Oh god oh man! Imagine my excitement when I saw we were going to start writing about forgotten franchises. Hell most of my most beloved games are dead and gone! You see, dear reader back in 1988 when I was 3 I started playing video games (in those days called Electronic Image Enhancement Demons) on our old Tandy computer. This predated windows and games were run through a thing called “Doshell” which we had to feed hard square disks to in order to play the games. It was a simpler time before life was cheapened by convenience and “games without crippling bugs.” A young me was just learning how to read and type on a computer through the magic of a game series to be featured later called “Kings Quest.” First, though, I want to talk about a much better series that came out around the same time, with the same quest theme, from the same company (Sierra). That game was a game called “Quest for Glory” and over the next decade they would set the stage for games today before vanishing in the late 90’s.

The year was 1989 and “Quest for Glory 1: So you Want to be a Hero” was released. Although for a short time it was called Hero’s Quest before a lawsuit with Milton Bradley / Games Workshop would force them to change it. The game has you take on the role of an unnamed Hero, fresh from completing an adventuring correspondence course (the game dips into a more light-hearted tone frequently, each game includes cameos by depression-era comedians) he stumbles into a snowed in valley home to the small town of Spielburg which is fraught with troubles. The local “Germans” are in dire need of a hero to restore the town to a happy state. What set this apart from Sierras other “Quest” games was that you chose one of 3 paths of heroship complete with personal stats and Dungeons and Dragons style stats. You could be a “fighter” and work your way through a game relying entirely on your physical prowess, a “magic user” who could solve problems with his laundry list of spells, or a “thief” who could sneak and steal and dodge his way out of anything.

In addition to interacting with the people of the town and talking to them in classic Sierra style (typing “ask man about noun” ) and using items you picked up for specific purposes (think of how items worked in Lucas Arts games), the bulk of the game involved you running around the forest battling monsters and villains to raise your stats until they were strong enough to complete the main quest. The battle system was almost arcade style fun and was changed quite a bit after the first game. If you ever played the game “Crossed Swords” at the arcades it worked somewhat like that, if not then I’ll explain. With the camera behind you, you could dodge to the left and right and block with your shield if you had one for defense, and stab with your sword or dagger and cast spells. Doing anything in combat (mainly “winning) would earn you some spoils and some increases in your stats. Some beasts would drop items you could sell to people in town for potions and money. These are all fairly simple things to gush over and these days are considered the minimum requirement for an RPG game but back in the 80’s this was gnarly to the max!
The crown jewel of the Quest for Glory series was at the end you could save your character to a disk to carry over the stats and a VERY short list of bonus items into the next game of the series. I’m not entirely sure if this was the first game to do this but it was at least one of the earliest. However, the multiple paths through the game all still ended the same story-wise so there wasn’t much to carry over into the other games other than a better knowledge of the world and very rarely you could question someone on the well being of a character you met before. The Mass Effect series improved upon the idea of save transfers to be sure, but even they buckled under the sheer complexity of carrying over all the possible choices and decisions. I think they realized the difficulty, or maybe EA just got cheap. Anyway sorry for the derail.

The second game, “Quest for Glory 2: Trial by Fire” would send you to an Arabian setting with a new tone. Word of your accomplishments in the first game have won over the cat people of the new town and not only are you treated like a hero from the start but also expected to be a Hero when the prophesied trouble arrives. Taking the form of 4 elementals (Fire, Air, Earth, and Water) you must save the town from them and solve the more minor problems in order to prepare to travel to the sister town and save them from its fascist ruling wizard and his plans to summon an evil Djinn to destroy the world. A new stat is introduced in this game, “Honor” and throughout the game numerous chances to be honorable appear to test you. Should you accumulate enough honor you unlock the illustrious “Paladin” class. Any of the original 3 classes can unlock it but it is typically taken by fighters as the gameplay is mostly the same for them with the addition of spells.

 

Combat was at its best in Quest for Glory 2. The actual combat screen seen here has a more overhead perspective that allows for better dodging, parrying, and 3 areas of attack (high, middle, and low). Enemies had their own strategies to learn and fighting felt dynamic, pretty impressive stuff in 1990! Originally the sequel was supposed to be “Shadows of Darkness” which would become the fourth in the series but “Quest for Glory 3: Wages of War” was made instead.

Quest for Glory 3 would take place in Tarna in the savannahs and jungles of “Fricana.” Your mentor from Quest for Glory 2, a “Liontaur” (lion head, human torso, lion lower body) named Rakeesh brings you to his homeland of Tarna to enlist your help in preventing a war between the local tribes, the cattle-raising Simbani and the magic-using Leopardmen. Demonic influence is suspected to be the cause.

While Quest for Glory 3 was a step up in graphics it was also a step back. The difference between the classes in terms of quests and paths was minimal at best, the combat was drastically different and clunky and unresponsive, and the game was riddled with bugs notorious on Sierras SCI engine. While still fun, the story was mostly inconsequential in regards to the other games and the problems mentioned detracted from the overall experience. Fortunately the best was about to come.

Enter “Quest for Glory 4: Shadows of Darkness,” a game that will live in infamy! Where oh where to begin? Quest for Glory 4 was a masterpiece. The game was fully voiced with recognizable voices like Jeff Bennet (Dexters Lab, Freakazoid, and several hundred other cartoons), Jim Cummings and Cam Clarke (Everything, trust me look them up on IMDB), and Jennifer Hale (Mass Effect Femshep, and hundreds of other things). To top it all off, the games narrator is John Rhys-Davis (Lord of the Rings, Sliders) who fondly remembers his unbelievable amount of recorded lines as “The Script from Hell.” After that the atmosphere of the game and setting are brilliantly set in a Transylvania like village of Mordavia. The townsfolk don’t trust you and are living terrified and superstitious lives under the watchful shadow of the nearby castle, whose inhabitants are rarely seen and believed to be vampires. The story and tone take on a Lovecraftian style with a cult trying to raise the Dark One from beneath the land.

I could go on and on about it but it is something best experienced. IF, and it’s a big if, you can get the game to work! These days a fix is easy to find but this game was held back by its legendary game breaking bugs and glitches. Chances are if you tried the game when it came out you were not able to get far as few machines could run the game without problems. Even if you could there were several bugs at important plot moments that you had to hope to be able to pass. If you know what the phrase “Out of Heap!” means chances are you played this game. Personally I wasn’t wild about the combat in this one. It had a pseudo-Mortal Kombat camera position and playstyle that I felt was a bit clunky and inconsistent to make any sense of. Shame too, as the coolest looking enemies were in this game. It’s too bad the game had so many bugs though, so much of it was so beautifully done and the people of the town grow on you despite their initial distrust. If you can, give this game a try, but there’s one more game in the series to cover.

Five years have passed since the release of Quest for Glory 4 and the closing chapter to the series is finally released after a lengthy development. “Quest for Glory 5: Dragon Fire” is released in 1998 by a dying Sierra. Your hero has been brought to the Greco-Roman land of Silmaria which, like the other towns, has fallen upon the hardest of times. Invaders have pillaged and taken over the fishing towns, monsters rule the countryside, the merfolk are attacking the remaining fishermen, some jerk is trying to awaken a dragon and now someones gone and assassinated the king. Your pals from the previous games tell you that you’d make a dandy king and endorse your entry into the contest to become him. All your chickens come home to roost in this game, love affairs get serious and you can pick a queen, the people of your past return once again, and you get to meet the man responsible for training you to become a hero. So basically fan service is dolloped out in heaping portions.

The playstyle is brand new, environments are panoramic and scrolling and the graphics look pretty much like Half-Life 1. You now have choices in weapons and armor which can alter your appearance and fighting style. Spells work strangly in the panoramic view of the game and can sometimes work poorly, but not nearly as poorly as the combat. No longer do you enter a separate screen to fight now you simply do it in real time. This does not work out that well at all. Combats not particularly hard but its also not particularly interesting! While it’s nice to end the story and finally make your hero from the past 4 games into a King the magic of the earlier games just isn’t there. I didn’t get as attached to these people as I did the vibrant personalities of the 4th game. This game could probably be remade and fleshed out a lot more if made today as a labor of love instead of during the death throes of one of gamings Founding Fathers.

What this series brought to the table was the idea of carrying a hero across multiple games. A concept that has proven to be a popular desire but ultimately very difficult to pull off effectively. Additonally it brought a Dungeons and Dragons style stat system to us lesser nerds and allowed for a smoother, more gradual growth process in an RPG instead of the popular “level up” system of RPGs like Final Fantasy and the like. Strangely you don’t see many RPGs not use the leveling system so maybe I’m wrong about how great it is. To me it felt more realistic, or at least less restrictive as levels. The game also offered different paths for the classes which usually made for very different game experiences but ultimately the same end result. I’d love for these games to become a proto-type for future games or at least be experience by a newer generation so that maybe they can learn something from them. Like all Sierra games these games could be very unforgiving which doesn’t fly these days with the consumer. The biggest reason I stuck with these games was because my Glorious Matriarch generally refused to buy me a new game until I had completed the last one she bought. It was hard to pull the wool over her eyes since she was, and still is, a computer wiz. It warmed my heart to see a fan group called AGD Interactive remake Quest for Glory 2 with somewhat updated graphics and a reworking of the combat system. They are known for their updates of the first couple Kings Quest games too, but with Quest for Glory 2 they didn’t add too much additional story. What they really did exceptionally was fine tune the combat into a genuinely challenging system that took some time and effort to learn, but made the combat sublime. I recommend downloading it since its free and giving it a whirl. It might be the gateway to the other games which you are on your own to find and play.

I miss this franchise and would welcome its return. Barring that, maybe I should just stop waiting for someone else to love it and make my own damn game as a homage and expose a new generation to the wonders I saw. The games made me feel like a hero, so they succeeded in their original intention. For now though, I’ll simply dream about what could be.

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