SMS Longplay #23: King's Quest - Quest for the Crown

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HIDEFACES

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Published on April 17, 2016 8:01:55 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-Qewr_uTPw

Game:

King's Quest I (1984)

Duration: 17:14

436 views

8

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King's Quest features interactive graphics that were an enormous leap over the mostly static 'rooms' of previous graphical interactive fiction. Prior to King's Quest, the typical adventure game presented the player a pre-drawn scene, accompanied by a text description. The player's interaction with the game consisted entirely of typing commands into the game's parser, then reading the parser's response, as the on-screen graphics rarely changed (except when the player moved to a new location).

As the first adventure game to integrate graphical animation into the player's view of game world, King's Quest shifted the focus away from the static scenery, to the player's character, which was now animated on-screen. There are animation sequences for most player-world interactions reachable through the normal course of exploration. For example, there were different animation sequences showing Graham picking up objects from the ground, opening doors, and wading through water. Depth perspective was simulated as well; Graham could walk behind objects, causing his character to be 'hidden' from view, or walk in front of them, obscuring the object. This attention to graphical animation, while commonplace in action games, earned King's Quest the distinction as the first "3D-animated" adventure game.

The original version of the game relies primarily on textual input as its interface. As the player used the keyboard to explore the game world, the on-screen character, Graham, was animated walking to the chosen destination. The fantasy world of Daventry consists of an 8×6 cyclic array of screens (or rooms) that make up the outdoor world in which the player can navigate freely (except for the screen South of the East end of the castle, which must be reached by special means), plus 30 or so additional screens for indoor and underground places (as well as a smaller world in the clouds).

King's Quest was innovative in its use of 16-color graphics for the IBM PC platform. The game used the PCjr and Tandy 1000's Video Gate Array and enhanced sound, and those with the Color Graphics Adapter computers could display 16-color graphics with artifact colors on a composite color monitor or television. Selecting 'RGB mode' at the title screen would instead result in the usual 320×200 CGA graphics mode limited to 4 colors. In this mode, dithering was employed to simulate extra colors. Like previous static-screen Sierra adventures, King's Quest used vector graphics rather than pre-rendered bitmaps which would take far too much disk space. Each screen is drawn line-by-line and painted in. This technique was used on all Sierra adventure games up to King's Quest V.

King's Quest: Quest for the Crown:

Since the 4th release IBM PC/Apple II (1984) and the repackaged 5th release (1987), the backstory was greatly expanded. The Kingdom of Daventry is in serious trouble, after its precious magical items have been stolen. One day, King Edward the Benevolent rescued a beautiful young Princess Dahlia of Cumberland, but on the night of their wedding she was discovered to be really an evil witch who stole the king's treasure. Knowing that he had to save the kingdom, the dying King Edward sends his bravest knight, Sir Graham, to Cumberland on the quest to rid of the treacherous witch, outwit the other assorted villains, and retrieve the three lost treasures. Because he had no heir, if Graham should succeed, he would become the next king.