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Hanging out around the GameSpot offices recently, I heard a disheartening bit of industry gossip that hit closer to home than I expected. One of the editors mentioned to me that until not very long ago, a seventh installment in the Space Quest series was in development over at a Seattle-based team called Escape Factory. Apparently, whoever was backing the project--presumably Sierra, since the Escape Factory page refers only to an unnamed publisher--decided there's no market for PC games that eschew explosions for inventive puzzles or MP5s for an icon bar or text parser, because the Escape Factory page says its project has been canceled. For you young'uns, Space Quest is an old Sierra franchise, and in bygone days it was one of the foremost graphic adventure series on the PC. These days, Sierra is just a part of the big publishing conglomerate that makes up the Vivendi-Universal juggernaut, but back in the day, Sierra On-Line was a top-notch company responsible for so many of the PC adventure games that filled my formative years. Sierra made a ton of great adventures way back when, and I played every one I could get my hands on. Those games really do make up some of my fondest gaming memories. So of course Sierra had to dangle the carrot of a new Space Quest in front of my nose, only to take it away as quickly as it appeared. Thanks, Sierra.
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Roberta Williams, where are you? |
These days, the graphic adventure genre on the PC is all but dead. Yeah, we've gotten a couple of gems in the last few years, like Syberia,
The Longest Journey, and (stretching a little further back) Grim Fandango, but for the most part, the adventure game well is bone-dry. Even these recent games somehow lack the warmth and character and atmosphere that made me love the older adventures so much. I think in large part this is due to the use of CG for these games' backgrounds (and often for their characters). Stylistically, the coldness of CG might be appropriate in Grim Fandango, but wouldn't The Longest Journey have been a lot more interesting to look at if the backgrounds had been built with brushstrokes instead of polygons? That's part of what I loved about those old adventure games. Even in their low-res VGA glory, the handcrafted backgrounds in King's Quest VI exuded love and attention to detail. Think about how great an adventure game done in the old style could look today. We could be running the game at an insanely high resolution (like 1280x1024), which would really bring out the detail and care that went into creating the painted background. And with the power of modern video cards, the characters could all be cel-shaded to complete the cartoonlike look, if that's what the developer was going for. Why isn't there a market for this kind of thing? I know I'd pay for a new King's Quest or Space Quest game done in this style, especially if it had the kind of stories and writing (and later, voice acting) those series were known for.
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Roger Wilco's in trouble once again. |
Since this topic has been on my mind for the last week or so, I've been looking around on the Web to see if there's still some interest in keeping these old games alive. Surprisingly, I've found that there's not only interest in keeping old adventure games playable, but there are several fan-supported projects to make new ones as well. Though it's still incomplete, FreeSCI is an open-source interpreter for SCI (Sierra Creative Interpreter), the virtual machine that Sierra used to run most of its early adventure games. Some of the most popular games that FreeSCI can run right now are King's Quest IV, Space Quest 3, the original Quest for Glory (aka Hero's Quest), and Leisure Suit Larry 2 and 3. The developers say that more features are slowly being expanded on, so hopefully even more games will be supported in the future. If you don't want to wait that long, you can always make your own old-school adventure game with SCI Studio, an editor that lets you build an SCI game from the ground up.
Several groups of fans seem to have gotten impatient themselves, and they've taken matters into their own hands. I ran into a Web page that showcases work done by some fans on King's Quest IX: Every Cloak has a Silver Lining, which is of course an unofficial new installment in the famous series. There's not much to look at besides concept art so far, but they say they're hoping to get the game out this year or next, so that may be something to watch for. In a similar vein, there's a Space Quest 7 fan project going on in light of the real Space Quest 7's cancellation, though there's even less to look at on this site. This one's using the AGAST scripting language, so hopefully it will turn out pretty well. Of course, the quality of these or any other fan-created adventure games depends on the creative talent of the fans working on them, since the writing and storylines were a huge part of what made the old games great. Let's keep our fingers crossed that these games turn out OK.
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Gabriel Knight was another great adventure game with a mature story and a pile of celebrity voices. |
I know some of you old adventuring stalwarts are probably foaming at the mouth that I haven't mentioned any LucasArts adventure games yet (and don't even bring up Infocom text stuff--I don't go back that far). Well, I might as well fess up: I haven't really played many adventures from the LucasArts camp. I did finish Loom, considering it took all of three hours to play through, and I liked the demo of Full Throttle that I played back in, oh, 1994. For the most part, though, I was always aligned with the Sierra camp. I've always wanted to play Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle, though, and I hear Tim Schafer works not too far from the GameSpot offices, so maybe I'll try to get a personal intro to those games sometime soon.
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