Roberta Williams – King's Quest 40th Anniversary [video] | Hacker News Reader

Roberta Williams – King's Quest 40th Anniversary [video]

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31 pointspeterkelly9 comments

I have such great memories playing all the Sierra games back in the 80s on my IBM PC, overcoming all that difficulty over weeks and weeks of trying to figure out what to type to get to the next stage of the game. No internet, giving us all that space to imagine and wonder what those world may be like, imagination going off with the help of all the constraints of EGA/VGA graphics, that was a special time. Roberta and Kenneth, all my respects.

I didn't know the name, for any others like myself:

    Roberta Lynn Williams (née Heuer; born February 16, 1953) is an American video game designer and writer, who co-founded Sierra On-Line with her husband, game developer Ken Williams.

    In 1980, her first game, Mystery House, became a modest commercial success; it is credited as the first graphic adventure game.

    She is also known for creating and maintaining the King's Quest series, as well as designing the full motion video game Phantasmagoria in 1995.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberta_Williams

Congratulations, you made me feel older than dirt!

For a good 15 years shops would sell games with Roberta Williams' name prominently emblazoned across them. She was possibly the first person who shifted games based on their name alone.

Which is wild because the puzzles in these games were pretty nonsensical.

Sorry 'bout that, but I think that feeling might be on you; I'm older than 60, I live in Australia, I've played half of the first King's Quest and not a lot of other games aside from some Doom, a bit of Quake, half an hour or so of a bunch of others each.

I recognize names from other domains, eg: George Havas, Jens Hovgaard, George Burarrwanga, Jack Wong Sue, etc.

US game designers, not so much <shrug> ..

The Digital Antiquarian has a good article about Roberta Williams:

https://www.filfre.net/2011/10/ken-and-roberta/

this triggered a memory in me. The term "filfre" is a spell in the enchanter text based series from infocom, taken from the response when another editor wanted to make changes on some code. "Feel free".

I tried to search it to find something to back this up but I am coming up empty, but I did find the original use for the spell:

“The filfre spell – cause gratuitous fireworks to appear”

It is otherwise useless in the game save for entertainment factor.

I'm pretty sure I've read on his blog that the site name is indeed taken from a spell in an Infocom text adventure, but I can't remember where he wrote that.

40 years of the Rumpelstiltskin puzzle (that also depends on a misspelling of the character as Rumplestiltskin). Thankfully, that puzzle was optional at least, unless you wanted to full score.

I can't say that I love or even like any of the King's Quest games, but it's undeniable how important they were for an entire industry, so cheers to that!

That drove us nuts! We must've tried a dozen different spellings, but over and over again.

The game itself was magical for kids of our age (end of primary school and first few years of high school).

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