In the ‘80s and ‘90s, her games traded on fairy tales, mythology and genre fiction to give the player, in a conceptual sense, an adventure-an opportunity to inhabit familiar scenarios from the realms of imagination and fantasy. Well, what would I have done?”Ĭolossal Cave is also known just as Adventure and that one word, to her, is everything. “I don’t think I’ve ever thought of that. So essential are Colossal Cave and Mystery House to the making of Roberta Williams that she cannot imagine life without them. Her and Ken’s Mystery House, an Agatha Christie-inspired horror, combined text with graphics and was a triumph everything that Sierra became flowed from there. When there were no others like it, she wrote her own. When she had finished the game, she wanted to play others like it. “I could hardly leave it.” Late nights, handmade maps, unmade dinners, as goes the Sierra creation myth. Roberta, in the cave, found Roberta Williams-and her fortune. Colossal Cave echoes in game design from Myst to Dark Souls. If the game is about anything, it’s being lost, and finding a way through the darkness. The player must draw their own maps, die for unclear reasons and start from the beginning over and over again. The spelunking simulator soon becomes a quest for treasure in a messy network of twisty passages connecting halls of mist and mountain kings, populated by singing swords, pirates and axe-throwing dwarves. In his game, the player is dropped into a vast, foreign labyrinth and challenged to figure it all out. Crowther and his wife were avid cave explorers after their divorce, he recreated, for his daughters, the wonder of their experiences in a world of his own making. MAGIC IS SAID TO WORK IN THE CAVE.Ĭolossal Cave is a puzzle of sentiment. SOMEWHERE NEARBY IS COLOSSAL CAVE-the game introduces itself-WHERE OTHERS HAVE FOUND FORTUNES IN TREASURE AND GOLD, THOUGH IT IS RUMORED THAT SOME WHO ENTER ARE NEVER SEEN AGAIN. Ken typed commands, and the printer replied. He didn’t have a monitor, so the game spoke through the printer. It was text only, as all computer games were then, and Ken played it on a terminal hooked up to his work computer. In ’79, Ken brought home a computer game, Colossal Cave Adventure, created by Will Crowther and revised by Don Woods. Her mom said, what you always wanted to be was a writer. “That’s the ultimate adventure game,” he says. I look at him and it doesn’t look like fun at all. He pulled me out when I was ready to go downhill.” By 1979, she was 26, a mother to their two sons and working for extra money as an entry-level programmer-Ken’s idea. “I was this teenybopper, had no idea what I was going to do with my life, didn’t want to go to college, and didn’t want to do anything but party…. “He was very straight, very responsible,” she said in 1982, of her husband, a hustling programmer prodigy. Roberta Heuer of California married Ken Williams in 1972, when he turned 18. By the end of this year she’ll know whether the game that changed her life can do it again. The project through which she’ll find her answer is a remake of the game that inspired her to all of this. I haven’t even played games since then, not really.” Technology has changed, gaming has changed. “You know, can she do this? I mean, things have changed. “There’s probably an element of me doing this to prove myself-not necessarily to others, but to myself,” she says. As Sierra’s marquee designer, she delivered hit after hit: her King’s Quest series was the guarantor for Half-Life and Leisure Suit Larry acquisitions and IPOs. “It’s probably a little more personal than maybe it is for him,” says Roberta, 69, in an interview with Vice aboard-well, where else. “Our marketing people said, ‘Well, you gotta go to the show.’ And I go, ‘Man, I don’t want to go to Germany.’ We’ve done the whole proving ourselves thing.”īut that’s not totally true. “There’s a trade show a few weeks in Germany,” says Ken, 67, formerly the chief executive of Sierra On-Line. When they’re not working, they sail around the world. They return on their own terms: writing the checks, calling the shots, and running a fully-distributed independent game studio from the open sea: Cygnus Entertainment, named for the boat. The yacht is the third the couple have sailed since their unplanned retirement from the video game business in 1998. When you are as successful as Roberta Williams, you can decide you are done making video games on land.Ĭolossal Cave is the designer’s first game in 24 years, and her first designed aboard the Cygnus, a 60-foot motor yacht she captains with her husband Ken. Forty years later, she’s heeding its call again. ‘Colossal Cave Adventure’ summoned the Sierra adventure game legend to her calling.
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