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When I first stumbled on this site, I felt the child in me suddently waking up. A collective of Sierra memories! I registered in a split second to read what other fans had to say, and also because I couldn’t think of a better place than here to share my story.
I was around twelve when I played my first Sierra game. We were fortunate enough to have a computer at home, even if we had little money and lived far away from anything resembling a big city.
I remember it was a huge metal box, very heavy, very noisy, and definately very beige. The machine was a 286 with a monochrome screen and a 5 inches floppy drive. The cutting edge. And it was as boring as watching paint dry. It could do little more than play beeps and tweeps, calculate biorythms, and occasionnally play Tic-Tac-Toe. In front of such a towering display of raw technological power, the kid I was kept asking but one question : couldn’t that thing play any REAL games?
One afternoon, my cousin from the city visited our house and, knowing we owned a computer, had brought me a present. A box, with computer disks in it. Ten, huge floppy disks. I had never seen so many at one time and apparently, they were all for one program. I had no idea what it was, but I was intrigued.
And then the box asked me ” So you want to be a hero? “
I said yes.
On that afternoon, in my tiny bedroom, the silent, always daydreaming kid I was fell in love with gaming. This wasn’t TV firing music videos faster than I could zap. This wasn’t a jump and stomp rake-in-a-gazillion-points console system. It was an adventure game. It was a world.
That was my first Sierra game, and one of the fondest memories of my entire life. I’m obviously refering to the then named ” Hero’s Quest “, which later became the Quest for Glory series. I still play them to this day, and no other computer game stands higher on my list than those five games. Not even Half-Life 2 could beat them in my eyes. I owe these games a great deal.
Can you tell english is not my first language? If not, it’s thanks to all those years of questing for glory. I live in a small town north of Montréal. I’m french and so these games forced me to read, type and write in a language that was not my own. They were the best english teachers I ever had. They filled my childhood with countless joyful gaming moments, fueled my imagination and helped shape the man I am today.
Now, I’m a writer. I write science-fiction, fantasy, graphic novels, cartoons, and I’m a game writer for a local software company. We’re hoping to release our first game next year. All this I owe it to the books I read as a child, and that box who doubted I had the stuff heroes were made of.
The Quest for Glory series was – and still is – more than just games to me. They’re places where I enjoy going back after exhausting writing sessions. They’re people and sounds. They’re smiles. They are fond memories.
So if Lori and Corey Cole read this one day, thank you. Thank you for many great memories. And to Ken and Roberta Williams, thank you for making it all possible. Sierra brought amazing games to millions of fans. We are all in your debt.
Simon Charles -
(My memories as well) I believe it was the summer of 94 or 95, (whichever came after my 7th year in public school,) and I had just finished my frankenstien project. I had saved my dad around a thousand dollars by building our new computer piece by piece buying the parts from computer shows. The process took about six months, and on the way I learned amazing things. First, if you work on the computer at school in the computer lab without too much teacher supervision during your study hall and teacher asisstant hour and you wire a power supply backwards, a cloud of smoke appears and everyone gets to go outside for twenty minutes. Another was that dropping a hard drive tends to end it’s life (adios, two hundred dollars, i.e. three weeks wages at 7 mile fair.) Further it’s all worth it when the first game you buy is The Quest for Glory. I loved it so much I bought the sequel which had come out some years earlier. I couldn’t figure out for the longest time why the graphics were so much better on the first game in the series. I have since figured it out. I soon after bought wages of war while waiting for shadows of darkness per the decieving end credits of QFG2. During the day I was a computer geek nobody really cared for, but at night I came alive in these games. I saved an ungrateful prince, a grateful princess, a strange court jester, met the most whimsical and loveable wizard of all time, killed trolls, rode on a saurus, stopped a war, saved a land from more strange ooze, chased away an ogress only to make her a pie, and I didn’t even get a lousy t-shirt. But I do have the happiest nights of my young adult life to thank sierra, ken and roberta, and of course Lori and Corey (by the way Corey, there’s not an e in your name even if 9 out of 10 grammer school teachers agree with you) for. Love and gratitude and of course thank you.
-Cornell Weber
Milwaukee, WI -
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(re: re: re: re: re: Leisure Suit Larry 6 Memory Error) hey no problem… 🙂 glad it works for you. Actually I have a very wide knowledge about problems with the old games on new computers… especially QFG (we have a website over at
Link: http://www.geocities.com/qfgs(http://www.geocities.com/qfgs)
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this happens because today sound cards don’t actually have a midi player, it’s actually a software (part of the sound driver) that listens to the MIDI port, and play actually WAV accordingly. That’s why if you try to “play” into the MIDI chip on the sound-card (i.e you choose Sound-Blaster/Adlib, even if it says it supports it, and it says that becuase your card is SB compatible) yout get nothing because THERE IS NO MIDI CHIP there…
-Eyal -
(Learning english with Sierra)
English is not my first language either. I come from a small village north of montréal also. English in Québec is learned as a second language. But thanks to Quest for glory, Leisure suit larry (I’m a perv, what can I say?), King’s quest and all of those fantastic games, I learned to write and speak english properly(you be the judge :)).
It may sound like nothing to people born with the english language. But it completely changes the game experience.
Let’s say I want King graham to pick up a bowl. I need to learn what the word for bowl is, and what I want to do with it. So you try a few sentences until you get the rewarding message ‘You have taken the bowl’. You also get a nice little song on the pc speaker. Figuring out what sentence to use was as much a puzzle as using items on others.
There is no other way I can think of that I could have developed such a fascination for the english written langage.
Nowadays when I finish a game, I know my thumbs are a bit more agile and my eyes a little more tired. Sierra games rewarded the player on so many levels. And the high-quality writing, even though sometimes simplistic, made sure that you could trust these games to be well written.
And I have a confession to make, to me Ken williams was the mayor of Cooltown. I mean, he appeared exactly when I finally thought I was going to see some nakedness in leisure suit larry. That sort of quirkyness is rare in games today I think. And it helped shape the dysfunctional buffon that I am 🙂 Thanx Ken and all who showed me the door into the world of possibilities.
!Simon Love!
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(re: My memories…)
Oh I remember always wanting to play the Tandy that I have as a tiny 4 year old kid.I never new much words so I could never ever beat the only Fun Tandy game (at least I thought so) Which was Hero’s quest. I would always just make a fighter with magic properties so I could shoot at the enemies then attack them. Though I never lasted long cause of me never buying any potions due to not knowing many words. I remember beating Quest for glory but I have never beaten hero’s quest. There are just too many disks to switch around. I still play it and get farther and farther into it. I’m currently just finishing off the great kobalds cave wheere I sing along to that great tune.
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