I’ve spent a lot of my recent fascination with adventure games in the margins of the genre, poking around the edges of the obscure, the forgotten, and the maligned. This was true even when I was younger and had my first forays into the space with stuff like Phantasmagoria, Harvester, and Dark Seed. Not that shit like the I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream game is unknown, just less talked about then the likes of the Lucas Arts and Sierra legends. So now that I’m on a hiatus from Nancy Drew but still feeling the itch, I’m feeling around a bit. And since I thoroughly enjoyed Gabriel Knight my endless fascination with the histories, legacies, and evolutions of genres and developers and series over time of course led me back to the beginning of the company and really this era of the genre, with the original King’s Quest, which is a Cool Game, imo.

It’s very much a transitional piece between old timey text games and the modern style of adventure games that it heralds, so there’s an obvious feeling of age to it beyond the 1984 IBM graphics, which are actually super impressive (it’s fun to think that the equivalent of a AAA game dumping all their time and money into the first hour of the game because that’s all most people will play is having flags AND alligators that animate). I do think, however, that the text parser you use for all of your interactions beyond basic movement (and, frustratingly, like two other actions one time each) works really well, and all in all I didn’t have any trouble adapting to the control scheme at all.

There’s really a tug of war to the experience of playing King’s Quest 1 that define the experience as one that must have been really mind blowing compared to its contemporaries and still makes it feel unique and worthwhile today: one side is the extremely generic old school D&D quality to the quest and dialogues with npc characters throughout the game, very rote mid-century fantasy trash with no sense of identity of an ilk I find very personally unappealing. The other is the extremely charismatic and playful writing and design philosophy of the game’s writer, Roberta Williams. A lot of the scenarios in the game are just straight up cribbed from popular fables and fairy tales, but Williams engineers cute solutions, characterizing the player character Graham (who could have easily been a blank slate) as a guy who is both better suited to and prefers to use his wits to solve problems without violence whenever possible. Something that’s cool is that sometimes this is mandatory and sometimes it’s not. Yes, you do have to be diplomatic with the leprechaun community to get one of the items you need to finish the game, but you could absolutely kill that dragon and the giant at the top of the beanstalk if you really wanted to. Wouldn’t you rather just extinguish the dragon’s flame though? It’s not only more creative, it’s not only better role-playing, it’s a more fun solution to poke at and implement. And with the game’s cheeky humor and bevy of fast-coming game overs, you’re gonna be saving constantly anyway, so why not try stuff?

It’s a game that’s designed from all angles to really reward experimentation and creative play. The open world, the multiple solutions to problems, the free movement, the text parser; not all of these things were revolutionary for their time but together they were something really special. And despite these games’ reputation for needlessly obtuse and difficult puzzles (which they may well live up to somewhere down the line) there’s really only one genuine clunker here (all my homies hate Rumpelstiltskin). It makes sense that like, four franchises and an entire genre spawned from this. Even today I felt palpably excited playing it. It’s electric.