[Reedx]

Same here! I absolutely loved the King's Quest and Space Quest games (and really most of Sierra's adventure games) and have very fond memories of them. Definitely a big part of it was due to the settings, characters and stories. And the interaction and exploration of those worlds... on a computer. Which I was just naturally fascinated by. I was also fascinated by Ken and Roberta's story about creating games from their kitchen table. That seemed magical to me. I poured over every page of their pamphlets and magazine (Interaction).

I know that if those games were released today there's no way I would play them for long and I'd recognize them as poorly designed. But when I was a kid every new game was a big deal and so I pushed through the puzzles (I felt certain ones were ridiculous, but generally just accepted them as what adventure game puzzles were). Sometimes I'd get stuck and come back months later. Ultimately I beat most of the King's Quest and Space Quest games, even years later.

It's hard to imagine that today with the unlimited buffet of cheap or free games. The constraint used to be money, now it's time. Even for kids.

[djsumdog]

That entire genre had a lot of issues. People like to talk about the Gabriel Knight 3 / cat hair moustache as being the pivotal moment for the death of adventure games, but really it was all along in the design.

Puzzles were difficult, natural language processing is a hard problems, and commands/grammers could get weird/complex. The icon based point-n-click cleared this up a little, but Sierra had a business model build around needing to order hint books (or play with large groups of people).

No one wants hint books, because once you use one hint, you tend to just keep using them. With the Internet and things like UHS for adventure games, this model kinda hit a wall.

Telltale, Double Fine, et. al. brought this gene back by treating it more as an interactive story. The puzzles were less crazy and you could get through them without a hint guide.

Broken Age is a stealer example of both versions of this genre. Part I is more like Telltale, except with better puzzles. It's easy to get through, but still challenging. Part 2 goes back to the Sierra model though, with puzzles that make little sense and are insolvable for most casual and moderate gamers without a hint guide.

[Eric_WVGG]

"cat hair mustache" that bit is a classic. http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

[cdr]

> Part 2 goes back to the Sierra model though, with puzzles that make little sense and are insolvable for most casual and moderate gamers without a hint guide.

Really? I don't remember having to look up hints a single time in part 2. The puzzles were more difficult, but definitely not "Sierra model". The solutions were logical if you paid attention, with the possible exception of the tree joke (I don't remember if that was part 1 or part 2).

The knot puzzle was probably the most annoying of them, but the problem with that one was having to take the long walk back and forth every time you failed.

[benologist]

King's Quest 8 just came out recently ... they've kept with the times:

https://www.humblebundle.com/store/kings-quest-the-complete-...

[jaredsohn]

I think it is just "King's Quest". But if it was numbered it would be the ninth one. (Mask of Eternity would be the eighth.)

[flukus]

We don't talk about that one...