Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter

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Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter
Image:Space Quest - The Sarien Encounter Coverart.png
Developer(s) Sierra
Publisher(s) Sierra
Designer(s) Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy
Engine AGI
Platform(s) DOS, Macintosh, Amiga, Atari ST
Release date 1986
Genre(s) Adventure
Mode(s) Single-player
Media 3.5" Floppy Disk or 5.25" Floppy Disk
System requirements 8088/8086 CPU, 256KB RAM, CGA, EGA, Hercules, or Tandy/PCjr Graphics, PC speaker or Tandy/PCjr Sound Card
Input methods Keyboard or Joystick

Space Quest or more formally Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter was a video game released in October of 1986 and quickly became a hit, selling in excess of 100,000 copies (sales are believed to be around 200,000 to date, not including the many compilations it has been included in).

Contents

[edit] Plot

(Players of the original game are never told the hero's name, but are instead asked to enter their own. The default name of "Roger Wilco" — a reference to the abbreviated radio communication, "Roger, Will Comply" — became the de facto name of the hero in the later games of the series.)

Roger is a member of the cleaning crew onboard the scientific spaceship "Arcada", which holds a powerful experimental device called the "Star Generator" (a thinly-veiled reference to the Genesis Device from Star Trek II). Roger emerges from an on-duty nap in a broom closet to find the ship has been boarded and seized by the sinister Sariens. Using a keycard he found from the dead body of a guy named Jerry, he finds his way to an escape pod and escapes the "Arcada". After crash-landing, he finds himself on a dry and barren wasteland that is the planet Kerona. Making his way through the desert and through a system of caves below, he is tasked with the killing of a creature called the Orat. Luring a Sarien Spider Droid sent by the aliens to find him, he leads it into the Orat's cave. It attacks the Orat and detonates, destroying itself and the Orat.

After succeeding in this task, he returns to the area where he had been given the task and shows the alien that assigned the task to Roger a piece of the Orat. He lets him through a door, and Roger is given a skimmer and the keys.

After navigating a rocky section of the planet, he goes to a bar, and, playing a game of slots, wins a sufficient amount of money so that he can buy a spaceship and a navigation droid. He does so, and flies to the coordinates (which he overheard from a customer at the bar) where the "Deltaur", the Sarien ship that boarded the "Arcada", is located. After getting aboard it, he infiltrates the "Deltaur" and self-destructs the Star Generator.

At the end of the game his efforts are rewarded when Roger receives the Golden Mop as a token of eternal gratitude from the people of Xenon and becomes an instant celebrity.

[edit] Gameplay

The game was programmed using Sierra's AGI engine and featured a pseudo-3D environment, allowing the character to move in front of and behind background objects. The primary means of input in Space Quest, as in many other AGI games, was through the use of a text parser for entering commands and use of the keypad or arrow keys for moving Roger Wilco around the screen. The Amiga, Apple IIGS, and Mac versions of the game offered basic mouse support for movement as well. The game had a 160×200 resolution displaying 16 colours. Sound cards were not available in 1986, so sound was played through the PC's internal speaker; owners of Tandy 1000, PCjr and Amiga computers would hear a three-voice soundtrack, while Apple IIGS owners were treated to a fifteen-voice soundtrack with notably richer sound.

A precursor of this game is an interactive fiction game by the name of Planetfall, created by Infocom, whose player-character is a lowly "Ensign Seventh Class" who does the lowest form of labor aboard a spaceship and who appears on the cover with a mop. Just as King's Quest adapted the text-adventure puzzle games set in a medieval world to a visual display, Space Quest did the same for the space puzzle game.

[edit] Remake

Space Quest was eventually remade using Sierra's newer SCI language, which allowed the game to upgrade from its original EGA graphics to VGA. This version was released on August 20, 1991; in addition to the new VGA graphics, which were drawn in 50's B-movie style, it now featured digitized sounds. The game's interface was also changed, with text-entry being replaced by a standard icon interface which would be used by many SCI games. Curiously, the VGA remake featured the taste and smell icons, which were rarely used during gameplay and were only featured in one Sierra game after Space Quest, namely Space Quest IV, where they were as rarely used.

[edit] Comics

Adventure Comics (a division of Malibu Graphics Publishing Group) released three issues in 1992 of a comic based on Space Quest under the name The Adventures of Roger Wilco. The first was written by John Shaw and was in full colour. The other two were written by Paul O'Connor and were black and white. The print run was very small and the books are very hard to find now.

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