Now this one is a TRUE classic. Every fan of point-and-click adventures may NOT consider him-/herself a fan of this genre if he/she never played this particular game. It was this game that brought life to the genre, earning its main author Roberta Williams the name "mother of the graphic adventure games".

In Sierra's early days, it's main CEO, Ken Williams, noticed how obsessed his wife, Roberta, was by a text game called "Adventure". You have to remember that gaming in general was pretty new to everybody back in those days. Adventure games did exist at the time, but all of them were text only.

Roberta Williams decided to change that. Some semi-graphical adventures were created before, but those were rather a kind of visual novels with more interactivity and very poor graphics.

When Sierra decided to actively visualize the concept of adventure games, allowing Roberta Williams to write the story script, the adventure genre was changed.... forever! And this way Roberta Williams paved the road for all later adventures to come, like Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest, but also of competiting companies came up with games like Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, Flight of the Amazon Queen and many more, and all thanks to her. And thus Roberta Williams got herself the name of the "mother of the graphic adventure games", for good reasons.

Story line

Don't expect too much here. As the very first game of its kind, the story line is very simplistic. You are a brave young knight, known as Sir Graham. You are summoned by the king of Daventry. The king is old and doesn't have much time left to live. Although never mentioned in the story, I guess it's safe to assume the king had no children and thus no successor to the throne. However if you can return three magic treasures to the king, you will have proven yourself worthy of the throne.

Well all the game is about si finding these three treasures and when you return them to the king, the king will die and you will be the new king and the game has been won. Hey, take a look in which the game was written. The copyright date in the screenshot was already the copyright date of a NEW VERSION, as the original release was in 1984, mind you! Geez, I was 9 back then... How time flies by.

Gameplay

You may see a mouse pointer in my screenshot, but that was only because I played the game using ScummVM when I was writing this review. In the original game, the mouse was NOT very common, and that's why back in those years the game was called a "graphic adventure" in stead of "point-and-click-adventure" which only got in use when the mouse became the standard for the genre.

You will need the arrow keys to move Sir Graham around. And if you want to take any action, you need to type simple commands. Like "OPEN DOOR" or "TALK KING". You can just leave it to verbs and nouns, you can leave out all other words as the command parser will ignore them anyway. "TALK BETWEEN KING" will do the same as "TALK TO KING" or "TALK KING".

Of course the vision about adventure games not being the type of game in which the player should not die, only came YEARS later, so be prepared that there are COUNTLESS ways in which you can die in this game. The crocodile pool around the castle is already lethal and will cause a "GAME OVER" sequence requiring you to either load a savegame or start a new game. This crocodile pool became legend in the genre, and has also been parodied in Space Quest I (original version) as when you press the "Don't Touch" button in your escape pod you will land in this crocodile pool.

There are more dangers in the field. Some can be avoided by having or using special items, others will be there during the entire game. Also when you jump into the water you must use the swim command or Graham will drown (something that would later happen automatically).

You will have to deal with the flaws this game has compared to the adventuring standards common today, but remember this was the first game of its kind, and it may be hard to imagine today how revolutionary this game was and how it paved to road for many more classics to come, and that alone makes this game a true classic every adventure fan must have played.

Playing this game in modern times

Well fortunately, both DOSBox and ScummVM handle this game perfectly, so no problem there.

Looking for it through Google can lead you astray as the series have been reimaged, still featuring Graham as main protagonist but apparently with a whole new approach. I've not yet tried this, I came across this as I was looking for how to buy this game today (I got my own copy from the Roberta Williams Antologies collection, but that is no longer for sale).
But you can still buy this game here in a collection that will get you KQ1, KQ2 and KQ3 for $8.49

King's Quest I has been remade by Sierra also, and I might review that version too, although no promises there yet. :(
A lot of fan remakes also circle around.

So all in all

King's Quest is certainly not the best title of its genre, but remember folks, THIS IS HOW IT ALL BEGAN. When this game was never made, the entire collection of truly outstanding titles such as Leisure Suit Larry, Monkey Island, Kyrandia and many other great series would never have existed either.

Thank you, Roberta. For being the mother of this fantastic genre.