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Sierra Creative Interpreter – Scripts
- twoodfin 3y agoI spent hundreds of hours playing the SCI-era Sierra adventures. King’s Quest IV was the first game I played on my first computer, a Hyundai-made XT clone. I’ll die on the hill that dead-end game states and “just in case” save game histories were a critical part of the magic. And the games were never the same when the text prompts were replaced by point & click. Maybe I just hate the feeling I’m on rails.
- geigco 3y agoIt was Kings Quest III and Hero's Quest (Quest for Glory) on my Tandy 1000HX for me!
- karim79 3y agoI'm probably quite a bit older than you, but +1 for King's Quest. The first time I ever loaded a game was on my dad's IBM PC XT when he wasn't around. He had those old slide-out floppy disk drawers. One of them was labeled "games". I had watched him put floppies into the disk drive and switch on the computer. One day he was out and I cheekily decided to try out his computer without permission. I must have been around six years old. I opened the games drawer and pulled out a floppy of King's Quest I, put it into the drive, and switched on the PC (with glorious CGA graphics). It loaded successfully. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do anything in that game and the first eureka moment was when I was standing in a field and typed "pick up carrot". The most notable takeaway from that experience was, I thought there was a real world running inside the computer and from that day the only thing I really wanted to do was mess with computers. I played all the king's quest games, KQ4 (The Perils of Rosella) came quite a bit later, and I loved it.
- johndhi 3y agoAwesome story. Similar for me but my dad showed me this stuff on purpose, haha.
- ninkendo 3y agoMy experience was so identical to yours, except replace Kings Quest 1 with Kings Quest 3, and replace “pick up carrot” with “kick cat”. Other than that I could have written this post myself.
- karim79 3y agoThis comment just made my day. What I didn't mention in my initial comment is that when people ask me, even today, "how did you get into computing and programming" that is the story I tell them. Of course, there's hell of a lot more to it, but that's mostly where it started. (That and my mom teaching me Logo on some ancient Apple machine)
- NikolaNovak 3y agoLol, eerily similar experience, late 80s in eastern Europe. My dad had a 286 for work. I saw him start t a weird version of space invaders in possibly COBOL of all places. So when he was at work I had to figure out how to navigate to right folder, load up what I guess must've been like an online interpreter environment, load up the program, and execute it. But oh the satisfaction! The pride! The feeling of conquering the machine and puzzle! Following that I was on space quest rails more than king quest but what an experience - even if it were on black and white Hercules graphics. Being in east Europe all games were pirated. No manual, no details, foreign language. Playing mean streets without knowing the coordinates for places. And eventually spending first hour of dune 2 terrified of my trike falling off the island into the space chasm... Which turned out to be fog of war not a hole :) Good innocent exciting times!
- empyrrhicist 3y agoI do think Kids These Days (tm) are being done a disservice by how opaquely polished computing environments have become. It's hard to learn about what is going on when everything is abstracted away and the guardrails work so hard to keep you inside the walled garden. It's gotten to the point where cloud services and search interfaces are being pushed so hard that the actual filesystem is a mystery to people at a high school/college level.
- scovetta 3y agoYep, I'm sure it's nostalgia, but AGI/SCI have a special place in my heart. I played King's Quest 3 a few months ago through to the end and it was everything I'd hoped it would be. I really wish someone would point AI at this problem and generate a whole bunch of AGI/SCI games. SierraGPT.
- bradly 3y agoKings Quest IV was my first computer game as well on an LCII. There was just something different about the pace of those games.
- johndhi 3y agoDid you ever play the Kyrandia games? My God I spent a lot of time with them. Leisure Suit Larry (Sierra) was being played by my older cousin and introduced me for the first time to a lot of new concepts haha.
- karim79 3y agoI got my ass handed to me by my dad when he found out I had been playing LSL3 at a friends house. Speaking of the LSL series, we had mastered the whole "how old are you" quiz at the beginning of LSL1, and had photocopies of the bizarre copy protection solutions for 2 and 3. I think I enjoyed LSL2 the most, the one on the cruise ship.
- autoexec 3y agoThose kinds of text interfaces for games would be a perfect use for the kind of AI we have right now. It drove me nuts when I'd try 10 versions of the same thing to find whatever noun or verb the programmer thought I should be using. They were also unforgiving when it came to bad spelling which didn't help. I was grateful for the move to point and click adventure games. Pixel hunting was honestly less frustrating.
- karim79 3y agoThere was this one bit in KQ4, I think near the end, where I got stuck for weeks. A bunch of step stones going across a swamp, if I recall correctly, which needed to be navigated in order to get to the next screen. I repeatedly tried stuff like "jump on stone", "jump across", "swim". "YOU CAN'T DO THAT HERE" It took weeks to figure out that all I needed to do was type "jump" without any additional text. Oh, the good old days.
- cperciva 3y agoIt was Space Quest 1 for my family and friends. "Insert disk into computer"? "Insert disk into drive"? "Use computer to read disk"? Nope, turns out the magic words were "Insert disk into slot".
- vkazanov 3y agoNow, imagine the same problem, but for a kid who didn't really have a lot of exposure to English in his daily life. I both loved and feared those moments in early adventure games: all good, moving on with the story and then... am I an idiot? Is this part of the game puzzle, or I have to iterate all the dictionary words again?
- cperciva 3y agoI learned to spell by playing KQ1 and SQ1. Well, playing the games and having parents whom I could ask questions like "how do you spell 'search body'". It's not just kids without exposure to English who struggled with typed English interfaces!
- vkazanov 3y agoOn the brighter side: I lived through that period when the games transitioned from text-based interfaces to point-and-click ones. What a relief that was! I understand the nostalgia for Infocom games of people like Jimmy Maher - I also have a soft spot for beautiful and polished writing, but this definitely was a way forward for games in general.
- sillywalk 3y agoI remember those "just in case" saves. Sierra loved those 'death screens' I especially liked the Space Quest ones - reload, restart, quit. In hindsight, they're annoying, and IMHO kind of bad game design. Getting to the end, and finding out that to win the game, you needed some random item from level 1, and now you have to go back and do it all over again..
- smokel 3y ago"Rubber tree!"
- brandall10 3y agoAgreed. Infocom games were initially my introduction to text based adventures on an Atari 800XL, then moved to Sierra upon getting a 386xl. I started w/ Leisure Suit Larry 3, then played a variety of Space Quests, Hero Quests/Quest for Glories, King Quests, Police Quests. I also bemoaned the move to point and click. Despite having an original Nintendo (w/ Rob!), those text based Sierra games were the highlight of my game playing youth. There was a perfect blend of imagination, interaction, frustration, that just felt so intimate.
- cempaka 3y agoI'm still surprised that a Hollywood that's clearly starved for good script ideas has never picked up the Gabriel Knight series.
- bombcar 3y agoHollywood doesn’t want good scripts, they want moneymakers and GK isn’t a big enough property to guarantee that.
- no_wizard 3y agoI know this is conventional wisdom and also is very true. however, the funny thing is, when eventually a film maker comes along and makes a film that is both new, unique, and outlandishly successful, then suddenly its "obvious" and Hollywood starts to copy that, but it takes forever for the right person to be in the right place for that to get moved forward, so you end up with rinse wash repeat stuff for the longest time. For example, HBO taking a risk on Game Of Thrones or the initial conception of the new Marvel movies (I'm talking about Iron Man, the first one from 2007, and so on, when it was still novel), Breaking Bad was novel when it came out too. Same with The Walking Dead (the plot elements, not so much the idea of a zombie horror) Its so weird how this industry appears to work from the outside
- bombcar 3y agoWhat’s interesting is “good scripts” are apparently a dime a dozen (diamond dozen in the rough) all over Hollywood; if you find the original scripts for many “crappy” movies they’re moderately decent. It’s after they get massaged for public consumption that they’re often the common dreck we’ve come to expect. What’s annoying is the studios still buy up the rights to tons of properties and then never develop anything. So you can’t even have a small studio/independent film on something like (for example) the Penny Arcade comic, because someone owns those rights and won’t sell
- stcroixx 3y agoAgree, though I think LOTR made fantasy enough of a moneymaker to make GOT not such a moonshot as these other genre kickoffs.
- grumbel 3y agoSimilar collection for SCUMMVM games: https://github.com/EricOakford/SCUMM-Decompilation-Archive https://github.com/EricOakford/SCUMM-Decompilation-Archive
- tptacek 3y agoYour first instinct looking at this is that it's a Lisp, and you read the article about the Smalltalk backstory, but then you read through the code and... it's a Tcl.
- capableweb 3y agoThat was my first impression as well but a closer looks seems to reveal it's missing lists, and I do not know many lisps that are missing lists :)
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoI mean, I read some of the code and it looks like a Smalltalk with an sexpr syntax. But it also seems to have free-floating functions as well unbound from an object/class scope. Also seems to have a mix of class-based and prototype-based inheritance. Why do you say Tcl? Overall I would have loved to have had this programming language available to me as a general purpose language in the 80s and early 90s.
- stcroixx 3y agoKings Quest, Police Quest, Space Quest - these were the first experiences that really fascinated me with computers. The exploratory conversational aspect of the text based interface is still compelling to me. I’d love to see all these games on phones - I think they’d work well.
- andrensairr 3y agoI played a port of PQ1 on a Nokia N95. Sadly it didn't work well, between the small screen, the wrong aspect ratio and the 12 key pad. Perhaps a larger touchscreen might ameliorate some of these problems but I generally find text entry on newer phones much worse with my (large) fingers.
- syntheweave 3y agoSeeing the code for King's Quest V definitely felt like a bucket list item. Although, in truth, it now feels more mundane than mysterious. Reams of code that is just walk and hitbox positioning, animation, "if player has item do A, otherwise do B". I have to wonder if there was another tool or a DSL within Script generating the more lookup-tably stuff.
- hayley-patton 3y agoWhyever the dangling parens? The OpenGOAL decompilation has many dangling parens too - they're a rather odd sight when moving around S-expressions (dodging the issue of if it's "Lisp" or not). I guess WAST and SMT-LIB producers are a mixed bag too.
- joachimma 3y ago>The whole goal was flexibility in programming, and trying to push as much of the programming capabilities up to the game developer level rather than having them have to go into the engine as we could, and decoupling graphics and so forth to the point where you could keep extending the graphical capabilities. I was under the impression that this was not the case, and that the reason Sierra games run poorly on Amiga/Atari was that they could not use the custom chips in those machines. Compared to the Lucasarts interpreter that ran really well on all kinds of hardware, and even allowed the switching of old-school graphics to special-edition to be easily implemented.
- harel 3y agoI loved those games so much. Every time a new one came out and my friend got a "copy" it was a celebration. We'd sit for days at his house playing. I loved the text interface the most and some of the magic was lost when it was replaced. We went through them all from King Quest 1 through the Police Quest series, Space Quest etc. It was glorious. The 80s film "Terminal Entry" featured a 'futuristic' version of a Sierra style game, control by voice prompts. I thought this is what the future has in store for us...
- parasti 3y agoAs someone who has never played the games, this was top notch writing. I just read it all because it was so engaging, accessible and really well paced.