#roberta williams

Mystery House: The Birth of the Graphic Adventure – Marcus Mera

"Mystery House is a landmark in computing and video game history the first graphic adventure game ever released created in 1980 by Ken Williams and Roberta Williams. Developed on the Apple II, the game fused text-based interaction with simple black-and-white graphics, fundamentally changing how players experienced interactive storytelling.

Inspired directly by ADVENT Colossal Cave Adventure, Roberta Williams imagined a murder mystery that players could see as well as read. Using a VersaWriter, Ken Williams custom game DEV tools and early Apple II, the Williams’ designed a game where exploration, logic, and atmosphere were as important as puzzle-solving an idea that had never been realized visually before.

This exhibit explores the creative process behind Mystery House, from its origins in text adventures to its groundbreaking use of on-screen graphics, as well as the hardware and software that shaped its design. Visitors will learn how a home computer, cutting edge innovative tools, and a bold creative vision helped launch Sierra On-Line and establish the graphic adventure genre that influenced decades of games to follow.

I'm fine. Get her.

Phantasmagoria (1995)

Phantasmagoria is a point-and-click adventure horror game designed by Roberta Williams for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows and released by Sierra On-Line on August 24, 1995.

"I feel its presence, the icy fingers upon my throat. I hear its eerie sounds, unsettling my every thought. I try in vain to slumber, my reveries gripped by violent terror. My only salvation, the shock of awakening. Something is very, very wrong here."

Screenshots from the 1989 Sierra On-Line/Roberta Williams adventure game, The Colonel's Bequest via Let's Play With Brigands.

Happy 40th birthday to Kings Quest! All credit to cover images to people at MobyGames.

Notes and observations:

Original Kings Quest indeed does have 4 different covers, one being a release for the Sega's Master System. The other Kings Quest 1 after the 4th game is a remake made in SCI engine.

Kings Quest 5 also had a NES version, which I've excluded from this as the cover is the same as the second computer release.

King Graham's Board Games is part of a Crazy Nicks Software Picks, which is a series of minigames taken from various Sierra titles. Here the titular board games aren't actually from any Kings Quest game, but rather they're taken from Sierra's Hoyle Official Book of Games Volume 3. This also appears in some of the collections.

The first two collection releases are the same, they just have different covers.

I was originally gonna write how the second collection doesn't include the original Kings Quest in favor of the remake, but it does! Its just not specifically mentioned on the box. It also includes 3 other Roberta Williams games and 4 pre-KQ games running on Apple 2 emulator.

I've excluded the Roberta Williams Anthology from this as its not directly Kings Quest related. Its mostly the same as the second collection, with few other extras and the Apple 2 version of Dark Crystal.

The Windows XP collection curiously lacks the original Kings Quest game, sticking with just the remake; This for some reason was common with all the Sierra collections at the time. It also lacks Mask of Eternity, which was hard to get run properly at the time (and still might be, haven't checked in a while.)