King's Quest II and III remakes planned by Sierra to be made after King's Quest I: Quest for the Crown remake. They were cancelled for various reasons perhaps due to fan criticism, while others claim disappointing sales.
Background
Donald B. Trivette mentions in 1993 in the The Official Book of King's Quest VI (aka 3rd Edition) that plans were made to re-do II and III, "but at this writing that has not been done."[1]
In 1990 the developers at Sierra redeveloped Kings Quest with a new interface and up-to-date technology. The 1990 project to revamp the original King's Quest was widely viewed as a critical failure because many reviewers and gamers took offense at what they perceived as an attempt to "destroy the classics." In fact, the project was compared to the controversial practice of "colorizing" classic black-and-white movies..ref>KQCollection 2, pg 5</ref>
The plan was to redevelop Kings Quest II but due to rather disappointing sales of the 1990 remake of King's Quest I, the prospect of officially remaking and re-releasing King's Quest II was scrapped.[citation needed]
Valid or not, these reactions essentially stopped work on future attempts to modernize later King's Quest installments.[2]
- Was there ever any ideas or designs thought up into any of those before the idea was cancelled, due to poor sales?
- No, we didn't put any effort into further KQ remakes. By the time I got to Sierra, that project had lingered for a LONG time. I don't know what the budget had been, if any, but I'm sure it exceeded all expectations. And the other remakes turned out to be very expensive as well. Really, they had to be significantly redesigned (because of the move to P&C interface), and all the artwork was new, and the code had to be new, too. So while I think the thought was, "Oh, we already know this game inside and out, so doing a remake will be cheaper," that turned out not to be the case. So we were putting almost as much effort into creating the remakes as we put into making new games. And customers would much rather have a new game than a retread of an old game; the remakes were quite not the automatic purchases that I think the company expected. So while I'm not sure I'd describe their sales as "poor," they were certainly not as good as the same budget poured into a new game.-Josh Mandel[3]