Stuff, Geek, What?

Fast forward a year or so and one of my school friends told me how he’d just got a PC and did I want to come over and see it. This was back in the day when no one really had a PC at home and it was definitely my first memory of playing on one. It was a very basic machine and only had a monochrome display so everything was only in black and white. He only had 2 games back then, Silent Service, a WWII submarine simulation game and King’s Quest 2. Needless to say we spent most of time playing King’s Quest.

It was just like my Dad had described, and we’d sit for hours around that black and white display playing this game. Wondering around the forest, picking up random items we’d find trying to solve the puzzles and work out what we were supposed to be doing. We met witches, mermaids, Little Red Riding Hood and lots of other characters. Oh and we’d die an awful lot too. Falling off ladders, down ledges, killed by random enemies. It taught us the importance of saving your game regularly.

The game was built around some random elements, so sometimes you’d enter a location and it would look a certain way or have a certain character in it. Like Grandma’s house, I remember needing to give an item to Grandma. You’d enter her cottage and the room would be empty, so you’d have to walk back out and immediately enter the room again. This time the Big Bad Wolf would be there and try and eat you, so quickly turn around and leave. Repeat this process until finally you enter the room to find Grandma in bed so you could talk to her. Looking back on it today it seems a crazy system to use, I don’t even remember how I knew that you had to keep entering a location to make the right character appear, but I could quite easily imagine people would go in once find the room empty, explore it and then wonder off thinking there was nothing more to be seen in there.

One special event I can remember came after we’d been playing it for sometime, while wondering around the many screens looking for something we might of missed or something new we walked to a cave near the beach, a location we’d been many many times before on our adventures. Suddenly out of nowhere we see this long flat looking shape coming out of the cave. This had never happened before, what the hell was going on. We watched as what looked like a car drover out of the cave, but it wasn’t just any car, it was the Batmobile! It drove forward, turned around on the spot and then drifting back into the cave. We were stunned into amazement at what we’d just seen. So many time we’d been to this cave and never seen that, and no matter how many times we came back to the cave to try and make it appear again it never did.

A little while later my family got their own PC and I got to play the game in colour, admittedly it was only a CGA display so could only have 4 colours on screen at once, but it was better than black and white! The PC they got was second hand and came with a boat load of software including a few other of the Sierra-online Adventure games like Space Quest 2 and Police Quest. Many hours were sat playing through them trying to work out what to do, but I’ll always remember King’s Quest II as the first PC game I played and being this amazing experience that lead to a love of adventure games from then on.