Old School EGA Goodness in your Browser

April 20, 2009 9:31 AM

Welcome to Sarien.net, the portal for reliving the classic Sierra On-Line adventure games. With its focus on instant fun and a unique multiplayer experience, Sarien.net hopes to win new gamers' hearts and promote the adventure game genre. Available currently: Leisure Suit Larry 1, Police Quest 1, and Space Quest 1.
posted by spec80 (58 comments total)

Police Quest 1! Don't forget to do a full walk around of your vehicle or else you might get a flat tire!
posted by Burhanistan at 9:33 AM on April 20, 2009

Also, per the title, it's EGA, not VGA.
posted by Burhanistan at 9:34 AM on April 20, 2009 [1 favorite]

A few bugs in the interface: careful using the backspace key, as your browser may interpret it as a Back command; you might have to use the more->selection location command if you get stuck.
posted by jedicus at 9:42 AM on April 20, 2009

Please add The Colonel's Bequest and King's Quest III.
posted by jeremy b at 9:51 AM on April 20, 2009

I never really got in to Sierra's games as they were adventure games, that, unlike Monkey Island (and the rest of Lucasart's titles) punished you for experimentation. I died so many times when I wanted to do something basic like walk to a certain point or pick up a knife. An adventure game where you get punished for adventuring is not my cup of tea.

Which is not to say I didn't play Leisure Suit Larry endlessly for a glimpse at virtual boobs. I remember the copy protection teaching me (through trial and error) about American culture/politics.
posted by slimepuppy at 9:53 AM on April 20, 2009 [1 favorite]

Thanks Burhanistan! I just mailed a mod to request a correction.
posted by spec80 at 9:54 AM on April 20, 2009

Oh man. I haven't seen Leisure Suit Larry 1 since middle school. Thanks so much for this!
posted by shiu mai baby at 9:54 AM on April 20, 2009

Is there no sound or am I experiencing something funky?
posted by fusinski at 9:57 AM on April 20, 2009

Consider it ezzle gizzle azzled.
posted by cortex at 9:57 AM on April 20, 2009

Wow I remember Larry like it was yesterday. I think I had a sequel also, where he goes to Los Vegas or something. And Police Quest, awesome. I think I actually put these games on the curb 2 years ago when we moved. I had them in the basement for years.
The online Larry seems to have several Larrys playing at the same time, it's very confusing.
posted by chococat at 9:58 AM on April 20, 2009

I haven't seen Leisure Suit Larry 1 since middle school.

How did you get past their impenetrable age-verification process?
posted by jeremy b at 9:58 AM on April 20, 2009

Las Vegas. Lost in Las Vegas?
posted by chococat at 9:59 AM on April 20, 2009

The MMO aspect of this is hilarious!
posted by fusinski at 9:59 AM on April 20, 2009

Enjoy it while you can. Countdown to lawyering out of existence in 3..2..
posted by mark242 at 10:00 AM on April 20, 2009

Is there no sound or am I experiencing something funky?

Depends, are you playing Leisure Suit Larry?
posted by blue_beetle at 10:00 AM on April 20, 2009

I accidentally clicked the screen and crashed my patrol car in Police Quest already. Damnit, Sierra.
posted by uncleozzy at 10:01 AM on April 20, 2009

Ah, Sierra On-Line. Just the other day, I was fondly reminiscing about the gloriously awesome Gobliiins series. The original artist, Pierre Gilhodes, has recently released a 3D sequel. There's also a spiritual sequel called The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble.

Sorry, slight derail.
posted by archagon at 10:02 AM on April 20, 2009

Leisure Suit Larry is super buggy....good idea though and I hope they fix it.
posted by GavinR at 10:15 AM on April 20, 2009

An adventure game where you get punished for adventuring is not my cup of tea.

The Sierra games were more "old-school" in that respect. I think the punishment aspect comes from attempting to prevent players from simply trying completely random things and winning the game by exhausting all of the possible options rather than by cleverness. So in an early text adventure like Zork, stumbling around a dark room trying to complete a puzzle through random actions would get you eaten by a grue. It even extends to games outside of adventures, such as Nethack and other roguelikes that have random unknown items and punish players for simply trying them rather than deducing their properties.

The problem with doing it in an adventure game is that, to a certain extent, everyone has to try some random things at some point when they get stuck. In some ways in-game death can be helpful, because it tells you that you're not on the right track. But it does require you to be more careful about saving in the right places, and for many people makes the game less fun.

I thought Sierra's gameover-heavy gameplay really worked well in the early Police Quest games, though. As Burhanistan mentioned, tiny violations of police procedure resulted in big penalties, and in some cases death, but if you read the massive game manual you could learn pretty much everything you needed to know (although it didn't tell you not to walk in front of the dartboard at the biker bar). It added an extra research aspect to the game that actually made sense in the context of a police procedural.
posted by burnmp3s at 10:20 AM on April 20, 2009

Oh man, the police quest games. The only games I can immediately recall that were so insistent that you follow the personal story of the protagonist that you couldn't actually do your fucking job as an officer of the law until you either visited your partner the hospital, or called your wife on the phone, or spoke at your kid's school or whatever personal task they'd assigned you.

oh sierra. I love you like an abused wife loves her man.
posted by shmegegge at 10:22 AM on April 20, 2009

Las Vegas. Lost in Las Vegas?

The first Leisure Suit Larry took place in the town of Lost Wages.
posted by Kabanos at 10:23 AM on April 20, 2009

Burhanistan: "Also, per the title, it's EGA, not VGA."

In case you need it, you can download VGA2EGA .EXE from ExecPC BBS, it's the biggest BBS in the world, they have over 100 lines.
posted by stbalbach at 10:24 AM on April 20, 2009 [3 favorites]

Ah yes, this is my childhood. A year ago I realized there were walkthroughs of these games available at YouTube (I'm quite slow sometimes), so I watched all my favourites; Space Quest I, II, and III, Leisure Suit Larry I, Kings Quest I, II, III... The things I learned from this exercise were that a) I still remembered them from beginning to end and b) that I have no idea how I ever made it from, well, beginning to end. I mean, when Police Quest I (for instance) was released I was eleven and I had been studying english for about two years, I think. How my friends and I ever managed to navigate Sonny Bonds through gun lockers, nightsticks, speeding women, drug pushers and what have you is beyond me.

Or, I guess we managed because we loved, LOVED all the Sierra Games we could get our hands on; from Mixed Up Mother Goose to Leisure Suit Larry. We loved them so we invested the time, to through trial and error work out how you should arrest the DUI guy in Police Quest I was a chore, but we finally did it and then we were on our merry ways.

We probably became better persons for it as well. Somehow.

Then the Sierra games became more complex (I remember Kings Quest IV being on 14 5.25 discs, but I could very well be wrong) and we found other interests and suddenly we didn't have the time any more. A shame, I suppose.
posted by soundofsuburbia at 10:32 AM on April 20, 2009

I was super into "Gold Rush" when I was a kid. If you haven't checked out that one, you should.
posted by mattsweaters at 10:51 AM on April 20, 2009 [1 favorite]

I was super into "Gold Rush" when I was a kid

I really liked Gold Rush, except for the random, silent event that would cause you to inexplicably lose the game many hours later.
posted by uncleozzy at 10:58 AM on April 20, 2009

The MMO aspect of this is hilarious!

The 10 minutes I spent creeping other people out in the Police Quest locker-room was totally worth it.
posted by Adam_S at 10:58 AM on April 20, 2009 [2 favorites]

(I remember Kings Quest IV being on 14 5.25 discs, but I could very well be wrong)

I'm pretty sure it came on 4 low-density 3.5" floppies, one of which was a save game disk. So . . . that's about 2MB? Pretty hefty for 1989. And I didn't realize until I typed that date that it was 20 years ago. Wow.
posted by stopgap at 11:02 AM on April 20, 2009

How awesome is this?

D. Quite Awesome.
posted by Mister_A at 11:06 AM on April 20, 2009

Pretty hefty for 1989.

1988, actually. The second release of King's Quest IV came on 9 5.25" disks. See vintage-sierra.com for pictures of What Came in the Box, including those glorious piles of floppies.
posted by jedicus at 11:13 AM on April 20, 2009

Sierra adventure games, I love you so much. I wish I could go back in time to when I was 7 years old so I could experience the joy from the perspective of a kid again. Hell, I think they taught me how to read and write. Thank you, parents, for letting me play these games obsessively.

King's Quest IV - yeah, a crazy amount of floppies. I also remember having to switch disks every few screens or so!
posted by naju at 11:22 AM on April 20, 2009

I loved emptying Manannan's bedpan.
posted by jeremy b at 11:28 AM on April 20, 2009 [1 favorite]

I was super into "Gold Rush" when I was a kid

I think the moment where we realized we both loved Gold Rush as kids might be the moment where my roommate in my first year of college transformed from "weird guy" to "friend for life." Never mind that it's possible to lose the game and have no idea how or why, any game where you can die by being run over by a wagon, getting scurvy, or being eaten by ants? That game owns.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 11:29 AM on April 20, 2009

Speaking as someone who named his first car the Aluminum Mallard: I approve of this, and will be getting no work done for the rest of the day.
posted by 1f2frfbf at 11:30 AM on April 20, 2009

oh sierra. I love you like an abused wife loves her man.
posted by shmegegge at 1:22 PM on April 20 [+] [!]

Seriously? This is the best you can come up with? FFS.
posted by shiu mai baby at 11:38 AM on April 20, 2009

Hi guys, I came into this thread because Ken sent me.

Thanks for this! It's awesome.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 11:40 AM on April 20, 2009

I forgot how to drive in Police Quest. :(
posted by spec80 at 11:47 AM on April 20, 2009

Seriously? This is the best you can come up with? FFS.

no? i didn't realize i was being graded. what's the problem?
posted by shmegegge at 12:04 PM on April 20, 2009

The problem is that it's an offensive, assholish line that's way beneath you.
posted by shiu mai baby at 12:10 PM on April 20, 2009

well then I'm sorry I offended you.
posted by shmegegge at 12:14 PM on April 20, 2009

While I appreciate the apology, it's not a matter of offending me. That kind of throwaway comment is a weak-assed, 4chan-ish thing to throw out in an otherwise fun thread, and it's a bummer that you seem to have a hard time understanding why anyone would regard it as such.
posted by shiu mai baby at 12:22 PM on April 20, 2009

FIAMO
posted by Burhanistan at 12:26 PM on April 20, 2009

it's a bummer that you seem to have a hard time understanding why anyone would regard it as such.

I don't have a hard time understanding it. I completely understand it, and my apology is totally sincere. I'm not trying to say something backhanded like "well, i'm sorry i offended YOU." I'm just apologizing straight up. I'm sorry I offended you. I completely understand why you'd think it was offensive and I apologize without reservation.
posted by shmegegge at 1:49 PM on April 20, 2009 [2 favorites]

I can only hope for Colonel's Bequest AND Dagger of Amon Ra. How many ways were there to die in those games, anyway? Crossing the street, killed by bats, acid, falling down a dark staircase....
posted by ElaineMc at 1:53 PM on April 20, 2009

Colonel's Bequest was much better than Amon Ra.
posted by jeremy b at 2:09 PM on April 20, 2009

Also, per the title, it's EGA, not VGA..

This will not be old school goodness for me until they can emulate my old CGA monitor mangling the graphics of Space Quest I.
posted by Kabanos at 2:29 PM on April 20, 2009

Some of my most cherished junior high memories involve these games. I didn't have reliable access to a computer, but a friend's dad was a computer programmer. His house wasn't all that far away from mine, so I got to go over there a lot. We played Space Quests 1 through 4, Leisure Suit Larry 1 and 3, Police Quest, Manhunter: New York, and King's Quest 1, 2, 3, and 4. I don't know how we got through them.

We'd stock up on junk food at the corner gas station, or at the donut shop next to it. Me, Pat, Paul, Jesse, and Aaron. We'd drink Dr. Pepper and eat Cow Tales. It was summer.

There was a Nintendo in the house, too, but when we played the Sierra games, we'd gather around the computer so all of us could decide what the next action would be. Everyone's ideas counted. We tried everything possible; Sierra games may punish failure, but you can get around it just by saving a lot. That's how it's easy to get the right amount of money in Leisure Suit Larry—you just load the game, pull the lever on the slot machine, and save again if you win. If you lose, load the game again. Save, fuck the prostitute. Die of some STD, reload the game and don't fuck the prostitute. Save before you go around the corner, in case Roger Wilco automatically walks off the cliff on the next screen.

We all became better typists because of these games. And you wouldn't believe how long it took us to realize that you could "pause" the game by pressing the space bar—or how thrilled we were when we discovered it. Sometimes, you need a second to think before the spider robot passes under the stone bridge.

My real skill, for some reason—where I helped the most—was getting through those questions at the beginning of Leisure Suit Larry. There actually aren't all that many of them, and I remembered them well. See, the summer before, my little friends and I went to a party at a girl friend's house. There were the girl equivalents to each of us there, only they were cooler than we were. During the party—which really was just a bunch of kids eating Doritos and drinking soda and listening to music—someone showed us that there was a computer in a little room in the girl's house, and it had this adult game on it. I sat there with a friend, playing it for an hour or so. At one point, news trickled into the little computer room that one of the girls liked me, which scared the shit out of me, so I refused to come out of the room and played Leisure Suit Larry for another hour until we all decided to go for a walk.

There were places where we were epically stymied by the games. I'm not sure which one it was, but there's a part in a Leisure Suit Larry game where it seemed like all summer, whenever we played it, we were stuck forever on an airplane. If you got up, stewardesses came in from either side and blocked you. If you sat down again, nothing seemed to happen. We couldn't figure it out. I don't know if we ever did.

There's a place in one of the King's Quest games where you encounter Baba Yaga's hut, and we all were convinced that it had something to do with the piece of music by Modeste Mussorgsky, "The Hut on Fowl's Legs". My dad had a recording. Of course, it turned out to have nothing to do with it.

We would have loved The Secret of Monkey Island. That game rewards experimentation in a way the Sierra games never did. And even though we knew that most likely, there was only one solution to a problem in King's Quest or Space Quest, we still wandered around forever, trying everything, looking for the Sierra equivalent to jumping the flagpole in World 3-2.

These games were holy grails for me forever; I looked for them online for years, and when I found them, it appeared that I couldn't play them unless I had OS9, so I got myself a computer with OS9 on it. Later, I learned how to emulate them, learned about SCUMMVM and DOSBox. I have them all, now. I have Leisure Suit Larry—the black & white version—on an emulated System 6 computer on a thumb drive in my pocket. I can play it on any computer I want. I never, ever thought that it'd be like this in the future.
posted by interrobang at 4:23 PM on April 20, 2009 [4 favorites]

Oh, hell yeah. This is truly awesome, thanks. I never played Space Quest back in the day; been meaning to check it out for a while. I hope they add some of the Kings Quest sequels, too.

Was it just me, or was the driving part of Police Quest 100 times more fun than the actual game? I liked it so much I once spent an entire summer writing a QBasic clone of the driving-around stuff, complete with the original graphics, and a much much larger, procedurally-generated world--something like 40x40 screens, I think. (I meant to add some kind of actual gameplay, too, but never thought of anything good...)

I never, ever thought that it'd be like this in the future.

Man, me neither. I thought all these things were gone for good. This is truly an amazing time to be a nerd...
posted by equalpants at 4:31 PM on April 20, 2009

LSL = KQ with tits.
posted by lemuel at 4:38 PM on April 20, 2009

Oh man, Manhunter:New York. I played that for weeks until I got stuck. I think it was somewhere around the lighting the candles in the church part. Never did get past that. I think I memorized NYC from the map that came with that game, so when I finally did go there for the first time I knew vaguely where "The Battery" was, or the fountain in Central Park, etc.
posted by chococat at 4:50 PM on April 20, 2009

I'm proud to say I beat nearly all of the King's Quest games and the first Space Quest game. Leisure Suit Larry always made me angry because I felt like it needed to be way more porno-like to live up to the whispers that circulated my dweeby crowd. I miss those 486dx50 days. My very first computer game was Megarace! Then, it was the 11th hour and the 7th guest. Then Zork. After that, PC games took a backseat to the Playstation and that's where it's stayed thanks to the 360. I can't even get into the online flash games. Unless there's achievement points involved, there's just no... point.
posted by Bageena at 5:17 PM on April 20, 2009

There are points in the Sierra games. They're in the upper left corner.
posted by interrobang at 7:29 PM on April 20, 2009

Wow, the memories. The first game that I bought with my own money was Conquest of Camelot (it was ~$50 CDN then... games are still ~$50 now... I'm ok with that, I think).

Played Police Quest I and II, Kings Quest I-IV mostly collaboratively, the Space Quest games were awesome until they switched to VGA. Sure, all of the franchises looked 'better' but the gameplay started going downhill. The time-travel-EGA sequence in SQ4 was pretty sweet. I played Leisure Suit Larry but even at the tween age, was pretty disappointed with the limited risque that they entailed. Hero's Quest (renamed Quest for Glory) was my personal high-water-mark for "oh wow, computer games are awesome" - I wrote a fanletter and got a dead-tree letter in reply. Wow. Already, developers were looking forward to higher storage capacity (CDs), but in ways that were totally not what the first titles that were released on CDs used the capacity for.

I wonder what the people who worked at Sierra are up to these days (aside from the founders/producers/whatever - like, the grunt guys)?
posted by porpoise at 9:07 PM on April 20, 2009

Thanks for that, shmegegge. Truly.
posted by shiu mai baby at 4:13 AM on April 21, 2009

I wonder what the people who worked at Sierra are up to these days ...?

Al Lowe, Ken & Roberta Williams, & Scott Murphy
posted by Pinback at 4:16 AM on April 21, 2009

I grew into loving "Kings Quest" and "Gold Rush", did anyone when they were even younger play "Mixed up Mother Goose and the Black Cauldron"?

I'm pretty sure this was the first video game i ever played. My grandparents loved Sierra.
http://www.vintage-sierra.com/childrens/games/donaldclam.jpg
posted by mattsweaters at 10:14 AM on April 21, 2009

I would just like to gloat that in elementary school (6th grade), I got to play King's Quest III on the classroom computer. I spent many an hour trying to explain what a 'save game' was to my uninterested classmates.
posted by Twicketface at 10:43 AM on April 21, 2009

I love that these are multiplayer. my playthrough of Police Quest: In Pursuit of The Death Angel went as follows:

Me: HAS ANYONE SEEN THE DEATH ANGEL?
Me: I'M LOOKING FOR THE DEATH ANGEL.
IF YOU SEE HIM. TELL HIM I'M LOOKING FOR HIM.
APPARENTLY, HE'S A BIG CRIMINAL AND I'M A COP SO I'D LIKE TO ARREST HIM.

some other guy: who are you?

Me: I DON'T KNOW YET, I HAVEN'T ASKED ANY NPCS.

2nd guy: take out gun.

Me: LF DEATH ANGEL. /W ME IF YOU GOT.

2nd guy: shoot self

2nd guy then leaves the game.
posted by shmegegge at 2:08 PM on April 22, 2009

Oh man, this brings back real memories. I had to have my dad play poker for me, because my 10 year old brain couldn't wrap itself around the game.

Here's hoping they add KQ as well. I had a buggy copy of KQ2 that didn't allow me to save my game. I must finish it.

P.S. Anyone know of a site where they have walkthroughs of the old Sierra games? I had one for PQ that told you what to type and what to do to finish the game.
posted by reenum at 2:55 PM on April 22, 2009