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I recently put together a post about AGI games on the Macintosh for my blog, and I was wondering if you remember the reason why you stopped publishing AGI games for the Macintosh at the end of 1990, and why Police Quest II, Space Quest II, and Kings Quest IV were announced but never released?
I have a couple of guesses, e.g. LC’s couldn’d run them (crash, B&W only, color issues), and a focus on SCI instead of AGI. But it would be great if you can remember anything that I could add to the blog, or comment there yourself 🙂
Steve. -
Steve:
I don’t exactly remember. My recollection is that our Mac games didn’t sell that well, and we didn’t have a programmer on staff who was passionate about the Mac. I’m trying to remember who coded the Mac games and no name is coming to mind. My guess is that the Mac version was done by one of our DOS programmers who never really liked the Mac and wanted to go back to programming a PC. Alternately, we may have outsourced it. I’m pretty sure the conversions weren’t particularly well done.
-Ken W
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Thanks for taking the time to respond Ken, digging through the old Sierra Newsletters I found a quote from you saying pretty much the same thing… the Black and White versions didn’t sell well. From the timeline I reconstructed, it seems that Sierra launched colour versions just as the move to SCI had started, and soon after stopped selling any AGI games for the Macintosh.
At the moment it seems to be the last “patched” Mac versions of the AGI games are the hardest to find, it looks like the only way to get the fixes was a patch disk direct from Sierra, so not sure how many people know about those or paid the fee to get them. I just wish I could find out if the 16 colour graphics issue was ever fixed. Too bad that the source code is probably long lost by now.
Hope the sailing life is treating you well, and thanks again to you and your wife for my favourite games of my high school years.
Steve.
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Do the names John Hartin and John Rettig sound familiar? I found an article in the Spring 1990 Sierra newsletter about them working on Space Quest III for the Macintosh.
https://archive.org/details/Sierra_News_Magazine_The_Volume_3_Number_1_Spring_1990_1990_Sierra_On-Line_US/page/n25Thanks again for responding, before, I’ll do a search online and see what I can turn up.
Steve. -
That’s some great work in investigating the Mac ports of AGI games, Steve.
According to the credits for the Mac versions of KQ1, SQ1, and SQ2, the Macintosh version were done by “Mark Langbehn of Fairfield Software”, so that sounds like the Mac ports were contracted out.
Speaking of Mac versions of other Sierra titles, it is interesting to see how few of the SCI0 games were ported to the Mac (SQ3 is the only one which immediately comes to mind). I read that Hero’s Quest was ported to the Mac, but that may be incorrect, or might be confused with the VGA remake which was ported to the Mac.
However, Sierra did a pretty good job in bringing quite a few of its games of the first half of the 90s to the Mac (many which I own).
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“I have a couple of guesses, e.g. LC’s couldn’d run them (crash, B&W only, color issues)…”
That is not true. Larry1 AGI-Version 2.0.6 does work in 16colors on my LC with 6.0.8.
B&W version has glitches, regardless what version.I did not find the AGI patches for Version 2.0.6 for the other sierra titles.
Does anyone have them? -
dr.zeissler is correct, there is a 1991 2.06 release of the AGI interpreter for Macintosh bundled with a later release of Larry 1 that partially fixes the problem. I was able to run it in 16 colours on my Macintosh LC 475, but I had to switch to 24 bit memory mode or selecting the “status” menu caused it to crash.
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68020 LC with 6.0.8:
1.5.5 AGI is working in 1Bit colors
2.0.6 AGI is working in 4Bit colorsDoc
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