Author name: Shannon Garcia

My Ars colleagues were kicking back at the Orbital HQ water cooler the other day, and—as gracefully aging gamers are wont to do—they began to reminisce about classic Sierra On-Line adventure games. I was a huge fan of these games in my youth, so I settled in for some hot buttered nostalgia.

Would we remember the limited-palette joys of early King’s Quest, Space Quest, or Quest for Glory titles? Would we branch out beyond games with “Quest” in their titles, seeking rarer fare like Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist? What about the gothic stylings of The Colonel’s Bequest or the voodoo-curious Gabriel Knight?

Nope. The talk was of acorns. [Bleeping] acorns, in fact.

The scene in question came from King’s Quest III, where our hero Gwydion must acquire some exceptionally desiccated acorns to advance the plot. It sounds simple enough. As one walkthrough puts it, “Go east one screen and north one screen to the acorn tree. Try picking up acorns until you get some dry ones. Try various spots underneath the tree.” Easy! And clear!

Except it wasn’t either one because the game rather notoriously won’t always give you the acorns, even when you enter the right command. This led many gamers to believe they were in the wrong spot, when in reality, they just had to keep entering the “get acorns” command while moving pixel by pixel around the tree until the game finally supplied them. One of our staffers admitted to having purchased the King’s Quest III hint book solely because of this “puzzle.” (The hint book, which is now online, says that players should “move around” the particular oak tree in question because “you can only find the right kind of acorns in one spot.”)

This wasn’t quite the “fun” I had remembered from these games, but as I cast my mind back, I dimly recalled similar situations. Space Quest II: Vohaul’s Revenge had been my first Sierra title. After my brother and I spent weeks on the game only to die repeatedly in some pitch-dark tunnels, we implored my dad to call Sierra’s 1-900 pay hint line. He thought about it. I could see it pained him because he had never before (and never since!) called a 1-900 number. In this case, the call cost a piratical 75 cents for the first minute and 50 cents for each additional minute. After listening to us whine for several days straight, my dad decided that his sanity was worth the fee, and he called.

Like the acorn example above, we had known what to do—we had just not done it to the game’s rather exacting standards. The key was to use a glowing gem as a light source, which my brother and I had long understood. The problem was the text parser, which demanded that we “put gem in mouth” to use the gem’s light in the tunnels. There was no other place to put the gem, no other way to hold or attach it. (We tried them all.) No other attempt to use the light of this shining crystal, no matter how clear, well-intentioned, or succinctly expressed, would work. You put the gem in your mouth, or you died in the darkness.

Returning from my reveries to the conversation at hand, I caught Ars Senior Editor Lee Hutchinson’s cynical remark that these kinds of puzzles were “the only way to make 2–3 hours of ‘game’ last for months.” This seemed rather shocking, almost offensive. How could one say such a thing about the games that colored my memories of childhood?

So I decided to replay Space Quest II for the first time in 35 years in an attempt to defend my own past.

Big mistake.

Play it again, Sam

In my memory, the Space Quest series was filled with sharply written humor, clever puzzles, and enchanting art. But when I fired up the original version of the game, I found that only one of these was true. The art, despite its blockiness and limited colors, remained charming.

As for the gameplay, the puzzles were not so much “clever” as “infuriating,” “obvious,” or (more often) “rather obscure.”

Finding the glowing gem discussed above requires you to swim into one small spot of a multi-screen river, with no indication in advance that anything of importance is in that exact location. Trying to “call” a hunter who has captured you does nothing… until you do it a second time. And the less said about trying to throw a puzzle at a Labian Terror Beast, typing out various word permutations while death bears down upon you, the better.

The whole game was also filled with far more no-warning insta-deaths than I had remembered. On the opening screen, for instance, after your janitorial space-broom floats off into the cosmic ether, you can walk your character right off the edge of the orbital space station he is cleaning. The game doesn’t stop you; indeed, it kills you and then mocks you for “an obvious lack of common sense.” It then calls you a “wing nut” with an “inability to sustain life.” Game over.

The game’s third screen, which features nothing more to do than simply walking around, will also kill you in at least two different ways. Walk into the room still wearing your spacesuit and your boss will come over and chew you out. Game over.

If you manage to avoid that fate by changing into your indoor uniform first, it’s comically easy to tap the wrong arrow key and fall off the room’s completely guardrail-free elevator platform. Game over.

Get used to it because the game will kill you in so, so many ways: touching any single pixel of a root monster whose branches form a difficult maze; walking into a giant mushroom; stepping over an invisible pit in the ground; getting shot by a guard who zips in on a hovercraft; drowning in an underwater tunnel; getting swiped at by some kind of giant ape; not putting the glowing gem in your mouth; falling into acid; and many more.

I used the word “insta-death” above, but the game is not even content with this. At one key point late in the game, a giant Aliens-style alien stalks the hallways, and if she finds you, she “kisses” you. But then she leaves! You are safe after all! Of course, if you have seen the films, you will recognize that you are not safe, but the game lets you go on for a bit before the alien’s baby inevitably bursts from your chest, killing you. Game over.

This is why the official hint book suggests that you “save your game a lot, especially when it seems that you’re entering a dangerous area. That way, if you die, you don’t have to retrace your steps much.” Presumably, this was once considered entertaining.

When it comes to the humor, most of it is broad. (When you are told to “say the word,” you have to say “the word.”) Sometimes it is condescending. (“You quickly glance around the room to see if anyone saw you blow it.”) Or it might just be potty jokes. (Plungers, jock straps, toilet paper, alien bathrooms, and fouling one’s trousers all make appearances.)

My total gameplay time: a few hours.

“By Grabthar’s hammer!” I thought. “Lee was right!”

When I admitted this to him, Lee told me that he had actually spent time learning to speedrun the Space Quest games during the pandemic. “According to my notes, a clean run of SQ2 in ‘fast’ mode—assuming good typing skills—takes about 20 minutes straight-up,” he said. Yikes.

And yet

The past was a different time. Computer memory was small, graphics capabilities were low, and computer games had emerged from the “let them live just long enough to encourage spending another quarter” arcade model. Mouse adoption took a while; text parsers made sense even though they created plenty of frustration. So yes—some of these games were a few hours of gameplay stretched out with insta-death, obscure puzzles, and the sheer amount of time it took just to walk across the game’s various screens. (Seriously, “walking around” took a ridiculous amount of the game’s playtime, especially when a puzzle made you backtrack three screens, type some command, and then return.)

Judged by current standards, the Sierra games are no longer what I would play for fun.

All the same, I loved them. They introduced me to the joy of exploring virtual worlds and to the power of evocative artwork. I went into space, into fairy tales, and into the past, and I did so while finding the games’ humor humorous and their plotlines compelling. (“An army of life insurance salesmen?” I thought at the time. “Hilarious and brilliant!”)

If the games can feel a bit arbitrary or vexing today, my child-self’s love of repetition was able to treat them as engaging challenges rather than “unfair” design.

Replaying Space Quest II, encountering the half-remembered jokes and visual designs, brought back these memories. The novelist Thomas Wolfe knew that you can’t go home again, and it was probably inevitable that the game would feel dated to me now. But playing it again did take me back to that time before the Internet, when not even hint lines, insta-death, and EGA graphics could dampen the wonder of the new worlds computers were capable of showing us.

Space Quest II, along with several other Sierra titles, is freely and legally available online at sarien.net—though I found many, many glitches in the implementation. Windows users can buy the entire Space Quest collection through Steam or Good Old Games. There’s even a fan remake that runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux.