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If you take the time to dig beneath the surface of any human community, no matter how humble, you’ll be rewarded with a welter of fascinating tales and characters. Certainly this is true of Oakhurst, California. The little town nestled in central California’s Yosemite Valley near the western end of the Sierra Nevada Mountains has attracted more than its fair share of dreamers and chancers over the past 175 years or so.

Oakhurst sprang up under the name of Fresno Flats back in the 1850s, when, according to the received wisdom back East, the streams of this part of California glittered with gold; one only had to dip a hand in and scoop one’s fortune out. Needless to say, that was not really the case: the vast majority of the starry-eyed prospectors who passed through the budding settlement found only hardship and disillusionment in the forest around it. The people who did best from the gold rush were those who never ventured any farther into the wilderness than Fresno Flats itself, the ones who settled down right there to serve the needs of the dreamers, by selling them picks, axes, shovels, and pans, not to mention food, liquor, beds, and companions to share said beds for a brief spell of a night. Other hardy pioneers later opened a school, a post office, a lumber mill (complete with a log flume on the Fresno River), and eventually even a proper, moderately productive goldmine. Every one of the brave souls who came to the town and stayed had a unique story to tell, but for sensation value none can top that of Charley Meyers.

On the evening of May 22, 1885, two masked men armed with pistols and shotguns robbed a Wells Fargo stagecoach passing through the Yosemite Valley. The sheriff was at a loss about the crime and its perpetrators until the next afternoon, when a local man noticed some footprints leading away from the site of the robbery through the forest — leading, as it happened, directly to Fresno Flats and then right up to the front porch of Charley Meyers, a young farmer and handyman whose family had heretofore been held in good repute. Called to the scene by the amateur sleuth, the sheriff and his deputies burst into Meyers’s log cabin, where they found another resident of the town, a fellow named William Prescott, fast asleep in bed, looking like he had had quite a night. Prescott told the lawmen that Meyers had gone to Coarsegold, the closest town to Fresno Flats. He was duly rounded up there in short order.

The sheriff thought he had his quarry dead to rights. Not only had they left a trail through the woods obvious enough for his half-blind grandma to follow, but their frames matched the victims’ descriptions of their attackers’ build and they were found with guns in their possession that matched the ones used at the robbery. The victims had said that their assailants had smeared boot blacking over all of their exposed skin to further conceal their identity; sure enough, a can of the stuff was found in Meyers’s barn, traces of the same substance on two shirts that had been left lying on the floor inside the house. Further, one of the robbers had been so impolitic as to call the stagecoach driver by his name, indicating that he had to be a local who knew the man. Meyers and Prescott’s claim that they had gone into the woods that night merely to hunt wild hogs fell apart when they were asked to lead their interrogators to their supposed hunting ground separately, and each proceeded to go to a completely different place.

But, once taken to the larger city of Fresno to stand trial, these two rather astonishingly inept criminals were fortunate enough to enlist the services of a rather astonishingly wily defense attorney. Walter D. Grady was a scion of double-barrelled frontier justice straight out of a Zane Gray novel, a hard-drinking brawler who had lost an arm during a shootout. In addition to being a lawyer, he was a California state senator, a goldmine owner, and the proprietor of Fresno’s opera house.

Five years earlier, the transportation arm of the Wells Fargo conglomerate had hired Grady to help it secure the conviction of a different accused robber. But after that task had been accomplished, Grady’s client agreed to pay him only half of the amount he billed it. From that moment on, Walter Grady regarded Wells Fargo as his sworn enemy, making it known near and far that he would happily become the pro bono legal representative of anyone who got sideways with the nineteenth-century mega-corp. For he regarded his feud as a matter of personal manly honor; mere questions of guilt and innocence became less important in the face of such a consideration as this.

As the representative of Charley Meyers and William Prescott, Grady embarked on a strategy of legal exhaustion that Johnnie Cochran would have recognized and nodded along with. He refused to concede even the most trivial of points to the prosecution, even as he scored repeated laughs from the jury with his folksy manner, ribald jokes, and sheer pigheadedness in the face of common sense. For example, he noted that the can of boot blacking found in Meyers’s barn could also be found in those of dozens of other people, and speculated that the traces of the same substance found on the defendants’ shirts might just be residue from “the perspiration of a hard-working man.” (“I never worked hard enough to know,” quipped the sheriff, no stranger to folksy charm himself, by way of response.)

Despite Grady’s legal and logical contortions, Meyers and Prescott were found guilty and sentenced to twenty years at San Quentin State Prison. But their defense attorney refused to give up the fight even now. He appealed all the way to the California Supreme Court, with whom he shared damning evidence that the sheriff and the prosecution team had taken the jury out for drinks on at least two occasions. (He neglected to mention that he had done the same thing himself once.) The conviction was overturned and the prisoners remanded for a new trial. Grady did his thing, and this time he was able to charm or flummox enough of the jury to secure a mistrial. A third trial was ordered; another mistrial followed. By this point, the case had become a running joke in Fresno and its surroundings, with Grady, Meyers, and Prescott becoming unlikely folk heroes for the way they kept fighting the law and common sense and, if not quite winning, at least staving off defeat again and again. The authority figures who had been cast in the roles of the straight men in this legal farce decided they had had enough; they vacated the case and let the prisoners go free. You win some, you lose some.

So, Meyers and Prescott came home to Fresno Flats about a year and a half after they had been led away in handcuffs. Justice may not have been served, but Charley Meyers at least seemed to have been scared straight by his brief sojourn in San Quentin. He worked hard at legitimate pursuits, married well, and became a prominent landowner and businessman in his community. Throughout, he refused as adamantly as ever to fess up to being one of the perpetrators of the stagecoach robbery of 1885. Yet people in Fresno and elsewhere continued to remember him and the town from which he hailed primarily for that bizarre series of trials and his improbable escape from justice.

This really stuck in the craw of his wife Kitty Meyers, an eminently respectable lady. She decided that, if only a town called Fresno Flats no longer existed, people might stop talking about her and her husband in this unsavory context. She therefore embarked upon a lengthy campaign with the post office to change the official name of the town, a campaign whose ultimate success was more a testimony to apathy among her fellow residents than any groundswell of support for the idea. On April 1, 1912, Fresno Flats became Oakhurst in the eyes of the post office and the rest of the government. For many or most of the residents of the town, however, it would remain Fresno Flats for decades to come.

Charley and Kitty Meyers, long after the former had put his stagecoach-robbing days behind him. If Kitty hadn’t gotten tired of hearing her husband’s name brought up in association with that crime, Sierra On-Line’s boxes would have listed Fresno Flats rather than Oakhurst as the company’s address 70 years later. When a butterfly flaps its wings…

By whatever name, the town was still, as a report in the closest newspaper delicately put it, a “lively” place at this time, filled with miners and lumberjacks whose interests and recreations weren’t all that far removed from those of the starry-eyed prospectors the place had first been built to serve. (“One of the major sports among men at payday was pitching $20 gold pieces to a wagon rut. [The] man pitching the closest took all the coins on the ground.”) In time, though, the local goldmine ran out of bounty from the earth, and in 1931 the onset of the Great Depression spelled the end of the lumber mill as well. “Now, like so many of the early mountain towns, Fresno Flats finds itself slowly rotting away, soon to become another of the ghost towns of the Sierras,” wrote its last remaining schoolteacher despairingly in 1938.

But this mountain town got a new lease on life before it rotted away completely. In the 1950s, automobiles and the new interstate highway system led to an explosion in the number of visitors to this region of incredible natural beauty. Fulfilling at long last the ambition of the now long-dead Kitty Meyers by shedding the name of Fresno Flats once and for all, Oakhurst reinvented itself as “The Gateway to Yosemite National Park.” Road-tripping families became a more lucrative and far more reliable source of revenue for Oakhurst businesses than the gold hunters of yore had ever been.

Yet just like back then, some minuscule percentage of the visitors who streamed through the town elected to stay and leave their mark upon it. They were people like Jack Gyer and Cal Ragland, a pair of Los Angelenos who started the Sierra Star, the town’s first and only newspaper, in 1957, when there were still just 85 telephone numbers in all of Oakhurst. And they were people like the Ohioan Hugh Shollenbarger, who in 1965 erected the optimistically titled “World Famous Talking Bear” on Highway 41 just at the edge of Oakhurst. In the decades since, this statue of a grizzly bear has growled and spouted facts about his species from a tape recorder ensconced somewhere inside his fiberglass innards to thousands upon thousands of tourists, winning himself a page in many a catalog of roadside American kitsch. (“I am a native of this area, but don’t be alarmed. There are not many of us left…”)

The World Famous Talking Bear in Oakhurst. Notice the name on the storefront just behind him. Century 21 Real Estate was one of the brands owned by HFS, then later by Cendant Corporation. It’s a small world sometimes…

Seen in the light of this long tradition of creative entrepreneurship, Ken and Roberta Williams’s decision to move the “headquarters” of their budding two-person company On-Line Systems to Oakhurst in December of 1980 begins to seem like less of an aberration — even if, as I wrote quite some years ago now in these histories, Oakhurst was “about the unlikeliest site imaginable for a major software publisher.” They bought a home in Coarsegold, the neighboring town where Charley Meyers had been apprehended all those years ago, and leased their first office space in Oakhurst proper, in the form of a tiny ten-foot-by-ten-foot room above the print shop where new issues of the Sierra Star were run off each week. Indeed, the name of their early newspaper landlord may very well have been a factor in the Williamses’ decision to rechristen their company “Sierra On-Line” within a couple of years.

Like so many of those who had come to Oakhurst before them, Ken and Roberta Williams arrived seeking financial success; Ken, you’ll recall from the first article in this series, wanted more than anything else in life simply to become rich. Yet they both wanted to attain success on their own terms, in a town surrounded by all the trappings of paradise; their dream was half Ayn Rand, half Robert M. Pirsig. But first, like Charley Meyer before him, Ken Williams in particular had to go through a bit of an outlaw phase, filled with wild parties and a fair amount of recreational drug use and even a modicum of libertine sex, before he straightened up and turned Sierra into a respectable company. The tales about how he did that, and of a goodly number of the hundreds of games said company published over its nearly sixteen years of independent existence, have been a regularly recurring fixture of these histories of mine almost since the very beginning. So, rather than attempt to summarize them here, allow me to point you to the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve already written on these subjects.

As these tales were playing out, Oakhurst was being invaded by a new breed of outsider: folks who tended to be somewhat paler and skinnier than the legions of road-trippers and hardcore hikers streaming through, folks who tended to talk an awful lot about kilobytes and registers and opcodes and other incomprehensible technical arcana. The locals shrugged their shoulders and accepted them, as they had so many other strangers in the past. After all, their money spent just as well as anyone else’s at restaurants, shops, and gas stations, and some of them seemed to have a considerable amount of it to throw around. For their part, some of the computer-mad newcomers learned to love their new lives here in paradise, a few of them to such an extent that they would do their darnedest to avoid leaving it, even after the job that had brought them here was no more.

For to everything there is a season — to computer-game publishers just as to everything else, in Oakhurst just as everywhere else. The first indubitable sign that Sierra On-Line’s season in Oakhurst might not be eternal emerged already in 1993, when Ken and Roberta Williams set up a second office for the company in Bellevue, Washington, not far from Microsoft’s sprawling campus, to serve as its new “administrative headquarters.” By now, Ken was no longer the genial, party-hearty boss who had once celebrated the end of the working week each Friday by slamming down schnapps shots with his staff. The more buttoned-down version of Ken Williams insisted that the office in Bellevue was necessary. He said — and we have no reason to doubt his word on this — that Sierra’s isolated location was making it hard for him to hire top-flight talent from the world of business and finance, that Oakhurst’s lack of proximity to a major airport was becoming a crippling disadvantage in an ever more competitive, increasingly globalized industry. Nevertheless, in a telling testament to how big the gap between the Williams family and the rank and file in Oakhurst was already becoming, some of the latter believed the decision to up stakes for Bellevue was an essentially personal one, having much to do with the absence of a state income tax in Washington. And who knows? That may very well have been a consideration as well. For whatever reason or reasons, the era of a collective of “software artisans in the woods” effectively ended for Ken and Roberta Williams in 1993.

Although the announced plan was to continue to make the games in Oakhurst and to market them from Bellevue, many of the established staff suspected that this division of labor would prove no more than temporary. Sierra game designer Corey Cole, for one, told me that he was “pretty sure that the move would soon result in moving most or all of the project teams out of Oakhurst.” His cynicism was partially validated just one year after the Bellevue office opened, when Sierra laid off a substantial chunk of the Oakhurst workforce, in the most brutal downsizing of same since the company had nearly gone bankrupt in the wake of the Great Videogame Crash of 1983. Sure enough, Bellevue now started making games as well as selling them. In fact, as the Oakhurst employees saw it, Ken Williams now displayed a marked tendency to choose the projects that he felt had the most potential for his own backyard, leaving the scraps to the town that had built Sierra. Be that as it may, one definitely didn’t need to be a complete cynic by this point to suspect that the writing was on the wall for Sierra’s remaining software artisans in the woods.

Thus when the news came down to Oakhurst from Bellevue a year and a half after the traumatic layoff that Sierra On-Line had been suddenly, unexpectedly acquired by a company called CUC, it was greeted with more trepidation than excitement. The Oakhurst people’s first question was the obvious one: “Who the hell is CUC?” Craig Alexander, the current manager of the Oakhurst operation, was less surprised that Sierra had been acquired — he had always suspected that to be Ken Williams’s endgame — than he was by the acquirerer. “We always thought we’d be bought by a large media concern or Hollywood studio or technology company,” he says. A peddler of borderline-reputable shopping clubs and timeshares had not been on his bingo card. Al Lowe of Leisure Suit Larry fame saw dark clouds on the horizon as soon as he read the email from CUC that said, “We love this company. That’s why we bought it.” “Translated into English,” Lowe says wryly, “that means, ‘We’re going to change everything.'”

In the long run, his prediction wouldn’t be wrong, but there was a period when the more optimistic folks in Oakhurst were given enough space to fondly imagine that their lives might continue more or less as usual indefinitely. The Sierra employees who lost their jobs in the immediate aftermath of the acquisition were the marketers, accountants, and other front-office personnel who worked from Bellevue, who were deemed redundant after it became clear that Bob Davidson and his administrative staff rather than Ken Williams and his would be setting the direction of the new CUC software arm. The Oakhurst people sympathized with the plight of their ostensible comrades in arms, but the truth was that there had been little day-to-day contact between the two halves of the company — and, what with the stresses and rivalries playing out in the corporation as a whole, not always a lot of love lost between them either.

Still, there were some changes in Oakhurst as well, some of which become distinctly ominous in retrospect. “Little conversations stick out” today in the memory of Craig Alexander: “I remember CUC management lecturing me and my leadership about why we couldn’t deliver revenue and earnings on a quarterly basis. They were all proud of the fact that they had been delivering to Wall Street expectations for the last four or five years. ‘How come you guys can’t do that?'” CUC called everyone in Oakhurst together to pitch to them a scheme known as “salary replacement,” in which employees would agree to be paid partly in stock rather than cash; a fair number of them signed up, much to their eventual regret. Less sketchily but no less disturbingly, the Oakhurst folks were told that they now worked at “Yosemite Entertainment,” just one of a portfolio of studios that would henceforward live under a broad umbrella known as Sierra. To be thus labeled just one among many sounded worrisomely close to being labeled expendable.

For the time being, though, games continued to be made in Oakhurst. One of these would prove the very last of the “Quest”-branded Sierra adventure games, released about two weeks after King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity wrapped up another such series in such confusing and dismaying fashion. Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire would acquit itself decidedly better, even though it too was subject to many of the same pressures that conspired to so thoroughly undo Mask of Eternity. As was always the case with the Quest for Glory series, its ability to at least partially defy the natural gravity of Sierra, where good design was never a thoroughgoing organizational focus even in far less unsettled times than these, was a tribute to Corey and Lori Ann Cole, to my mind the two best pure game designers who ever worked on Sierra’s adventure games.

In a way, the most remarkable thing about Quest for Glory V is that it ever got made at all. Certainly no reasonable person would have bet much money on its chances a short while after the fourth game in the Coles’ series of adventure/CRPG hybrids came out.

That entry, Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness,^[1]Note the decision not to include a Roman numeral in the name, which serves as proof that the debate over whether numbering the installments of a long-running series hurt or harmed sales was older than King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity. is considered by many fans today to be the very best of them all. Yet the game that modern players experience through facilitators like ScummVM is not the same as the one that was released on December 31, 1993, just in the nick of time to book its revenues as belonging to the third quarter of Sierra’s Fiscal 1994. The game as first shipped was riddled with bugs and glitches that led to harsh reviews and many, many returns. Although some of the worst of the problems were later remedied through patches, the damage had been done: Shadows of Darkness’s final sales figures were not overly impressive. The Coles were contractors rather than employees of Sierra at the time they made it, but they too felt the pain of the layoff of 1994. The day after more than 100 regular employees had gotten their pink slips, Ken Williams met with them to tell them that there would be no Quest for Glory V. The series, it seemed, was finished, one game short of the epic finale that the Coles had been planning for it ever since embarking on the first installment circa 1988.

I mentioned earlier that some of the people who came to Oakhurst to work at Sierra never left the town even after the job that had brought them disappeared. Count Corey and Lori Ann Cole among this group. Even though their services were no longer desired at Sierra, they were determined to keep on living here in paradise. They took on contracting projects that they could do from their home, most notably the adventure game Shannara for Legend Entertainment, based on the long-running series of fantasy novels by Terry Brooks.

Some time after that game came out — and after a second game for Legend, to be based on Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels, had fallen through — a rapprochement between the Coles and Sierra took place. One of the projects that was still being run out of Oakhurst was The Realm, one of the first graphical MMORPGs, which ran on a modified version of Sierra’s venerable SCI adventure engine and even lifted some of its code straight from the Quest for Glory games — understandably so, given that these were the only other SCI games which, like The Realm, weaved monster-killing, character levels and stats, and other CRPG traits into their tapestry of adventure. For a while, Craig Alexander considered turning The Realm into some sort of Quest for Glory Online with the help of the Coles, but ultimately thought better of it.

Nonetheless, the lines of communication had been reestablished. Sierra had received a good deal of fan mail over the last couple of years asking if and when the next Quest for Glory would come out; the fourth game had ended on a cliffhanger, which only made the fans that much more desperate to know how the story ended. So, it did seem that there was a market for a Quest for Glory V, even if a relatively small one by the standards of the growing industry. Hedging his bets in much the same way that Roberta Williams was about to do with King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, Craig Alexander came up with the idea of a “small-group multiplayer” game; a matchmaking service would put players together in “shards” with just a handful of others, as opposed to the hundreds or thousands who could play together in The Realm. Yet it was never clear how the narrative focus of the older Quest for Glory entries might be made to work under such a conception. Lori Ann Cole accepted a commission to work up a design, but she almost immediately began lobbying for the inclusion of a single-player mode as well. This, one senses, is where her heart really was right from the start: giving players the narrative closure they were begging for in all those letters. Under the pressure of practicalities, the multiplayer aspect gradually slid away, from being the whole point of the game to an optional, additional way to play it; then it disappeared entirely in favor of a Quest for Glory like the series had always been, in the broad strokes at least.

Still, Quest for Glory V was destined to remain the odd man out in the series in many other, more granular respects. The SCI engine wasn’t maintained after 1996 — The Realm was one of the last things ever done with it — and so the team behind the fifth game was forced to look for another way of implementing it. Lead programmer Eric Lengyel first devised a state-of-the-art voxel-graphics system, only to find that it was too demanding for the hardware of the day. After some flailing against the inevitable, he agreed to scrap it and code up a more conventional 3D-graphics engine from scratch. Corey Cole, who didn’t join the project until it was about a year old, considers all of these efforts to have been misplaced. Buying someone else’s 3D engine would have entailed a large one-time cost, he notes, but it would have freed up a lot of time and energy to focus on design rather than technicalities. He has a point.

During 1998 and 1999, the new-look Sierra would release three adventure games with one foot in the past and one in the future: King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire, and Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned (a subject for a future article). Rather incredibly, each of these games would run in a different 3D engine, two of them custom-built for this application and then never used again. The contrast with the 2D SCI engine, which was used over and over again in dozens and dozens of applications, could hardly be more stark. It seems that there are major advantages to having a group of developers all working out of the same location and communicating daily with one another, as was the case during the glory days of Sierra in Oakhurst. Who would have imagined?

Of the three aforementioned games, Quest for Glory V is the only one that could have been implemented in 2D without losing much if anything. Despite the departure from the comfortable old SCI environment, its presentation and gameplay are quite consistent with that of the earlier games in the series: that of a (mostly) fixed-camera, mouse-driven, third-person graphic adventure of the classic style, with a geography divided into discrete areas or “rooms.” Combat is a little different from before, in that it takes place on the same screen as the rest of the gameplay, but, again, it’s hard to see why this couldn’t have been implemented in SCI. The benefits of 3D graphics, such as they were, must have come down largely to the production costs they could save — although one does have to question how much money if any was really saved in the end, given the time and effort that went into making a 3D engine from scratch, such that Quest for Glory V ended up becoming by far the most expensive of all the games in the series. On the plus side, though, the visuals are generally sharp, colorful, and reasonably attractive; they’ve held up a darn sight better than many other examples of 1990s 3D. From the player’s perspective, then, the choice between 2D and 3D is mostly a wash.

In other respects, Quest for Glory V has a lot going for it. Each game in the series before it has a setting drawn from the myths and legends of a different real-world culture: Medieval Europe for the original Quest for Glory, the tales of the Arabian Nights for Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire, Sub-Saharan African and Egyptian mythology for Quest for Glory III: The Wages of War, Gothic Transylvania (plus an oddly discordant note of H.P. Lovecraft) for Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness. Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire is based on ancient Greek myth, a milieu more familiar to most Western gamers than any since that of the first game. The Coles take their usual care to depict the culture in ways that combine humor, excitement, and respect. And in the end, who isn’t happy at the prospect of spending some time on a sun-kissed Aegean archipelago? Quest for Glory V is a nice virtual place just to inhabit, which is a large part of the battle in making a satisfying adventure game.

Another large part is the gameplay itself, of course, and here as well Quest for Glory V acquits itself pretty well. The puzzles are generally solid. The combat is more frequent and more action-oriented than in the earlier games, betraying more than a slight influence from the hugely popular real-time-strategy genre, but the shift is more one of degree than of kind. At its best, Quest for Glory V, like its predecessors, manages to avoid that sense of jumping through arbitrary hoops that dogs so many adventure games, making you feel instead like you’ve been plunked down at the center of an organically unfolding story. This isn’t always the case, mind you; there are a few puzzles that are under-clued in my opinion, such that the grinding gears of the game show through when you encounter them and have your progress stopped dead. But by any objective standard, there’s more to like than dislike about the design of Quest for Glory V.

For all that, though, I must admit that I walked away from the game feeling a little bit underwhelmed — and, judging from what I’ve read of other players’ reactions, that feeling is fairly typical. There’s an elegiac quality to Quest for Glory V that overshadows the here-and-now plot, involving, it eventually emerges, a dragon who is ravaging the archipelago by night. The Coles indulge in buckets and buckets of fan service, bringing back characters who were both prominent and obscure in the previous games, for starring roles and cameos in this one. Nice as it is to see them, the Greekness of the setting sometimes threatens to get lost entirely amidst this multicultural babble. It’s a double-edged sword for which I can’t prescribe any ready remedy. For a fan who grew up with Quest for Glory, seeing characters from childhood memory return like this must have been magical indeed. For fans who grew up with Sierra’s adventure games in general, and were now beginning to suspect that there were not likely to be many more such games, the poignancy must have been that much more intense — as if all of these beloved characters were waving farewell not just to this gaming series, but to an entire era of gaming history.

That said, the constant nostalgic callbacks do have a way of preventing Quest for Glory V from ever fully standing on its own two feet, separate from the series for which it serves as the finale. Even those players whose eyes filled with tears upon seeing the wise old leonine paladin Rasha Rakeesh on their monitor screens again might have to admit that the game never quite feels like the epic culmination of all that has come before which it perhaps ought to be; throughout its considerable length, it feels rather more like The Lord of the Rings after Frodo has thrown the One Ring into Mount Doom. In one sense, that’s noble, moving as it does beyond the lizard-brain emotional affect of most games. But it does also demonstrate that, although Quest for Glory V is a vastly better game than King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity by any standard you care to name, it was nevertheless subject to some of the same cognitive dissonances. There weren’t enough old Quest for Glory players to justify its budget, even as the new players that the better graphics and more extensive and action-oriented combat were meant to attract would feel like they had been invited to a cocktail party where everyone knew each other and they didn’t know anybody.

Despite the technological changes, Quest for Glory V still looks and feels like a Quest for Glory. The Adventurer’s Guild here looks much like the one in the first game, except that it’s now filled with mementos of your own previous adventures.

In addition to looking like Quest for Glory, the game also manages to look appropriately Greek. And note the time that is displayed at the upper right. Like all of the other games in the series, Quest for Glory V plays in accelerated real time, complete with day-to-night cycles. This can be annoying in that you have to keep going back to your hotel room to eat and sleep, but it does wonders for the verisimilitude of the experience.

Fighting a hydra with your old friend Elsa, whom you first met all the way back in the first game, where you freed her from Baba Yaga’s curse. In another blast from the past, the Quest for Glory V combat engine was the work of John Harris, one of Ken Williams’s star programmers from the very early days, the creator of a masterful clone of Pac-Man. As chronicled at almost disturbing length in Steven Levy’s classic book Hackers, Ken Williams made it his mission in life for a while to get the shy and awkward young man laid. The version of John Harris who returned to work on this game was presumably more worldly…

You can take the same character through all five Quest for Glory games, which is kind of amazing when one considers the transformative changes in computer technology that took place over the decade or so that the series encompassed. And yet Quest for Glory V doesn’t give you the feeling that your character has become really, really powerful. All of the monsters to be found here are strong enough themselves to challenge him; there are no kobolds to go and beat on to prove how far he’s come. Similarly, if you create a character from scratch, you don’t necessarily feel that this is a high-level character. Is this part of the reason that the game fails to inculcate that elusive sense of being truly epic? Perhaps.

The Science Island section smacks of The Castle of Doctor Brain.

Veterans of the series will be horrified when Rakeesh is poisoned. Newcomers will wonder who the hell this weird lion guy is and why they should care what happens to him. Herein lay many of the game’s problems as a commercial proposition.

Quest for Glory V was released on December 8, 1998, about a year behind schedule. Reviews tended to be on the tepid side. Computer Gaming World’s was typical. “While Quest for Glory V isn’t likely to win over anyone new,” wrote Elliot Chin, “it will serve as a fond farewell for all those longtime fans who want to guide the Hero through one last adventure”; he went on to admit that “what fueled my desire to play the game was nostalgia.” Perhaps surprisingly in light of reviews like this one, Corey Cole believes it may have sold as many as 150,000 copies, although a substantial portion of those sales were probably at a steep discount as bargain-bin treasures.

If you had told the people in Oakhurst on the day that Quest for Glory V shipped that it would be the very last adventure game to come out of their offices, they might have been saddened, but they wouldn’t have been shocked. For it had been announced just eighteen days earlier that Sierra had another new owner, this one based more than a quarter of the way around the world from the Yosemite Valley. The people at Yosemite Entertainment had good cause to feel themselves more expendable than ever.

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Sources: The books Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Line by Ken Williams and Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy. Computer Gaming World of October 1997 and April 1999; Sierra’s customer newsletter InterAction of Fall 1996, Spring 1997, Fall 1997, and Fall 1998, Sierra Star of November 28 2017; Fresno Bee of March 8 1912; Madera Tribune of September 24 1957 and February 18 1965.

Online sources include “How Sierra was Captured, Then Killed, by a Massive Accounting Fraud” by Duncan Fyfe at Vice, the Fresno Flats Historic Village & Park’s “History of Fresno Flats & Oakhurst,” “Stagecoach to Yosemite: Robbery on the Road” by William B. Secrest at Historynet, and an old television interview with Hugh Schollenbarger.

I also made use of the materials held in the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play. Most of all, though, I owe a debt of gratitude to Corey Cole for answering my questions about this period at his usual thoughtful length.

Where to Get It: All five Quest for Glory games are available for digital purchase as a single package at GOG.com. And be sure to check out Corey and Lori Ann Cole’s more recent games Hero-U: From Rogue to Redemption and Summer Daze: Tilly’s Tale.

The VGA remake of Quest for Glory I. By this point, Sierra’s graphics exceeded the quality of most Saturday-morning cartoons, and weren’t far off the standard set by feature films, being held back more by the technical limitations of VGA graphics than those of the artists doing the drawing.

Quest for Glory, Lori Ann and Corey Cole’s much-loved series of adventure/CRPG hybrids, took a year off after its second installment, while each half of the couple designed an educational game for Sierra’s Discovery Series. After finishing her Discovery game Mixed-Up Fairy Tales, a less ambitious effort aimed at younger children than Corey’s The Castle of Dr. Brain, Lori headed a remake of the first Quest for Glory, using VGA graphics and a point-and-click interface in place of EGA and a parser. While opinions vary as to the remake’s overall worthiness — I’m personally fonder of the original version, as is Corey Cole — no one could deny that it looked beautiful in 256 colors. Sierra was, like many other media producers at the time, operating in a short-lived intermediate phase between analog and fully-digital production techniques, which gave the work a look unique to this very specific period. For example, most of the characters in the Quest for Glory I remake were first sculpted in clay by art director Arturo Sinclair, then digitized and imported into the game. One can only hope that contemporary gamers took the time to appreciate the earthy craftsmanship of his work. Sierra and much of their industry would soon fall down the full-motion video rabbit hole, and the 3D Revolution as well was just over the horizon, poised to offer all sorts of exciting new experiential possibilities but also to lose almost as much in the way of aesthetic values. It would, in other words, be a long time before games would look this good again.

Thankfully, the era of hand-drawn — or hand-sculpted — art at Sierra would last long enough to carry through the next two Quest for Glory games as well. Much else, though, would conspire against them, and in my opinion neither the third nor the fourth game is as strong as either of the first two. Today we’ll have a look at these later efforts’ strengths and failings and the circumstances that led to each.

Well before starting work on the very first Quest for Glory, Lori Ann Cole had sketched out a four-game plan for the series as a whole. It would see the player’s evolving hero visiting four different cultural regions of a fantasy world, all drawn from cultures of our own world, in adventures where the stakes would get steadily higher. The first two games had thus covered medieval Germany and the Arab world, and the last two were slated to go to the murky environs of Eastern Europe and the blazing sunshine of mythic Greece. In fact, Quest for Glory II ends with an advertisement of sorts for the “upcoming” Quest for Glory III: Shadows of Darkness, the Eastern European game. Yet almost as soon as the second game was out the door, the Coles started to have misgivings. To go with its milieu drawn from Romanian and Slavic folklore and the Gothic-horror tradition, Shadows of Darkness was to have a more unfriendly, foreboding approach to gameplay as well. The Coles planned to make “aloneness, suspicion, and paranoia,” as Corey puts it, the hallmarks of the game. They didn’t want to abandon that uncompromising vision, but neither were they sure that their players were ready for it.

Shortly before leaving Sierra to join Origin Systems, staff writer Ellen Guon suggested that the third game could easily be set in Africa instead, following up on an anecdote mentioned by one of the characters in passing in Quest for Glory II — thus extending the series’s arc from four to five games and postponing the “dark” entry until a little later. The Coles loved the idea, and Quest for Glory III: The Wages of War was born. Sure, making it did interfere with some of the thematic unities Lori had built into the series; its entries had been planned to correspond with the four classical elements of Earth, Fire, Air, and Water, as well as the four cardinal compass directions and the four seasons. But perhaps that was all a little too matchy-matchy anyway…

Other, less welcome changes were also in the offing: the new game’s gestation was immediately impacted by the removal of Corey Cole from most of the process. Corey had originally been hired by Sierra in a strictly technical role — specifically, for his expertise in programming the Atari ST and the Motorola 68000 CPU at its heart. His first assigned task had been to help port Sierra’s then-new SCI game engine to that platform, and he was still regarded around the office as the resident 68000 expert. Thus when Sierra head Ken Williams cooked up a scheme to bring their games to the Sega Genesis, a videogame console that with an optional CD-ROM accessory was also built around the 68000, it was to Corey that he turned. So, while Lori worked on Quest for Glory III alone, Corey struggled with what turned out to be an impossible task. The Genesis’s memory was woefully inadequate, and its graphics were limited to 64 colors from a palette of 512, as opposed to the 256 colors from a palette of 262,144 of the VGA graphics standard for which Sierra’s latest computer games were coded. Wiser heads finally prevailed and the whole endeavor was cancelled, freeing up Corey to reform his design partnership with Lori.

This happened, however, only in the final stages of Quest for Glory III‘s development. Among fans today, this game is generally considered the weakest link in the series, and the absence of Corey Cole is often cited as a primary reason. I’ll return to the impact his absence may have had, but first I’d like to mention what the game undeniably does right: the setting.

It’s often forgotten that Egypt, that birthplace of so much of human civilization, is a part of Africa; this essential fact, though, Lori Ann Cole didn’t neglect. The western part of the game’s map, where you begin, feels like an outlying outpost of Egyptian culture, complete with the pyramids and other monumental architecture we know from our history books. As you travel eastward, the savanna turns into jungle, and the societies you meet there become reflections of tribal Africa. It’s all drawn — both metaphorically, through the writing, and literally, through the graphics — with considerable charm and skill. Sub-Saharan Africa in particular isn’t a region we see depicted very often in games, and still less often with this degree of sympathy. As I noted in my first article on the Quest for Glory series, there’s a travelogue quality that runs through its entirety, showing us our own world’s many great and varied cultures through the lens of these fantasy adventures. The third game, suffice to say, upholds that tradition admirably.

Also welcome is the theme of the game. In contrast to most computer games, this one has you trying to prevent a war rather than win one. The aforementioned Egyptian and tribal African cultures have been set at odds by a combination of prejudices, misunderstandings, and — this being a fantasy game and all — the odd evil wizard. It’s up to you to play the peacemaker. “You start getting a better and better idea of just how senseless war is,” says Corey, “and how everybody loses by it.” Of course, there’s a certain cognitive dissonance about an allegedly anti-war game in which you spend so much of your time mowing down monsters by decidedly violent means, but props for effort.

In fact, any criticism of Quest for Glory should be tempered by the understanding that what the Coles did with this series was quite literally unprecedented, and, further, that no one else has ever tried to do anything quite like it since. While plenty of vintage CRPGs, dating all the way back to Wizardry, allowed you to move your characters from game to game, the Quest for Glory series is a far more complex take on a role-playing game than those simple monster bashers, with character attributes affecting far more aspects of the experience than combat alone — even extending into a moral dimension via a character’s “honor” attribute and the associated possibility to change to the prestige class of Paladin. It must have been tempting indeed to throw out the past and force players to start over with new characters each time the Coles started working on the next game in the series, but they doggedly stuck to their original vision of four — no, make that five — interlinked games that could all feature the very same custom hero, assuming the player was up to the task of buying and playing all of them.

But, fundamental to the Coles’ conception of their series though it was, this approach did have its drawbacks, which were starting to become clear by the time of Quest for Glory III. Corey Cole himself has admitted that “the play balance — both pacing and combat difficulty — and of course the freshness of the concept were strongest in Quest for Glory I.” Certainly that’s the entry in this hybrid series that works best as a CRPG, providing that addictive thrill of seeing your character slowly getting stronger, able to tackle monsters and challenges he couldn’t have dreamed of in the beginning. The later games are hampered by the well-known sense of diminishing returns that afflicts so many RPGs at higher levels; it’s much more fun in tabletop Dungeons & Dragons as well to advance from level 1 to level 8 than it is from level 8 to level 16. Even when you find that you need to spend time training in order to meet some arbitrary threshold — more on that momentarily — your character in the later Quest for Glory games never really feels like he’s going anywhere. The end result is to sharply reduce the importance of the most unique aspect of the series as it wears on. For this player anyway, that also reduces a big chunk of the series’s overall appeal. I haven’t tried it, but I suspect that these games may actually be more satisfying to play if you don’t import your old character into each new one, but rather start out fresh each time with a weaker hero and enjoy the thrill of building him up.

Sanford and Son make an appearance.

Quest for Glory III also disappoints in other ways.The first two games had been loaded with alternative solutions and approaches of all stripes, full of countless secrets and Easter eggs. Quest for Glory III is far less generous on all of these fronts. There just isn’t as much to do and discover outside the bounds of those things that are absolutely necessary to advance the plot. And one of the three possible character classes you can play, the Thief, has markedly fewer interesting things to do than the others even in the course of doing that much. The whole game feels less accommodating and rewarding — less amenable to your personal choices, one might say — than what came before. It plays, in other words, more like just another Sierra adventure game and less like the uniquely rich and flexible experience the first two games are.

This lack of design ambition can to some degree be attributed to the absence of Corey Cole for most of the design process. Corey was generally the “puzzle guy” in the partnership, dealing with all the questions of smaller-scale interactivity, while Lori was the “story gal,” responsible for the wide-angle plotting.  And indeed, when I asked Corey about his own impressions of the game in relation to its predecessors, he acknowledged that “certainly Quest for Glory III is lighter on puzzles, while having just as much story as Quest for Glory II.”

Yet Corey’s absence isn’t the only reason that the personality of the series began to morph with this third installment. The most obvious change between the second and third game — blindingly obvious to anyone who plays them back to back — is the move from a parser-based to a pure point-and-click interface. I trust that I don’t need to belabor how this could remove some of the scope for player creativity, and especially what it might mean for the many little secrets for which the first two games are so known. I’m no absolute parser purist — my opinion has always been that the best interface for any given game is entirely contextual, based upon the type of experience the designer is trying to create — but I can’t help but feel that Quest for Glory lost something when it dumped the parser.

One issue with Quest for Glory III that may actually be a subtle, inadvertent byproduct of the switch to point-and-click is a certain aimlessness that seems baked into the design. Too much of the story is predicated on unmotivated wandering over a map that’s not at all suited to more methodical exploration.

I hate the Quest for Glory III overland map with a passion. Unique locations aren’t signaled on it, but it’s nevertheless vital that you thoroughly explore it, meaning you’re forced to click on any formation that looks interesting in the hope that it’s more than decorative, a process which disappoints and frustrates more often than not. And while you’re wandering around in this random fashion, you’re constantly being attacked by uninteresting monsters and being forced to engage in tedious combat. Note that what you see above is only the first of several screens full of this sort of thing.

When I played Quest for Glory III, I eventually wound up in that dreaded place known to every adventure player: where you’ve exhausted all your leads and are left with no idea what the game expects from you next. This was, however, a feeling new to me in the course of playing this particular series. When I turned with great reluctance to a walkthrough — I’d solved the first two games entirely on my own — I learned that I was expected to train my skills up to a certain level in order shake the plot back into gear.

But how, you ask, can such problems be traced back to the loss of the parser? Well, Corey has mentioned how Lori — later, he and Lori — attempted to restore some of the sense of spontaneity and surprise that had perhaps been lost alongside the parser through the use of “events”: “Instead of each game scene having one specific thing that happens in it, our scenes change throughout the game. Sometimes the passage of time triggers a new event, and sometimes it’s the result of the ripple effect of player actions. It was supposed to feel organic.” When this approach works well, it works wonderfully well in providing a dynamic environment that seems to unfold spontaneously from the player’s perspective, just the way a good interactive story should. That’s the best-case scenario. The worst case is when you haven’t done whatever arbitrary action is needed to get a vital event to fire, and you’re left to wander around wondering what’s next. Finally, when you peek at a walkthrough, the mechanisms behind it all are revealed in the ugliest, most mimesis-annihilating way imaginable. I understand what Quest for Glory III wants to do, and I wholeheartedly approve. But there needed to be more work done to avoid dead spots — whether in the form of more possible triggers or just of more nudges to tell the player what the game expects from her — or, ideally, both.

Another odd Quest for Glory tradition was to give each game in the series a new combat system. Quest for Glory III tried to add a bit more strategy to the affair with buttons for “swing,” “dodge,” “thrust,” and “parry,” but in my experience at least simply mashing down the swing button works as well as anything else. Thus another Quest for Glory tradition: that of none of these multifarious combat systems ever being completely satisfying.

Still, whatever the game’s failings, few players or reviewers in its own time seemed to notice. Upon its release in September of 1992 — just four months after the Quest for Glory I remake — Quest for Glory III was greeted with solid sales and positive reviews, a reception which stands in contrast to its contemporary reputation as the weakest link in the series. With this affirmation of their efforts and with Corey now free of distractions, the Coles plunged right into the fourth game. Quest for Glory IV would prove the most ambitious and the most difficult entry in the series — and, in my opinion anyway, its greatest waste of potential.

The game officially known simply as Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness — Sierra inexplicably dropped the Roman numeral this time and this time only — is indeed often spoken of as the “dark” entry of the series, but that claim strikes me as, at most, relative. My skepticism begins with the unbelievably cheesy subtitle, which put my wife right off the game before she saw more than the title screen. (“Someone should tell those people that darkness doesn’t make shadows…”) Banal subtitles, perhaps (hopefully?) delivered with an implied wink and nudge, had become something of a series trademark by this point — Trial by Fire? The Wages of War? Cliché much? — but this was taking things to a whole other level.

Dr. Brain fans will presumably be pleased to meet his alter ego Dr. Cranium in Quest for Glory IV. (Frankie, for the record, is a female Frankenstein whose “assets” Dr. Cranium very much approves of.)

To speak more substantively (or at least less snarkily), the “dark” aspects of the game come to the fore intermittently at best. I’ve played games which I’ve found genuinely scary; this is not one of them. It certainly includes plenty of horror tropes, but it’s difficult to take any of it all that seriously. This is a game that features Dr. Brain channeling Dr. Frankenstein. It’s a game where you fight a killer rabbit lifted out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It’s a game where you win the final battle against the evil wizard by telling him the Ultimate Joke and taking advantage when he collapses into laughter. From the Boris Karloff imitator guarding the gates to the villain’s castle to Igor the hunchbacked gravedigger, this is strictly B-movie horror — or, perhaps better said, a parody of B-movie horror. It’s hard to imagine anyone losing sleep over this game.

In fact, I was so nonplussed by its popularly accepted “dark” label that I asked Corey what he thought about it, and was gratified to find that he at least partially agreed with me:

Maybe a better word would be “unforgiving.” A Quest for Glory III theme is friendship and the need to work together with others. In Quest for Glory IV, we turned that around 180 degrees. The player would start out on his own, mistrusted by everyone. Through the course of the game, he will gradually win people’s trust and once again have allies by the end. This is not an easy theme for players new to the series to handle.

Lori Ann Cole elaborated on the same idea in a contemporary interview:

You’ll be very much alone [in Quest for Glory IV]. In Trial by Fire, you had a lot of friends to help you. You always had a place to go back to rest. You always had a place of safety until the very end of the game. Once you get into Shadows of Darkness, you’re not going to have any sanctuary. You won’t be able to trust anyone because nobody will trust you.

It’s true that a few subplots here strain toward a gravitas unlike anything else the Coles have ever attempted. In particular, the vampire named Katrina can be singled out as a villain who isn’t just Evil for the sake of it. She’s kidnapped a little girl from the village that is your center of operations, and one of your quests is to rescue her. In the course of doing so, you learn that the kidnapping was motivated by Katrina’s desperate, very human desire for family and companionship in her isolated castle. You end up killing her, of course, but her story is often praised — justifiably on the whole, if sometimes a bit too effusively — as a benchmark for intelligent characterization in games.

Structurally, Quest for Glory IV is most reminiscent of the first game in the series. You arrive in the village of Mordavia, part of a region that goes by the same name, which has been plagued of late by vampires, ghosts, mad scientists, and most of the other inhabitants of the Hammer Horror oeuvre. As you solve the villagers’ considerable collection of problems one by one, they go from being spit-in-your-food hostile to lauding you as the greatest hero in the land. In the best tradition of the series, and in contrast to some of the most commonly voiced complaints about Quest for Glory III, much of the game is nonlinear, and some of it is entirely optional.

The combat system in Quest for Glory IV owes a lot to the Street Fighter franchise of standup-arcade, console, and computer games, which were among the most popular of the era. Corey Cole considers it the best combat engine in the history of the series; opinions among fans are more divided. For those not interested in street-fighting their way through a Quest for Glory game, the Coles did make it possible for the first time to turn on an auto-combat mode.

Sadly, though, the game is nowhere near as playable as Quest for Glory I, II, or to some extent even III. This fault arises not from doing too little but rather from attempting to do too much. At the risk of being accused of psychoanalyzing its designers, I will note that the Coles had clearly been psyching themselves up to make this game for a long time — that, even as it was being pushed back to make room for Quest for Glory III, it had long since come to loom over their conception of the series as the Big Statement. Even when they were giving interviews to promote the finished Quest for Glory III, the conversation would keep drifting into their plans for the fourth game. “It will be a very intense game to design,” said Corey in one of those interviews, a comment that could be taken to reflect either excitement or trepidation — or, more likely, both. This was to be the place where the series departed from being easygoing light fantasy to become something more challenging, both thematically and in terms of its puzzles and other mechanics.

So, they just kept cramming more and more stuff into it. The setting doesn’t have the laser focus of the earlier games in the series, all of which portrayed fairly faithfully the myths and legends of a very specific real-world culture. Quest for Glory IV, despite including some monsters drawn from real Eastern European folklore, is more interested in Western pop culture’s idea of Transylvania than any real place — a land of shadows and creatures that go bump in the night and “I vant to bite yer neck.” Then, because the parade of Gothic-horror clichés apparently wasn’t enough, the Coles added H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos to the mix (or, as the manual calls him, “P.H. Craftlove”). The two make decidedly uneasy bedfellows. Gothic horror, as expressed best in Bram Stoker’s ultimate Gothic novel Dracula, takes place, explicitly or implicitly, in an essentially moral universe drawing heavily from Christianity, in which Good and Evil, God and the Devil, are real entities at war with one another, thus setting up the narratives of sin and redemption which predominate. Lovecraftian horror, on the other hand, posits an utterly uncaring, amoral universe, in which Good and Evil are meaningless concepts, mere ephemera of the deluded human imagination. To combine the two in one work of fiction is… problematic.

For all that one has to wonder whether any fans of this heretofore genial series were truly saying to themselves, “You know, what these games really need to be is harder,” the Coles’ determination to make this entry more difficult than its predecessors isn’t invalid in itself. In trying to make their harder game, however, they sometimes fall into the all too typical trap of making a game that’s not so much more difficult as less fair. The CRPG aspects are yet further de-emphasized in favor of more puzzles, some of which push the bounds of realistic solubility. And, for the first time in the series’s history, there are irrecoverable dead ends to wander into scattered across the design, along with other situations that seem like dead ends. The latter arise because the design once again relies heavily on “events” that the player triggers without being aware how she does so — and, once again, this isn’t a bad thing at all in theory, but in practice it’s too easy to get stuck in a cul de sac with no idea how to prod the plotting machinery into motion again.

Greatly exacerbating all of these issues — indeed, virtually indistinguishable from them, given that it’s often unclear which design infelicities are intentional and which are not — are all the bugs. Even today, when patch after patch has been applied, the game remains a terrifyingly unstable edifice. If your (emulated?) machine runs just a little bit too slow or too fast, it will crash at random points with a cryptic “Error 47” or “Error 52.” But far worse are the hidden bugs that can ruin your game while letting you play on for hours without realizing anything is wrong. The most well-known of these involves a vital letter that’s supposed to show up at your hotel, but that, for reasons that are still imperfectly understood even after all these years, sometimes fails to do so. If you’re unfortunate enough to have this happen to you, it will only be much, much later, when you can’t figure out what to do next and finally turn to a walkthrough, that you realize you have to all but start over from scratch.

In my experience, an adventure game must establish a bond of trust with its player to be enjoyable. My dominant emotion when playing Quest for Glory IV, however, was just the opposite. I mistrusted the design, and mistrusted the implementation of the design even more, asking myself at every turn whether I’d broken anything, whether this latest problem I was having was a legitimate puzzle or a bug. When you have to meta-game your way through a game, relying on FAQs and walkthrough to tiptoe around all its pitfalls, it’s awfully hard to engage with the story and atmosphere.

Still, I can be thankful that I first played Quest for Glory IV a quarter-century after its original release, after all those patches had already been applied. The game that shipped on December 31, 1993, was in a truly unconscionable, very probably unwinnable condition. This wasn’t, I should emphasize, the fault of the Coles, who would have given anything to have a few more months with their baby. But Sierra was having an ugly year financially, and decided that the game simply had to be released before the year was out for accounting reasons, come what may. If there was any justice in the world, they would have been rewarded with a class-action lawsuit for knowingly selling a product that was not just flawed but outright broken. To give you a taste of what gamers unwise enough to buy Quest for Glory IV in its original incarnation got to go through, I’d like to quote at some length from the review by Scorpia, Computer Gaming World magazine’s regular adventure columnist.

My difficulties began after the game was installed and it simply refused to run, period. A call to the Sierra tech line revealed that Shadows of Darkness, as released, was not compatible with the AMI BIOS (not exactly an obscure one). This was related to the special 32-bit protected mode under which the software operates. Fortunately, a patch was available, and I quickly got it online.

After the patch was applied, the game finally came up. Unfortunately, it came up silent. The 32-bit protected mode grabs all of upper memory for itself, so nothing can be loaded high, and a bare-bones DOS boot disk is necessary. This made it impossible to load in the Gravis Ultrasound Roland emulator, and I found that with the Sound Blaster emulator loaded low, the game again wouldn’t run. So, I had to play with no sound or music, which explains why there is no commentary on either.

I ran from a boot disk without sound, and for a while everything was fine. However, the further into the game, the slower it was in saving and restoring. Actual disk access was quite speedy, but waiting for the software to make up its mind to go to disk took a long time, often a minute or more. Some online folk complained of waiting three minutes or longer to restore a saved game. It was usually faster to quit the game, rerun it, and then restore a position. For saving, of course, you just had to wait it out.

Regardless of the frustrations, I got through the game [playing as] a Paladin and a Mage, and then moved on to the Thief. Three quarters of the way along, the game crashed in the swamp whenever I tried to open the Mad Monk’s tomb. This turned out to be a “random error” that might or might not show up. It hadn’t done so with the other two heroes, but this time it reared its ugly head.

Well, Sierra had a patch that fixed both this problem and the interminable waits for saves and restores (this patch, by the way, came out some time after the first one I had gotten). There was only one drawback: because of the extensive changes made to the files, my saved games were no good and I had to start over again from the beginning.

So, I started my Thief over. By day 11 in the game, all the quests had been finished, the five rituals collected, and it was just a matter of waiting for a certain note to appear in my room one morning (this note initiates the end of the game). On day 26, I was still waiting for it. Nothing could make it appear, even replaying from some earlier positions. Either the trigger for this event was not set, or somehow it was turned off. I had no way of knowing, and, with that in mind, I had no inclination to start from scratch again. This also happened to other players who were running characters other than Thieves, and we all eventually abandoned those games.

A way around the dead-end problem was worked out by Sierra. The key is spending enough nights in your room at the inn to hear several “voice dreams,” and, most importantly, hearing the weeping from the innkeeper’s room one midnight (you are awakened by this; don’t stay up waiting for it). These events must happen before you rescue Tanya.

Once those situations have occurred, it should be safe to rescue the girl. I tried this in my Thief game, and after spending two extra nights in my room, the problem was cleared up and I finished the game with the Thief. So, if you have been waiting around for that note, and it hasn’t shown, follow the above procedure and you should be able to continue on with the game.

Scorpia’s last two paragraphs in particular illustrate what I mean when I say that you can’t really hope to play Quest for Glory IV so much as meta-game your way through it with the aid of walkthroughs. She was extremely lucky to have been among the minority with online access at the time of the game’s release, and thus able to download patches and discuss the game’s multiple points of entrapment with other players. Most would only have been able to plead with Sierra’s support personnel and hope for a disk to arrive in the mail a week or two later.

What ought to have been the exciting climactic battle of Quest for Glory IV was so buggy in the original release that the game was literally impossible to complete. It’s remained one of the worst problem spots over the years since, requiring multiple FAQ consultations to tiptoe through all the potential problems. Have I mentioned how exhausting and disheartening it is to be forced to play this way?

Some months after the bug-ridden floppy-based release, Sierra published Quest for Glory IV on CD-ROM, in a version that tried to clean up the bugs and that added voice acting. It accomplished the former task imperfectly; as already noted, plenty of glitches still remain even in the version available for digital download today, not least among them the mystery of the never-appearing letter. The latter task, however, it accomplished superlatively. In a welcome departure from the atrocious voice acting found in their earliest CD-ROM products, Sierra put together a team of top-flight acting professionals, headed by the dulcet Shakespearian tones of John Rhys-Davies — a veteran character actor of many decades’ standing who’s best known today as Gimli the dwarf in Peter Jackson’s Lords of the Rings films — as the narrator and master of ceremonies. Rhys-Davies, who had apparently signed the contract in anticipation of a quick-and-easy payday, was shocked at the sheer volume of text he was expected to voice, and took to calling the game “the CD-ROM from hell” after spending days on end in the studio. But he persevered. Indeed, he and the other actors quite clearly had more than a little fun with it. The bickering inhabitants of the Mordavia Inn are a particular delight. These voice actors obviously take their roles with no seriousness whatsoever, preferring to wander off-script into broad semi-improvised impersonations of Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood, and Rodney Dangerfield. Would you think less of me if I admitted that they’re my favorite part of the game?

Of course, one could argue that Sierra’s decision to devote so many resources to this multimedia window dressing, while still leaving so many fundamental problems to fester in the core game, is a sad illustration of their misplaced priorities in this new age of CD-ROM-based gaming. The full story of just what the hell was going on inside Sierra at this point, leading to this imperfect and premature Quest for Glory IV as well as even worse disasters like their infamously half-finished 1994 release Outpost, is an important one that needs to be told, but one best reserved for a later article of its own.

For now, suffice to say that Quest for Glory IV was made to suffer for its failings, with a number of outright bad reviews in a gaming press that generally tended to publish very little of that sort of thing, and with far worse word of mouth among ordinary gamers. For a long time, its poor reception seemed to have stopped the series in its tracks, one game short of Lori Ann Cole’s long-planned climax. When a transformed Sierra, under new owners with new priorities, finally allowed that fifth and final game to be made years later, it would strike the series’s remaining fans as a minor miracle, even as the technology it employed was miles away from the trusty old SCI engine that had powered the series’s first four entries.

The critical consensuses on Quest for Glory III and IV have neatly changed places in the years since that last entry in the series was published. The third game was widely lauded back in the day, the fourth about as widely panned as the timid gaming press ever dared. But today, it’s the third game that is widely considered to be the series’s weakest link, while the fourth is frequently called the very best of them all. As someone who finds them both to be more or less flawed creations in comparison to what came before, I don’t really have a dog in this fight. Nevertheless, I do find this case of switched places intriguing. I think it says something about the way that so many play games — especially adventure games — today: with FAQ and walkthrough at the ready for the first sign of trouble. There’s of course nothing wrong with choosing to play this way; I’ve gone on record many times saying there is no universally right or wrong way to play any game, only those ways which are more or less fun for you. And certainly the fact that you can now buy the entire Quest for Glory series for less than $10 — much less when it goes on sale! — impacts the way players approach the games. No one worries too much about rushing through a game they’ve bought for pocket change, but might be much more inclined to play a game they’ve spent $50 on “honestly.” All of which is as it may be. I will only say that, as someone who does still hate turning to a walkthrough, the more typical modern way of playing sometimes dismays me because of the way it can — especially when combined with the ever-distorting fog of nostalgia — lead us to excuse or entirely overlook serious issues of design in vintage games.

But lest I be too harsh on these two middle — middling? — entries in this remarkable series of games, I should remember that they were produced in times of enormous technological change, in a business environment that was changing just as rapidly, and that those realities were often in conflict with their designers’ own best intentions. Corey Cole:

Lori has commented that we started at Sierra almost completely clueless, and had to figure out how to design a Sierra-style game “from scratch.” Then, armed with that knowledge, we confidently started work on the next game, only to have Sierra pull the rug out from under us. Each time the technology and management style changed, we had to rework many of the techniques we had developed to make our previous games.

They may be, in the opinion of this humble reviewer anyway, weaker than their predecessors, but neither Quest for Glory III nor IV is without its interest. If you’d like to see the progression of one of the most unique long-term projects in the history of gaming, by all means, have a look and decide for yourself.

(Sources: Questbusters of May 1992, September 1992, December 1992, September 1993, February 1994; Sierra’s InterAction magazine from Fall 1992, Summer 1993, and Holiday 1993; Computer Gaming World of January 1993 and April 1994; the readme file included with Sierra’s 1998 Quest for Glory Collection; documents and other materials included in the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play. Most of all, my thanks go to Corey Cole for once again allowing me to pepper him with questions, even though he knew beforehand that my opinion of these two games wasn’t as overwhelmingly positive as it had been the last time around.

The entire Quest for Glory series is available for purchase as a package on GOG.com. And by all means check out the Coles’ welcome return to game design in the spirit of Quest for Glory, the recently released Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption. I don’t often get to play games that aren’t “on the syllabus,” as a friend of mine puts it, but I made time for this one, and I’m so glad I did. In my eyes, it’s the best thing the Coles have ever done.)