Who better to clean up space than Janitors? Space Quest I, II, III

How to introduce the first PC game I ever played to people who perhaps have no idea what it is?

I guess we'll start at the beginning with Sierra On-line. Sierra was for much of the 90's the king of PC gaming. Back then adventure games ruled on the PC and Sierra was the premiere maker of adventure games (Lucasart's fans refuse to believe this and out of our gracious spirits we let them believe whatever they want to, it doesn't change the realities.) King's Quest was their flagship product, the creation of Roberta Williams, that followed the adventures of Sir Graham and his family, set in a fantasy setting. Space Quest was the creation of two men, Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy (they become the two guys from Andromeda) they pretty much created the first two games by themselves. Space Quest is a sci-fi game with a simple sense of humor.

I'll be guiding you through the first three games of the series (there was a total of 6). My primary goal in these LPs is to show you through the games, while getting a perfect score, or higher. Second, is to show you all the ways to die in them (or all the ones I've ever discovered). Sierra's games had a lot of ways to die, as well as quite a few ways to make the game unbeatable, which is why you were expected (and told) to save often. Most of the fun in Space Quest comes from the death messages you receive. If I have time (and the technical savvy) I might go through the VGA version of SQ1 and show the differences. So anyway feel free to post your thoughts, expectations, and more. The first post should be up tonight!

For the record I'll be playing these games from memory, yes as a youth I did have the time to waste and the fortitude to play repeatedly to get perfect scores... I also had the phone number to Sierra's Hint-Line (they charged you, Man, were my parents pissed about that)

PS - For more info than you could possibly want on the Space Quest Series, I recommend SpaceQuest.Net

Space Quest I
Space Quest II
Space Quest III
BONUS! Space Quest VGA

Looking forward to this. I was always more into Lucasarts games, so getting to see these should be fun.

With this ongoing and KQ5 starting next month, we're going to have a bit of a Sierra exposition month on our hands in October. I definitely look forward to this, though; I only ever played SQ4 of this series, which was probably one of the worst spots to start (besides the obscene difficulty, it was littered with obscure references to past games).

I'm also really looking forward to this -- please point out whenever you can cases where you can render the game unwinnable.

I love Space Quest I & II: They're my favorite Sierra adventure games.

I still have nightmares about WHAT IS THE MAGIC WORD.

I have a story about that to tell when we get there!

While I think V is my favorite, the entire Space Quest series is pretty good and I'm looking forward to seeing someone play through them again.

I await this with bated breath. Sierra games were my youth. Y'all may have had your Super Nintendos and whatnot, but I had a stack of (probably bootlegged) floppy disks. King's Quest V was the first game I got for the family's first computer and required much tinkering with autoexec.bat and config.sys to run.

Space Quest is a series I'm sure I've played at least one of, but I couldn't tell you which.

I already can't wait for the next update.

This place we'll be updated as inventory items are added to Roger's voluminous pockets:

This is where the collection of dying will go, the first image is the standard text you get after the death description, everything else are the specifics:



Getting shot on the Arcada:


Falling down the launch bay pit:


Entering bay without suit:


Going into space:


No Autonav:


Pushing "Don't Touch" Button:


Getting up close with the Sarien Droid:


Falling off the outcrop, or walking across the "bridge" multiple times, or falling from any great height:


Damn looks like I need another death post!

Okay lets get this thing going: Space Quest 1: The Sarien Encounter



I'd be doing a disservice if I didn't put the theme music to Space Quest up either, so here's that (which I had to record myself because everyone seems enamored with the remakes soundtrack... where's the love for the old PC speaker? Though I think what you're hearing is the better audio on the Tandy, emulated)

Ok, so the story of Space Quest is that you, Roger Wilco, are part of the crew of the Arcada which is completing work on the star generator which will be used to turn one of the lifeless planets in the Earnon solar system into a new star, as the current one is dying. Unfortunately, you're not one of the scientists or military men working on the project. You're a janitor and not a very good one. We start SQ1 walking up from an on-shift nap.



we head left from where we started and continue through the next screen.



Til we get here and search this unfortunate fellows body, he's got a keycard on him, and following the adventurer's creed of taking everything, we loot the corpse. Next we head back the way we came, only to witness:




He stumbles forward a little and then slumps over, Roger investigates:



The man works up just enough strength to look over at the rows of cartridges on the wall and says "astral body" before breathing his last.

So we head over to the console and "look at screen" once there we type in "astral body" and let the futuristic system do its work:



Then we grab the cartridge, adding it to our inventory and put it in to the machine to see why it's so important:



Or not... guess we'll have to find out later...

Restoring the game I take the cartridge and this time leave through the left door and take the elevator down and through the blasted open doors:



We head out the blasted doors and to the right, taking the elevator down:



Will Roger make his way off the ship? Of course he will, but he'll die trying first!

As soon as Roger got off the elevator he heard footsteps and hid behind a bulkhead, after the guard moved on he headed right to the next chamber:



after looking around he uses the control to open the bay doors, and then headed right:



sliding the purloined keycard into the slot he heads through the elevator and into the airlock. being a janitor he checks the two closets for cleaning supplies but finds only a suit and some sort of gadget. He changes clothes and picks up the device:



He then makes his way over to the console and pushes the open button, opening the door to the left, he then moves into the next room:



There are several ways to die here. I'll briefly fill you in and then you can head over to the death section to see the actual descriptions and images: If you enter the airlock without changing clothes, you die; if you go into the big pit in the middle of the screen, you die; and, if you walk into space, you die. Returning to the console we check it out and raise the platform, and then enter the escape pod:



Okay there's a lot going on here. First things first lets close the door and buckle our seat belt. Next let's turn the power on... what next?



can do!



Ok there isn't much to do in here, only two more buttons the "don't touch" one, and "autonav." Pushing the first sends us to King's Quest 1, with some commentary by Ken and Roberta Williams, not pushing the other one sends us spiraling through space forever (both of which have been added to the death post.) So let's push autonav!



Looks like were headed for Kerona!


If we'd had left Arcada without the gadget, we would have been screwed as without it the aliens we'll be meeting soon would be unintelligible, and we'd have been unable to progress through the game.

Next time, Part 2: Kerona, but Where's the Lime?

Note also that if you don't get the cartridge the game's also unwinnable. You need the cartridge to get out of the desert, I believe.

The amazing thing about Space Quest I is how bad it is at being funny. Considering it was Sierra's most prominent comedy series, there's a lot of "Taken." and "Done." feedback, which gets replaced in the update with actual jokes. The later games are much better at being funny during the main thrust of the plot, and not just when you get yourself killed.

Wooo! Space Quest LP!

The last line of the King's Quest death slays me.

You can get out of the desert without the cartridge, you can't beat the game though as the cartridge contains vital info that you can finally access in the desert. I'll be covering that portion of the game in the next post or so

Dear lord. For all the nostalgia that I have for PC games, which I've been playing since about 1986, the sound of the PC speaker is one thing I can't forget soon enough. Interestingly, our first PC was an IBM PC Jr that was actually capable of multi-channel MIDI synthesis. Our next PC was, I think, a PS One (no relation to the Sony product) that only did PC speaker, which meant that the later King's Quest games sounded like garbage on our more advanced computer, while they sounded fantastic on my cousins' identical (and completely out of date by this point) PC Jr.

I was with great excitement that I received my first ever sound card a few years later, and Adlib card that didn't even do WAV playback. Just having music in my games that didn't cause my ears to bleed was enough for me, despite the fact that most sound effects simply samples from the MIDI drum bank. Amazing the stuff we take for granted now, huh?

When we get to SQ3 I'll post the theme song again and the difference will be stunning!

The only Sierra game I ever really played (and beat) was Shadows of Darkness: Quest for Glory. It just happened to be one of the only games I had on my first PC, and I had the patience of youth. I never got very far in any other adventure game.

QFG4 is one of my all time fav adventure games, especially patched which makes it playable, the voice acting is hilarious... the 3 men in the inn all doing Jack Nicholson impersonations... nothing but laughs

I had the floppy version. No voices for me

Thanks to Merus for pointing out that if you don't take the cartridge in the Arcada the game is unwinnable, in fact you can get all the way to the final "level" of the game not knowing you need it before you get stuck... If I miss something else, and I'm sure I will, please point it out to me!

I thought that if you wasted enough time on the Arcada it'd blow up but doesn't seem to be the case, in this version (2.2) perhaps in one of the earlier ones though.

Back to Roger, who has just reached crash landed on to the planet Kerona:



(I tried unbuckling my seatbelt before landing but it doesn't let you, which also seems different from my old floppy version which would have you busting out of the window on landing)

Looking around Roger finds a survival kit that's been dislodged and nabs it. Finding nothing else of interest he climbs out and takes a look around... and notices some of the windshield on the ground and picks it up. then heads off to the left:



Ok, so there's nothing to the left, death also awaits you if you go up or down, so right it is, picking up some of the local fauna on the way:



Well this outcrop seems to be the only thing around so lets head up and investigate:



Notice the cracks growing on the bridge? every time you cross it the get a little bigger, until on the 5th crossing it collapses and you die... It's right about here too, if you don't take your time that you meet:



Now if that thing runs into Roger he's going to be nothing more than a fine red mist, but seeing as its down there and we're up here Roger can ignore it for now. He continues to the left, and it appears I'm missing the a screen capture here, but if you look over in deaths you'll see where we are, it's the one with the hole in the side of the cliff, continuing onward:



Ok, not much going on here Let's just check that fallen arch out:



Next time, what strange danger lurk below ground in Part 2: Kerona Cont'd

Deaths added: 4
Inventory Updated

Ran out of room in the first one so we interrupt Roger's adventure for more of his deaths.

Investigating local rock structures:

I often wonder if that last sentence is an obscure sex joke/admonition...

Enjoying the scenic desert:

I have to say that I prefer the deaths to be included in the flow of the LP. I think the Out of this World one is set up is pretty great. I though it'd be a good idea to have an all deaths post, but now I think a die, reload, continue setup might be easier to read.

Thanks for doing this again. It's such a flashback. I don't think I played any of the #1s from Sierra until they rereleased Quest for Glory, but it's still so familiar.

I thought about doing that but there's so many deaths that putting them into the narrative would take too long, and disrupt the narrative, I think.. It'd just be death after death... Which is why I'm putting some into the narrative and the rest in their own posts. But if TT wants it all included in the main posts I will.

Yeah, I'd rather read each update straight through rather than have to page back to the beginning to check out the deaths each time. If you're worried about disrupting the flow, why not show the "correct" way, and then at the end of each update, round up all the ways that segment could have gone wrong.

Good point. There are a spectacular number of ways to die in these games. A death post with all the ways to end your game (like the one you just posted) every few updates would also be great. I just had a problem with going back to the beginning to see how Roger screwed up this time.

Yes!

I'll stop crowding this thread with nitpickiness. Keep up the good work!

I recall there's also a death in the desert where you get hit by a meteorite, and of course if you dick around for too long you'll dehydrate (I think you need to not have the dehydrated water -- yeah -- on you to start getting thirsty, though.)

Are you going to show off both ways to deal with that spider droid?

There's a meteortite death? You get thirsty whether you have the water or not. I'll mention both ways of dealing with the spider and Orat

Ah. I remember lots about this game but I don't have much patience for fiddly details. I found the meteorite death when I was writing the GameSpite Space Quest article. I think it's in the screen to the east of the elevator to the underground, if you wait around in the middle of the screen, though I could have sworn that was where the orat cave was. It's an empty screen, and is basically an easter egg.