King's Quest

King's Quest, developed from the mid-1980s by Sierra On-Line under Roberta Williams, was among the first adventure games to put its hero on screen instead of relying purely on a text parser, sending players walking and climbing freely through the fairy-tale kingdom of Daventry. The series drew on classic fairy-tale motifs – dragons, trolls, witches, cursed castles – woven through puzzles where a single wrong step, a wrongly taken item, or arriving too late on a scene could kill the character on the spot; this unforgiving approach was typical of adventure games at the time and is heavily criticized today.

The first three games centered on the brave knight (and later king) Graham, and the series gradually moved from simple treasure-hunting in King's Quest and King's Quest II toward more elaborate stories with multiple playable characters. King's Quest III (1986) briefly let players control the young Gwydion, and King's Quest IV (1988) handed the lead role to Graham's daughter, Princess Rosella, for the first time. The turning point was King's Quest V (1990), the first with detailed high-resolution graphics and mouse-driven controls that did away with typed commands, opening the genre to a far wider audience.

King's Quest VI (1992), co-written by Jane Jensen, is generally regarded as the series' peak, offering a more branching story and two distinct paths to completing it. Beyond launching one of Sierra's longest-running adventure brands, King's Quest, alongside its sister series Space Quest, helped define the graphic adventure genre of the 1980s and '90s, and shaped Roberta Williams' own later work.