Oh, I played many of the others, but SQ -- specifically II -- was what made me fall in love with adventure games, warts and all. I learned English (well, besides taking actual English classes anyway) by typing words in its text interface.
I remember being nine years old, sitting in front of SQ1 with my best friend, and trying to survive the escape pod early in the game. How do you avoid dying when it crashes on an alien world?
Our only hope was my neighbor who was a few years older and seemingly infinitely wise. I called him up, and patiently he spelled out the magic words to type before launching the escape pod:
“FASTEN SEAT BELT”
What do those words mean? We had no idea, but we lived on to explore another world.
A few years later I could read and write English just fine, but had no idea how anything was pronounced. Sierra English was a real thing among my generation.
Same memories for me, but with King’s quest 3. I still have the tiny English-french dictionary I wrecked by opening it and translating every and each word of each sentence, for that [6 months] adventure. To get rid of the wizard, become a bird, kill that nasty spider, go into bear’s house, etc, etc…
The guys who created Space Quest kickstarted another sci-fi comedy adventure game... 13 years ago. It went (and is still going) poorly, and Kotaku just posted about the ordeal today:
I’ve been waiting 13 years and just received a Steam early access code a few days ago. Someone did some regression analysis a while back based on average kickstarter demographics and estimated that 25% of the people who kickstarted the project are already dead. 13 years feels like a lifetime ago. I’m grateful they kept chipping away at the game instead of walking away, but it has been disappointing.
The money must have run out ages ago, right? So it has to have been a huge burden for the Two Guys. I don't envy them. And it seems the Early Access game they finally released is broken and not very good.
I've read an article that guesses they must have attempted changing Unity versions at least a couple of times, partly because they couldn't figure out how to solve a savegame bug (still not working right!).
25%? Wow. That seems high, but when you consider we were backing a game based on the popularity of a now almost-40-year-old franchise, it seems a bit more reasonable.
To be honest I'm not sure I want to relive that era; my memories of it are some of the fondest, but I don't think I'd like to play these games nowadays (it's been a while since I replayed them using DOSBox or ScummVM!).
Oh, I played many of the others, but SQ -- specifically II -- was what made me fall in love with adventure games, warts and all. I learned English (well, besides taking actual English classes anyway) by typing words in its text interface.