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This is a fine basic plot overview, but if you really want to get the full backstory of how the original King's Quest came to be, I recommend this piece from The Digital Antiquarian:

http://www.filfre.net/2013/07/the-unmaking-and-remaking-of-s...

A note of warning - if you're of a certain age, be prepared to get sucked in. It's a massive trove of some of the best written and researched longform content on the history of PC gaming I've ever seen. Sierra, LucasArts, Infocom, Origin, Broderbund, Commodore, Atari... it's all there. Great stuff.

You're completely right. I started reading this on my commute and am thoroughly enjoying it. Thanks for sharing!
What I miss most about the old point and click adventure games, that is sorely lacking in modern video games is the humor.

Modern video games are so dark, and take themselves so seriously, it is just tiring.

LOL, point and click. More like press F3 and type LOOK UNDER THE BRIDGE

Oh, they were the good old days and to your point about humour, the responses from Space Quest to text commands it didn't understand were a perfect example: "Pardon me. This program is too stupid to glean your desire from such a wonderfully crafted sentence. Please try something else."

http://spacequest.wikia.com/wiki/SQ3_transcript

Looking at that KQ2 screencap brought back found memories of playing it on my Tandy 1000SX. I think it supported TGA (Tandy Graphics Adapter) so the graphics looked better than standard PC CGA of the time.

I personally stopped playing video games when they got too realistic. I'm haven't thought much about why but off the top of my head more realistic games make me feel like I needed to take them more seriously which kind of defeats the purpose of playing a game for me.

Agreed. I was never a Kings Quest player but I loved Space Quest with a passion. One of those very well written experiences that I enjoyed as a kid, then when I went back years later picked up all the jokes that went right over my head...
You can play the 1983 King's Quest (in your browser!) here https://archive.org/details/a2_King_Quest_1983_Sierra_Save Unfortunately they don't have the others (or at least they're not up and running yet).
You can get them all on GOG too, along with all the other Sierra classics:

https://www.gog.com/mix/sierra_quest_games_1

https://www.gog.com/game/quest_for_glory

Careful, I bought some and they were worse versions than I played. Can't recall the details, but I think KQ5 was not the CD version and KQ4 was the original graphics with some game ending bugs version too. Maybe GoG updated them since.
I've beaten KQ 1 through 4 from GOG, 4 definitely has some bugs and took several restarts - the whale sometimes didn't exist.
Just remember that many of the early Sierra games you can end up in a no-win situation without a game-over screen.
Like the hand painted textures. Good to see Sierra return. Hero's Quest next?
Do you mean the Quest for Glory series? The original designers having been working on a spiritual successor through Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/transolargames/hero-u-r...

I backed it, but it's been slow going, and they've already run out of money once (and rather controversially had a second kickstarter to raise more money), so I'm not very optimistic. Video game projects seem to flounder on Kickstarter unless they've already got a decent playable demo made before they start raising money.

Hero's Quest was the original name, the EGA version of the first one was released under. Due to Sierra not trademarking it, the name had to be changed to Quest for Glory. 1 and 2 are still some of my favorite games of all time, if you haven't played the VGA port of 2 that was done by agd interactive I strongly recommend it.
Quest for Glory 4 was always my favorite of the series. I loved the darkness and lore of Mordavia, and had a huge crush on Katrina. 2 was the first one I played, but most of my memories of it involve dying, getting lost, and was there some time-based mechanism in that game? I feel like some of my failures were based on not getting to certain places by a certain time... I was only 10 years old, and some of those puzzles were pretty difficult.

I haven't replayed any of them since around the time 5 was released. I am definitely going to have to look up that remake.

4 was awesome but I just experienced way too much grief from it crashing, hanging, and otherwise being the buggiest game I had played at the time to consider it my favorite. Later when I revisited after finding a QFG Anthology CD in a bargain bin it handled the increased CPU speed of the day even worse than the other games and would crash almost every time I left the cave at the beginning.

I do remember loving it enough the originally to put up with all the bugs and play through it. I should probably get the gog versions and try them as those are I assume the best copies available.

I loved QfG2. I even hand-made a map of the entire city and labelled where everything was. It made traversing the mirror city a lot easier. I also got really really quick at typing "ask about".

Fun game. That "Suleiman" answer later in the game was total bullshit though. I only learned that through one of those red-cellophane sierra hint books and never could figure out how you were supposed to know that.

It's been a long time, but I think the time-based things might have just been a day/night cycle?

Oh man, I never had one of the red text hintbooks, but I do remember paying my parents back out of my allowance to call the 1-900 hint line a few times.

It's amazing some of the things that don't exist anymore in this modern world of internet and gamefaqs.

And then there is the Homestuck adventure game, which was originally going to be developed by the Odd Gentlemen (who did this new KQ); apparently they took a lot of the Homestuck Kickstarter money and worked on KQ instead.
Oh man, I loved Hero's Quest back in the day - even more so than King's Quest. Oh the days of picking locks over and over and over again to gain experience.
Locks? How about 'pick nose'?

Congratulations, your nose is now open!

There have been some spiritual successors to that game that can be played for free:

Heroine's Quest: http://store.steampowered.com/app/283880/ A complete remake of Quest for Glory 2: http://www.agdinteractive.com/games/qfg2/homepage/homepage.h...

> Good to see Sierra return

Wait, what?

I just saw a few minutes of gameplay of this new King's Quest and it doesn't look very Sierra-like to me at all.
I may have just skewed memories/expectations but the graphics in the earlier games are excellent compared to what I remember at the time. I'm thinking specifically of the screenshots of:

KQ5 (1990): https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/OIoS9JrnCaaX60mJWfECdJjtVus...

KQ6 (1992): https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/kZopVZ3ZIoxfkmLrQXeKxlmiVto...

KQ5 also came in an EGA version, so you may have played one with significantly worse graphics than the 256 color screenshot you provided.

http://scummvm.org/data/screenshots/sci/kq/kq5-ega-1-full.pn...

Ahhh gotcha. Still that EGA screenshot is pretty nice. I think it's running on an emulator that's applying some smoothing algorithm, but nevertheless I'm impressed
Not Sierra, but I accidentally bought the EGA version of Monkey Island despite having a VGA card (I didn't realise there were separate versions and only saw the sticker on the side when I got home), but they did a really nice job on the EGA version: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B0BX6n1CUAARP_S.jpg
Definitely brought back memories to see that Sierra loading screen at the beginning of one of the play-through clips. I spent an embarrassing number of hours playing Lords of the Realm 2 and Civil War Generals on my first PC. Also Half-Life, which I believe Sierra published.

Damn, I would love to see Civil War Generals on GoG...