Al Lowe - Interview about King's Quest 3, Black Cauldron, and the early Sierra years

I got the chance to have a wonderful chat with Al Lowe about the early days of his game development career, and the early years at Sierra.

I was excited to chat with him about some of my favorite games: King's Quest 3 and The Black Cauldron.

Al Lowe's links

allowe.com on the web  (including CyberJoke 3000™!)

@allowe on Twitter

Books about Sierra History

The Sierra Adventure by Shawn Mills

Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings by Ken Williams

The Murry family: Ancient Art of War & Manhunter

Ancient Art of War was a really excellent game!  And in my opinion, perhaps the first "real time strategy" game, despite others being sited as the first.  This was 1984!  It was created by Dave Murry and Barry Murry.

AAoW was also one of the games most responsible for drawing me into game development because it shipped with an excellent level editor! I spent hours constructing my own maps using the provided tileset, and you could write your own intro story, and set some of the game rules as well.

I played the old CGA version...

The gameplay itself involved selecting units and giving movement orders around the map...

It wasn't until years later (around 2005) that I realised the same Murry family (now also joined by Dee Dee Murry) was behind another of my favorite, and most influential games, Manhunter: New York (1988) and Manhunter: San Francisco (1989) for Sierra!

The Manhunter games were these fantastic sci-fi adventure games, with a really brooding mood and dark story, depicting a dystopian future where Earth had been overrun by Orbs from outer space!

There were some cool sections of gameplay where you would track suspects in a Google Maps like device called the MAD!

The beauty of the game comes from everything being depicted in quite an everyday way where the domination of the Orbs has become mundane and accepted.

You play as a Manhunter, a worker for the Orbs, tracking down those who seek to overthrow the Orbs.  

The game featured great ghoulish art depicting the brown robed Manhunters, and a variety of scenes of gruesomely murdered victims and cadavers.  

Thanks to the Murrys for this unique and evocative chapter in the history of adventure games!

I'm still waiting for the final title in the series, Manhunter: London.  :)

Here's a nice little promo video for Manhunter: New York...



And another for Manhunter: San Francisco...




And a bit more of Manhunter: New York in action...

King's Quest

King's Quest is probably my single fondest memory of computer gaming.


I don't think that's something that will change any time soon.  It doesn't matter if it's not the best game ever.  To me, it will always hold a totally special place in my imagination.


So many things seem to have been lost, or at least not fully explored, that King's Quest did.


It was a cinematic world, presented in resplendent color.  And the best part, a fully WRITTEN story, based around TEXT, and the player inputing their actions through TEXT.  


I loved that the world was experienced through the eyes, and the MIND, and that to interact with the world, you would READ, THINK, and WRITE.


To be honest, I can see why they brought in the mouse interface years later.  But it did remove a layer of imagination from the game.  It removed the "infinity" of the game world.


When playing King's Quest, ANYTHING was possible, because there was basically no interface.  There was a flashing cursor at the botton of the screen, inviting you to type in ANYTHING.  Anything you could imagine.


Can you think of a VERB?  Try it!  


Sure the game might say, "I DON'T UNDERSTAND THAT".  But there's always the possibility that it WILL understand what you type next, that the next thing you type will open a new door, show you a deeper layer to the world, find a special hidden item or secret.  The world was revealed, and the story moved forward, by you talking to the computer, and it talked back.


I loved that.  


Every little morsel of the graphics were mouthwateringly full of potential.  My eyes and mind would savour every detail, wondering what lay hidden inside this world before me.




When the mouse cursor came in, with the fixed set of verbs, "Walk, Talk, Manipulate", it actually closed off a lot of that potential in the game world.  Things became much more explicitly binary.  There were things you could do, and things you couldn't do.  No discussion.


And ever since, I feel that games do not want to enter into a discussion with you.  You play by their rules, and you move through the puzzles laid out for you.


If you waved your mouse cursor over a hole in a tree that looked suspiciously alluring, and the cursor did not change, then you can forget about it.  Nothing of interest there.  That is a useless bit of graphics that you can just forget about.


With the text interface, you could never really close off the potential of anything.  You just hadn't discovered it yet!  And I think there was a beauty in that.  Sure, perhaps the actual interactions that are possible are the same.  But there was something I liked about not being sure.  About everything being possible, and my mind having to remain open.  Perhaps it more accurately mirrors the real world, where everything has potential, and that potential is in the eye of the beholder.