My family lived in Hobart for the first three years of the 1990s. It was there that I met Nick, who is ultimately to blame for my addiction to adventure games. Nick encouraged me to try Space Quest Ⅰ, and from there we ended up playing stacks of graphical adventure games together.
Over the past few months, I've been able to revisit these old and nearly lost gems, with the aid of software emulators such as Nick's NAGI for the old Sierra AGI games, FreeSCI for the early 1990s Sierra SCI games, and finally ScummVM for those brilliant LucasArts games of the last decade.
Despite not being a “gamer”, I purchased my first sound card, a Sound Blaster 2.0 (with Dr. Sbaitso) costing around AUD$100, to gain the full benefit of the sound from Space Quest Ⅲ. Beyond that, I received my first CD-ROM drive as a present, ultimately so I could play the classic Day of the Tentacle — a game where Nick thought it best that I shouldn't have the hint book that came in the box, and subsequently hid it from me!
It could be said that several of these games had a profound impact on my personality, predominantly encouraging my innate curiosity and forever warping my sense of humour. For the latter, I specifically blame Tim Schafer and the two guys from Andromeda. The Space Quest series, for example, probably introduced me to satire!
Both Space Quest Ⅰ and Ⅱ are fully playable using NAGI (a tiny program that's brought Nick a small dose of “Internet Fame”), while Space Quest Ⅲ can be almost completely played with FreeSCI. Beyond that, DOSBox can be used quite successfully.
I was using FreeSCI version 0.3.5, and had to work around a bug using the debugger. When landing on Phleebhut, to get to the World of Wonders and back, you'll need the following trick: Use control-` to enter FreeSCI's debug mode, and use vmvars g 13 42 to get to the World of Wonders, and vmvars g 13 49 to return to the ship.
Space Quest Ⅲ is probably the most influential of the series to me, with its subtle satire of American culture and science fiction. These days, I wonder if I've become one of the programmers working for ScumSoft, trapped in my cubical next to all the other clones…
Day of the Tentacle must be one of the greatest graphical adventure games ever made. One of the joys of the LucasArts era was that they paid so much attention to detail, that each time you played the game you might try something different with hilarious results. The humour within this game was also highly influential to me, as were some of the concepts within the game-play.
Where D.O.T.T. left off, Sam & Max took over — perhaps in a way that I only fully appreciate as an adult. The game was brilliantly crafted with its comic-book feel, and brought with it such a subtle yet caustic satirical view of American culture.
Rediscovering these games nearly a decade later is better than a movie: Try solving problems you solved so long ago and you might surprise yourself.
Unfortunately the golden era of adventure gaming is lost, possibly forever. Sierra's internal politics and financial situation saw the company sold-on countless times, while LucasArts' focus shifted entirely towards bloody Star Wars crap. In the end, the gaming industry as a whole shifted in the mid-1990s towards instant gratification, big explosions and lots of gore. I thought that's what we had Hollywood for, right?
Now, if I can't find my Curse of Monkey Island discs, I'm going to have to return to my usual bollocks.
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