EcoQuest

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EcoQuest is a series of two educational adventure games developed by Sierra Entertainment. The original concept was developed by Sierra VP of Creative Development, Bill Davis. The authors of the series game design are Jane Jensen and Gano Haynes, but Jane was not involved in creating the second game, having moved on to her famous Gabriel Knight series.

The last of Sierra's various "Quest" series, EcoQuest is designed to teach children about the importance of environmental ethics. The games are considerably easier than most Sierra adventures and cannot be lost or rendered unwinnable. Both use a fully mouse-driven version of SCI, in the manner of Space Quest IV and King's Quest VI.

The protagonist is a 10-year-old boy named Adam Greene: the son of an ecologist, and an expert scuba diver.

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[edit] EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus

The first installment, titled The Search for Cetus, was released first on floppy disk, then on CD-ROM with full speech. Adam's attempts to help a dolphin his father has rescued take a turn for the weirder when it starts speaking. In no time flat, he's trying to seek out Cetus, the whale king of Eluria, an underwater kingdom populated by marine animals. He has assistance in the form of several creatures found in the various ecosystems of the world; for instance, a dolphin named Delphineus is an important contributor to the quest. Aside from the considerable liberty of sentient talking animals, the game is more realistic than cartoony - it needs to be, to tell about the real world's environment and pollution. The Search for Cetus introduced the recycling symbol to Sierra's standard palette of command icons, giving the player bonus points for picking up litter. The game features a primitive form of copy protection in the first scene: the player must input a code into a security door to exit the room. The code is 9721, and could be found in the game's manual.

[edit] EcoQuest II: Lost Secret of the Rainforest

In Lost Secret of the Rainforest, the second installment in the series, Adam, now slightly older and able to speak with animals as a matter of course, explores the tropical rainforest in search of a cure of a disease afflicting the local natives, and a way to save the rainforest from destruction. One of the game's innovations was the "Ecorder" display: a tricorder-like device Adam uses to learn about things he finds during his journey. The game is somewhat harder than its predecessor and places more emphasis on the dangers of selfishness and greed, as opposed to the blight of man.

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