Quests and Whanot

The computer: it is to my generate what the television was to my parent's generation. This strange new technology that, when it first appeared seemed strange, untilitarian, even ugly and frightening, but at the same time mystical and cool. If your friends had a computer, you wanted to be around it, to play with it. You wanted to spend hours obsessively writing lines of Basic so that you could make your computer say "Hi, (insert your name), how are you?" and then answer, "That's great!" when you told it you were fine.

My dad got into programming early in his career. He's a smart guy, my dad (writer, Jonathan Carroll once told me my dad was the smartest person he ever knew. It made my dad blush when I told him that; I was so proud), and he could tell that computers were the new and the coming way of the world, so he learned how to use them. Dad was an English teacher at the time, which I guess is why it was so easy for him to pick computers up. The transition from one language to another must have just struck him as natural. So I grew up around computers, and as a result, I grew up around computer games. The first game I ever played was The Leather Goddesses of Phobos, a racy sci-fi game in that was text-based, which meant that, at age nine, I always knew something kind of sexy was going on without having any inkling what that might be.

But the game that really had me hooked was King's Quest III. I can still remember the day I went over to Mark Irving's (he was my best friend at the time) and found him playing this guy on his computer. We spent the rest of the afternoon in front of the monitor, likely blowing out our retinas in the process, as we guided our heavily pixellated hero around collecting various items to use in potions, solve puzzles, fight pirates, and defeat the evil wizard who had us enslaved (that's the guy on the box cover).

King's Quest III was followed by Space Quest, Quest for Glory, King's Quest IV, and Space Quest III, Quest for Glory II and III. They were all the adventure I wanted, needed, could realistically expect as a chubby suburbanite kid with a fantasy bent. Other of my friends ran around with B.B. guns playing war games. Not me. I stayed pale and inside and fought dragons and griffins out in the Shapier desert. As the games demanded ever-greater graphics components and drive space, I spent birthday and Christmas presents year after year, just so I coould keep up with them. I had to have them. How could I not have them?

As I grew up, I still loved the adventure puzzle games, but the tides were shifting. Computer gamers had fallen in love with the first-person shooter. Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem: while my little adventures mired themselves in two dimensions, these games rendered environments in three, making game play a fuly-immersive experience. The market changed, and by the time I got out of college, the adventure games I grew up with had gone the way of the dinosaur. It was a sad day.

When I was about a year out of college, had just moved back home, and was bumming around in my dad's place, looking for something to do in my spare time while I looked for a job and tried to break into my imminent career as a world-famous actor, I found the Hero 6 project on the Internet. Hero 6 was the efforts of a group of devoted Quest for Glory fans who didn't want to see their favorite series die, so they took matters in their own hands and started writing their own game: not a sequel to QFG, but an hommage. I jumped on the project, and before I knew it, I was writing dialogue, quests, etc. for a game series like the one I had loved most as a teenager. It was great for a while. But the project was mismanaged. Too many voices with too many disparate aims and few people willing to iron fist it. This guy wanted a ranger class and it was in. This guy wanted a realistic Celtic style, but this guy didn't. This guy wanted a more DND feel to the game and was depressed that the original was just too easy to build stats in. And so on and so on. Each of these voices pulled and prodded and pulled again, taking the project this way and that, like a ship caught in a storm. And after a while, real-world concerns, like finding a job and working in theatre, took my attention. So I abandoned the project.

A month or so ago, I went back to the page and discovered, to my delight, that my login still works. So I've been stalking their boards here and there. Largely, it seems to be moving forward, although with the same ship-in-the-storm direction that I remembered.

I assumed for the longest time that Hero 6 was the only such project out there, but yesterday, just tooling around the board for a while, I found AGD Interactive, a group dedicated, not to writing new games based on the old, but to revamping the old games for VGA computers. They've already done the first King's Quest games, and are working on the second Quest for Glory. From there, I discovered the SQ7 project, which is making a sequel to the Space Quest series, and Quest for Infamy, a sort of antithesis to Quest for Glory. I discovered a bevvy of these projects. There's Quest for Glory 4.5, and Re-Quest for Glory, which patches the original QFG into the very beautiful style of Morrowind. There are an astonishing number of projects like these. Low-budget, collaborative efforts made just for the love of the game.

I'm really glad to see these sites. In the future, my generation will talk of the computer the way our parents talked about the TV. We'll remember what it was like not to have one, and we'll be savvy enough with them to be able to see how they so cleanly will define the first half of this century. We are the last generation of whom that's true. When the first-person shooter game became the norm of the gaming industry, I sort of lost my interest in computer games. The graphics were cool, sure, but I never cared about that. All I cared about were the stories, the plots, the clever one-liners. Without that, you couldn't keep me in my seat long enough to get good with a sniper rifle. As a result, computers became a hassle to me, a thing I didn't really see any reason to know much about. I've since gotten over that, but it's nice to know some remnant of that old style of game still lives out there and that there are people who still care enough about it to devote their free time to creating new ones.

Best of luck to all of you.

Next time: Slide (this time for real)

post blog entry aside

Monday is my birthday. I turn 27. While I don't require gifts, I also wouldn't mind being showered with lots of chocolate and gold. In that order.