King's Quest Online

King's Quest Online was to be a massively multiplayer online adventure game (with possible RPG elements).

Background

Ken and Roberta once believed that the future of adventure games like King's Quest would be multi-player adventure games. To this end he experimented with several attempts. In 1989, Ken Williams decided to look at the possibilities of playing adventure games with multiplayer over a global network. He assigned Sierra staff to convert SCI programming language over to multiplayer. However, Due to the lack of technology at the time, the multiplayer game was ultimately dropped. But research lead to the development of INN, later known as The Sierra Network.

Donald B. Trivette commented in 1991 (The Official Book of King's Quest Second Edition):

Ken foresees a considerable evolution in adventure gaming in the next five to ten years. Already Sierra is testing a realtime, multiplayer version of a game similar to Leisure Suit Larry. The test is being conducted with 1100 players in the Los Angeles area, but the software is designed to connect players from different parts of the country via telephone lines. A player can enable his or her character to sit at a bar, for example, and talk with the guy in the next seat,'\who happens to be playing from Texas or Iowa or Maine. The two characters could then agree to go to the casino for a game of blackjack.

To make multiplayer games feasible, Williams expects to significantly cut rates from those charged by services like CompuServe and Prodigy. If the test market proves successful, there will surely be a multiplayer version of King's Quest.

A Peasant's Quest to Become King and Beyond

Sierra Tried To Turn King's Quest Into an MMORPG?-2

As early as 1993, Ken , Chris and Roberta Williams discussed bringing a number of Sierra Adventure games to world of Massively-Multiplayer Online Adventure Games, and wondered what this would involve (giving examples such as King's Quest and Police Quest, but focusing on King's Quest). Would it be more adventure, or more RPG in aspects? Would each player have a 'role' in the game, both good guys or bad guys, or each solve the game's quests together against NPCs. Would players create the puzzles and the quests for other players to solve? Would players collect items, and have to put them together with other players to solve puzzle? Is it literally a quest by peasant trying to become King, Emperor, evil Wizard, Dark Lord or Emperor of the entire Daventry universe? How would the other King's Quests fit into the game's stories (could players meet Royal Family of Daventry)?

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...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 their as the central character and all 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 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 the quests while others are creating them. Soon or later it becomes your turn to complicate the lives of others.

Those are only my preliminary thoughts...

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 you're doing a multiplayer King's Quest, how do I keep people from talking about outer space?
• How do you earn money to buy things?

-Ken Williams

Chris Williams had this to add...

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 who 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 where you have to get a magic bottle, for instance. So first you have to beat a dragon that's guarding the bottle and deliver it. There are other things you can do, if you're king you can invade another kingdom, etc. That's it, or at least in short form.

In other product categories, such as adventure games, it isn't clear what we'll do. Some of our designers believe that adventure games are about interacting with people and places, and that the story should be whatever you make it. So, we are working in several different directions to give our customers a variety of options.

-Ken Williams

Some of the early ideas for internet capability or multiplayer King's Quest was to allow players to be able to swap magical items in the game, or to have the universe be expanded over time, with new lands, items, and stuff in the world.

All of our games will include Internet play, and be based around worlds that survive and exist whether or not any particular user is signed in...Within King's Quest, they will swap magic items. Forget the Internet and think about what happens to our games when you recognize that all our users can be linked together during play. The kinds of games you can design are so much more ambitious than what can be done on a single machine that it is staggering!...my current guideline to our developers is to stop thinking in terms of shipping a game in a year to start thinking in terms of pervasive universes. Using the Internet, we should be able to build worlds which get better over time.... This is hard to explain--but you have to change metaphor from thinking about games to thinking about fantasy universes--kind of a cyber-"Fantasy Island." We create it and make it better from year to year. Customers visit when they like. The days of shipping games which obsolete prior versions are over.

I like the idea of where infocom was going. There were the inklings of an idea in their text games - which was to focus on artificial intelligence. If the same effort were coupled with today's computers - perhaps a game could be built that is a VERY accurate simulation. I like the idea of an environment with unpredictable characters. The problem with multi-player is that most people don't like multi-player environments. I think that through having truly smart NPCs, something that could be done that gives the best of both worlds; single and multi-player games. If I personally did a game, this is the area I would focus on. The problem is that games become puzzle games at some point. It's the player versus the traps left by the designer. I have a lot of ideas on how to build credible intelligent characters."

-Ken Williams

What can computer game players expect from Sierra On-Line in the future? According to Roberta Williams as explained in The Royal Scribe (1994)... Sierra On-Line was exploring the potential of video-captured live action, multiplayer adventure games, and a voice recognition interface. Ken Williams summed it up best when, speaking to the game player, he said "I want to eliminate the artificial barriers between you, the characters, and the story, and make you an integral part of the adventure."

Multiplayer Adventures

Roberta had been toying with the idea somewhat under Ken Williams suggestions she push King's Quest into massively multiplayer game, or 3D or both. Ultimately she settled on the idea for 3D and started designing King's Quest 8: Mask of Eternity. She put off the idea for an online game as a future idea for a future game (perhaps King's Quest IX, or King's Quest X), or as its own spin-off game (however note marketing was moving away from numbers for sequels, hence King's Quest 8 being forcibly published under the title "King's Quest: Mask of Eternity).

Also...Mark and I entertained the idea of making it multiplayer also, but that was nixed. It was like, well were doing 3-d, and that's enough, you know, for now. Maybe Multiplayer later.

-Roberta Williams, Talkspot part 2 (1998).

When I started development on King's Quest Mask of Eternity, we also decided, we were thinking at the time to make it multiplayer, and also 3-d, but we dropped the multiplayer aspect of it. It was just too much to try to develop, and also develop 3-d."

-Roberta Williams, Talkspot part 1

Roberta brings up the idea that there were two design teams, one under her that wanted to push 3D, and keep the game closer earlier games (but adding some new features to keep it up with how culture had changed, and what they were interested in at the time), while the second team wanted to turn the game into a RPG Massively Multiplayer Game. Roberta said she was interested in both ideas (she was not interested in RPG stuff as much), but felt MMO Adventure wasn't conceivable at the time, and possibly not conceivable at all in hindsight.

For more information see World of King's Quest: Mask of Eternity.

"We sort of discussed the massive-multiplayer aspect, and I thought about it a lot, because part of Sierra at the time was saying that is where it's going. Lots and lots of people are playing a game at once. I knew that to be true. So some people were saying, we need to go that way. Then there was the 3-D aspect, we need to go that way. And I knew we needed to do something, because technology was changing, the culture of game play was changing. And that to try to keep up you have to keep up as well, maybe even push a little bit. I've always been known for that. So, I really had to think about it, but I had my genre that I do, which is the adventure game. That's my genre. I don't do any other genres of games. That's it. And so in keeping with a genre, if you try to go outside of it too much, you are going to lose the people that love your genre. They are going to say, "well, that's not, this isn't really an adventure game. This isn't what I love. This is something else, which is trying to deviate and trying to get me into role-playing games, or something like that, and that's not what I want. That's not what it is." So I had to really think about, as a designer, I put a lot of thought into, "can you take an adventure game, the adventure game genre as I defined it, which is an interactive story (story is important for my type of adventure game), and can you just put lots of people in it at once, roaming around, and each of them trying to solve it, you know, get through the story, solve the game, and/or you bump into other people. You can talk to them, and you can do this, and this, and that. Can I maintain the story aspect with that? I wanted to be able to come up with it. I really did, I wanted to figure it out. And even to this day, and I have thought about it over the years, and to this day I have not figured it out. And I have come to the conclusion It's not possible. It doesn't have to be point and click. I think maybe you could do it, if you had two players, but I don't know. It's hard enough as it is. I've worked with alot...I've had to be sort of a teacher, I guess, to other adventure game writers: I found that it's actually easier to teach non-writers how to do it. But I did have a couple of writers that I had to work with (who were writers of books, they knew how to write a book), but they had a much harder time with figuring out how to design an adventure game. Because they obviously thought linear story, and it was hard for them to get it through their heads, that they don't have to keep leading the player down this line of story all the time. You have to let them go. You have to let them go, and explore. Then the person would say, "ya, but at some point you have to get them back to the story. Maybe if you just let them go, then how do you continue a story, if you just let them go. And so I, the way I described it was that: "You come in to your story, come in the beginning and you are sort of given your goals. You are told your goal of what you are supposed to be doing at the beginning, and then you come in, and it kind of opens up exploration (it kinda opens up like that), and then it comes back at some point to the story point. And then you can explore some more, and then you come back to another story point, and you might have a couple of on the side. It's like bubbles, bubbles come to a story point, then another bubble of exploration, then story point. And a lot of that turned out to be regions, different areas of exploration. That sometimes even within that, you have to lead them to a story point. That is where it gets tricky. That's when the hardest part for people to understand that when their learning how to design these kind of games is how to allow exploration, puzzle solving, and obstacles, and gathering inventory objects, and being careful of what you do, and then come back to a story without being really leading them too much. I guess you can say that's an art, in and of itself. But if you have, a lot of people all of a sudden... That's if you have one player, but if you are going to have ten players, or a hundred players, or a thousand players, however many... I just couldn't ever see how you maintain that...

While not specifically King's Quest related she has also said that the future of Adventure Gaming may have to rely on the multiplayer, and become something similar to MMORPG, but instead would be a Massively Multiplayer Online Adventure Game (see Myst Online: Uru Live). In fact, she said originally there was a discussion for early on for KQ8 to have a multiplayer component, but it was something she had save for a future game instead (Talkspot Part I). Ken Williams had been discussing the idea of a Multiplayer King's Quest long in InterAction Magazine before or during development of KQ8. In a later game, the multiplayer may have included the three protagonists for that game (Rosella, Alexander, and Connor). -Roberta Williams, "Sierra tried to turn King's Quest into an MMORPG?"

If not massively multiplayer, multiplayer might have been two or three people competing against a common goal.

For example multiplayer had made it into King's Quest (IX), it's possible that players may have been capable of choosing between Rosella, Alexander and Connor the primary protagonists of the game, in their attempt to stop Rasputris, and rescue King Graham and Valanice. It appears that King's Quest (9) would have at least introduced the idea of Rosella developing an affection for Connor, but the outcome of this wouldn't have been touched upon until a later game (specifically King's Quest X). This could have evolved into SQ10's story in which Edgar and Connor would initiate a love triangle to compete for the hand of Rosella. Which might have included an optional multiplayer aspect allowing players to take on the role of the two or three characters (perhaps still maintaining a single player mode where you could have chosen between Rosella, Edgar, or Connor each leading to different endings).

...back ‘in the day,’ I had put in a lot of time thinking about the future of adventure gaming—whether 3D or massively multi-player. I came to the conclusion that a ‘true’ adventure game could never be multi-player. MAYBE with just a few players, like 4 or something like that, but certainly not massively multiplayer! Because an adventure game, at its heart IS a story. It’s just a story that you can interact with (either a lot, or a little…depending on the game designer). But still, it’s a story at heart. And if someone ever does what they call ‘an ADVENTURE game,’ but it’s multiplayer and lots of people are wandering all over the place—it won’t really be an adventure game.-Roberta Williams

In interview by an Asian game publication, Roberta Williams promised her return to the video game industry as soon as she figured out how to combine the adventure genre with massively multiplayer online gaming.

Legacy

Some of Ken Williams, et al's early ideas split off into The Realm, concepts for Quest For Glory Online/World of Quest for Glory, Middle-Earth Online, Police Quest Online, Quest For Glory V's multiplayer component and Space Quest VII's - "Space Quest Online" multiplayer component. However, most of these ideas were never fully realized or released.

Fantasy Adventure/Role-Playing

The Realm Online

The Realm Online-2

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The realm allowed players to build towns, and they could choose to either fight monsters with other players, or take on a career in towns, or socialize and just explore. New regions were created to expand the Realm into forests, deserts, swamps and other lands. It had somewhat King's Quest style exploration (see KQ1-5, and somewhat 6), and also seen in Conquests series, and some of the Quest For Glory series (QFG1, QFG2, and QFG4). It's combat system and interface was somewhat reminiscent of Quest for Glory.

To explore the other side of adventure gaming, we created a new concept that it can only be played online -- The Realm. The realm is a multiplayer adventure game and an online community. When you enter the The Realm for the first time, we give you a house, some clothes, and a bit of gold. From that point on, your life within The Realm is what you make of it. You can fight monsters, or just make friends.-Ken Williams

I don’t know much about today’s games, so I’m the wrong one to ask. The big games today seem to be the massively multiplayer ones, and Sierra was certainly a pioneer in that space. [Sierra published an early MMO called The Realm in 1995.].

The Realm Online has undergone ownership by several companies, but continues to exist, and be expanded upon to this day.

World of King's Quest Online

• see World of King's Quest (MMORPG)

Quest for Glory Online

World of Glory

World of Glory was a proposed 1994 online rpg to be hosted on Sierra's INN.

...we proposed World of Glory as an INN game in 1994, seems like that was a 3rd iteration of a QfG MMO even earlier than the Realm tie-in discussion.-Corey Cole

Quest For Glory Online

Quest for Glory Online was an planned online MMO spin-off of the Quest For Glory Series to be released in 1996. But after Corey Cole left the development of the game, it was transformed into the released game The Realm (and all QFG related ideas were dropped from the project, short of adventure game exploration elements, and art style similar room to room exploration seen in the maps of forests and deserts, and other regions seenn in games like King's Quest series, Quest For Glory series (QFG1, QFG2, QFG4), and Conquests series but in a higher SVGA resolution).

According to various accounts, the original game premise (for The Realm) started out as Quest For Glory Online before it was converted over to its own IP, but this was even before the Cole's were asked to take part in it's development.

There were two main attempts to create "World of Quest for Glory".

Yes, first one was after Sierra cancelled QG V, and I went off to work on other projects, and Craig Alexander had the idea of branding The Realm as World of Quest for Glory. The 1999 edition was after we made QG V with Sierra, and it was our idea of how to extend that game concept to be an MMO. Of course we had no clue how expensive such a project would be!

According to Corey Cole:

Yes, the game was The Realm. It was quite far along at that point, but Sierra was looking at "branding" it as "World of Quest for Glory." That sounded exciting, and they wanted us to create quests for it.

Unfortunately, when we had the meeting and asked about tools and support for creating quests, the developers admitted that they hadn't created anything along those lines yet. They assumed they could just add quests at the end of the project.

The game was supposed to release in a few months; we didn't think there was enough time to "shoehorn" in an entire quest system and the hundreds or thousands of quests it would take to create a compelling multiplayer world.

Given enough time, it could have been pretty cool, but I don't think we would have had enough time. The positive side was that participating in that meeting instead led to Lori making Quest for Glory V with Sierra.

LC: When Sierra decided to make QfG again about three years after breaking our contact and waving good-bye to us, it was because they had a problem. They had an aged on-line role-playing system, The Realm, which was starting to lose subscribership and definitely was dying out. They wanted to bring it back to life and so the "Powers That Be" decided that they should mix the Realm with QfG. Since the PTB were different PTB when we left Sierra, I really believe they were influenced by all the fan letters and the "Quest for MORE Glory" website.

Shannara was released in December 1995, and the Coles were called back to Sierra to develop multiplayer on-line QG game.

Lori Cole: After we made “Shannara,” Sierra had entirely changed management. I was approached by the new Sierra to co-design a multiplayer on-line game with another designer using the QG name." .

Quest for Glory 5 Multiplayer

Originally Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire was to have at least three player multiplayer mode. The player would have been able to co-op and compete against players who were using the various Hero character classes, the thief/warrior hybrid Elsa of Spielburg, and/or the gladiator Magnum Opus. A version of this mode appears in the QFG5 Demo, allowing each player to choose from any of the hero classes, and the two extra characters. This meant a total of four class characters, and two unique characters competing together. Material related to cut multiplayer content can still be found in the base game (but only Elsa and Magnum Opus are playable with hacked character files).

Quest for Glory 5 ½ Multiplayer

Quest for Glory 5.5 was the name for the expansion packs/stand alone game mid-sequel set in Silmaria, and continuing the Hero's story.

The stand alone game concept evolved from Quest for Glory V Mission Expansion Packs CD concepts that had been planned for Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire. The original ideas for the Mission & Expansion packs were apparently combined into what would become concept for a stand alone game, reusing assets, and creating a new story (tentatively titled Quest for Glory 5.5).

This would have added the cut multiplayer to work with the original game, and to play with the new stand alone mid-sequel game.

Item E. Jan. 15, 1999

"QG 5.5" -- Use as much of the existing artwork as possible.  Create a few new scenes and some new characters.  This is an entirely new storyline that continues from the end of QG5.  Leveraging existing assets will make this considerably cheaper than developing a full game from scratch.  This would include the wedding scenes, maybe a formal coronation, an abandoned temple to dark gods, pirates, ship battles, ghosts and other undead, and might have a feel something like Jason and the Argonauts.

According to Corey:

Other possibilities were a multi-player demo vertical slice to show Sierra management what we could do with a multiplayer QG V, multiplayer extensions to the original game, and a number of others.

What we didn't know at that point was that Sierra was getting out of the adventure game business entirely, and that they had just waited for QG V to ship before giving Yosemite Entertainment the axe.

During the development of QFG5, it was decided to remove the character of Punny Bones from the game. In QFG4 he mentions that he was heading to Silmaria ahead of the player. But due to fan complaints and seeming dislike for the character Lori Cole decided to cut the character from the game. It was one of her favorite characters and she was saddened to have to remove the character.

After the announcement, and following a Punny Bones fan club and petition, she decided that she would have plans to reincorporate Punny Bones into an expansion CD for the game, along with some other material she wanted to add, as well as new quests and storyline set in Silmaria set after end of game when the Hero had become the Hero of Silmaria (or turned it down). It would have expanded acknowledged and expanded on the King's choice of marriage. In the released game Gnome Ann mentions that Punny Bones had worked for her for a few weeks after leaving Mordavia, and left shortly before the hero arrived. She hopes after you improved the place, and brought in tourists that he would return to work there.

The mission expansion packs were originally intended to be a series of expansion packs originally planned for Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire. These were to include both a King of Silmaria and Punny Bones Expansion CD and Mission Packs, or even possibly evolving into a stand alone game. The proposal for the stand alone known as Quest for Glory 5.5 in the development notes. Multiplayer might have been another mission pack.

Apparently the first expansion to QG5 would have involved pirates. It was also supposed to have ship to ship battles. It might also been multi-player as QG5 was originally supposed to have a multi-player mode. The co-op mode also was to have a feature to rob the bank together.

The Coles even thought about making their own company to make the Mission Packs for Sierra, but couldn't figure a way to make it profitable.

Unfortunately, as QFG5 was not a huge success, and with Sierra closing its doors. All plans for the expansion CD were cancelled.

Gloriana: The World of Quest for Glory

Here was our one-paragraph concept for a 1999 MMO - H.    "Gloriana" or "The World of Quest for Glory" -- Massively multiplayer game.  Highly extensible.  Designed to let Lori and others continuously add content. Developer kit to let fans add on to the world.  Significant Web support lets every player feel he/she is really part of the world.  Either an absolute ban on player-killing or a hybrid approach in which players can choose whether or not they are susceptible and can participate.  Designed to encourage cooperative rather than competitive play.

"Lori's real long-term interest is in "H" as that's the closest to "real" role-playing. The idea is to really create a constantly changing and evolving community of the players. The key IMO is to create great tools to make content creation and extension easier. The game could be financed creatively with "real estate" (they're really "fantasy estate") sales, rental of Web space and email accounts, advertising within the game world, and anything else we come up with. Generating massive hits on the Web site would be key to this. We can accomplish that by linking with QG fan sites, running contests, continually adding new content, running a BBS, having chat conferences, etc." - Corey Cole

Middle-Earth Online

Middle Earth Online trailer-2

Abandoned MMOs - Middle Earth Online-2

Some of the ideas for Middle-Earth online included it was to be built upon allowing the player to choose a race, a basic class, and a vocation, and then they could choose to either go around adventuring or fighting, or stay in a town and sell things, create an economy, build a house, then cities, and build up the world. They could also choose to be good or evil based on their choices and actions (somewhat similar to the system introduced in early versions of Lucasarts; Star Wars Galaxies before it turned more traditional).

In 1997, Sierra’s Craig Alexander looked at the moderate success of The Realm Online and wondered how successful a similar game might be if it had a powerhouse IP behind it. The notion of licensing the works of Tolkien popped into his head, and he told the team to pursue it. Initially, the game was going to use The Realm Online’s server code and be presented in a 2-D isometric format (which was eventually changed to top-down 3-D). Middle-earth Online was designed as far more of a sandbox experience than its themepark descendant. The idea was to let you live a virtual life in Middle-earth by choosing your path, whether it be hunting down other players or setting up shop as a crafter. “I believed in the sandbox school of MMP design,” Daniel James wrote. “Give the players the tools and a rich environment in which to exercise them. This part of the design did a complete 180, much to my delight.” To cut down on the amount of content creation the limited team had to do, the devs designed MEO’s systems to let the players shape the world such as build and destroy structures and random adventures would be generated for those looking to quest. The team bandied about other concepts such as having player characters automatically flee from deadly fights and be capturable by NPCs, which would necessitate a rescue from friends. Characters were planned to have a “psychology” that could be modified by players through repeated or deliberate actions. Making loud noises would have attracted bad guys. And in probably one of my personal favorite ideas, the team said that it would limit the number of Elven players to keep the numbers in line with the diminishing population according to the official lore. “Some of the ideas actually survived into the game that Turbine eventually shipped, but some were what I like to call ‘crazy.’ The biggest of those was permadeath. The high level design here was that any player would be able to work up the nerve to commit murder by way of lesser crimes. Eventually they would be able to permanently kill another player’s character. Certain high level monsters would also have the ability to permakill a player character. James, permadeath wouldn’t have been that common, and only players who made conscious decisions to be branded “murderers” would be fair game for such an act. PvP would have been broader than that, however, with the ability to play as a free-roaming servant of Sauron. The devs would pitch monster play progression by saying that the more you leveled up, the bigger and badder you became, but then you’d start to become tied to locations...this original vision for Middle-earth Online wouldn’t have flown with the Tolkien estate, especially in allowing player characters to become evil. “The Tolkien guidelines (which by the way I sorely wished I’d taken a copy of, they were interesting reading) were very clear that players were not to be evil or commit evil acts,” he wrote.

Middle-Earth Online later evolved into Lord of the Rings Online, under much more traditional MMORPG mechanics like World of Warcraft or Everquest.

Other Series

Police Quest Online

The Police Quest Online was a MMO-style game suggested and discussed by Ken Williams in The Inside View (Summer 1993).

"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."

Longer term, here's what I'm up to: my current guideline to our developers is to stop thinking in terms of shipping a game in a year and to start thinking in terms of pervasive universes. Using the Internet, we should be able to build worlds which get better over time. There should be no reason we have to start from scratch with each game. We should be able to build a version of Police Quest which spans a million households--and then add new weapons, buildings, and scenarios from year to year. This is hard to explain--but you have to change metaphor from thinking about games to thinking about fantasy universes--kind of a cyber-"Fantasy Island." We create it and make it better from year to year. Customers visit when they like. The days of shipping games which obsolete prior versions are over.

SWAT would later add multi-player aspects in SWAT 2, Swat 3, and SWAT 4. The first allowing SWAT to compete against Terrorists, with a story-based campaign for both.

Leisure Suit Larry Online

The fourth Larry game was once envisioned to be multiplayer adventure game. Sierra began work on a multiplayer installment of Leisure Suit Larry that was to be played out over The Sierra Network. This failed due largely to technical reasons, and the planned multiplayer Larry game was shelved.

Al Lowe also had problems of thinking of the game Scenario... The ending of Larry 3 was very definite and somehow metafictional (showing Larry and Patti escaping their game world, and coming to the Sierra studios and making games based on their adventures (essentially creating their own existence), living happily in a mountain cabin in Coarsegold). This completed a relatively cohesive trilogy with no sequel planned; Al Lowe was in a dead end because he couldn't find a way to start it since the scenario had completed a story arc.

Larry Online was going to be Leisure Suit Larry 4, the first multi-player on-line adventure game.

Jeff Stephenson had written much of the system code for the AGI and SCI languages. He was going to create the system. Matthew George would create the low-level communications code. I would be the designer and high-level applications programmer. The three of us grabbed an office and a coffee pot and started coding in January, 1991.

We had a few basic questions:

How will people connect up? The only way we knew was through dial-up modems, so we filled a computer with modems, then bought an expansion chassis and filled it with modems, then plugged in another chassis and kept daisy-chaining them together.

Could we expect 2400-baud modems? We opted to "demand" 1200-baud minimum speed but "recommend" the speedier new technology, which was, at that time, still quite expensive.

How do we handle the huge graphics files necessary? Easy. We planned to sell the game in a box, but require a modem. The game code, graphics, sounds, etc. would be on the floppies (no CD-ROMs either). Only minimum data would pass through the slow comm bottleneck.

How would players decide who was in their game? I came up with the concept of a "waiting room" where newcomers hung out until they found others who wanted to play.

How would I know what you were like? I created what we nicknamed "Facemaker," which let you decorate your avatar with various eyes, noses, mouths, and hair (including bald, of course).

And on and on…

After a month or so, we knew we were in trouble. I decided to write a checkers game as a simple test case to see if we could actually move objects and communicate. It worked. But we were still a long way from making characters walk and communicate and interact.

So I wrote a backgammon game. Then chess. Still we had no system to support all the features needed for an adventure game. But we were having so much fun playing against each other, we decided to push what we had into a real product. Ken envisioned a product so simple that even his grandmother could use it. That became our goal.

My wife, Margaret, came up with the first name Constant Companion, because we figured anyone could log on at any time, day or night, and find someone else to play with. Constant Companion became The Sierra Network. TSN was quite successful in its day, especially considering the small numbers of players who also had modems.

Eventually, when TSN was losing 10 million dollars per year, Ken sold half of it to AT&T for 50 million dollars. I laughingly said Sierra was the only company to make money in on-line gaming: by selling out! Later AT&T would pay another 50 mil for the other half. They then sat on it for about a year before giving up and selling the whole thing to America On-Line for 10 million. AOL announced big plans, but never carried through and the whole thing withered up and died without ever seeing the light of day.

Ultimately an idea for LarryLand made it into The Sierra Network, but it later changed to simply Casino Land.

Leisure Suite Larry's Casino was later released that had multiplayer options, and allowed characters to move around a casino playing various gambling games.

Space Quest Online

'Space Quest Online' was the multiplayer component tied to development of Space Quest (1997-1999) (aka 7/VII).

Scott Murphy was involved in a Space Quest 7 project that originally looked very promising, but that had later started facing serious problems when Sierra's management wanted it to be a multiplayer adventure game, a design that had been unsuccessfully attempted before with Leisure Suit Larry 4 and was doomed to fail this time as well.

It was going to allow multiple Roger Wilco clones to play at the same time and compete with each other to beat the game.

As stated in the KQ7 sneak peek trailer:

Roger must rescue his beloved Beatrice Wankmeister from all sorts of creeps, including some that look an awful lot like Roger himself (yuck!).

Scott Murphy explained:

The scoop on Space Quest 7 is actually mostly empty, Jess. Honestly, there's almost nothing to tell. Because it had to be a multi-player game as well as 3-D we toyed with the idea of Roger being accidentally cloned at the start of the - many times, and all with differing personalities. That way multiple players could play as different Rogers all trying to reach the same goal; to snuff all the other Rogers. God, I hate even talking about this. It sucked. We were set up to fail. It felt like it, and it was real hard to come up with what felt like a true Space Quest. I'm SO glad it never came to fruition - at least under those circumstances.

June/July 1997 Sierra released some basic information about their upcoming Space Quest 7 game The team is currently developing a Space Quest 7 prototype (which will be a playable demo) and a rolling SQ7 promo, which will be included in the upcoming Space Quest Collection CD-Rom. Since the roject is still so young, not much has been decided regarding story line, interface, etc. The team will be trying to introduce a multiplayer aspect to SQ7, as well as a single-player mode. It remains to be decided whether they want to go for the RPG-style multiplayer, or a hybrid. According to Scott Murphy Space Quest 7 will contain some 3-D elements. However, these elements will NOT require the use of a 3D accelerator card and the game should retain its standard 2-D scrolling view.

However, the developers had said that little of what was discussed in the trailer had anything to do with the game they had planned to actually develop. So its not clear how much of the speculation concerning the multiplayer aspects are actually true.

SM: The deal with the demo is that it had nothing to do with what Space Quest 7 was supposed to be. It was merely eye candy for management (ugh) and for the Collection.

Shivers Online

For those who believe the story is the key, but would like to experience some level of multiplayer adventure gaming, we put a new feature into Shivers 2 that allows players to link to the internet at any time during play and chat with others. To make sure this experience adds up more than just another visit to a chatroom, we even did some work behind the scenes to place you together with others who are approximately the same place within the game when you call. The end result is that when you jump onto the Internet during play, it's like going to a movie with a bunch of friends. You're experiencing the same movie privately, but you're also experiencing the movie together. Internet hooks Shiver players to instantly join other adventurers exploring the game. Players can redesign puzzles and share them with others.-Ken Williams

Behind the scenes

Sarien.net

Sarien.net - Dedicated to the history and products of Sierra On-Line Inc. With its focus on instant fun and a unique multiplayer experience, Sarien.net hopes to win new gamer's hearts and promote the adventure game genre.

Paxamore

Paxamore Adventure Game] is an RPG puzzle solving adventure game with a user interface completely in html and javascript so that it can be played on just about any device. It is completely free to play and does not require any downloading so it does not take up any storage space on your computer or device. It is like a multiplayer King's Quest. Create an account so your progress will be saved and discover a land of storybook adventure.

Paxamore was created because ever since I played King's Quest over 25 years ago I wanted to make a similar game but with multiplayer capabilities. I never got around to it. In fact, I started making many games but never finished any of them. Fast forward 25 years in the future: I found a game called Peasant's Quest, which was a parody of King's Quest. It was fun walking down memory lane. After I completed Peasant's Quest in a few hours, I decided that it was time to make the multiplayer adventure game in the old school adventure style.

Little did I know that it would be so much work. I started making Paxamore around March of 2011 and released the first beta test to the public in January of 2013.