Season 1, Episode 5 – The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 3

In this episode, Sean details tons of other 1980s and early 1990s adventure games LucasFilm Games/LucasArts and Sierra On-Line. Even better, this episode helps to trace how this run of games helped shape the standards of the point and click genre! He’s Sean Jordan, and he is your Great Game Guide!(And yes, Sean still has a cold, so pardon his creaky voice, nasally tones, bad singing and the sounds of sniffling here and there!)-------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 5: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 3Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack or BlueSky (@greatestgames.substack.com)And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean’s free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown!-------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music “The Great Game Guide Theme” written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/)Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He’d love to hear from you!--------------------------------------------------SOURCES:LOOM Audio DramaThe Dagger of Amon Ra: Why Almost No One Solves This Game: https://adventuregamehotspot.com/feature/5349/why-almost-no-one-solves-this-gamehttps://mixnmojo.com/features/sitefeatures/LucasArts-Secret-History-11-The-Dig/5https://www.adventure-treff.de/Interviews/11754-chris-joneshttps://kotaku.com/relooted-review-heist-game-steam-game-pass-2000667754--------------------------------------------------Coming up in this episode –We’re going to continue our survey of late 1980s adventure games by talking about LucasFilm Games and the development of the SCUMM engine. We’ll cover Ron Gilbert’s no-death, always winnable philosophy that would make their 1990s games the most popular alternative to Sierra On-Line’s adventures. And speaking of Sierra, we’re going to talk about some of the early games powered by their SCI engine that eventually would cement many of the standard mechanics of the point and click genre. And we’ll touch on how one of Sierra’s earliest SCI engine games, made by yet another awesome power couple, would show just how far adventure games could go as players embarked on a Quest for Glory!I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Let’s delve into the golden era of late 80s and early 1990s adventure games you probably have heard of, as well as a few you possibly haven’t!If you were to ask the average person on the street what comes to mind when they hear the name George Lucas or the word “LucasFilm,” chances are good they’re going to mention Star Wars or maybe Indiana Jones. But if you were to ask a gamer the same question, particularly if they’re an old-school gamer like myself, you’d probably also hear about adventure games like Maniac Mansion, Sam & Max Hit the Road, The Secret of Monkey Island or Grim Fandango.But LucasFilm Games, which changed its name to LucasArts in late 1991, created a whole lot more than just adventure games and Star Wars games. In fact, its first batch of games, which include Ballblazer, Rescue on Fractalus!, Koronis Rift and The Eidolon, were all 3D action titles, and while Ballblazer is a surreal competitive splitscreen game set on a flat checkerboard plane, the latter three of those games all used a novel fractal-based game engine that allowed players to explore large environments despite the fact that the games were running on mere 8-bit computer hardware.LucasFilm Games also was known for building simulators, including the naval hydrofoil sim PHM Pegasus in 1986, the naval fleet simulator Strike Fleet in 1988 and the World War II Pacific Theatre flight simulator Battlehawks 1942, which was developed by Lawrence Holland’s development studio Totally Games and which led to a series of flight sims that included Their Finest Hour, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe and, of course, the later Star Wars: X-Wing and TIE Fighter games.But as I said, LucasFilm Games and LucasArts are probably best-known today for adventure games, and that takes us back to 1986 when two similar-looking, but very different-playing, games were in development.Our story begins with yet another Jim Hensen fantasy property, this time one that mixed live action with puppets to create an interesting feature film about a teenager who has to venture through a gigantic maze to defeat Jareth the Goblin King, a character famously played by David Bowie. The film is, of course, the 1986 movie Labyrinth, and LucasFilm Games’s Labyrinth: The Computer Game is a loose adaptation of it, allowing players to select their own gender and work their way through the labyrinth using a word wheel that allows them to select which commands they’d like to input. The game was directed by David Fox, a LucasFilm Games veteran who’d go on to make several other graphical adventure games.There is really nothing quite like Labyrinth: The Computer Game – it begins as a text adventure game where you go to the movies and settle in as Jareth appears onscreen, calls you out by whatever name you selected and explains that he and his goblins have been watching you and are challenging you to find his castle in the center of the labyrinth or be trapped in the game. He even gives you a time limit of 13 hours, and the action morphs into a side-scrolling adventure.The game itself is mildly confusing at first but gets easier if you take some time to map things out. The side-scrolling hallways have doors you can open with corridors that lead to other sections that have items laying on the ground. Once you recognize that this is truly just a graphical representation of the same basic design of a text-based adventure game, Labyrinth: The Computer Game gets much easier. The game’s word wheels also make your range of actions simple to understand, and there’s really no way to fail beyond getting stuck in a dungeon you can’t get out of. Even though this game was designed for the Commodore 64, it has relatively good graphics for its time, and it owes a lot of its design and style to another 1986 LucasFilm Games title called Habitat designed by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer.I don’t want to get too deep into discussing Habitat in this episode because it’s not an adventure game, but rather a sort of graphical take on a multi-user dungeon that focused on social interactions between players who were using the QuantumLink online service. But it was also a bit more sophisticated than Labyrinth because it utilized a point and click GUI driven by a joystick-controlled cursor with four available commands. The game allowed players to not only create their own avatar and complete quests but actually acquire a house and a pet and exist within a persistent world where players themselves created the rules.We’ll talk about Habitat another time. But for now, I want to focus on one of the most important games LucasFilm Games released in the 1980s, a classic adventure called Maniac Mansion, created by a team led by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick.In Maniac Mansion, you play as a guy named Dave who is infiltrating the Edison mansion to rescue Sandy, your kidnapped girlfriend. But unlike most adventure games, Dave can select two friends to accompany him, and each of the six selectable friends have skills and motivations that ultimately determine how the game’s puzzles have to be solved and what ending you will see.One of the most famous elements of the game is the creepy Dr. Fred Edison’s two sentient tentacle henchmen, the friendly green one and the more hostile purple one. But the mansion is also populated by Dr. Edison’s family members, including Nurse Edna, his son Weird Ed and even a mummy by the name of Dead Cousin Ted. There’s also a mysterious meteor that seems to be influencing Dr. Fred and even a surprisingly chill piece of greenery simply known as Chuck the Plant.The genius of Maniac Mansion is that the game uses a graphical user interface where players move a cursor around with a joystick to select words from a grid and then apply them to specific areas on the screen. While Maniac Mansion wasn’t the first adventure game to use a graphical user interface, the system works so well that it allows the game to run on simpler 8-bit hardware like the Commodore 64, Apple II and even the Nintendo Entertainment System while also scaling up quite well to mouse-driven 16-bit and 32-bit systems with a more graphically impressive enhanced edition.This game engine, known as the SCUMM engine because it’s the “Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion,” became so well-known that one of the most popular adventure game interpreters today is known as SCUMMVM, primarily because it was first used to make LucasFilm and the later LucasArts adventure games playable on modern computer hardware.The SCUMM engine led to several more games in the 1980s, but none of them are quite like Maniac Mansion in offering multiple storylines and characters to choose from. Maniac Mansion is also atypical in that the player characters can die under certain circumstances, particularly if players are cruel enough to put Weird Ed’s beloved hamster in the microwave and then bring Ed into the kitchen to show him.Oddly, Maniac Mansion even got its own 1990 TV show on the religiously-themed cable outlet The Family Channel with a writing team led by Eugene Levy, who’s a lot more famous today than he was then. The show has almost nothing to do with the game, though, and even though I personally found it pretty dull when I watched it in the 1990s, it made it for three seasons with 66 episodes, ending right around the time the game’s sequel, Day of the Tentacle, debuted.But moving on to other SCUMM engine games, let’s talk about the less familiar Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, a 1988 graphical adventure from David Fox that follows the adventures of the tabloid journalist Zak McKracken as he travels around the globe in search of parts needed to neutralize dumbifying devices that evil aliens are using to make humans stupider through a nefarious plot involving telephones. Zak is eventually accompanied by three other characters named Annie, Melissa and Leslie, and they head to all the places you’d expect – the Bermuda Triangle, Stonehenge, the Egyptian Pyramid and even the face on Mars.As intriguing as Zak McKracken may sound – and it is a good game well worth playing! – it’s not quite as polished as Maniac Mansion and is both known for having a more linear story and for having some frustrating parts that truly feel like they’re there to pad the game out. The game was intended to launch a series, and several fan sequels have since continued its story. One of these fan sequels even got professionally published in Germany in 2008 as Zak McKracken: Between Time and Space, though it wasn’t officially licensed.After Zak McKracken, LucasFilm Games moved on to use the SCUMM engine to create another movie tie-in game with 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure, which had to be differentiated from another game released the same year that was more of an arcade action adaptation. This one was designed by David Fox, Noah Falstein and Ron Gilbert, and after it, David Fox moved on to other things.While this Indiana Jones adventure follows the plot of the feature film fairly closely, it also deviates in many places and requires you to solve some puzzles crafted specifically for the game that aren’t made easier by being familiar with the film. Unlike most LucasFilm and LucasArts adventures, there are also a number of arcade action sequences that require players to master some additional control schemes.One of the most innovative ideas in the game is a point system called the IQ or “Indy Quotient” system, which allows Indy to find some different ways to solve puzzles by earning points by taking actions in line with his character. The game also introduces some nice lighter moments that would go on to influence other LucasArts adventures down the road. One of the most familiar gags is when Indy tries to talk his way past a Nazi guard by saying, “I’m selling these fine leather jackets.” If you pay attention during later LucasArts games, you’ll see this line reappear.Of course, this game is often seen as the warm-up act for 1991’s Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, which I maintain is still the true 4th chapter in the Indiana Jones saga and which is way better than either of the official Steven Spielberg films that have come out since. This one was designed by Noah Falstein and Hal Barwood, and it was not only one of the first games to use the LucasArts branding, but also among the first CD-ROM talkie games released by the publisher, with Doug Lee playing the role of Indiana Jones alongside a very talented voice cast that helped set the standard for the voice acting LucasArts games would become known for.The Fate of Atlantis is similar to The Last Crusade in how it looks and plays, but it uses a three-tiered approach to allowing players to experience the game the way they’d like to play it with a Teams Path where Indy is joined by a partner name Sophia Hapgood, a Wits Path where the puzzles are harder and a Fists Path where Indy can fight more often. The story itself revolves around a race to beat the Nazis to the lost city of Atlantis in the year 1939 and to prevent the evil Nazi Klaus Kerner and his associate Dr. Hans Ubermann from unlocking the power to make men into gods.Perhaps the most famous LucasFilm Games adventure aside from Indiana Jones, and certainly the most successful in terms of the series it inspired, is The Secret of Monkey Island, a 1990 point and click adventure that was created by Ron Gilbert and co-designed with Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer. If you haven’t played it – and you absolutely should, because it’s a true classic! – it’s the story of a wimpy but optimistic adventurer named Guybrush Threepwood who visits the Caribbean port on Mêlée Island on a quest to become a mighty pirate. He eventually runs afoul of the evil ghost pirate LeChuck and has to travel to the mysterious Monkey Island to save Governor Elaine Marley, whom LeChuck desperately wants to marry, and Guybrush eventually does in later games.The Secret of Monkey Island is known for its incredible sense of humor and its reliance on clever mechanics like insult sword fighting to replace the often frustrating arcade action sequences too many graphical adventures were relying upon to pad out their gameplay. The game also implemented a new philosophy that Ron Gilbert had articulated in a 1989 essay called “Why Adventure Games Suck” that argued for getting rid of deaths, eliminating the need for forced saves and eliminating situations where players could not progress due to forgetting to pick up a needed item now gated off by the game.Suffice it to say that Ron Gilbert’s philosophy is present in most adventure games today because so many modern designers were heavily inspired by the accessibility of the LucasArts games compared to the frustrating dead ends found in Sierra titles and games from other developers.So, in The Secret of Monkey Island, the gameplay allowed Guybrush to escape death in almost every scenario by ramping up the cartoon violence and making the pirates in the game more silly than fearsome. Guybrush also receives the quality of being able to hold his breath for ten minutes so he can solve one puzzle where he’s stranded underwater without any stress on the player – though stubbornly waiting out the clock can result in Guybrush’s demise! There’s also one other point in the game where Guybrush can fall off a panoramic peak, only for the typical “restart, load the last save or quit” prompt to give way to Guybrush announcing he was saved by a rubber tree below.The Secret of Monkey Island is one of those games that absolutely lives up to everything you’ve ever heard about it. It’s well-designed, hysterically funny, genuinely fun to play and filled with well-designed puzzles that aren’t overly tricky but which force you to think a little bit. The highlight of the game is a sequence where Guybrush has to learn how to swordfight and you expect the game to move into an arcade sequence along the lines of Sid Meier’s Pirates!, but once Guybrush actually finds the Swordmaster and learns to fight, he finds out that sword fighting is really won by having a sharp wit, not a sharp blade. For example, the first insult he learns, “You fight like a dairy farmer!” is countered with the phrase, “How appropriate. You fight like a cow.” And so Guybrush has to go around Mêlée Island and swap insults with other swarthy pirates to find the right lines to attack or defend. It’s an absolutely awesome way to make an adventure game feel like a true adventure and to bypass the need for lousy arcade sequences that were infesting the genre at the time.One of the other memorable moments in The Secret of Monkey Island takes place in the SCUMM Bar on Mêlée Island where Guybrush sees a pirate named Cobb wearing a button that says “Ask Me About Loom.” If he does, the pirate says:You mean the latest masterpiece of fantasy storytelling from Lucasfilm’s™ Brian Moriarty™? Why it’s an extraordinary adventure with an interface of magic, stunning high-resolution, 3D landscapes, sophisticated score and musical effects. Not to mention the detailed animation and special effects, elegant point ‘n’ click control of characters, objects, and magic spells. Beat the rush! Go out and buy Loom™ today!The character Cobb, by the way, also appears in Loom, and in that game, he actually dies when he sees the face of your player character, Bobbin Threadbare, who wears a hood to keep other characters he encounters from having the same fate. But this little advertorial moment in The Secret of Monkey Island is not only a great way to make fun of the product placement in media that was already becoming a big problem in the late 1980s, but also to remind players that yeah, if you enjoy Guybrush Threepwood’s adventures, you might like Loom as well.And Loom is a really good game, even if it’s not a very funny one. It was designed by Brian Moriarty after he left Infocom and features one of the most unique stories I’ve ever seen in a video game. The premise is that you are a Weaver who can manipulate reality by playing sequences of four musical notes on your distaff, a spinning tool that in this game is carried around like a walking stick and capable of casting spells called drafts. Unlike most LucasFilm Games and LucasArts adventures, Loom has a serious story with a lot of lore backing up its world and characters, and this is shared with the player through a 30-minute audio drama that was originally included on a cassette tape in the game box.The gameplay of Loom is quite unusual because you don’t use any sort of parser and there are no dialogue trees. You click where you want Bobbin to go and meet up with characters who talk with you but primarily give you information about things you need to know to progress. Most of the game’s action involves clicking on certain objects and then attempting to manipulate them with your drafts. Some drafts can even be played backwards so you can create an opposite effect with them – for example, the draft to open things can be played backwards to close them, and the draft to turn straw into gold can be played backwards to turn gold into straw. A few drafts are also the same backwards and forwards so they never have a counter effect.To add some challenge to the game, the drafts are different every time you play, and you also sometimes learn them before Bobbin has advanced enough to be able to use them, which means it’s a good idea to keep a notepad handy.Loom is not a terribly long game, but it is a very memorable one with incredible realms to visit and some truly distinctive characters. As graphical adventure games go, it’s one of a kind and well worth playing today. Many players today prefer the 1992 Talkie edition with voiced lines as well as a rewritten audio drama prologue. But there is something special about the original disk-based version as well.We might as well continue talking about LucasArts, because their next few games helped to set a standard for what adventure games could be. The talkie editions of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Loom were successful enough that LucasArts continued to create fully voiced CD-ROM versions of many of its adventures to come, but Maniac Mansion, Zak McCracken and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade didn’t receive any talkie editions, and the first two Monkey Island games didn’t get them until much later.Speaking of Monkey Island, its 1991 sequel Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge brought back the trio of Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer for an even more irreverent trip through the Caribbean, this time tasking Guybrush with searching for the secret treasure known as “Big Whoop.” A series of misadventures lead to the ghost pirate LeChuck being resurrected as a zombie, and Guybrush learns that whatever Big Whoop actually is, it’ll give him the ability to be free of LeChuck for good. And after even more misadventures, including the game’s very famous loogie-spitting contest on Booty Island, Guybrush learns the truth about Big Whoop in one of the most surprising endings ever to grace an adventure game.In fact, it’s so stunning and literally game-changing that when LucasArts decided to make a sequel without Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman or Tim Schafer in 1997 called The Curse of Monkey Island, the new development team had to contrive a scenario to get Guybrush and LeChuck back into the Caribbean rivalry players had gotten used to, and the series proceeded from there, largely retconning the whole Big Whoop plotline to fit the new direction. I do want to say that I actually like the third, fourth and fifth games a lot and they have some of the funniest moments in the entire series. But Ron Gilbert’s development studio Terrible Toybox ultimately did get to conclude the series his way in 2022 with Return to Monkey Island, tying up lots of loose ends, including, as it happens, what the secret of Monkey Island actually is.I’ll give you a hint – it’s not the friends we made along the way. But it might as well be, because both Ron Gilbert and Guybrush Threepwood are smart enough to know that any revelation is bound to be a letdown, and the game doesn’t mind making that point as it literally closes up and turns the lights off on Guyrbush’s pirate adventures.But let’s go back to the 1990s, when some of the Monkey Island 2 staff broke off to create their own adventure games. Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman took the helm on a sequel to Maniac Mansion, and they upped the ante on cartoon graphics and wild chicanery while also reducing the playable characters down to three pre-selected college students – the nerdy Bernard Bernoulli from the original game, his neurotic friend Laverne and his roadie buddy Hoagie. The game begins with the Purple Tentacle drinking some toxic sludge and sprouting arms, a unibrow, and a desire to take over the world.The Green Tentacle, terrified of this turn of events, convinces Bernard and his friends to head to the Edison mansion to put a stop to the Purple Tentacle’s machinations. But when they arrive, they discover the Purple Tentacle has escaped, and Dr. Fred reasons the only way to stop him is to send the three friends back in time one day to prevent any of these strange events from happening.Unfortunately, he cheaped out on the diamond powering the time machine, and Hoagie is sent 200 years into the past while Laverne is sent 200 years into the future. Bernard is stuck in the present day, and he and his friends have to work together to stop the coming Day of the Tentacle.While I originally played the disk-based version of this game without the voice acting, Day of the Tentacle was one of LucasArt’s gold-standard titles for excellent voice work. Every character has a strong personality and sounds like they’re voiced by a professional actor instead of the programmer from the next cubicle over like the early Sierra talkies did, and the game plays like a living cartoon show with heavily stylized graphics, wonderfully funny moments and a lot of time travel shenanigans. We didn’t have Adult Swim in 1993, but we did have Day of the Tentacle, and it perfectly delivered that exact flavor of irreverent, adult-oriented humor.But LucasArts had another ace up its sleeve, the 1993 adventure game Sam & Max Hit the Road led by Sean Clark and Mike Stemmle and based on the comics by Steve Purcell, an artist who’d contributed heavily to the Monkey Island games and also had his characters appear in cameos in earlier LucasFilm and LucasArts games as well as in fun full-color strips in the LucasArts magazine The Adventurer, which was included inside game boxes.Sam and Max are the anthropomorphic dog and psychotic rabbity thing who form the Freelance Police, a questionably legal pseudo-detective agency dispatched to solve weird crimes and interact with the stranger elements of society. In their debut adventure game, Sam and Max are investigating the case of a missing frozen sasquatch named Bruno and Trixie the Giraffe-Necked Girl, who’s disappeared from a carnival freak show with him.But the pair run into a British country music sensation named Conroy Bumpus who seems to be suspiciously trying to track down a sasquatch to add to his collection of taxidermied animals. Sam and Max have to jump in their DeSoto and travel all over the US to track Bruno down, visiting landmarks such as the world’s largest ball of twine, Frog Rock, the Gator Golf swamp, the Mystery Vortex, the Mt. Rushmore bungie jumping experience and dinosaur tar pits, a bigfoot convention, and, of course, various Snuckey’s locations, based on the once-common Stuckey’s chain of gas stations and tchotchke stores.Perhaps one of the most revolutionary aspects of Sam & Max is that it ditches the array of words used in previous SCUMM engine games to instead replace the actions with icons similar to those seen in the Sierra game, though with their own twist – the use icon, which shows a hand squeezing the classic children’s toy known as the “Martian Popping Thing,” also allows you to pick up Max and use him to unleash chaos at key points in the game. The game also enjoys mocking the player for selecting actions that don’t make any sense, including a sequence where Sam will start crying and Max will scold the player if they repeatedly try to pick up something Sam says can’t be picked up.Sam & Max Hit the Road is again one of those games that’s enhanced by its talkie version – the characters are perfectly voiced by Bill Farmer and Nick Jameson. One of the standout moments in the talkie version is a song called “King of the Creatures” performed by Conroy Bumpus in his thick Liverpool accent. Around him, the stuffed heads of all the animals he’s killed and collected sing along, and I love this verse in particular:Happy to be King of the Creatures!I’m proud to be the Lord of the Odd!I love collecting things with grotesque features!It makes me feel like some Chaldean God.That is Steve Purcell’s style of humor at its finest, and it’s one of the reasons why Sam & Max Hit the Road is one of my favorite games of all time.Beyond the adventuring itself, the game also has a ton of minigames that are actually fun because they’re completely optional. There’s a Whack-a-Mole game, a Highway Surfing game, a dress-up doll game, a Battleship-style board game called Car Bomb and even a paint by numbers coloring book. Beyond Whack-a-Mole, which has a small bearing on the story, these games are really just an opportunity to spend more time with the characters, and that’s welcome given that LucasArts never produced its planned sequel and the games that eventually did get made, while certainly tons of fun, have their own vibe.I’ll also take a moment to note that yes, Steve Purcell also worked with Nelvana to make an animated Saturday morning cartoon show in 1995 called The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police also based on his comics. Sadly, it’s just not as fun as the game itself, and it’s hard to explain why the pair doesn’t translate as well to a kid’s cartoon despite sometimes literally adapting the same comics the game was based off of. Ah well.But let’s take a break from the cartoon antics of these 1993 adventures, because another LucasArts adventure game I want to get to is The Dig, an ambitious and serious science fiction adventure pitched to LucasFilm Games in 1989 by, of all people, Steven Spielberg. And while it’s far from a perfect game, it is at least a distinctive one that’s notable for starring Terminator 2: Judgment Day’s Robert Patrick as well as prolific voice actors like Steven Blum and David Lodge.The Dig begins with an asteroid nicknamed “Attila” heading towards Earth on a doomsday collision course, so a five-person astronaut crew is sent up to intercept it and plant bombs to divert its course. After the bomb goes off, three of the astronauts discover Attila is hollow and drop down inside. But the asteroid transforms into a space pod and rockets away from Earth, taking them with it. They emerge on an alien world that seems to be devoid of life, but upon exploring it, they discover some mysterious crystals and the remains of an alien life form, both of which play heavily into the story.It’s a good-looking game, making great use of rendered videos and a Super VGA resolution to show off some cool alien vistas, some of which were apparently designed by the movie special effects studio Industrial Light & Magic. The music is also one of its more notable features, composed by Michael Land and offering a sweeping orchestral-style score to add a sense of wonder to the gameplay.The Dig took LucasArts over five years to develop, and Ender’s Game author Orson Scott Card was tapped to write the dialogue while Brian Moriarty, following his time working on Loom, worked built a team to restart the game after development stalled. But when he left the company, Sean Clark, fresh off Sam & Max, agreed to take over as project leader. The Dig was an entirely different type of adventure, however, and with Steven Spielberg’s name attached to the project, Clark and the development team found themselves under a significant amount of pressure to not only get the game completed, but also to ensure it lived up to the standard of previous SCUMM engine games.And whether or not it does is a matter of taste. I personally find The Dig pretty dull. The dialogue is atrocious and overwritten, and the story is almost completely humorless and way too invested in a story that I don’t feel pays off as well as it should. One of the most aggravating aspects involves the lack of agency you have as a player – your character, Commander Boston Low, interacts with the world through a streamlined point and click system that selects actions for him, and there are events that occur in the game that proceed regardless of your choices. On the other hand, there are many adventure game fans who consider it a well-crafted exploration adventure that’s second only to Cyan’s Myst, a game we’ll cover in a future episode.My advice? Play The Dig for yourself and see what you think.Now that we’ve gotten most of the LucasArts catalog out of the way – and don’t worry, we’ll talk about Full Throttle and Grim Fandango in a future installment! - it’s time to turn our attention back to Sierra On-Line, who, as we discussed in previous episodes, really set the standard for point and click adventure games with King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Grow Yonder!, a game powered by its SCI1 engine. Sierra’s clever use of a tilted perspective to offer screens with three-dimensional depth, an icon system with many different actions and puzzles that could be communicated through visuals, dialogue and fine details led to a winning formula still largely in use today.And this allowed for a better player experience, too, because the days of trying to figure out what commands the text parser would accept gave way to the more intuitive – though occasionally still frustrating – task of trying to figure out what you could interact with onscreen.The AGI games Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards and Police Quest all received VGA remakes in the SCI1 engine to make them play more like King’s Quest V, and those became the preferred versions of the games. But curiously, none of the King’s Quest games got the same treatment under Sierra – only King’s Quest V, VI and VII were developed under the new icon-driven system, while King’s Quest VIII went for a context-sensitive cursor.After King’s Quest IV and prior to King’s Quest V, Roberta Williams created a very different kind of game in the SCI0 engine called The Colonel’s Bequest, first released in 1989 and offering players the chance to solve a mystery as Laura Bow, a journalism student at Tulane University in the 1920s who has a penchant for solving mysteries since her father is a detective. The game’s story, much like the much earlier Mystery House, is inspired by Agatha Christie-style mysteries, and the unfolding plot involves a cast of characters who all have different motivations for murder as Colonel Henri Dijon – yeah, that’s a mustard reference - gathers his relatives to share his will. Laura Bow is caught up in the drama as a bystander and has to wander around the old sugar plantation searching for clues and listening for characters to give away their hidden motivations as they respond to a clock that governs the game’s progression.Unfortunately, The Colonel’s Bequest is built around a text parser and is only available with 16-color EGA graphics, and so many modern players prefer its 1992 sequel, The Dagger of Amon Ra. Roberta Williams had minimal involvement in this title – it was designed by Bruce Balfour instead - but it’s actually the better of the two games, taking place in a museum where an Egyptian artifact has been stolen and Laura Bow is tasked with writing an article about it. Of course, being a great detective, she can’t help but get wrapped up in the surprisingly complex plot, and she not only has to find the dagger, but navigate romantic interests, solve some murders and uncover an ancient mystery involving an Egyptian cult.The Dagger of Amon Ra is a great-looking game thanks to its 256-color VGA graphics and museum setting, and its point and click icon system does a great job of allowing you to interact with the game world without getting too frustrated. Even so, the game starts off slow and has a lot of talking to get through before you actually get to go adventuring, and the talkie version of the game has some absolutely amateurish voice acting from Sierra employees who were clearly called in to record some lines.The Dagger of Amon Ra has another problem, too, in that it’s pretty much impossible to solve the mystery using logic alone. You either need to consult a walkthrough or play it multiple times to gather all of the information needed to successfully solve the crimes. While this isn’t such a big deal in a time where you can simply consult the internet for help, it can lessen your enjoyment a bit if you prefer to go old-school and solve things on your own with limited hints.Sierra released another SCI0 game in 1990 called Codename: ICEMAN, designed by Jim Walls in between Police Quest games. Like The Colonel’s Bequest, it’s built around a text parser, but instead of being a murder mystery, it’s a more of a secret agent sort of experience that mostly takes place aboard a submarine, with a bookend story about a whirlwind romance in Tahiti leading to a mission in Tunisia to rescue an Ambassador from a terrorist group being sponsored by the KGB.Honestly, I can take or leave Codename: ICEMAN as an adventure game, because it’s so focused on unexciting tasks like piloting a submarine and decoding messages and playing dice games that it’s just kinda dull overall. Your mileage may vary.Fortunately, Sierra had some better games in that rough transition between the SCI0 and SCI1 engine. Under producer Guruka Singh Khalsa, Sierra On-Line also created another series led by a female creator, this time a writer named Christy Marx who partnered with her husband Peter Ledger, who largely focused on the art while she handled the design.And together, they created an intriguing game about history, mythology and the pursuit of a legendary relic that Indiana Jones was also looking for around that time.The holy grail.Christy Marx has worked on many games since those days at Sierra, but she’s also well-known for her work on comic books and animation. If you watched cartoons in the 1980s and 90s and early 2000s, you probably saw something she wrote, since she worked on shows like G.I. Joe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Spider-Man, Dino-Riders, Bucky O’Hare and the Toad Wars!, Mighty Max, ReBoot, that terrible Daktstalkers cartoon and X-Men Evolution. She also worked with J. Michael Stracynski on some his syndicated live-action shows like Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future and Babylon 5. Oh, and did I mention she was the creator of Jem, that series about the glam-rock band that’s truly outrageous? And that she was also the creator of the Conan the Adventurer cartoon and synonymous with both Conan and Red Sonja as a comic book writer?Peter Ledger, in the meantime, worked in film, comics and television as an illustrator and painter, and he is probably most closely associated with the work he did helping colorize and revive the Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge comics that would later inspire the cartoon show DuckTales and with the work he did for Marvel Comics. But he also created the early logo and some concept art for Babylon 5 and worked with his wife on some independent graphic novels like The Sisterhood of Steel.Together, these two created a very impressive game for Sierra, a surprisingly grounded foray into the legendary King Arthur called Conquests of Camelot: The Search for the Grail, a peculiar fusion of myth and legend that sent the king of Camelot to investigate stories about a mysterious relic left behind by Jospeh of Arimathea and to locate the missing knights of the Round Table, Lancelot and Galahad. Though the first half of the game takes place in England and includes several stories more familiar to those who know the Arthurian legends, the second half of the game sends Arthur off to Palestine and has him explore both Gaza and Jerusalem. One of the odder aspects of the game is that Arthur’s destiny is shaped by several gods from different traditions, including Jesus Christ, Mithras, Cernunnos, Fatima and Aphrodite. The end of the game suggests that these non-Christian deities are losing their power over mankind and that only Christ’s power remains once the quest is completed. Suffice it to say that this is a game deeply steeped in myth and legend beyond just the Arthurian tales, and there’s even one puzzle where you need to know some pretty detailed information about Greek mythology to advance.OK, so before I continue let’s pause here and talk about a couple of terms I keep mentioning and that we talked about in our previous episodes on Sierra – the SCI0 and SCI1 game engine.From 1984 to 1989, many of Sierra’s adventure games were made with its Adventure Game Interpreter engine, also known as AGI. It’s what powered their earliest games like King’s Quest and Space Quest and Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry. But starting with King’s Quest IV in 1988, Sierra adventures were built with a new tool called the Sierra Creative Interpreter, or SCI engine. The earliest version is today called the SCI0, and it also powered games like Space Quest III, the 2nd and 3rd Leisure Suit Larry and The Colonel’s Bequest, and the biggest differences between it and the next version, which we call SCI1 today, is that the SCI0 games had 16-color EGA graphics and limited use of an optional mouse cursor to go along with a text parser that still had you typing in your commands.Conquests of Camelot was an SCI0 game as well, and the text parser is probably its biggest drawback. The game’s graphics look great and the world itself is rendered splendidly, but getting around it requires a lot of figuring out where to go on the screen and what command you need to type in. In the earlier AGI adventures from Sierra, it’s a little easier to discern what you can do in the game because the simpler graphics make it more obvious. It’s much more challenging when the graphics provide more detail.Fortunately, Christy Marx got a second chance with Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood, an SCI1 point and click adventure game in the style of King’s Quest V released in 1991 in splendid 256 color VGA. While this game’s a bit simpler in scope, it’s also a little easier to play and understand since the entirety of it takes place in England and you don’t have to guess at the right words to use to solve the puzzles. And whereas Conquests of Camelot features arcade-style minigames like jousting and swordfighting, Conquests of the Longbow features archery, quarterstaff duels and Nine Men’s Morris. My only real complaint about this game is that Peter Ledger didn’t return to do the artwork, though the game still looks good.Of course, speaking of power couples in adventure gaming, there’s yet another duo that I haven’t yet mentioned in detail, and that’s Corey and Lori Ann Cole, the husband and wife team who created a game for Sierra called Hero’s Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero? in 1989.Hero’s Quest was an interesting proposition from the get-go, offering players a fantasy role-playing experience built within Sierra’s early version of the SCI engine. This name made sense given the King’s Quest, Space Quest and Police Quest games Sierra On-Line already had available. Unfortunately, there was also a fantasy board game being marketed by Milton Bradley called Hero Quest at the same time, and so Sierra was forced to rebrand the series as Quest for Glory in the sequels that would follow as well as the game’s eventual VGA point and click remake.To keep things simple, I’m just going to call the game Hero’s Quest, because there are some differences, the biggest of which is of course the text parser. The game begins by asking you to select a character class: you can be a fighter, a magic user or a thief, each of whom will have a slightly different adventure as you explore the barony of Spielburg. The fighter tends to carve the most straightforward path while the magic user gets to play through a challenge called the Mage’s Maze and the Thief can actually break into places and steal things, though it’s a good idea to do so under the authority of the Thieves’ Guild.Unlike just about every other point and click adventure game ever made, you also have to assign skill points to your character to boost your chances of success at the tasks you want to accomplish, and you can even import your character into the other Quest for Glory games and earn the benefit of playing as a Paladin from the third game onwards.But what’s particularly great about Hero’s Quest is the game’s balance of folklore, puzzling and good old fashioned humor. The original game is pretty much Shrek before Shrek was a thing, lampooning old fairy tale tropes but also taking them seriously enough to tell a meaningful story. This is even more pronounced in the VGA remake, Quest For Glory I, because the graphics and gameplay feel so similar to King’s Quest V, but also have this sense of playfulness and fun that Lori and Corey Cole have become well-known for injecting into all of their games.While we’re talking about Quest For Glory, I might as well mention what happens in the sequels, which came out in 1990, 1992, 1993 and 1998.The second game, subtitled Trial By Fire, takes the hero into the Arabian Nights-themed city of Shapeir, once again allowing you to play through the three paths of Fighter, Magic User or Thief, but giving the Magic User the opportunity to become a full-fledged Wizard and the Fighter to join the Eternal Order of Fighters. This game is also probably the least popular of the bunch because it was never remade in the later SCI point and click style and requires a text parser. Fortunately, a group of fans at a developer now known as AGD Interactive made a VGA-style point and click remake of this game (as well as the first three King’s Quest games) using Adventure Games Studio, and it even supports importing and exporting characters.And that’s good, because in Quest for Glory III: Wages of War, the Liontaur Paladin Rakeesh will allow those who’ve played the previous game to play the Paladin class as well as the other three. This time, you’re thrust into a setting based on African folklore, which includes some Egyptian elements as well – you can actually visit this world’s Egypt during your travels! The game was designed natively for the SCI1 point and click engine and has 256-color VGA graphics from the start, making it quite a step up from the second game’s 16-color palette. But Quest For Glory III is a love it or hate it entry because it involves a lot more fighting than the others, uses an overworld map instead of a continuous game world and has a story that isn’t quite as satisfying as the others. The game feels like a filler episode because it actually is – the Coles originally intended to make the third chapter the dark one, and then opted to save that story for the fourth game instead.Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness wasn’t initially regarded as being the best game in the series because it was so buggy and ran so poorly on many PCs of the day, but it has since become beloved as perhaps the only game in the series to rival the original. It’s also by far the darkest and most serious, featuring Slavic folklore this time around and bringing back the villains from the first and second games as they attempt to awaken a Cthonic Eldritch Horror-style monster.Sierra’s disk-based release was so broken and buggy that it’s essentially forgotten today; the CD-ROM version is the one you’ll find in compilations, and it noticeably includes voice acting from big-name talent like John Rhys-Davies, Bill Farmer and, in her first credited video game voice acting gig, Jennifer Hale. But the production isn’t quite up to the level of the LucasArts games from the same era, and some of the voice acting doesn’t match the actual lines the characters speak in the game.Nearly four years after the CD-ROM release of the fourth game, Sierra released the fifth and final game, Quest For Glory V: Dragon Fire, developed by Yosemite Entertainment and published under the imprint of Sierra FX. This time, the Hero is sent to a realm based on Greek and Roman culture, and while the Coles say this game was always intended to be the conclusion to the saga, it departs so much from the other games it really feels like a sequel made by a completely different team, despite Lori Ann Cole’s direction.Rather than talk about all the reasons I don’t prefer Quest for Glory V as much as the others, I’ll just note that the modern packs on GOG and Steam include all five games and you can try it for yourself and see what you think. As with so many games that take a significant deviation from their original design, your mileage may vary. As for me, I much prefer the Coles’ more recent 2018 game, Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, which feels a lot like the Quest for Glory series overall. I also recommend the 2013 game Heroine’s Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok by Crystal Shard, a completely free title that feels like Quest for Glory in the realm of Norse mythology.I realized while I was writing this script that there’s just no way we can talk about all of the Sierra SCI games in this level of depth without this episode getting way too long. So we’ll save the rest for next week. But I want to close this episode by talking a little bit about Sierra and Lucas’s incredible influence on the adventure games we play today, because pretty much every modern traditional point and click adventure game embodies the philosophies of those two studios by following a few rules.1. Pretty much everything is driven by a graphical interface with little to no text input beyond an odd puzzle or a specific mechanic like a keypad or an in-game database to search2. An always-winnable design, with deaths often being reversible or taking you back to a checkpoint rather than a restore or new game screen3. Inventory items that can’t be permanently lost, missed or consumed before the puzzle they’re needed for it completed4. Hints being integrated into the game itself, often suggested by NPCs, dialogue or in-game text5. A segmented puzzle design with maps gating off areas that aren’t relevant for now and focusing you on a smaller set of screens so you can more easily discern what needs to happen nextThere are definitely other influences – many games infuse a healthy sense of humor and puzzles that require some lateral thinking, for example – but there’s no question that modern point and click adventure games tend to feel a lot like the games from the first half of the 1990s and a lot less like the cel-animated, full motion video, digitized sprites and partial or full-3D adventures that were more common in the late 90s and early 21st century.A lot of this is due to the fact that one of the main tools for writing adventure games today – the open-source Adventure Game Studio created by Chris Jones – started out as a tool to allow players to replicate games like Space Quest IV and the SCI remake of Quest for Glory I. By the way, this Chris Jones is a British software developer not related to the Chris Jones from Access Software who became known for playing Tex Murphy.But Adventure Game Studio has definitely preserved the style of these older games and in many ways, pruned the genre to follow those mechanics and design ideas and to avoid some of the ideas of what were intended to be more evolutionary for the genre in games like Phantasmagoria, The 7th Guest, Gabriel Knight 3, King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity and Syberia, among others.But the earlier 90s style also proved to be really accessible to gamers of all ages and nationalities because it required more of a visual pixel hunt than puzzling out how to solve the mystery of which string of words the parser might accept. This also simplified design to some degree because the developers didn’t have to put the parser through the paces – they instead had to try to figure out what sorts of actions might warrant a click and how the game world could evolve in what it revealed to players as the storyline progressed.Some critics have, quite rightfully, accused the graphical adventure games of this era of dumbing down the actual adventures and focusing more on presentation elements and linear storytelling rather than encouraging players to experience a story driven by their imagination. I do get this criticism. If you just compare King’s Quest IV to King’s Quest V, for example, the adventures of Rosella require so much more thought and care than Graham’s wanderings in part 5. In Rosella’s journeys, you have to outthink the game world and find ways to get it to respond to you, which feels very personal. But in Graham’s graphically splendid adventure, you just have to keep clicking on the screen until you can find an icon or item that will allow you to do something.These 1990s graphical adventure games also don’t require the same level of exploration in the game world because they tend to close things off to a few screens at a time. Space Quest IV, as we’ll talk about in our next episode, is a great example of both a strong game design for keeping you focused on a few things at a time but also a quite limited one that has to rely heavily on humor and theme to make up for the fact that you really only get to do what the game wants you to do at any given moment. When you compare this to earlier graphical adventures like King’s Quest or Police Quest or Quest for Glory or to the designs of the often massive text-based adventures, the thrill of exploring a more open world is lost, and even seemingly open games like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis or Sam & Max Hit the Road really mask how small they are by creating the illusion of distance between screens.One more evolution during this era, for better or worse, is the shift away from danger and excitement through deaths and arcade sequences and the increased focus on staying constrained within the game’s adventure mechanics. This led to many traditional adventure games becoming less realistic and more cartoony since it allowed characters to ensure more implausible physical violence, but that also limited their appeal since their cartoonish qualities felt more like games for children than adults.Incidentally, this vestige carries over even into today – I remember a scene in the excellent modern adventure game Unavowed where a battle between a dryad and a djinn is undercut by the fact that the game doesn’t actually have any action mechanics, resulting in the same sequence of events happening over and over until you solve a puzzle. There’s another part where a giant merman is chasing your boat and the way to defeat him is to figure out how to lower a pole so a sword-wielding character can walk out and poke him. I want to say again - I love this game, but moments like that do take you out of the story for a bit, and it’s due to the genre limitations more than anything else.Speaking of games like Unavowed, I’m really excited to get to those in a future episode of the Great Game Guide, but we’ve still got more 1990s Sierra games to talk about as we explore the topic of adventure gaming, and we’re going to do that in our next episode.First, we’re going to continue our look at other graphical adventure games made by Sierra using the SCI engine and we’ll explore what Leisure Suit Larry and Space Quest’s Roger Wilco got up to along with talking about the rise of Jane Jensen, Al Lowe and Josh Mandel’s other games like Freddy Pharkas and Torrin’s Passage, Roberta Williams’s forays into full motion video and Sierra’s interesting attempts at creating animated games that looked like living cartoons!Then, we’ll turn our focus to other developers like Dynamix, Westwood Associates, Interplay, Adeline Software International, Humongous Games, Activision, Revolution Software, Cryo, Perfect Entertainment and MicroProse! I’ll also talk a little bit about what Steve Mertetzky was up to at Legend Entertainment and Boffo Games and Douglas Adam’s invitation to take a trip on the Starship Titanic.Next, we’ll turn our focus to the multimedia era of the mid to late 1990s and the transition to FMV and full-3D adventures in the declining days of the genre, covering titles like Myst, The Longest Journey, Burn:Cycle, Chronomaster, The Journeyman Project, The 7th Guest, Blade Runner, The Last Express and The Neverhood.Finally we’ll close by touching on the 21st century contributions of studios like Telltale Games, Double Fine, Daedalic Entertainment, Amanita Designs, Wadjet Eye Games and Quantic Dream. We’ll cover all of that and more in our next few episodes!If you enjoy this show, you can read this series every week on my Substack at Greatestgames.substack.com, where you’ll also find brand new articles on other great games you’ve never played.And you’re always welcome to talk with me on Bluesky!I’m Sean Jordan, I am your Great Game Guide, and I’ll be back next week with more to explore!THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED GAME TO TRYBefore I let you go every week, I’m close out the show with a game I want you to try that’s a little off the beaten path. This isn’t sponsored content and I don’t have any financial stake in anything I recommend; these are games that I think are really good but don’t have as much exposure as some of the more popular ones.This week, I want to recommend Relooted, a parkour platform game from the South African studio Nyamakop that is quite honestly one of the coolest games I’ve played in awhile. The premise is that you’re a parkour runner named Nomali who’s been recruited into a crew focused on repatriating artifacts that have been stolen through colonialism and which are now housed in museums in private displays so they don’t have to be returned to the cultures they were plundered from. Your job is to plan a series a heists, work out your exit strategy, grab the loot and then run to your escape point before you’re chased down.The game isn’t quite set in the real world – the developer describes it as “African-futurist” – but it does involve real world artifacts, and it’s happy to give you detailed info about where they’re from and why they’re important to the cultures they were taken from. Talk about a perfect game for Black History Month, but also a subversive way to remind the world that yeah, colonialism sucks and we still have a lot of work to undo its influence on many cultures around the world and to give them back the records of their own history.I’ve seen a lot of hate directed at this game and also some surprisingly tone-deaf reviews written by white people like myself who want to criticize this indie game for what they consider to be a so-so story amidst a promising premise.I personally feel this is the wrong way to handle a game that is literally about white people telling the story of black people around the world, and so I’ll instead quote the great headline from a review by Ash Parrish on Kotaku: “Relooted is a big black middle finger to history controlled by white people.” I couldn’t say it better myself.We need more games like this. We need more people to tell their stories through games so the rest of us can have a chance to understand what it’s like to feel what they feel and to experience what they experience. But I want to be clear – I am not recommending Relooted just because of that. I’ve played it, and it’s indeed a very good game that I had a blast with. It reminds me a lot of the 2D version of Mirror’s Edge, which was itself borrowing many things from Prince of Persia. But there are also some cool ideas from other 2D platformers thrown in to keep things fast and fun. I personally get some of the feelings of games like Gunpoint and Mark of the Ninja when I’m playing this one, and I love it.So be sure to try out Relooted. It’s just $15 on Steam and well worth it! And even if it’s not your cup of tea, you’ll be supporting a great South African game studio that I hope will continue to make more games in the years to come.SOURCES:LOOM Audio DramaThe Dagger of Amon Ra: Why Almost No One Solves This Game: https://adventuregamehotspot.com/feature/5349/why-almost-no-one-solves-this-gamehttps://mixnmojo.com/features/sitefeatures/LucasArts-Secret-History-11-The-Dig/5https://www.adventure-treff.de/Interviews/11754-chris-joneshttps://kotaku.com/relooted-review-heist-game-steam-game-pass-2000667754Thanks for reading The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greatestgames.substack.com