King's Quest
Sierra On-Line released King's Quest: Quest for the Crown for IBM PC self-booter in May of 1984. King's Quest is a flip-screen animated adventure game that employs solid-fill vector graphics.
King's Quest was designed and written by Roberta Williams. The original version of King's Quest was programmed by Charles Tingley, Ken MacNeill and Chris Iden.
King's Quest displays in 4-color CGA, 16-color CGA+ or 16-color EGA 320x200 resolution, but the actual fidelity of 160x200 -- yes, you read that right -- is natively-scaled by the display (note the blockiness). The image above shows the 16-color EGA version of 1986.
King's Quest employs the Adventure Game Interpreter, aka AGI. King's Quest eschews a consistent isometric perspective in favor of a hotch-potch of crudely-drawn viewpoints. In addition, its movement and positioning are not accurate. Thus, it was distinctly unpleasant to play even in 1984. Just trying to move around in King's Quest -- in any King's Quest game -- I find myself gritting my teeth. Also, anyone who had read a few faery tale books could have written and drawn the King's Quest games. Thus, do I refer to the King's Quest games as scribble-slop.
Sierra On-Line's King Quest employed a hotch-potch of viewpoints instead of a consistent isometric perspective with accurate and responsive controls. A massively overrated "classic" that no one plays but just praises, King's Quest popularized soulless Sierra scribble-slop spam. Computer games would be a lot better off if Sierra never made one.
King's Quest Amiga 1986
Sierra On-Line released King's Quest for the Amiga in 1986. King's Quest was ported to the Amiga by Sol Ackerman and drawn by Doug MacNeill.
Amiga King's Quest was distributed on 1x 3.5" 880kB DD diskette.
Imagine how much better King's Quest could have been if Sierra were able to employ the Amiga 1000 as lead platform:
- 256K of RAM as standard instead of 128K RAM (expanded IBM PCjr)
- 7 MHz M68K instead of 4.77 MHz i8088
- 32-from-4096 colors in 320x200 instead of 16-from-64 CGA+ 160x200
- 4-channel FM-synthesized Paula audio instead of bleeps & blurps
- Smooth hardware screen-scrolling instead of flip-screen
- Smooth hardware sprite-shifting instead of software sprites
- Proper planar isometric projection instead of chunky vector graphics
- Icon-driven interface & smooth hardware mouse-cursor control
Yes, the original King's Quest predates the release of the Amiga, but the point of the above is to show how hardware capacities can shape game design.
Now we can compare King's Quest graphics of 1986 (EGA King's Quest) with Amiga Defender of the Crown graphics of 1986. You can click the image and mouse-wheel up and down in order to compare the graphics of both games.
See the difference?
Graphics-wise, Amiga Defender of the Crown of 1986 also compares favorably with King's Quest 4 of 1988. It was only via VGA King's Quest 5 of 1990 that King's Quest graphics overtook Defender of the Crown.
Why do I add these comparisons? Because King's Quest graphics were hyped to the max back in the day yet King's Quest graphics were almost half a decade behind what the Amiga was capable of since 1986. The mainstream even went so far as to call King's Quest games "3D", when they are not. And I can't stand it when 2D games are called 3D. :)
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