I wonder why Ken and Roberta Williams tend to be very underrated game developers

Agreeably4263 said:
my personal two cents on adventure games is i do not like moon logic and games that let you soft lock but dont let you know until several hours after you screwed yourself so i avoid adventure games in general. however, the homestar runner guys have been putting out adventure games that do a great job of not fucking with the player and they are dirt cheap on steam. so i dont think about them because i dont care for any of their stuff
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God yes that's such a issue with this type of game. I've said it before on this website but this type of game is kind of hard at times to get into. For every Unavowed or Longest Journey there's a million puzzle games filled with crap like that cooking puzzle in Still Life that required you to have knowledge on how to bake cookies in real life or that goat puzzle in Broken Sword which hardly makes any sense. First person adventure games like Myst are just way better.
 
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The only King's Quest game I've played is Mask of Eternity and I remember enjoying it and spending a lot of time with it. I never really got into the 90's era point and click adventure games. I had Shadowgate on the gameboy color and we got Starship Titanic when it came out but those were really the only two. I got more into the genre during the flash game era on newgrounds and shit like that during the 2000's so I've always kind of associated the genre more with that rather than the games of the 90's.
 
They did get an Industry Icon award from The Game Awards 10 years ago:

I think the passage of time has a lot to do with them being underrated. Roberta mentions she stopped making games 17 years prior in that 10 year old speech (27 years ago). A lot of the audience at the 2014 Game Awards probably grew up playing their work and look up to them. Most people who work in games leave the industry in less than 7 years. I would guess that a lot of current game developers haven't heard of them given their age and the state of the industry.

I assumed they haven't done anything new since the 90's, but I looked up their credits just to check. It turns out they came out of retirement to do a 3D remake of Colossal Cave Adventure which released in 2023.
 
Pretty much like most people here said: They retired before a good chunk of the current videogame players were even born, and they are famous for a genre that is incredibly niche nowadays (And whose playerbase I'd argue is considerably older than average). Hell, I would be surprised if most of the gamedevs today know who people like Romero or Carmack were - and they were almost a decade ahead of the Williams.
Grub said:
The only King's Quest game I've played is Mask of Eternity and I remember enjoying it and spending a lot of time with it. I never really got into the 90's era point and click adventure games. I had Shadowgate on the gameboy color and we got Starship Titanic when it came out but those were really the only two. I got more into the genre during the flash game era on newgrounds and shit like that during the 2000's so I've always kind of associated the genre more with that rather than the games of the 90's.
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Mask of Eternity was a pretty nice game. The loading times were an absolute pain and the platforming sections were kind of shoddy, but it was solid overall. It was (And still is) treated as the red-headed stepchild of the franchise by both the devs and the playerbase. I recently saw that they released a collection with all King's Quest games in the mid 2000s and deliberately omitted Mask of Eternity from the lineup.
 
Need for Sped said:
Mask of Eternity was a pretty nice game. The loading times were an absolute pain and the platforming sections were kind of shoddy, but it was solid overall. It was (And still is) treated as the red-headed stepchild of the franchise by both the devs and the playerbase. I recently saw that they released a collection with all King's Quest games in the mid 2000s and deliberately omitted Mask of Eternity from the lineup.
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I don't really remember a lot about it to be honest. I do remember thinking it was a bit janky but just exploring around in a 3d medieval fantasy world was pretty awesome to me at the time. I do kind of remember struggling to figure out what I was supposed to do at times. I hadn't really played any 3d fantasy type games on pc before that and I'm not even sure if I'd played ocarina of time yet when we got that game. I think that might have actually been one of, if not, the first 3d fantasy adventure type game I played.
 
Illuminati Order Official said:
I think they only published this one. Also it's not the only one, this one was a sort of prototype for Leisure Suit Larry series.
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Correct. I just always thought it was funny. The guys wanted to hire strippers and their wives said "no photograph us instead". Only the waiter is hired help from a nearby restaurant.

King's quest 6 was great, btw.
 
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Same reason Sid miles gets all the credit for civilization even though Bruce Shelley helped him create the damn game the guy who's willing to screw the most people over usually gets all the credit from my experience lot of narcissists in the creative field.
The joke's on him Bruce Shelley later created the entire real time strategy genre with age of empire along with this code designer and Rick Goodman.
 
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