King's Quest V was a cancelled game for the Sega CD.
Background[]
King’s Quest V is a very popular role-playing game on computer formats. Now, it is arriving via Sierra on the CD format.
Players will be drawn into a world of fantasy and folklore as they searyc for the missing family that was kinapped by Mordack the Wizard. You will journey through the dark forests and dark castles to find Mordack and rescue your parents.
The outside of Mordack's Castle. Many dangers await within.
Your wizard friend will help you out in combat situations.
Development[]
Sierra attempted to convert King's Quest V along with several other VGA games into Sega's 61 on-screen color format. All part of a plan to port Sierra games to popular systems of the era (NES, Sega, SNES, etc), to get into the console market share, which had a much higher audience than the original PC market the games were originally marketed to.
- "Back when I got started, which sounds like ancient history, back then the demographics of people who were into computer games, was totally different, in my opinion, then they are today. Back then, computers were more expensive, which made them more exclusive to people who were maybe at a certain income level, or education level. So the people that played computer games 15 years ago were that type of person. They probably didn’t watch television as much, and the instant gratification era hadn’t quite grown the way it has lately. I think in the last 5 or 6 years, the demographics have really changed, now this is my opinion, because computers are less expensive so more people can afford them. More “average” people now feel they should own one."-Roberta Williams
During the development of Quest for Glory III, Corey Cole was assigned to work porting Sierra's SCI (Sierra Creative Interpreter) over to the Sega CD. Sierra cancelled their plans when it was deemed too difficult or even impossible for the engine to work on the console due to memory limitations in the Sega CD itself.
- ...Sierra had me off on the Sega Genesis CD ports (which eventually failed due to not enough memory and needing more memory to deal with the smaller color space).-Corey Cole.
The only games Sierra managed to port to Sega CD were Willy Beamish, Rise of the Dragon, and Stellar Fire, which used Dynamix own proprietary engines (and didn't have the same limitations of the SCI engine).