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It seems there is a nasty dragon terrorizing the kingdom of Balema (oh my), and King Galt (yes, yes, I know - "Who is John Galt?") sends his trusty Champion, Gorn, to save the day (hmm, Gorn strikes a strong resemblance to a certain well-known Barbarian, methinks). And no, you don’t get to play the part of Gorn (sorry). Instead, The Quest introduced the notion of you playing the part of the King's Advisor that is sent along to be the “brains” to Gorn's “brawn.” Most graphic adventures of the time required you to tell yourself what to do by typing in two-word commands (i.e. “go left,” “cross bridge,” “read scroll”). It always seemed odd that you would type commands to yourself, but that was pretty much the norm. And for some reason, only the popular text adventures allowed you to enter multiple word, complete sentence commands. The Quest was the first graphic adventure (or one of the first), to incorporate multiple word, full sentence parsing. It was also the first to abandon the notion of you telling yourself what to do. That’s where Gorn comes in. You tell Gorn what to do. Gorn, being all brawn and no brain, is totally clueless every step of the way, and helplessly reliant upon your every word (at least until he meets the beautiful and sexy sorceress): “Hey, Gorn, let's go left.” “How about we cross over the bridge to the other side, Gorn, my man!” “No Gorn, you can't eat the scroll, you must read it.” (Jeez, where does the King find these people!) "Gorn, get out of the Sorceress' house, we have work to do." The Quest was one of the largest, most graphic-intense adventures of the day. It filled two sides of a disk with over 200, hi-res locations. The graphics was some of the best seen at the time, and in a few cases was just a mite too “graphic.” The artist, Joe Toler, was inspired by the work of Boris Vallejo, especially those deliciously voluptuous, barbarian females that Vallejo is a master of. Even though the publisher had the authors tone down some of the mature themes and images to make it more family-friendly, it was still the only game by this publisher to ever be reviewed in Playboy magazine. |
