Old school sierra adventure games ported to HTML + JS | Hacker News Reader

Old school sierra adventure games ported to HTML + JS

sarien.net

41 pointsarscan15 comments

I just noticed that King's Quest VI was on the Steam store... I spent many hours in my youth playing that on my Packard Bell 386 (and yes, it ran terribly). That game in particular though required the user manual in order to solve puzzles given the listing of symbols in it - assuming pirates wouldn't have access to a copy machine. I wonder how that and other games that have been put up for sale again handled that?

Yeah, that was a common anti-piracy measure for Sierra games. The earlier games had a pretty boring "what is the xth word on page y" quiz, but by KQ3 they realized it was more fun to incorporate in-game puzzles with content in the manual.

As for redistribution... I assume they just provide a PDF of the manual, instead of actually rewriting parts of the game, but I don't really know for sure. I haven't yet checked out the Steam version of KQ6.

True true, I hadn't considered the use of a PDF for it. I hope it's good quality.

Years ago, I bought a CD with the first six Ultima games.

The manuals were provided as a single "WRI" file, which included a table of copy protection questions and answers for Ultima 6.

Apparently this has been around for awhile, but its the first I've seen it. A pretty darn impressive (mostly) automated port to javascript -- rendering done using DOM objects instead of inside a Canvas container. Support for multi-player & chat is pretty cool as well.

Police Quest, Space Quest, King's Quest, Hero's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Black Cauldron, Gold Rush.. best games ever. (I'm probably forgetting some.) Fancy 3D graphics are cool and all.. but some of the best games ever only needed 16 to 256 colors and a keyboard.

My father gave a "stone age ax" to Mark Wilden; the coder of Leisure Suit Larry.

(http://groups.google.com/group/alt.support.diabetes/msg/7c00...)

> Someone mentioned IDDT’s Bruce Beale a while ago. He’s a great guy, and I’ve enjoyed his hospitality several times on trips to England. He gave me a Stone Age axe given him by the Prince of Denmark (and there are pictures to prove it).

I thought Activision shut down Sarien.net in 2011 because the game content was copyrighted? What changed since then? The Sarien.net forums don't mention any legal change.

They have given him permission to host the first game in each series:

http://martinkool.com/post/13587392285/sarien-net-the-full-s...

I could never launch the spaceship in space quest. I remember I bought two different walk throughs and spent at least 20 hours but I never got it :-(

I never understood how anyone got past the first hour of gameplay in space quest.

Because they were bored and if you wanted to play a game, then that was what you played. So you were either a) reduced to brute forcing puzzles (use xxx look yyyy) or b) called Sierra's hint line.

Thinking back, I think that might be the reason a lot of the puzzles were so obscure - to get you to spend some more $$$ to win the game. Kind of like proto-freemium.

Oh man, I definitely brute forced the crap out of those games. And then I called the help line :) Yeah, come to think of it, they were the original Zynga in that respect.

My fingers were crossed for "Leisure Suit Larry"...

I've dreamed about making a King's Quest MMORPG and Sarien.net comes pretty close. :)

Great, there goes my productivity for a week.

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