| Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Sierra |
| Publisher(s) | Sierra |
| Designer(s) | Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy |
| Engine | AGI |
| Platform(s) | DOS, Macintosh, Apple II, Apple IIGS, Amiga, Atari ST |
| Release date(s) | October 1986 |
| Genre(s) | Adventure |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
| Media/distribution | 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, Tandy DAC (TL/SL), or Tandy/PCjr Sound Card |
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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).
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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 that the ship has been boarded and seized by the sinister Sariens. Using a keycard that he found from the body of a dead crew member, he finds his way to an escape pod and escapes the Arcada.
After crash-landing, he finds himself in the dry and barren wasteland of the planet Kerona. After making his way through the desert and a system of underground caves, he is tasked by an insectoid alien with killing a monstrous creature called Orat. After succeeding in this task, he returns to the alien with proof of his success in the form of a piece of Orat's flesh. As a reward, the alien lets him into an underground complex inhabited by more aliens, and provides Roger with a skimmer, a small flying vehicle which cruises a few feet over the sandy ground.
The alien tells Roger there is a town that he may travel to in order to find a way off the planet. After navigating a rocky section of the planet, Roger reaches the town of Ulence Flats and goes to the local bar. By playing a video slot machine, Roger wins enough money to buy a spaceship and a navigation droid.
He overhears from a bar customer the location of the Sariens' spaceship, the Deltaur, and flies to its coordinates. He then infiltrates the ship, finds his way to the Star Generator and programs it to self-destruct, escaping the ship just before it explodes.
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.
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, Atari ST 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 the interactive fiction game 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.
As a form of copy protection, coordinates in the game while in the escape pod as well as the rocket purchased at Tiny's Used Spaceships are only found in the manual. Also, the code for retrieving the cartridge aboard the Deltaur can only be found in the manual.
| Space Quest I: Roger Wilco in The Sarien Encounter | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Sierra |
| Publisher(s) | Sierra |
| Designer(s) | Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy |
| Engine | SCI1 |
| Platform(s) | DOS, Macintosh, Amiga |
| Release date(s) | 1991 |
| Genre(s) | Adventure |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
| Media/distribution | 3.5" Floppy Disk or 5.25" Floppy Disk |
| System requirements
8088/8086 CPU, 640KB RAM, EGA, MCGA, Tandy/PCjr, or VGA Graphics, Adlib, Game Blaster, MPU-401 MIDI, PC speaker, Pro Audio Spectrum, Sound Blaster, Tandy DAC (TL/SL), or Tandy/PCjr sound card. |
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Space Quest was eventually remade using Sierra's newer SCI language, which allowed the game to upgrade from its original EGA graphics to VGA. Rebranded to Space Quest I: Roger Wilco in The Sarien Encounter to follow the new series naming convention introduced with Space Quest IV, 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.
The VGA remake also featured the 'taste' and 'smell' icons, which would reappear in Space Quest IV. These icons are not used to solve any puzzles; instead, they merely serve as comic fodder for the game's humor.
When leaving Ulence Flats in the VGA version, the time pod from Space Quest IV appears. Space Quest IV was developed around the same time.
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 rare.
The 1991 remake of the game was reviewed in 1992 in Dragon #177 by Hartley, Patricia, and Kirk Lesser in "The Role of Computers" column. The reviewers gave the game 5 out of 5 stars.[1]
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