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Tuesday, April 7, 2009

King's Quest (Game)

King's Quest is an adventure game series created by the American personal computer game company Sierra Entertainment. It is widely considered as a classic series from the golden era of adventure games. Following the success of its first installment, the series was primarily responsible for building the reputation of Sierra. Roberta Williams, co-founder and former co-owner of Sierra, designed all of the King's Quest games.
The King's Quest series chronicles the saga of the royal family of the Kingdom of Daventry through their various trials and adventures. The story takes place over two generations and across many lands, including Daventry, Kolyma, Llewdor, Tamir, Serenia, Eldritch, Etheria and the Land of the Green Isles.

Games and media releases
Wizard and the Princess (1980)/Adventure in Serenia (1982)
King's Quest: Quest for the Crown (1984, 1990 - enhanced Sierra's Creative Interpreter remake)
King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne (1985)
King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human (1986)
King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella (1988)
King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! (1990)
King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow (1992)
King's Questions, a King's Quest trivia game (1994)
King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride (1994)
King's Quest: Mask of Eternity (1998)

King's Quest 9
King's Quest 9 was a game in development by Sierra during 2001-2002. It was cancelled before going into production. The game never made it past the prototype stage. Images of two renders of the playable character were leaked to the public.

Collections

King's Quest 15th Anniversary Collector's Edition (1994)
Contains 1 (AGI & SCI versions) through 6, The King's Questions, King Graham's Board Game Challenge. It also contains a french floppy version of KQ5, and the german floppy version of KQ6. It also contains Inside the Chest, Behind the Developer's Shield, A View from Inside the Mirror, Hold onto your Adventurer's Cap, and The Royal Scribe, programs which contain concept material, artwork, documents, magazine articles, etc.
It also contains assorted videos, including making of, interviews, anniversery material, promo videos for KQ7, etc. The Fun Has Just Begun, Sierra Technology History, 15 Years of Products, Roberta Williams's Inspiration Interview, Ken & Roberta Sierra Future Interview, Roberta Williams Designer Interview, the Making of KQ6, Intro Sequence, KQ6 Art Slideshow, KQ7 Promo, and two About KQ7 interviews.

King's Quest Collection (1995)
It contains 1 (AGI & SCI versions) through 6, King's Questions, Graham's Board Game Challenge. It contains all of the bonus material from the 15th Anniversery Collector's Edition, and added a playable demo of KQ7.

King's Quest Collection Series (1997)
Also known as King's Quest Collection 2; it contains 1 (AGI & SCI versions) through 7 (2.0 version), King's Questions, Graham's Board Game Challenge, Wizard and the Princess, Mixed-Up Mother Goose Deluxe, Laura Bow 1 & 2, Mystery House, Mission Asteroid, and Time Zone.
It contains most of the bonuses from the previous versions, including Developer's Shield, Royal Scribe, and Chest. It does not contain all of the videos from the previous versions. It contains making of and intro videos for KQ6, and the intro and ending videos for KQ7. It has an added sneak peek of KQ8: Mask of Eternity.

Roberta Williams Anthology (1997)
It contains KQ1 (AGI & SCI versions) through 7 (2.0 version), Wizard and the Princess. It also contains Laura Bow 1 & 2, Mixed-up Mother Goose (AGI & VGA versions), Mystery House, Mission Asteroid, Time Zone, Dark Crystal, and Chapter 1 Demo of Phantasmagoria.
It contains the Chest & Developer's Shield, as well as box covers, and KQ7 concept art. Videos contain some of the videos from the first collection (that were not included in the "Collection 2"), and more interviews from the development teams, and a different Mask of Eternity sneak preview.

King's Quest Collection (2006)
In September 2006 Vivendi Universal released King's Quest Collection, a compilation CD for Windows XP encompassing games I-VII. Rather than porting the games directly, however, this release uses the original versions running under the DOSBox emulator and a Windows frontend. As a result, it is also possible to run King's Quest I-VI on other platforms with a little tweaking and ports of DOSBox. King's Quest VII is the earlier 16 bit windows version, version 1.4. It lacks dos compatibility, the improved save and restore functions, and character speed control found in version 2.0. It contains the dragon tail death that was removed from version 2.0, "Father always said to let sleeping dragons lie". It runs natively on Windows 32bit versions but is incompatible with 64bit windows.
Missing in the collection are the original AGI version of King's Quest 1, as well as the Windows CD version of King's Quest VI with high-resolution character art (some of the original Windows files were removed from this release), the 2.0 dos and windows versions of KQ VII, and King's Quest: Mask of Eternity. It also lacks any of the bonus material from previous collections.
This collection was released on Steam in July 2009.

King's Quest 1+2+3, 4+5+6, and 7+8 collections (2010)
Three collections released by Activison through GOG.com. The first consists of the classic AGI versions of King's Quest I-III[2] released 2010, and the later games King's Quest 4-5-6 on Vista. The final collection contains King's Quest 7 and 8 designed to work on Vista and Windows 7 32bit and 64bit.