Sierra On-Line changed the landscape of adventure games in the 1980s and paved the first real asphalt upon which fut🉐ure developers would tread. In their quest (no pun intended!) to deliver outstanding, immersive games, they constantly pushed the limits of computer technology, which in those days were in relative infancy.
Today we're going to take a look at the Top 10 Sierra adventure game franchises, ranked in order of importance. We'll exami๊ne what each franchise managed to accomplish and why they deserve so much respect from the video game community.
10 𒀰 Mystery House
Mystery House was bold, ambitious, and clever. It was Sierra's first graphic adventure game🐎 and would lay the foundation for everything that followed in its wake. It was one of th🔴e first games to introduce actual graphics to an adventure game as opposed to a text-based interface. This singular feature made waves within the video game community.
Most shocking of all, the sales numbers went through the roof. Mystery House sold over 10,000 copies through mail order alone and enjoyed further success during a re-release which pushed another 80,000. That might seem like chicken feed in our day and age, but, for two budding developers working ou🐷t of their home during the fledgling computing age of 1980, it was a recipe for success.
9 Hoyle's Book of Games 🦂
Card players would find much to love about Sierra's foray into the tabletop gaming sector. Hoyle's Book Of Games blended such memorable card games as Crazy Eights, Old Maid, and Cribbage, with characters from man♏y of the company's most famous franchises. For the first time, players could have a game of Klondike with Larry Laffer, or Hearts with Princess Rosella.
What's most interesting about the Hoyle's series of games were just how many there were. While some gamers might be forgiven𒊎 for believing there were only a handful of volumes in the series, there were actually dozens of them which featured everything from Poker to Crosswords.
8 Phantasmagoria 🌊
Roberta Williams may have started out creating wondrous fantasy adventure games that appealed to a younger audience, but she had a dark side, as well. Phantasmagoria was her first true flirtation with the macabre a꧙nd serv🐭ed up as much controversy as it did dollar signs.
Besides the graphic violence and gore, Phantasmagoria struck a nerve among multiple activists groups for a particularly unpleasant rape scene, which was practically unheard of in gaming at that time, not to mention today! Nevertheless, it was still a technological marvel and broke new ground on several fronts by taking the adventure game formula into a more realistic direction, thanks to more acc💧essible technology.
7 Manhunter
The Manhunter series was perhaps the darkest and most adult of Sierra's game franchises at the time of its release. It focused heavily on the horror aspects of storyte🌄ll💟ing, set against the backdrop of a nightmarish future Earth that had since been dominated by an invading alien force.
As a Manhunter working for the aliens, your task is to infiltrate and destroy an underground human resistance by relying on a detective-style approach. The player could examine gruesome crime scenes, pick out evidence, and follow clues to the next objective. The story involved some twists and turns between the original and its sequel, Manhunter: San Francisco. It was also one of the first Sierra games to focus on a point and click interface as opposed to text parser, which would later be adopted for all of the company's ꧅future titles.
6 🍨 Mixed-up Mother Goose
Designer Roberta Williams would capitalize on the success she enjoyed with the King's Quest series, and develop a game targeted specifically at young gamers. Mixed-Up Mother Goose is a memorable take on classic children's nursery rhymes. It allowed kids to embark on ꦡtheir own adventure to set things right by identifying various items required to put the nursery rhymes back into harmony.
The game would go on to win several educational awards and sell over half-a-million copies, proving there was a market for imaginative, charming adventure games for kids. It was followed up with 1991's Mixed-Up Fairy Tales.
5 🀅 Leꦬisure Suit Larry
Though positively tame by today's standards, Leisure Suit Larry was a renegade game franchise that made massive headway within the wild west days of early computer gaming. This adult adventure focused on a down on his luck loser named Larry Laffer and his quest to get laid, with nothin🅺g but his signature leisure suit and $94 bucks in his pocket.
The franchise would go on to spawn 5 direct sequels before retiring in 1996. Vivendi would revive the series in 2004 with Magna Cum Laude, and most recently in 2018's Wet Dreams Don't Dry. It retains legendary status as the 🌠one game franchise which pushed the objectionable content en🌺velope long before mainstream internet pornography became a thing.
4 ☂ Quest For Glory 🐎
Originally titled "Hero's Quest," the Quest For Glory series took the established adventure game mechanics that Sierra had laid down and injected a heavy set of RPG elements into the game𒀰 for a more traditional roleplaying experience.
The original game let players craft their own character from Fighter, Magic-user, and Thief presets and add skills to personalize the gameplay experience to their liking. It was also one of the first games to feature a day and night cycle, the necessity for food and drink, and leveling of skills based on the frequency of use. In many ways, it was the precursor to Skyrim, through and through. The series would go on to enjoy a number of sequels each taking place in different lands, where the story could contin▨ue unabated.
3 🅷 Police Quest
Where Space Quest tackled comedy, Police Quest went for gritty realism. It was the brainchild of former California Highway Patrol officer Jim Walls, who retired after a traumatic shooting incident while on duty. During his time off, he crafted the story for the original Police Quest game, which focused on an idealistic cop in pursuit of a dangeꦜrous drug lord dubbed "The Death Angel."
Lauded for its attention to detail and adherence to actual police procedures, the Police Quest series served as a counter-balance to the lightheartedness of other Sierra adventure games and was one of the few games to put the pl🍌ayer in the shoes 🐼of an actual police officer.
2 ♏ ಌ Space Quest
By the time Space Quest had rolled out of production, King's Quest had already laid a solid groundwork that was making Sierra some serious dough. Designers Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy could have gone with a tradꦏitional sci-fi epic, but they instead chose t🅰o buck the trend and focus on a parody series, to everyone's delight.
Space Quest went on to ch☂urn out a number of excellent sequels with side-splitting content, from the starship Enterprise going through an intergalactic drive-thru window to jabs at Microsoft head Bill Gates. At the heart of it all was janitor extraordinaire, Roger Wilco, bumbling his way from one insane set piece to another. This was a magical time to be a ga🍒mer!
1 ♔ King's Quest 🥀
King's Quest is considered the great, great granddaddy of adventure games, and 🥃it's easy to see why. The original pushed the boundaries of what personal computers were capable of in 1983 while managing to tell magnificent stories that gamers had never before experienced.
One may balk at how stone-aged the game is by today's AAA standards, but, without King's Quest, there would be no Elder Scrolls, The Witcher, or168澳洲幸运5开奖网: Dragon Age—simple as that. Not only did it fight against the🌜 technical limitations of a CGA graphics palette, but it also tried its hand at animation, scripted events, and basic music production from pre-Soundblaster era computers. Pay your respects!