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Sierra was in a mindset where everything was medieval and it was all fairly serious. I wanted to do a game that was more fun. We even liked the idea offun death!I mean, if the player is gonna die or fail, they should at least get a laugh out of it. So we came up with the idea of making death amusing. Let's face it, most adventure games involve a good deal of frustration for the player. But we felt that if we made failure fun, to an extent, you might have players actually going back and looking for new ways to die, just to see what happens!—Scott Murphy
We wanted to do two things for the player. One, we wanted him to feel as if he were in a movie, where he could just sort of kick back and enjoy the scenery. We also wanted the player to feel as if he really was the character on the screen.—Mark Crowe
Certainly a classic adventure series, though not one I particularily like. I played SQ V (which is often considered the best of the series) for a while, without real conviction. Main design objective of the series seems to be to provide as many gruesome deaths for the protagonist as possible (in a Space Quest game, practically any wrong move leads to death) and include as many silly jokes about movies and other games as possible.
There have been six games in the series. A seventh was under development (supposed to be released around Christmas 1998) but cancelled when Cendant took over Sierra and closed down the Oakhurst division, where all of Sierra's adventure games had come from.
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1991 Sierra re-released some of their older adventure games in VGA remakes with sound, among them Space Quest I. This is the version that is included in the collections.
Links
- Roger Wilco's Virtual Broomcloset
- SpaceQuest.Net
- The Many Deaths of Roger Wilco
I'm the kind of person who loves to poke through my computer games thoroughly, trying to find out every little weird comment, or easter egg, or what have you. And since you can die in Sierra games, I added finding all of the possible deaths to my personal poking-around list while starting to play the Space Quest games. Upon discovering the Space Quest fandom, I noticed that while there were plenty of pages listing the various references, easter eggs, little secrets and the like, it seemed like nobody had ever made a list of all the deaths in the games, despite the fact that it seemed to be a fairly popular topic on occasion in the forum I frequent, the Subspace Channel.
- Captain Roger Wilco's Shuttle Bay has walkthroughs for all 6 games and large slow-loading graphics (original description). The site has not been updated since 1998.
- Scott-Land is Scott Murphy's homepage. Scott Murphy was the original designer of the Space Quest series. Since at least October 2002 there is only an email link on this page.
Fan Productions
- The Lost Chapter was the first. It is situated on the timeline between II and III and uses EGA graphics. It was finished in 2001.
- Space Quest 0: Replicated
is the latest addition. It uses the engine from I and II and was
finished in 2003 (version 2.0!).
Designed by Jeff Stewart, SQ0 offers fans an untold tale of Roger Wilco as our hero finds himself posted aboard Labion Orbital Station 10, a Class 3 Cloning Facility. Unfortunately, it appears that a mysterious someone (or something) has murdered all of Roger's fellow crewmates during one of his famous supply-closet naps. Join Roger as he escapes the station, travels to Labion for the first time, manages to die in literally dozens of creative new ways as he struggles to figure out just what happened aboard LOS10 and—if he plays his cards right—save the universe from a fate too terrible to mention.
- Fester's World o' Wonders is home of an upcoming fan production called Fester's Quest and has some basic information about the series. The site was last updated 2001-05-10, a month after it was set up.
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