I used to be a gamer. My introduction to computers was through gaming. My desire to learn about how computers worked was driven by new hardware required for games. My first computer program was a game.

I am not really sure why after 15 solid years of PC gaming I stopped. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t make the leap to consoles. Perhaps it’s TiVo’s fault. Perhaps it was getting married or becoming a cyclists or working. Either way, I don’t play games any more, and I miss it.

Every few months I try to reconnect via a sequel to a title I used to love (Half-life or Warcraft) or I pick up a controller to check out the new console hotness. It just doesn’t stick. I’d rather use my free time cruising the interwebs or writing some code or riding my bike than gaming.

Why the nostalgia? I came across a series profiling the 50 most important games and read about #14, King’s Quest.

All the innovation in King’s Quest, instead, lay in the system that
powered the textbook adventure. The difference from “interactive
fiction” was like night and day — instead of barking orders to some
faceless avatar as he wandered around the game world, you were
controlling Sir Graham yourself, using the arrow keys to point him in
the direction you liked. The old text-based parser was still there, but
it played a far less important role now, since you could actually see
the world for yourself — you didn’t need to rely on a text description
or draw out a map just to keep track of connections between rooms. It
wasn’t a revolution in the way adventures were played — instead, it
was an evolution in the way they were presented.

However unoriginal the story might have been, King’s Quest’s
release was a shock to the public. Roberta Williams and her crew
crammed a relatively huge world into a single 360K floppy disk — every
screen was drawn in glorious 16-color mode, and many of them had bits
of animation like gliding birds and swaying banners.

King’s quest V