Ken Williams

But a couple years ago, I saw this resurgence and kind of a renaissance of adventure game genre because it had, you know, everybody knows it kind of took a nosedive when the Dooms and the Wolfensteins came out.

And... it's been really wonderful to see so many new adventure games being coming out of the woodworks like ron gilbert did a brand new monkey island the williams came out of retirement after a quarter century and made a cult made the colossal cave read you know the revertas i forgot what they phrased but the remake essentially and i'm like this is amazing and if you look at like the data on steam there's More adventure games put out every year now than there was in the entirety of the 80s and 90s.

So cool.

Anyway, so I realized that Sierra hadn't properly had a feature length film made to tell its story.

To sell it as a trilogy of microcomputer titles, they and a bunch of other people founded Infocom, which released the first part of Zork in nineteen eighty.

The same year, Ken and Roberta Williams and their Online Systems released high-res adventure Mystery House, a game with graphics in addition to text and not about looking for treasure in a magic cave.

It wasn't great, but Mystery House would provide a model of adventure likes to the Japanese scene later.

The title of the first country outside of the UK to get its own original adventures is claimed by the UK, thanks to the mathematicians of Cambridge University having too much free time.

Aside from the scandalous soft porn adventure with no graphics, it released more high-res adventures with graphics and on disks, so the pictures weren't added at the expense of everything else.

The games, like most of the time, still used simple two-word parsers, though.

High-res adventure number three was Cranston Manor, a remake of an earlier game by Larry Ledden, done by Harold DeWitts and Ken Williams.

It's a treasure hunt set in and around a haunted manor, a fairly silly game full of references to movies and adventure, and the graphical version takes the silliness to the next level because all the art looks like a child's drawings, and not by a particularly gifted child.

...

the Ron, uh, the, I'm sorry, the Al Lowes and, uh, Ken and Roberta Williams a- and all those 'cause they were, uh, they were kind of there.

Um-

Yeah

Like, a real, real funk, and his mom suggested that, uh, "You go do this thing." And, um, long story short is that brought him out of his funk, and, uh, he was, he was in a bad way.

We'll, we'll just say that.

And just to hear, uh, people like Roberta Williams and Ken Williams, like, say our names and show appreciation.

Like, you know, we've done a little bit of business here and there with, with Ken.