's lip synching technology and the professional actor's voices, high resolution really brings the characters to life. High resolution is featured in several of the games that are currently under development. But there are many other ways besides increased resolution to improve an adventure game. We've developed other technologic innovations which will be coming this Christmas, such 10 hind out more about Kind's Quest VI CD and its revolutionary technology on page M. as: dynamic light sourcing when characters carry around lamps, dynamic shadows when characters walk, translucent surfaces for haze or fog, larger faster animations and even the ability to view the same scene from multiple perspectives. I wish every one of you had a super-fast 486 with lots of memory, a double-speed CD-ROM drive and a local-bus video card. It would be a lot easier to deliver all kinds of stunning effects. But, I don't expect you to upgrade your computer each time a hot new game comes along. Our new adventures have code which allows them to analyze your machine and adjust the graphics to get the most out of your hardware. Even so, as we design games with CD in mind, minimum hardware requirements will continue to increase. Starting with this fall's releases, most of our new games will require a minimum 386 system with 2 megabytes of memory and a VGA display. Some games, like the newest Leisure-Suit Larry game and Phantasmagoria, will require a CDROM drive. We have some other technology in the works. We are working on ways to deliver VCR quality graphics, with high resolution, millions of colors and smooth animation. We're also working on advanced voice recognition (so you can tell the character what do, instead of having to point and click), integrating the 3-D graphics engines used by Dynamix, in their games, and taking our sound another leap forward. I want to eliminate the artificial barriers between you, the characters, and the story, and make you an integral part of the adventure. Another unusual thing we're doing with adventure games is to work with famous people. My decision to publish Daryl F. Gates, former Chief of Police for Los Angeles, has created a fair amount of controversy. Chief Gates collected an extreme amount of negative publicity, primarily as a result of the Rodney King incident and subsequent related riots around the country. My guess is that I will still receive angry letters over this decision many years from now. The reason that I'm working with Chief Gates is that one of my goals has been to create a series of adventure games which accomplish reality through having been written by real experts. I have been calling this series of games the "Reality Role hind (ml mitre about Police Quest IV and "Reality Role-Playing" on page 28. Playing" scries. I wanted to find the top cop, lawyer, airline pilot, fireman, race car driver, politician, military hero, school teacher, white water rafter, mountain climber, etc., and have them work with us on a simulation of their world. Chief Gates gives us the cop game. We are working with Kmerson Fittipaldi to simulate racing, and expect to announce soon that Vincent Bugliosi, the lawyer who locked up Charles Manson, will be working with us to do a courtroom simulation. My goal is that products in the Reality Role-Playing scries will be viewed as serious simulations of real world events, not as games. If we do our jobs right, this will be the closest most of us will ever get to seeing the world through these people's eyes. We're also expanding the definition of adventure games by using them as educational simulations. Most people "/ think a multi-player adventure game is the next major step. Imagine a version 0/Police Quest, looking like it does now, except thatyour partner in the patrol car and the people on the street aroundyou are real people. I think this would be cool. " don't realize that some of the best adventure games we've ever done are hiding over on the educational shelf at their favorite software store; EcoQuest, Lost Secrets of the Rainforest and Pepper's Adventures in Time. EcoQuest is fairly easy to play and a real blast. I played all the way through with our son Chris. Now what I'm spending most of my days thinking about is the next generation of adventure games. This is where I'd like your help. Sierra has an on-line gaming network, TSN. I'm trying to figure out what a multiplayer adventure game could look like. The reason I am so excited about the idea of a multi-player adventure game goes back to what I said about wanting you to believe you are really in the game. We do our best to put artificial intelligence into our games for each of the characters. Still, it's quickly obvious, when you're playing one of our games, that most of the games' responses were programmed in. In other words, I'd like it if the characters that you encounter in our games could be just as unpredictable as the characters we meet in real life. To me, a perfect game would be one in which you could actually make friends with some character you meet. I think a multi-player adventure game is the next major step. Imagine a version of Police Quest, looking like it does now, except that your partner in the patrol car and the people on the street around you are real people. I think this would be cool. For three months Roberta, Chris, and I have been arguing over how this would work. The problem is that most adventure games have some central quest story. Generally speaking, once you've solved the quest the game is over. You are there as the central character and all of the other characters are there primarily to help move you towards completing your quest (or to get in your way). A multi-player adventure game would be a completely different animal. If 500 people were playing multi-player King's Quest at the same time, would there have to be 500 separate quests? There are also problems having to do with the fact that people aren't always connected to the network. If my goal is to save you from an evil wizard, what do I do if neither you nor the evil wizard happen to sign on? Here's the thoughts we've had so far. What if we create a world that just contains nothing but forest as far as you can see? When you enter the game you can do things like explore, or even build yourself a house. There'll be stores where you can buy supplies. Soon, cities will form. People may want to build walls around their cities. Cities may want to bargain with each other for food. Or, for protection against common enemies. There needs to be some sense of purpose to the game. What if after some amount of time, in the land, the game "promotes" you to some status where your goals become to create the problems which affect the city, such as plagues, war, rampaging dragons, etc. In other words, some of the players are solving quests while others arc creating them. Sooner or later it becomes your turn to complicate the lives of others. Those are only my preliminary thoughts, but I'd like to hear yours. Don't expect any compensation beyond knowing that you're helping to pioneer an industry, which is still rapidly emerging. Also, I doubt I'll be able to respond to everybody personally. There really are a lot more of you than me. I will study all of your thoughts and try to publish some of the more creative ideas. Here is what I'm trying to figure out: • What do you do while playing? What are you trying to accomplish? • Do you play in teams or alone? • How do I make the game so it takes years to play? • How do I get people to stay in character? If we're doing multi-player King's Quest, how do I keep people from talking about outer space? • How do you earn money to buy things? Write to me at: Ken Williams Multi-player Adventure Sierra On-Linc, Inc. P.O. Box 485 Coarsegold, CA 93614 Thanks! Ken Williams President, Sierra On-Line, Inc. (Editor's note: Chris Williams demanded that the following P.S. be added) P.S. In my dad's article he said that the story idea, for a multiplayer adventure game, was by all of us, what he wrote was really his idea. Here's mine: Basically you are a peasant that wants to become the highest rank that there is. You don't even want to stop at KING! So you're fighting your way up by either battling someone above you, or by going on a mini (as in two room) adventure. The first one is obvious, the second is to where you have to get a magic bottle, for instance. So first you have to beat a dragon that's guarding a bottle. Then you have to get the bottle and deliver it. There are other things you can do, if you're a king you can invade another kingdom, etc. That's it, or at least in short form. Sr