My first real computer was an IBM PCjr. This bit of history was IBM’s attempt to parlay their success with business machines into a computer designed for the home. The ad campaign used Chaplin’s “The Tramp,” a refreshing change from the late 70’s and early 80’s ads for family-oriented computers and game consoles that featured a family hopped up on Ritalin, smashed uncomfortably together, with looks of orgasmic joy on their faces as they played Asteroids or worked on their Lotus 123 spreadsheet together.

While the Junior never really took off due to various reasons you can read about in the link above, it was my main machine from around 7th grade up until I acquired a PC clone midway through my high school career. My family purchased a second floppy add-on from a company called Racor (you can see a pretty close approximation of what my rig looked like in that first Wiki entry) as well as a 300 (!) baud modem. While the modem consumed the bulk of my time with the machine, dialing into various local BBSes (one of which I’ll talk about in a future article), it was always first and foremost a gaming computer. And one of the first games I owned was Sierra Online’s King’s Quest.

As you can see in the photo, early PCjr games that were distributed by IBM came in a cool plastic container, much like an over sized cassette case. They’re definitely a bitch to open. The game itself came on a 5.25 inch floppy, and the case contains the save disc I was using as well (looks like I decided the Interplanetary Spy text adventure I was making at the time had to be sacrificed). Along with the manual, the game comes with a keyboard overlay to save your brain from memorizing the insane number of controls (all eight) the game had. I also like the backup disc voucher, just in case the cat decides to perforate your lone copy of the game.

Coming from a background of playing simple arcade games on an Atari 2600 and text adventures like Zork, King’s Quest was a massive upgrade. You controlled our hero Sir Grahame via a joystick (the one I had was IBM’s official version, a small box with two well placed buttons and a slender stick you could manipulate comfortably with the thumb) as he quested around his 16 color world, tasked with saving the realm for a dying king. Simple conversations could be had with the various residents as you solved a slew of puzzles, most of which were copped from The Brothers Grimm’s playbook.

My primary recollections are of desperate pixel hunting in order to avoid the many obstacles which the developers put in my path. I spent an unhealthy amount of time trying to find some way around the Gingerbread House, finagling the joystick to move Grahame into every pixelated tree nook and shrub cranny to no avail. A number of areas hosted an enemy which was impossible to outrun or escape, but there I’d be, reloading the game over and over in a futile attempt to beat the system. In the end, I resorted to hints from Compute or one of the other popular family computer magazines of the time to complete the adventure. But unlike today where I have a wealth of games from my acre long backlog, all I had then was King’s Quest and the edutainment game Fraction Fever (which apparently has had no lasting effect). My patience was never ending. Unless it involved solving fractions on a pogo stick.

While I recall putting a lot of effort into the sequel on the PC clone, I never completed Grahame’s second adventure. It would not be until I bought my first CD-ROM drive that I would plow through another King’s Quest game, at which point he’d turned over the questing duties to his son. One thing I never understood was that in all the sequels in which he was the main character, the dude never changed his outfit. You’d think after (spoiler alert) becoming a king he’d get a wardrobe upgrade from his Robin Hood by way of pastel adventurer’s garb. But in the end, the adventure game genre was demoted to a niche, Sierra as a company ran its course, and the final official title was a poorly reviewed third person action game. It’s an ignoble end to a series where that first game mesmerized and engaged me, firmly planting my roots as a lifelong gamer. Thankfully those early memories never dulled. They sparked my imagination and drove my hunger for more titles with the level of interactivity and visually realized world King’s Quest possessed, which up until then no one had experienced before.