Space Quest on PC - 1986

Sierra games were pretty groundbreaking back in the 80's. While most other games at this point were geared towards a child audience, Sierra was producing the "Quest" games that while kids could play them, for the most part they were far too complicated for a kid to complete.

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While many will argue that these graphics are inferior to those that existed on NES already at the time, there was no real match for the gameplay in that typing words on the keyboard made the game very complicated and dare I say, adult.

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In order to get past certain areas it would often involve wandering around and looking at everything and then attempting to interact with the environment. However, this wasn't like the NES or even modern-day systems where you could just press "x" on everything until something happened, you had to type EXACTLY what it was the system was looking for in order to progress, normally in exactly the correct order.

Keep in mind that there was no internet in the 80's so either you were going to figure it out, or you were going to buy a $15 cheat book - which kind of ruined the game.

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I think we can successfully say that this game would not hold anyone's attention for very long today but back when me and my buddy were playing this in the late 80's it was pretty engrossing. When we would get stuck we would ponder it at at school and come back with some ideas. We made a pact to never use the cheat book and as far as I know neither of us violated that rule.

When you would progress to the next area there was a tremendous feeling of accomplishment and despite the pretty poor graphics and sound for the time period, this type of game quickly became my favorite. There would later be many Space Quest and also King's Quest games, all of which functioned in a similar fashion.

While I don't really think that anyone would enjoy this text driven game today, anyone can play the game for free here. It is actually simplified a bit because all of the available options for commands can be selected from a drop-down list instead of referencing a book like we had to do back in the day.

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The girls commentary is a bit annoying but it was the only video I could find where the person doesn't play the entire game in one vid.