King's Quest I

King's Quest: Quest for the Crown, originally released as King's Quest, is an adventure game developed by Sierra On-Line and published originally for the IBM PCjr in 1984 as the first entry in the King's Quest series. It was released for several other home computer systems between 1984 and 1989, as well as the Master System console. The game follows the young knight Sir Graham as he journeys through the pseudo-medieval fairy tale-inspired fantasy realm of Daventry, on a quest to recover three magical items and become the next king. It is presented as an interconnected set of locations, or flip-screens, with a pseudo-3D art style. The player interacts with locations and items using text commands, and must avoid numerous hazards and obstacles in their quest.

King's Quest was developed by Sierra after it was approached by IBM to make a game similar to Sierra's Wizard and the Princess (1980) that would showcase the computing power of the upcoming PCjr with animation and complex graphics. It was designed by Sierra co-founder Roberta Williams as a blend of common fairy tales, and was completed over the course of 18 months by Williams and a team of 6 programmers and artists, who had to develop new techniques for making graphical adventure games with visual depth. A reusable game engine was developed for the game, the Adventure Game Interpreter, which was reused for later Sierra games.

The game was a bestseller, with over 100,000 copies sold by 1986. Critics applauded the advances in graphical gameplay, as adventure games previously were text-based or had static images, though some found the game slow-paced and very difficult. An official remake was released in 1990 with updated graphics, and an unofficial remake was released in 2001 for modern systems. King's Quest has been credited with saving Sierra from the financial effects of the video game crash of 1983, and has been considered the start of the graphic adventure genre. The series it started, which includes a further seven games by Sierra, has been termed its flagship series. King's Quest has been named as one of the most important computer games of all time, and in 2020 was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame.