If you haven't played the rebooted Kings Quest, I urge you to do so. It is got all the charm of a top end Disney movie with some of the most memorable and fantastic characters I have seen. But I also urge you to go back and play the original series. There is even a remastered version on Steam/GoG and trust me when I say it's fantastic.

I'm kind of surprised this site doesn't have more love for this series honestly. With the exception of @brad, who briefly mentioned fond memories of the original series there has been very little conversation about these games. I know @vinny said he was a Lucas kid, but the fact that he hasn't gone back and done a play through of these is mind boggling after I started to experience them myself for the first time.

The series blends a perfect mix of satire and comedy with various fantasy elements. It consistently has some of the best and well written characters I've seen. But it's commitment to being overly creative and not one note is fantastic. In what other series would you see talking Pumpkins, a sea world with a war between the Mer People and the Shark People, dancing leprechauns all mixed in with witches, wizards, dragons, and the rest high fantasy has to offer? That really only touches the surface as well.

Realistically the only negatives I have to say about this series is it's at times commitment to horrible puns (done very self aware, but still after hearing it for the fifth or sixth time it tires) and the crazy difficulty. Having multiple saves because you can die at any moment or completely mess up your game if you don't have the right items in the right order. Even still I don't know if that is a flaw or just the difficulty level of a lot of classic adventure games.

I have a lot of love for most of Sierra's games, especially King's Quest, but pretty much every time they've ever come up on the site, it's almost always been in the context of "LucasArts was so much better, obviously, right guys?" Brad has done a good job of trying to stand up for KQ recently, but even that's largely been from a standpoint of their historical significance more than anything. While I can definitely agree that LucasArts adventure games were less frustrating, they also felt a little...safe, a little toothless to me. There was never any danger, and really no way to lose; if you kept clicking around long enough, you'd eventually use the right object on the right thing and proceed with the story.

I was able to appreciate the difficulty of these games back in the 90's because when you only owned a small number of games and didn't buy new ones very often, it was easier to stomach the idea of spending weeks trying to work your way through a game, sometimes having to restart the whole thing (or at least re-do hours' worth of gameplay) because you dead-ended yourself somehow. These days, if someone's looking to check these games out just to get a feel for them, I could only really recommend it in good conscience if you play through them with a walkthrough. (KQ5 is the only game that was really bad about dead-ends that occur due to stuff you unwittingly did hours before, but it certainly was a big enough offender in that regard to give the whole series a bad rap.)

The series still has some of the most memorable sequences of all the games I've played. In KQ6, you walk into the damn Land of the Dead and throw down the gauntlet in front of Death himself.

While I like the series in general, it had some severe problems with difficulty and obtuse puzzles in the first three iterations. I think Mask of Eternity and the last crop of terrible games based on Sierra franchises (SWAT, Quest for Glory V, Leisure Suit Larry reboots, et cetera) killed a lot of enthusiasm for us old school fans. It's great to see them do a good job with King's Quest, but it only gives me a cautious optimism. If they continue to follow this up with great adventure games? Great. If they don't, I'm not exactly going to be shocked.

@cloudymusic: We are currently wrapping up Kings Quest 2 on my own playthrough with my roomate. I have played through 5 as well, and 1. We are making our way through the rest of them. But after playing the reboot (which is currently fighting for my number one game of the year spot.) I was astonished that the games were so good, because the fan service I'd heard for them was so little.

The quality of the writing, characters, and as you yourself state some of the sequences. Even in the reboot are not just "yeah this is pretty good adventure game stuff" it's pure fantastic for all game stuff. Thanks for the response. We need to get some more love going for this series on this site for sure!

I've always appreciated the Sierra style of adventure game from a distance, but not growing up with them the only one that actually appealed to me beyond mere novelty and the always entertaining "every single way you can die" videos was (the VGA version of) the first Quest for Glory. Of course, I can say the same for most of LucasArts' catalog, which dispenses with the part where you can die but still has the same love of obscure nonsensical puzzle solutions that would make no sense unless you used a guide.

I haven't heard of a remaster of the originals. Can someone link to them?

@drbroel: He might be talking about these.

@drbroel: @cloudymusic: Correct. I must of been misinformed but I heard that they were also released on GoG/Steam but I can't seem to find them on either. GoG has the old 1-2-3, but as you can see there is remastered versions of all of them to be more modern.

The AGD versions are free too for those who aren't aware.

I bought all of the kings quest games on gog, so they were at least available at one time

But yeah that reboot is incredible and kings quest as a whole is fantastic

I think the reboot is my #2 favorite game of the year so far (behind Witcher 3) which is saying a lot because it has been a fantastic year

King's quest always felt revolutionary during their times. Implementing staggeringly good graphics in the later ones (for their time) and always having a great balance of plot points and comedy. They have also aged incredibly well, given that you were alive to remember the times they were created. I can say this without bias of nostalgia as well, as I only played about half of them as a child (born in the 90s) and played the earlier ones later as a young adult. The reboot did a FANTASTIC job of capturing the spirit of the originals while ditching outdated mechanics. I'm honestly incredibly psyched for the next 4 Chapters.

Vinny needs to play these. Vinny absolutely needs to play these with Austin.

WHISPER CAN DO IT!

I'm all for obtuse puzzles but, as a kid, the game-ending puzzles in KQ:V went over the line for me.

PC gaming was very niche in the 80s and 90s. You'd need a machine that cost upwards of $1000 to play King's Quest back in the day. When I was a kid, lots of my friends had an NES or Sega Master System lying around, but only one had a PC that could play games. He was pretty popular.

@sinusoidal said:

Pretty much this. The LucasArts stuff got big later in the 90s, where as the Sierra stuff got big in the 80s and 90s. King's Quest is a solid series, but their exposure and overall legacy within public knowledge is low because so few people were playing PC games at that time (especially in North America, Europe was a slightly different scenario). It feels like a lot of the early PC greats are mostly unknown unless you're way deep into gaming. I'm guessing a lot of average people wouldn't be aware of many PC games much older than like, DOOM, or Warcraft 2, or Myst or something.

I also think Quest for Glory needs more love. Quest for Glory III in particular I loved. Sanford and Son were in the game as vendors:

Well, shit. I was the PC kid too back then, and I was just shut out of everybody's game conversations.

Them: "Hey, Mario, guys!"

Response: "Yeah, Mario!"

Me: "Commander Keen, guys!"

Response: "... Who?"

*grumble grumble* At least I had canyon.mid... canyon.mid understood me.

I dunno OP, I think it's a combination of how old KQ is and frankly just that this website has a Lucas lean to it. Which is ok as those games were great too. I was a Sierra kid, so these games were my jam.

You didn't like QfG V Sparky? I thought it was a pretty good conclusion to the series, pretty heavy on fan service but I dug it all the same. I mean I know the Coles wanted to have QFG be a four parter, but I was glad to have the more explicit conclusion.

fwiw imo even if the Odd Gentlemen continue to make good Adventure games, to me they aren't Sierra games. The people who made Sierra games have long departed to other places and there's no continuity here like in another franchise (e.g. Aonuma worked closely with Miyamoto before taking over Zelda) They seem to be doing a good job with Sierra's crown jewel King's Quest and I'm glad they exist, but it doesn't feel or look like a game the Williamses would have made.

@slag: I did like QfG V, but it was a pale shadow of its predecessors - even III. V watered down the series so much and it showed all the Sierra signs of fatigue - a lot of flash, very little polish, and not enough of what made those games special. It heralded my realization that Sierra was no longer the company that I wanted it to be.

As for the modern King's Quest not being a true Sierra game, I don't care whose names are in the credits, so long as they get the spirit down pat. This series looks to have a promising start in that regard, but it's too early to say. I am still mildly curious about Hero U and Space Venture from some old Sierra folk, but I think this King's Quest series has the most potential.

I need to learn to read the whole threads before writing up a response, because I was just about to post a 2 or 3 paragraph rant about how much of an asshole KQ5 was for that very reason.

One thing I will say in KQ5's defense is that most of its save-destroying bullshit came from an otherwise noble attempt at offering multiple solutions to puzzles. You can solve puzzle 1 with items A, B, or C, which is cool. The problem is that puzzle 8 REQUIRES items A and C, so unless you happened to use B for puzzle 1, you need to start the game over.

To your second point, nailed it on the head for me. The reboot has so much of the same tone and flavor of the originals that it is by no means an insult and to me does the series justice, regardless of who made it.

At the end of the day I just can't believe that despite Lucas fan boy Vinny has never given these games a chance on camera. To say they would be right up his ally (ridiculous adventure game that has some serious difficulty loops but has some great dialogue, characters, and sequences) would be an understatement.

Sierra games weren't so much hard as they were completely and utterly unfair in every possible respect. It's not fun to do something that the game never tells you will make the game impossible 10 hours later.

Hunh, I never saw it that way at all. Granted around that time I had a ton going on, so I wasn't as wired into the gaming culture, and 98 was a super stacked year on top of that, so I was probably predisposed to be positive . Makes me want to go back and replay it to see if I can see now what you saw then.

re: Sierra - I get what you are saying. I largely feel that way too. I guess the spirit is what I was driving at, to me there is absolutely nothing wrong with the Dreamworks/Pixar type take on KQ the odd gentlemen seem to have on Daventry. It just , I dunno, sounds different to my ears.A different one that also works, not a wrong one. Like the jokes and delivery of dialogue are things are ones Roberta Williams wouldn't write. Does that make sense? In today's world is probably a necessity anyway to modernize it a bit.

btw I've been checking in on Hero-U. I think the concept is actually pretty promising (mechanically looks like a cross between say a loot driven turn based dungeon crawler with QfG), but I'm deeply concerned they didn't scope the game anywhere near to the budget they had. i.e.The Game is far too large/ambitious for the funding they got. They've already gone back to the kickstarter well a second time for the game and I gotta admit that I don't know if they can get the production values to where it will satisfy mainstream gamers after such a long wait.