Former AGDI member here. Great video! I really enjoyed it. Very comprehensive and well researched (as well as narrated)! Some of the details regarding the fan remakes are a little off, though. Specifically about the motivations for AGDI changing the story of KQ2 in their remake. They didn't do it because they were worried about Vivendi. They just wanted to try something new. Daniel Stacey suggested to Tierra that they reimagine and flesh out the story for KQ2 instead of just adapting it straight just to be more interesting and worthwhile and Tierra told him (jokingly) to come up with something and they'd consider using it. However, his pitch surprised and impressed them so much that they decided to use it. After both remakes had already been released, it was then that Vivendi contacted Tierra asking them to contact them back. It wasn't a C&D, they just wanted to talk. Tierra hammered out a licensing deal with Vivendi to allow them to exist with official permission as well as for the then forthcoming QFG2 and KQ3 remakes to be allowed to be finished. The condition was to change the graphics from the Sierra game collage-backgrounds to completely new handpainted originals as was said in the video, to change their name from Tierra (so as to not confuse the official Sierra brand with it), to allow the remakes to only be downloaded from the AGDI website and no where else, and lastly any new update would have to be validated and authorized by Vivendi before release. There was even a point where the remakes were supposed to appear on the small-box 2006 "WinXP-compatible" release of the King's Quest Collection, but Vivendi's left hand didn't know what their right hand was doing and this never came to be.
Thanks for taking the time to type all of that in! I'll admit I had a hard time getting details for that section, it was a lot of trying to piece things together from forums and old versions of websites from archive.org. Good to have the history, even if it's annoying to find the places I got my info from had their chronology wrong.
@@TimberwolfK Oh I can imagine! Considering the state of hearsay information online it's impressive you managed to find the actual facts on everything else you researched! Also, what might interest you is that it was discovered a little while back that there was also a Japanese-only remake of Softporn called Las Vegas by Starcraft. It was similar to Mystery House in that it's a "graphic adventure" and not a "animated graphic adventure." I think Larry has had the most remakes of any game I can think of! 😄
I remember reading reviews of the CD-ROM version circa '92 and being wowed by the graphics even then. Must have been quite something to see when even the rare few games to use VGA tended toward the "add some gradient fills to 16-colour artwork" end of things.
UA-cam's mysterious algorithm suggested this video to me because of my interest in Sierra and I gotta say I'm really glad they did. After watching a few of your videos, I am really enjoying your content. You got a new subscriber with me. Keep up the great work 👍
It's all been a bit mad, I've got used to making videos for the same tiny band of followers mostly in a specific niche of the UK retro scene and suddenly get hit with the recent algorithm change that picks random small channels to highlight. It's been nice but they could have warned me before they did it, I might have put in a bit more explanation for new viewers!
This is an extremely polished and all around professional grade mini-docco, thank you so much! And a special thanks for being kind to Sierra, there’s only a few other videos of this quality on adventures of the era and they lack the balance you maintained in perspective towards them. I’ll leave the consequence vs errands topic aside and instead say I think it’s worth noting that the flip side to the truth of Sierra trying to capitalize, is that LucasArts didn’t have to capitalize, at all. I believe Ron Gilbert or David Fox had Quoted George Lucas saying ‘just don’t lose money’. Basically, it’s no wonder quality artists placed on actual sky walker ranch, produced one hit at a time (and after another) while the company that was founded by a young couple selling their game in plastic baggies, had holiday deadlines (and bugs!). Two different realities. I suppose in other videos I got a sense that somehow the billionaires company, LucasArts, was this crazy underdog story while the competition- the husband and wife, with this team of like, high school music teachers, starving artists and dishwashers from the local diner, were the mega corporation we should root against. So thank you for showing them equal respect, they both gave me so much and both deserve it. Oh no I’ve blacked out and ranted in public again. Ok well, you do good videoing, thank you for this, happy to be a sub:)
Ken Williams openly admits that Sierra didn't have the polish, but as the flip side of that they were pushing out new instalments in 3-4 franchises every Christmas. What I found interesting was how much of this seeming capitalist fervour actually came from the company's near-extinction in 1983 and the realisation they were the ONLY tech employer in the Oakhurst region. If Sierra didn't make money, people lost their careers, houses, everything.
Wow, THE Josh Mandel? I didn't clock the name at first. Thanks for the kind comment and for all the games you worked on; almost goes without saying for a PC gamer of my age the Sierra games were a huge part of my formative years.
@@TimberwolfK For whatever part I was able to play, you're more than welcome...overall, it was a joy to work at Sierra and to be a part of so many people's lives.
6:44 DOS 3.2 disks were 113K, not 110K. (35 tracks * 13 sectors/track * 256 bytes/sector = 113.75 KB) What’s crazy is that by the end of the Apple 2 time disks were holding 35 tracks * 6 sectors/track * 768 bytes/sector = 157.5 KB of data thanks to Roland Gustafsson's RWTS18.
Ah damn, all of my sources rounded down and I didn't check against the physical disk layout. Increasing the capacity in later versions of Apple DOS was impressive, especially the percentage upgrade. Microsoft did similar with their DMF format (1680KB over the standard 1440KB for a 3.5" HD diskette) but that's only 17% or so. I think the Amiga could get even more usable space, but it was rare to see anything other than DD diskettes when the machine was in its prime, at least in my experience of them.
@@TimberwolfK Yeah many resources pretend the Apple 2 has 34 tracks and round down (110K) as opposed to the correct 35 tracks having 113.75 KB. I used the DOS "fdformat" to get higher capacity 3.5" disk back in the day. (Still have a few floppies with it!) *TIL:* _Microsoft's Distribution Media Format._ I never knew MS had their own name for it and that explains where the CAB (cabinet) came from. Thanks for the history / info!
I know I’ve literally brought it up to you today already but seriously, take a quick play of the master system kings quest 1. It’s in some ways 10 years ahead and in some behind the pc ones. It does at least make it very obvious you can swim.
00:52 There is definitely a whole load of 'too risk averse' going on in the industry regardless of whether there are a lot of remasters currently or not. The reason is the same as it is in many other industries, in that the worth of a product is boiled down merely to the bottom line and infinite growth and keeping shareholders and boards of directors happy is the sole reason for doing anything at all. Also why that quality is relatively rare in small studios, studios that are their own publishers, and indie devs. It's the publishers and the 'growth', as ever.
It's also so expensive to make games now! One of the philosophies Ken Williams talks about from Sierra is they'd often let the first game in the series turn a loss if it looked like the series overall would gain a loyal following... but that was because all they were in for was paying the designer's salary and a bit of time from Mark Crowe to do the graphics and Al Lowe to stick a bit of music and sound on. (Other Sierra employees are available, but they seemed to be particularly prolific) Now doing that would be 50+ developers for 18 months, which means publishers want to play it safe and guarantee turning a profit.
@@TimberwolfK Games arent expensive to make, its just astronomically impossible to make a hit regardless of how much money is put into them. a 1 man game is as likely to become a hit as a big studio game, so the only edge any publisher had is brand recognition. All of the extra funding that big studios have that isnt marketing is basically a tax writeoff for them
As a fan of both Lucasfilm/arts and Sierra adventure games, this was a fantastic and in-depth retrospective. And the voice is like soft honey. Instantly subscribed. I love video essay content like this.
Great video! Never knew that there were two remakes of KQ3, always thought it's just AGD. By the way, just like LOOM is the best in EGA, I believe Mafia lost quite a bit of depth in the remake. Graphics are great, though. I'm too much of a fan of the original.
The first time I played Leisure Suit Larry was on my then girlfriend’s computer. After a couple of screens, I realized it was a remake of SoftPorn Adventure. My girlfriend couldn’t understand how I was figuring out most of the puzzles so quickly.
Leisure Suit Larry is the only adventure game series where I've been able to figure out most of the puzzles myself and at worst needed the first hint in the hintbook. What that says about me I'm not sure...
Thanks! I'm back on the adventure games at the moment, trying to pace myself through the new Monkey Island so I don't blast through it all in a hurry with too much use of the hint book.
32:29 - Your first reason didn't make sense, but your second reason is spot on. Game designers simply don't know how to make 3D look good unless it's prerendered like what Cyan did. And even then, most game artists get it wrong. I don't understand why they don't hire artists from Hollywood who actually know how to do 3D. I guess it mostly stems from the whiners who demand "real time" sub-quality game engines. Thank Poseidon for the Indie community or we'd be stuck with Unreal and Unity "3D" imitations for life.
My first computer had a 40 mb hard drive, I would play King's Quest, Maniac Mansion and Leisure Suit Larry on it! Later my friend would bring over a 2400 modem which took a lot of convincing for me to install because it would take all night to download a song.. Instead of marveling at what this technology did, we worried about how slow it was! Needless to say, I installed it and my life changed forever.. Thanks to that little piece of plastic, I feel like a pioneer of what became the internet and to this day I feel like I am an original part of it, I was there from the start! Without it, I doubt I would even be typing this right now because I wouldn't have become the natural troll that I am today.. Maybe I would have become a doctor or lawyer instead! Makes me wonder how much different my life would have been if I had been like, nahh take it back dude! If you're still around somewhere Daniel, holla! Those were the days! 😭
40MB (type 17!) on my first PC too. We used to have a batch file set up that would unzip a game installation, run the game, then zip it again and delete the install folder so we could have Monkey2, Fate and a couple of other large games all "installed" at the same time.
Sierra's landlord fed up big time, He said he would give him like 20% of Sierra for a little bit more time to pay the rent. He must still be butthurt for saying no to Ken. When selling Sierra they should have made a deal to keep the rights to SGI, Would be nice to see what SGI would have become as no one did understand what they had,
King's Quest VI was the pinnacle of the series, coincidentally I was just playing it again and was surprised at how well it holds. Great story, characters, art, settings and production. And the puzzles still made sense. It was in KQVII that things began to descend into moon logic As for Larry, I'll never understand why people call it misogynistic (well I do, I just think its stupid). If anything its misandric. Larry could not be any more of a loser, practically everyone around him, men and women alike gleefully walk all over him. He is *always* the butt of the joke. But some of us understand there's such thing as comedy and laugh even when there's a little bit of Larry in us.
If I'd had more time I would have included KQ6, because the Virtual Theatre version for the Amiga is quite interesting (and very good) compared to the rather lacklustre SCI ports of earlier games. The less said about Amiga SQ4's palette the better.
I wish we could see dragon age open world, however, it would mess up the Oregon trail travel system from map area to map area, but real-time vs Oregon trail style would be better.
Myst is a whole fascinating topic in itself, not least the way that when the game was first released it was pre-rendered video, but within a few years PCs had become so much more powerful they were able to render the same thing in real time. (And then were able to create better looking graphics in real time than would have been feasible to pre-render in the early/mid '90s!)
@@TimberwolfK also the techniques the used when putting it on a CD so that things that load together would share contiguous areas n what not to make sure it loaded quickly enough.
One of the few people to actually "get it" :D It's a bit of an in-joke for a few people I knew at the time and regular viewers who know I do that sort of thing, because usually UA-cam doesn't show videos to ANYONE ELSE. I wouldn't say this was universal even in the UK but this kind of thing was common in pre-Internet video, pre global synchronicity times; if something wasn't common in your country and time period your local hacker group had a chance of calling it the "wrong" name and never corrected themselves because you only interacted with the people outside of it by text. And even if you did - hey this is our group, this is what *we* call it!
@@TimberwolfK I have no love for IBM but calling it J.R. makes you sound ignorant. The name is PCjr and IBM’s *own 1984 ad refers to it as junior.* If it was meant to be initials it would have been written PC J.R., but it wasn’t. Intentional mispronouncing the name makes you look immature to an otherwise excellent video.
the point and click genre died sooner. you could argue that since it did rereleases earlier, it reached that stultifying point in its lifespan earlier. most of us here are fans of Openttd so obviously we would be hypocrits to admonish remasters on pure principle, but as a representation of market trends there is alot to be said about the monetization of remasters
Even Sierra were forgiving compared to some of Infocom's "you must make a near-perfect run with only 6 turns of margin for error throughout the ENTIRE game" text adventures!
@@TimberwolfK alas Infocom i only vaguely recall i play PC games since 92 and text adventures mostly missed me. i have vast amounts of respect for Sierra and Lucasarts offcourse, just based on their reputation (and later one's Dark forces, rogue squadron era games).
Fans will eventually create a fan voice patch for SQ5 with AI voices. An AI gary owens will be in demand for all space quest fan games for narration duties. With Microsoft about to own the ip another lsl remake seems unlikely. No way would it fit the xbox brand
I think the two Hard Drivin' videos put me off "trying to find all the platforms this thing was released on" for life! (joking...) PoP is interesting because while it got gradually more impressive over time, how impressive it was *relative to other games on the system* reduced. The Apple IIe version is pretty mind-blowing compared to other things on the computer, the PC port was one of the first wave of VGA+soundcard games, but once you get to the SNES version, while it looks technically superior to both it's also not much different to any other SNES game, plus or minus some nice use of parallax scrolling.
15:31 - That's not exactly true. The reason they released an AGI one is because Ken was/is a greedy, capitalist shill. Stephenson made SCI and he built Sierra's tech from the ground up, but Ken wasn't sure the new engine would work because he was a risk-adverse crybaby. So he made them put out an AGI version because he didn't trust Stephenson. Ken also hedged his bet by underpaying the QA team (which is why there are so many bugs in Sierra games) and fired Stephenson for talking about paying people for doing their jobs. Ken was anti-worker, and in love with money, that's why they made the AGI version.
Former AGDI member here. Great video! I really enjoyed it. Very comprehensive and well researched (as well as narrated)! Some of the details regarding the fan remakes are a little off, though. Specifically about the motivations for AGDI changing the story of KQ2 in their remake. They didn't do it because they were worried about Vivendi. They just wanted to try something new. Daniel Stacey suggested to Tierra that they reimagine and flesh out the story for KQ2 instead of just adapting it straight just to be more interesting and worthwhile and Tierra told him (jokingly) to come up with something and they'd consider using it. However, his pitch surprised and impressed them so much that they decided to use it. After both remakes had already been released, it was then that Vivendi contacted Tierra asking them to contact them back. It wasn't a C&D, they just wanted to talk. Tierra hammered out a licensing deal with Vivendi to allow them to exist with official permission as well as for the then forthcoming QFG2 and KQ3 remakes to be allowed to be finished. The condition was to change the graphics from the Sierra game collage-backgrounds to completely new handpainted originals as was said in the video, to change their name from Tierra (so as to not confuse the official Sierra brand with it), to allow the remakes to only be downloaded from the AGDI website and no where else, and lastly any new update would have to be validated and authorized by Vivendi before release. There was even a point where the remakes were supposed to appear on the small-box 2006 "WinXP-compatible" release of the King's Quest Collection, but Vivendi's left hand didn't know what their right hand was doing and this never came to be.
Thanks for taking the time to type all of that in! I'll admit I had a hard time getting details for that section, it was a lot of trying to piece things together from forums and old versions of websites from archive.org. Good to have the history, even if it's annoying to find the places I got my info from had their chronology wrong.
@@TimberwolfK Oh I can imagine! Considering the state of hearsay information online it's impressive you managed to find the actual facts on everything else you researched!
Also, what might interest you is that it was discovered a little while back that there was also a Japanese-only remake of Softporn called Las Vegas by Starcraft. It was similar to Mystery House in that it's a "graphic adventure" and not a "animated graphic adventure." I think Larry has had the most remakes of any game I can think of! 😄
@@BrandonBlume There was also a Portuguese language version of Leisure Suit Larry done with Graphic Adventure Creator for the ZX Spectrum!
AGDI did the VGA version of Quest for Glory II, right? I had fun with that.
I remember seeing KQ5's graphics on the box and not believing that was what the game looked like. VGA was beyond incredible at the time.
I remember reading reviews of the CD-ROM version circa '92 and being wowed by the graphics even then. Must have been quite something to see when even the rare few games to use VGA tended toward the "add some gradient fills to 16-colour artwork" end of things.
UA-cam's mysterious algorithm suggested this video to me because of my interest in Sierra and I gotta say I'm really glad they did. After watching a few of your videos, I am really enjoying your content. You got a new subscriber with me. Keep up the great work 👍
It's all been a bit mad, I've got used to making videos for the same tiny band of followers mostly in a specific niche of the UK retro scene and suddenly get hit with the recent algorithm change that picks random small channels to highlight. It's been nice but they could have warned me before they did it, I might have put in a bit more explanation for new viewers!
This is an extremely polished and all around professional grade mini-docco, thank you so much! And a special thanks for being kind to Sierra, there’s only a few other videos of this quality on adventures of the era and they lack the balance you maintained in perspective towards them. I’ll leave the consequence vs errands topic aside and instead say I think it’s worth noting that the flip side to the truth of Sierra trying to capitalize, is that LucasArts didn’t have to capitalize, at all. I believe Ron Gilbert or David Fox had Quoted George Lucas saying ‘just don’t lose money’.
Basically, it’s no wonder quality artists placed on actual sky walker ranch, produced one hit at a time (and after another) while the company that was founded by a young couple selling their game in plastic baggies, had holiday deadlines (and bugs!). Two different realities. I suppose in other videos I got a sense that somehow the billionaires company, LucasArts, was this crazy underdog story while the competition- the husband and wife, with this team of like, high school music teachers, starving artists and dishwashers from the local diner, were the mega corporation we should root against. So thank you for showing them equal respect, they both gave me so much and both deserve it.
Oh no I’ve blacked out and ranted in public again. Ok well, you do good videoing, thank you for this, happy to be a sub:)
Ken Williams openly admits that Sierra didn't have the polish, but as the flip side of that they were pushing out new instalments in 3-4 franchises every Christmas. What I found interesting was how much of this seeming capitalist fervour actually came from the company's near-extinction in 1983 and the realisation they were the ONLY tech employer in the Oakhurst region. If Sierra didn't make money, people lost their careers, houses, everything.
Great video! Really thorough and informative.
Love hearing about the history of the old Sierra games. Such amazing games and a long history.
Found your channel the other day and it's one of my new comfort zones 🤗
Brilliant retrospective! Looking forward to more like this!
Wow, THE Josh Mandel? I didn't clock the name at first. Thanks for the kind comment and for all the games you worked on; almost goes without saying for a PC gamer of my age the Sierra games were a huge part of my formative years.
@@TimberwolfK For whatever part I was able to play, you're more than welcome...overall, it was a joy to work at Sierra and to be a part of so many people's lives.
6:44 DOS 3.2 disks were 113K, not 110K. (35 tracks * 13 sectors/track * 256 bytes/sector = 113.75 KB)
What’s crazy is that by the end of the Apple 2 time disks were holding 35 tracks * 6 sectors/track * 768 bytes/sector = 157.5 KB of data thanks to Roland Gustafsson's RWTS18.
Ah damn, all of my sources rounded down and I didn't check against the physical disk layout.
Increasing the capacity in later versions of Apple DOS was impressive, especially the percentage upgrade. Microsoft did similar with their DMF format (1680KB over the standard 1440KB for a 3.5" HD diskette) but that's only 17% or so. I think the Amiga could get even more usable space, but it was rare to see anything other than DD diskettes when the machine was in its prime, at least in my experience of them.
@@TimberwolfK Yeah many resources pretend the Apple 2 has 34 tracks and round down (110K) as opposed to the correct 35 tracks having 113.75 KB.
I used the DOS "fdformat" to get higher capacity 3.5" disk back in the day. (Still have a few floppies with it!)
*TIL:* _Microsoft's Distribution Media Format._ I never knew MS had their own name for it and that explains where the CAB (cabinet) came from.
Thanks for the history / info!
Unforseen Incidents is a worthy play for lovers of point-and-click adventures.
love your channel. Found it searching for videos about qbasic and stayed for the rest
Great video! I thought I knew most things about these games but I learned a few neat tidbits as well. 👍
I know I’ve literally brought it up to you today already but seriously, take a quick play of the master system kings quest 1. It’s in some ways 10 years ahead and in some behind the pc ones. It does at least make it very obvious you can swim.
Great Video. Watched the whole thing beginning to end.
00:52 There is definitely a whole load of 'too risk averse' going on in the industry regardless of whether there are a lot of remasters currently or not. The reason is the same as it is in many other industries, in that the worth of a product is boiled down merely to the bottom line and infinite growth and keeping shareholders and boards of directors happy is the sole reason for doing anything at all. Also why that quality is relatively rare in small studios, studios that are their own publishers, and indie devs. It's the publishers and the 'growth', as ever.
It's also so expensive to make games now! One of the philosophies Ken Williams talks about from Sierra is they'd often let the first game in the series turn a loss if it looked like the series overall would gain a loyal following... but that was because all they were in for was paying the designer's salary and a bit of time from Mark Crowe to do the graphics and Al Lowe to stick a bit of music and sound on. (Other Sierra employees are available, but they seemed to be particularly prolific)
Now doing that would be 50+ developers for 18 months, which means publishers want to play it safe and guarantee turning a profit.
@@TimberwolfK Games arent expensive to make, its just astronomically impossible to make a hit regardless of how much money is put into them.
a 1 man game is as likely to become a hit as a big studio game, so the only edge any publisher had is brand recognition. All of the extra funding that big studios have that isnt marketing is basically a tax writeoff for them
As a fan of both Lucasfilm/arts and Sierra adventure games, this was a fantastic and in-depth retrospective. And the voice is like soft honey. Instantly subscribed. I love video essay content like this.
23:01 i agree so much with this. i thought i was the only one who preferred playing Monkey Island and Loom in the original EGA.
Great video! Never knew that there were two remakes of KQ3, always thought it's just AGD.
By the way, just like LOOM is the best in EGA, I believe Mafia lost quite a bit of depth in the remake. Graphics are great, though. I'm too much of a fan of the original.
IA's KQ3 remake was actually first by a few years!
I really enjoyed this video hope to see more of these kind
Fantastic video!
UA-cam recommended this video to me and i'm glad it did. nice vid subbed hope your channel grows.
8:41 The backdrop makes the guitarist in me happy
Very informative video. Great job, dude!
The first time I played Leisure Suit Larry was on my then girlfriend’s computer. After a couple of screens, I realized it was a remake of SoftPorn Adventure. My girlfriend couldn’t understand how I was figuring out most of the puzzles so quickly.
Leisure Suit Larry is the only adventure game series where I've been able to figure out most of the puzzles myself and at worst needed the first hint in the hintbook. What that says about me I'm not sure...
Great video Timberwolf 👍
Thanks! I'm back on the adventure games at the moment, trying to pace myself through the new Monkey Island so I don't blast through it all in a hurry with too much use of the hint book.
32:29 - Your first reason didn't make sense, but your second reason is spot on. Game designers simply don't know how to make 3D look good unless it's prerendered like what Cyan did. And even then, most game artists get it wrong. I don't understand why they don't hire artists from Hollywood who actually know how to do 3D. I guess it mostly stems from the whiners who demand "real time" sub-quality game engines. Thank Poseidon for the Indie community or we'd be stuck with Unreal and Unity "3D" imitations for life.
👍 This was good. I enjoyed it.
Very nice video, well done. Well narrated, too! subbbed!
My first computer had a 40 mb hard drive, I would play King's Quest, Maniac Mansion and Leisure Suit Larry on it! Later my friend would bring over a 2400 modem which took a lot of convincing for me to install because it would take all night to download a song.. Instead of marveling at what this technology did, we worried about how slow it was! Needless to say, I installed it and my life changed forever.. Thanks to that little piece of plastic, I feel like a pioneer of what became the internet and to this day I feel like I am an original part of it, I was there from the start! Without it, I doubt I would even be typing this right now because I wouldn't have become the natural troll that I am today.. Maybe I would have become a doctor or lawyer instead! Makes me wonder how much different my life would have been if I had been like, nahh take it back dude! If you're still around somewhere Daniel, holla! Those were the days! 😭
40MB (type 17!) on my first PC too. We used to have a batch file set up that would unzip a game installation, run the game, then zip it again and delete the install folder so we could have Monkey2, Fate and a couple of other large games all "installed" at the same time.
@@TimberwolfK Good times! 😆
Sierra's landlord fed up big time, He said he would give him like 20% of Sierra for a little bit more time to pay the rent. He must still be butthurt for saying no to Ken. When selling Sierra they should have made a deal to keep the rights to SGI, Would be nice to see what SGI would have become as no one did understand what they had,
A great history lesson right here! Thanks for the awesome video!
King's Quest VI was the pinnacle of the series, coincidentally I was just playing it again and was surprised at how well it holds. Great story, characters, art, settings and production. And the puzzles still made sense. It was in KQVII that things began to descend into moon logic
As for Larry, I'll never understand why people call it misogynistic (well I do, I just think its stupid). If anything its misandric. Larry could not be any more of a loser, practically everyone around him, men and women alike gleefully walk all over him. He is *always* the butt of the joke. But some of us understand there's such thing as comedy and laugh even when there's a little bit of Larry in us.
If I'd had more time I would have included KQ6, because the Virtual Theatre version for the Amiga is quite interesting (and very good) compared to the rather lacklustre SCI ports of earlier games. The less said about Amiga SQ4's palette the better.
I wish we could see dragon age open world, however, it would mess up the Oregon trail travel system from map area to map area, but real-time vs Oregon trail style would be better.
PC jayarr? lol
It should be pointed out that I have 4 copies of Myst on steam and that doesn't even include the original version which has never made it onto there
Myst is a whole fascinating topic in itself, not least the way that when the game was first released it was pre-rendered video, but within a few years PCs had become so much more powerful they were able to render the same thing in real time.
(And then were able to create better looking graphics in real time than would have been feasible to pre-render in the early/mid '90s!)
@@TimberwolfK also the techniques the used when putting it on a CD so that things that load together would share contiguous areas n what not to make sure it loaded quickly enough.
Today I learned that people in commonwealth nations don't call it the "PC JUNIOR."
One of the few people to actually "get it" :D
It's a bit of an in-joke for a few people I knew at the time and regular viewers who know I do that sort of thing, because usually UA-cam doesn't show videos to ANYONE ELSE. I wouldn't say this was universal even in the UK but this kind of thing was common in pre-Internet video, pre global synchronicity times; if something wasn't common in your country and time period your local hacker group had a chance of calling it the "wrong" name and never corrected themselves because you only interacted with the people outside of it by text. And even if you did - hey this is our group, this is what *we* call it!
I’m so sorry. I’m really quite enjoying this except for it being called the “jay are.”
Could I get a citation for that name?
Because "junior" sounds stupid and I don't care what IBM think, Timberwolf, 2022
@@TimberwolfK pc junior sounds cute. PC jayare sounds like you don't know what Jr. means.
@@Slail You lot are going to get a video about the "Tandy One Zero Zero Zero" if you're not careful.
@@TimberwolfK I have no love for IBM but calling it J.R. makes you sound ignorant. The name is PCjr and IBM’s *own 1984 ad refers to it as junior.* If it was meant to be initials it would have been written PC J.R., but it wasn’t.
Intentional mispronouncing the name makes you look immature to an otherwise excellent video.
@@TimberwolfK lol. I'd watch it
the point and click genre died sooner. you could argue that since it did rereleases earlier, it reached that stultifying point in its lifespan earlier.
most of us here are fans of Openttd so obviously we would be hypocrits to admonish remasters on pure principle, but as a representation of market trends there is alot to be said about the monetization of remasters
Sierra vs Lucasarts games the original "this game is too hard add easy mode" vs "get good" argument
Even Sierra were forgiving compared to some of Infocom's "you must make a near-perfect run with only 6 turns of margin for error throughout the ENTIRE game" text adventures!
@@TimberwolfK alas Infocom i only vaguely recall i play PC games since 92 and text adventures mostly missed me.
i have vast amounts of respect for Sierra and Lucasarts offcourse, just based on their reputation (and later one's Dark forces, rogue squadron era games).
Fans will eventually create a fan voice patch for SQ5 with AI voices. An AI gary owens will be in demand for all space quest fan games for narration duties.
With Microsoft about to own the ip another lsl remake seems unlikely. No way would it fit the xbox brand
What about Prince of Persia that had a whole bunch of upgraded better looking versions on different systems.
I think the two Hard Drivin' videos put me off "trying to find all the platforms this thing was released on" for life! (joking...)
PoP is interesting because while it got gradually more impressive over time, how impressive it was *relative to other games on the system* reduced. The Apple IIe version is pretty mind-blowing compared to other things on the computer, the PC port was one of the first wave of VGA+soundcard games, but once you get to the SNES version, while it looks technically superior to both it's also not much different to any other SNES game, plus or minus some nice use of parallax scrolling.
15:31 - That's not exactly true. The reason they released an AGI one is because Ken was/is a greedy, capitalist shill. Stephenson made SCI and he built Sierra's tech from the ground up, but Ken wasn't sure the new engine would work because he was a risk-adverse crybaby. So he made them put out an AGI version because he didn't trust Stephenson. Ken also hedged his bet by underpaying the QA team (which is why there are so many bugs in Sierra games) and fired Stephenson for talking about paying people for doing their jobs. Ken was anti-worker, and in love with money, that's why they made the AGI version.
PC J.R. 😂😗