Slashdot Mirror
Old Sierra Games Playable In Browser Through Open Source Game Engine
Lord Byron II writes "Like Quake III and Zork, Sarien.net has converted and made available many of the earlier Sierra adventure games. Currently, Space Quest, Police Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry are playable, and more are on the way. They are Javascript-based, and require no Flash. The site's creator, Martin Kool, said, 'To actually allow gameplay, I reverse engineered the original AGI interpreter in javascript. The reverse engineering process has been done before by others, and the best known existing interpreter (Sarien) has recently merged into ScummVM. Due to that, the interpreter mechanics were fairly well documented online.'"
That was really the death knell for adventure games for me, even though I grew up with them. The games were never that logical, yet they were kinda fun, but no one likes being told "You should have given the jerky to the eagle and the lamb to the wizard four hours ago." The damn jerky was 100 saves ago I dont have any saves from then. Or whatever the item that was easily to mix up in the beginning in King's Quest V. That was my last adventure game.
I felt without a gaming home until I later discovered the FPS and Civilization along with copious amounts of online tradewars. Not to mention Master of Orion and Dune II. So long adventure games. It was good while it lasted. We'll always have the memories. Please dont try to find me on facebook. Youre already blocked.
Great that AGI games are getting some support, but what about SCI? There are far more of them, and they were (IMO) far better. Why are there no real SCI emulators out there?
Soylens viridis homines es
I miss them both really.
Sierras adventure games up until around KQ6, Larry 6 were really quite fun, Space Quest too.
Even Police Quest, up to 4 was great, so was LA of course, with MI 1 / 2 and the Indy Franchise - Full throttle.
Those games were once the king of the IBM personal computer, you got a PC because it could run Larry or Space Quest, maybe castle, alleycat and eventually Lemmings, Prince of Persia etc.
I got 'in' around 18 years ago, 386DX was out and I had a 286 at the time, they were amazing - no doubt nostalgia has a hell of a lot to do with it but they were simpler times (not much conviential ram required for the old adventure games either, more games like Falcon etc)
I spent many an hour playing these mysterious games and while some of it was frustrating, I think they shaped me to who I am today, my sense of humour and in part some of my intelligence and vocabulary is owed to these witty and intelligent game writers.
Do yourselves a favour and track down a developer of one of these games and fire them off a thank you email, I emailed Scott Murphy a while back (Space Quest 2) - he still has a website.
I eagerly look forward to retirement, in about 30 to 40 years time there should be enough classic games to re-play for the rest of my life.