Hacker News Reader

Comment by Exuma | Hacker News Reader

This game was such an insane strong part of my childhood that when I think about the present day many years later it feels like a dream. I try to imagine in my current life having the same sort of "connection" to a game and it just feels impossible. Everything around me feels like "just" a game, show, material object, whatever... but space quest 2,3,4 all feel like they are fundamentally part of my DNA, intertwined with it.

View on HN

Space Quest III was my first Sierra game and it definitely has that hold. But so many of their games from that period really were so special, Police Quest II, LSL III, Hero's Quest in particular I ended up playing roughly together.

There was something really magical about those text driven EGA Sierra games. To me it was a goldilocks level of emotional/creative connection between Infocom and the later point and click VGA variants.

I bought Space Quest II and III on the same day, back in 1989. I think it was on a Saturday morning, and by the end of the next day, I'd already finished Space Quest III. But Space Quest II took a lot longer, more like 2 months to finish. Having lived the game for longer, my memories of SQ2 are fonder.

That's wild. Never played II but I do know it's regarded as a classic.

What do you feel the difference was for you? Just did a quick google and this person puts both on the level of the hardest Sierra games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-1XyI72hvY

I can't remember what the specific puzzles in Space Quest II were that I got stuck on. I think the first one was probably still down on the planet. And I can't say for certain now why I was able to finish SQ3 so quickly. I guess things just seemed to flow. I certainly finished SQ3 quicker than any other Sierra game I played, by quite some margin. The others took at least a few weeks, if not months.

This was obviously back in the days before the Internet, and I hadn't yet discovered BBS boards either, so it was just me and my brother trying to work it out.

That's amazing you guys got through that game so quick with no outside help. They did sell hint books that started off blank with a marker to uncover the hint. I got one for most games I played. As a rule I'd get stuck on some part for more than an hour, come back a day later, and still be stuck, then I'd uncover a hint. Generally using it a half dozen times to get through a game.

https://www.sierragamers.com/hint-books/

Fun fact - Sierra made more $$ on hint books for the first LSL than the game itself due to piracy issues.

SQ2 is only “hard” because of all the inane unwinnable situations it puts you in. Didn’t help an alien at the beginning of the game? His friends are going to murder right near the end. Forget to search your locker at the second screen of the game? Unwinnable. That’s not even mentioning the long pixel walking maze the game makes you do twice.

SQ3 was actually fun and fair. I don’t remember a way to make the game unwinnable, it let you backtrack to get items or mercy killed you on the spot.

I remember playing SQ2 on a "laptop" my dad brought home from work. It had 4 shades of dark blue and shimmered like crazy when anything moved. What a cool experience.

I started with 6 but then went back and played 1-5 and yeah, definitely part of my core person.

Actually SQ also is intertwined with one of my favorite “early internet” stories.

There used to be (back when websites were primarily hosted by geocities and bored college students) a fan site for space quest. I reached out to the owner of one of the biggest SQ sites and shared my love of the titles and love of the site (via email of course). I was about 14 at the time. He reached back out and told me he had copies of the original games he could send me for something like $40. This was all of the original games in their original boxes on floppy. Even then I was a bit worried about just sending some dude across the country $40 for something with the hope they’d actually come through (this was like… 1997) but he absolutely did. A couple short weeks later and all the games arrived exactly how he described them. I was over the moon. True believer overnight. I think it’s like the solar core of whatever optimism I hold onto anymore.

Jess, if you’re out there, you’re a real one. Hope I connect with you again someday.

Both Jess and his website are still out there: https://wiw.org/~jess/roger2.html

What! I could never seem to find this site again!

Thanks!

I have very similar feelings. My dad worked at a steel mill and was friends with a 'computer guy' at the mill who gave him a copy of SQ2 for me to play at home. I played that game relentlessly but was pretty young so I was confused by a lot of it.

Anytime I was really stuck, I would ask dad to ask the 'computer guy' how to get past a certain point and I seem to remember he would kindly provide hints, but not outright solutions.

It's probably been 35 years since, but I even remember with some detail a dream I had related to that game. It really had a big impact on me.

I'm not sure how my dad (Mechanical Engineer) would have figured this out, but I think he ran the DOS equivalent of `strings(1)` to dump the list of strings in old Sierra games (I want to say KQIV), to find hints about what might be possible. I wonder if he remembers. It was probably much cheaper than whatever Sierra hint hotline I wanted to call at the time.

Same feelings but specifically about Space Quest II.

I played SQ I way later in life, and SQ III didn't resonate as strongly with me. The rest were no longer EGA "text input" games either.

SQ II brings back memories. I learned some of my English with it, too. I remember the feeling of satisfaction when I discovered I could "rub berries" on Roger Wilco ;)

SQ III had a hilarious Sierra HQ part.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I liked The Pirates of Pestulon. It's also the last EGA SQ to my recollection. Call me weird but the limited palette of EGA graphics appeals to me.

It just didn't have as big an impact on my young self as SQ II.

Leisure Suit Larry III, released around the same time as SQ III, also has a very similar fourth-wall-break at the end of the game. The Sierra team must have had Blazing Saddles on their minds in the late '80s.

The sierra adventure games presented an overly simplistic world view and then the devs subverted that. It still amazes me today.

Scumsoft Software and Elmo Pug, the fat dude that walked around whipping the programmers. Scumsoft Software was of course Sierra On-Line, and Elmo Pug was Ken Williams. They did get away with it, Ken Williams approved :D

That scene at the end, where they land in the car park of the "Redwood" building in Oakhurst where the Sierra offices were, was one of my favourite parts. Like many of you I'm sure, I dreamed of one day working for Sierra in that building.

I actually attribute my high typing speed to the practice I got with OPEN DOOR, TAKE KEYCARD, CLOSE LOCKER, LOOK CAULDRON. Police Quest, King's Quest, Space Quest. Good memories.

Haha, I remember this with Leisure Suit Larry 1. When you knock on the door at Lefty's Bar, a guy opens a hatch in the door and asks "What's the password?". Then you need to type "ken sent me" and press enter. I was 7-8 years old at the time, and it was hard for me to type "ken sent me" in the 5 or 10 seconds you have to give him the password. Sometimes I asked my dad to help me out, so he could write it for me hehe. But we found a trick after a while, you could just set the game to SLOWEST at that part, and you had much more time to enter the password. Good times!

I loved SQ but it frustrated me so much. As a kid I could NOT get anywhere with it without one of those hint books with the red garbled text or calling the Sierra Hint Line (on my parents bill...).

All of the Sierra games, as much as I loved them, would just piss me off with dying constantly. Having to do a specific thing at a specific time or dying. You had to do SUCH specific things. I remember the park/lake scene and pulling people over driving in PQ being impossible until I found hints.

I'm not sure I ever beat a Sierra game outside of LSL. Maybe a KQ and potentially a QFG, but I definitely didn't beat a PQ. I LOVED PQ3. I think out of all of them that SQ was the one that really, really pissed me off, and scifi is my favorite genre, with no other scifi adventure games back then (other than beneath a steel sky which I also got nowhere with), total bummer.

Whenever I discovered LucasArts (DOTT I think was first), Legend of Kryndaria, Discworld, etc, it was such a breath of fresh air. There was a Black Cauldron game that I LOVED.

I remember all of these games so vividly. I don't think I remember many other games nowadays to that degree. Baba Yagas hut, the wizards house, cleaning the stables in qfg, Otto standing outside the bar.. Could very well be because I died so much and played scenes over and over..

edit: This made me want to give them a go again.. https://playclassic.games/games/point-n-click-adventure-dos-...

edit2: I forgot how slow you walk.. ugh. There are a LOT of modern Adventure games now on Steam. It's had a bit of a comeback and they're usually affordable games. I'm playing the Plague Doctor of Wippra right now. All of the Wadjet Eye games are really cool too.

Yes, Space Quest was fun overall but dying was not. I think it was LucasArts who started to make adventure games where you can't die.

My perhaps rose-tinted memory is that the deaths were pretty comic in Space Quest.

Some of the best parts of the SQ4 talkie are the sarcastic narrated death screens. And SQ5 has neat animations.

The manual tells you to "save early, save often" for a reason.

My subconscious has just dredged up the memory "you take a good long whiff of the acid, and .. whoah, talk about clean sinuses!". That might have been from the later remastered SQ I even?

Sounds like Space Quest 4. That one had a Nose/Smell and Mouth/Taste icon.

The narrator (Gary Owens) was also amazing in the CD version.

I enjoyed the death sequences too.

I was sure to have plenty of savegames before I tried anything, of course.

You can die in Monkey Island. Twice.

One is a Sierra Spoof complete with a Sierra death dialog. That one lets you continue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6F55am-rOY

The other has to do with the fact that Guybrush can hold his breath for 10 Minutes. And only ten minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah5o3aAeZso

If I remember correctly that is the only real game over in any later Lucasfilm/LucasArts adventure game.

EDIT: I just remembered the jumping puzzle in Indy3 where you died all the time when jumping on the wrong tile. Or the Knight Statue that axed either Indy or his father. Or you got shot when you punched Hitler... You could also die in Manic Mansion and Zak McKracken.

Lucasfilm games killed you quite a lot. LucasArts stopped doing that.

> I loved SQ but it frustrated me so much. As a kid I could NOT get anywhere with it without one of those hint books with the red garbled text or calling the Sierra Hint Line (on my parents bill...).

Interesting! When I played SQ II, it was a pirated copy and I had no hint book. Also, no access to the Sierra Hint Line from my country. And no Internet websites to google the answer, either. So I beat them all by myself. All of those games were pirated, and the hardest was SQ 4 which would randomly crash to desktop, and I wasn't sure if this was supposed to happen, or some badly cracked copy-protection thing, and to this day I still don't know.

Spanish is my native language, so the inspiration to try things like this was pretty cool: "mooom, how do you say "rub" in English? I think I'm supposed to rub these berries on the dude!"

> I forgot how slow you walk.. ugh.

Oh, yes. Those early adventures didn't let you teleport to the next screen either, you had to very slowly walk all the way. I used to use savegames for fast teleporting: "ok, this didn't work, I want to go back to that other screen but it's so far, let's restore my savegame".

Space Quest 4 was one of the only times in my childhood that I found a legit error in a game. There is one part in the space mall with the ice rink where you can go into an arcade. You get a quest to do something, but if you then try to click on one of the arcade cabinets it will cause the game to throw an error.

I remember it because I actually called Sierra to tell them about it. The person on the other end even fired up the game and verified it, then told me vaguely that the solution to the puzzle was something else. I'm guessing the tech support weren't allowed to give hints because they had a paid tip line.

> You get a quest to do something, but if you then try to click on one of the arcade cabinets it will cause the game to throw an error.

Wait, I'm pretty sure that's the crash to desktop I'm remembering! It was definitely in the arcade. I tried randomly clicking to avoid the Time Police (or whatever those androids were called) and the game would error out. I was never sure if it was an error or copy-protection. I remember winning the game, but don't remember what I did to bypass this (remember: no access to any hint line).

So it was an actual bug, and not copy-protection after all? Wow.

It wasn't obvious that you had to _administer field sobriety test_??

> Whenever I discovered LucasArts (DOTT I think was first), Legend of Kryndaria, Discworld, etc, it was such a breath of fresh air.

Discworld MUD or some other game? The MUD is still alive and well!

They probably mean Discworld (1995)/Discworld II/Discworld Noir, which are all point-and-clicks.

You're probably right. I did not know about them, will have to check them out. Thanks!

They are great. 1 & 2 might have aged less well than Noir.

Some puzzles are quite nonsensical, true to adventure game standards of the day. Sierra gamers found it too easy, people new to the genre too hard.

Eric Idle as Rincewind is amazing though.

Ahhh, the hint line.. I would have been sent to boarding school if there was money left after that phone bill.

LMAO I have no idea how much money it cost but I do remember my parents yelling at me for it. I'm pretty sure they charged by the minute. I wonder how many 8 year olds like me called them and how they talked about that in the break room. Super funny to think about as an adult.

I am almost certain that I played an EGA version of SQ IV, even if there was also a "VGA optional" version.

Wow, are you sure? I thought SQ IV was VGA only; I certainly played it in VGA.

Regardless of whether an EGA version existed, the style of the sprites was already different. The sprites from SQ I, II & III belong to an earlier era -- hard to describe, but if you remember them you must know what I mean. More abstract & pixelated, designed for low-res and low-color displays.

They bring back memories! I don't want to wax nostalgic -- but I will anyway. I've come to think the more primitive/abstract the graphics, the more they engage the imagination. Similar to Scott McCloud's concept of "closure" from Understanding Comics, maybe? While playing SQ II, I could believe the world was enormous even when it was actually quite limited. In the jungle of planet Labion, I believed I was exploring a vast wilderness. Games with more realistic graphics -- even when they are sandbox games -- don't give me the same feeling anymore. Of course, I'm also older and more jaded, so there's that too ;)

I think my PC still had EGA when I first played SQ4. I don't think there was a separate EGA version as such. I think it was the VGA version but I believe the interpreter supported a dithered mode that used the EGA palette but was dithered to try to match the VGA colours.

This fan wiki seems to say the EGA version had a unique title screen: https://spacequest.fandom.com/wiki/Space_Quest_IV:_Roger_Wil...

I was just delighted that "free little dude" worked on rescuing the creature early on in that game. It's also the first game I've ever played of the sort (as like a ten-year-old) and I spent weeks and weeks with it.

Same, this was the 1st game I had on the first PC we had at home. And I didn’t even know English so I played through all of it using an English-Spanish dictionary and lots of patience.

I have the same feeling about the first games I played "seriously". You know, some games you know of and have played as a kid, but some game was the first game that you consciously invested time in to finish it. For me it was some super weird Shrek-themed clone of MarioKart on the Nintendo GameBoy Advance. As a kid I really didn't see it as a MarioKart clone, just a fun game I wanted to finish entirely.

I absolutely forgot about it and only recently saw some YouTube video about what a weird game that was. Seeing that game again with its soundtracks and weird sound effects and clunky mechanics really triggered that exact feeling of a "connection" that you speak of.

I feel that for music. During my teenage years I used to listen to the same songs over and over on my walkman. I still remember 99% lyrics to the whole albums. The music used to have such a strong connection.

Nowadays there are 1000+ songs in my playlist I can't even recollect 20% lyrics nor there is a chance in hell that I would listen to every single song on the entire album let alone every single song by tthe same artist.

It's like if I don't like the first 10 seconds, it's hide song and Spotify makes sure I never have to listen to that again. Even though some of my all time favorites are songs I hated at first but then there was no hide song button.

Sorry I digress but yeah the connections you make in childhood are really something. I just hope it's my age and not the technology responsible for this and the youth of today feel the same connection too.

I still try to find time to sit down and listen to an album from start to finish - it's kind of like the musical equivalent of spending an hour in a gallery exhibition of a single artist's work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com