King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne

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King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne

Developer(s)	Sierra Entertainment
Publisher(s)	Sierra Entertainment
Release date(s)	1985
Genre(s)	Adventure
Mode(s)	Single player
Platform(s)	MS-DOS, Mac, Apple II, Apple IIGS, Amiga, Atari ST, PCjr

King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne is the second installment in the King's Quest series created by Sierra Entertainment (formerly Sierra On-Line). It uses the same AGI game engine as King's Quest I: Quest for the Crown and features King Graham as the player character.

1 Story
2 Name
3 Re-releases and remakes
4 Trivia
5 External links

[edit] Story

The Magic Mirror shows King Graham a vision about a beautiful woman, Valanice, imprisoned on the top of an ivory tower. Being charmed by her, he is teleported to the world of Kolyma to rescue her. There he must travel through sea, air, and even death to gain the keys that unlock the three doors to the world where Hagatha the witch has imprisoned Valanice.

[edit] Name

The name is a parody of the movie Romancing the Stone (1984) by Robert Zemeckis.

[edit] Re-releases and remakes

The game was first released in 1985 as a disk that booted on start-up but was re-released in 1987 with EGA support to run under DOS. This is why most remaining copies bear a 1987 rather than a 1985 copyright date.

Due to rather disappointing sales of the 1990 remake of King's Quest I, the prospect of officially remaking and re-releasing King’s Quest II was scrapped. It was unofficially remade in 2002 when AGD Interactive, then known as Tierra Entertainment, released the fan-made King's Quest II+: Romancing the Stones.

The remake uses a point-and-click interface functionally identical to an advanced SCI game engine, VGA graphics and digital sound, including full speech for all characters. Notably for an unofficial, fan-made project, the game's protagonist King Graham is voiced by Josh Mandel, who also voiced the part in Sierra's official CD-ROM full-speech versions of King's Quest V and VI. In contrast to the group's remake of King's Quest I, a content-wise identical presentation upgrade, King's Quest II+ redesigns the original game to add a full-fledged plot instead of the scarce few story elements of the 1985 version, a number of puzzles, new characters and locations including a town, and references to future King's Quest games.

[edit] Trivia

Future Space Quest series designers Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe were on the King's Quest II development team, beginning the long-standing Sierra tradition of using King's Quest as a training ground for future game designers.
King's Quest II included 92 different "rooms" (individual screens), a 15% increase over the original King's Quest.
The title is a play on Romancing the Stone