King's Quest started out as a seemingly impossible quest for three magical items that would bring prosperity back to a far-away land, but evolved into what would become the many mythical adventures of a royal dynasty that would rise in the wake of the first game.
The Cauldron Brews
The game was originally created as a tech demo for the ill-fated IBM PCjr. The PCjr wasn't very impressive, as it was more expensive than it should have been, had a cheaper chiclet keyboard and lacked PC compatibility.
Throughout 1983 and 1984, the game was developed by Roberta Williams (the founder of the franchise) and six full-time programmers who worked for 18 months to complete the game at a cost of $700,000 - a lot of money for a computer game at the time.
Unlike other games where there were no graphics and there were only static 'rooms' with in-depth descriptions and a text parser for game interaction, there was real backgrounds as well as a character that could be moved around on the screen. Described backgrounds and static pictures gave way to enhanced focus on the main character, which made for improved storytelling as well as easier immersion into the game world.
Along with animations that showed the game's protagonist King Graham performing actions such as walking, opening doors, picking up items, and climbing, depth perspective was simulated as well. Thanks to then-revolutionary programming ideas of the time, King Graham could not only get in front of objects and obscure them, he could go behind objects and actually hide from view (which would be used for puzzles in later entries in the series).
A Long, Hard Quest
Due to the failure of IBM's PCjr, King's Quest didn't do very well...until. Until the game was re-released for the Tandy 1000 and IBM-compatibles, the game would not reach the high sales that it would be known for.
The game would not only see a release on standard PCs, but also on the Sega Master System (albeit redesigned from scratch and with a completely different user interface), the Apple PCs, and even see a remake in 1990.
Retry, Abort, Fail?
With the success of future entries in the series (as well as the introduction of the new SCI (Sierra's Creative Interpreter) engine, Sierra remade the game as King's Quest I: Quest For The Crown.
Unlike in the original, in which you moved the character with the arrow keys and typed all the commands in, you had a point-and-click interface that was used not only to move the character but also switch between basic commands such as movement, touching, observing, using items and speaking.
This was not just a mere update of graphics and play control. Some puzzles were made easier, some locations were revamped, some item locations were changed, and the story and character roles were expanded. Critics and fans slammed the remake, calling it "the destruction of a classic," even going so far as to compare it to colorizing classic black and white movies. The remake was a critical failure, and prevented the release of further remakes in the series (including a re-make of King's Quest II: Romancing The Throne, which was officially scrapped upon the remake's failure).
Dynasty
The King's Quest series was responsible for the creation of the entire graphic adventure boom from the the mid-1980s until the mid-1990s. Since the original, there have been seven other games in the series, and there have been other graphic adventure series such as Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Quest For Glory, Police Quest, the Laura Bow games, and Gabriel Knight. This, in turn, led to other interesting graphic adventures by other companies, including Maniac Mansion, Myst, Sam and Max, the Monkey Island series, Deja Vu, Shadowgate, and the under-rated Grim Fandango, among many others.
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