In this episode, Sean details the history of On-Line Systems and Ken and Roberta Williams's development of the Hi-Res Adventures that gave birth to the genre of graphical adventure games! He's Sean Jordan, and he is your Great Game Guide! -------------------------------------------------------------------Season 1, Episode 3: The Adventure Where Seeing is Believing, Part 1Enjoy the show? Please share it with a friend! And be sure to like it on your platform of choice or leave a glowing review.You can contact Sean via Substack @greatestgames (https://greatestgames.substack.com) or BlueSky @greatestgames.substack.com And if you enjoy this show, you should check out The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played at https://greatestgames.substack.com, Sean's free newsletter featuring tons of great games that are obscure, overlooked, forgotten or otherwise unknown! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2026, Sean J. Jordan. Some Rights Reserved. Permission is granted for the noncommercial, free distribution and archival of this episode.Music "The Great Game Guide Theme" written by Sean J. Jordan using Online Sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/) Questions? Concerns? A burning desire to talk about obscure video games? Contact Sean via Substack or Bluesky. He'd love to hear from you! -------------------------------------------------- Coming up in this episode – We’re going to dive into graphical adventure games by taking a look at the early adventure games by Roberta and Ken Williams, talk about the evolution of adventure games from text parsers to point and click experiences and highlight a few of the lesser-known 1980s graphical adventure games you should definitely check out! I’m Sean Jordan, and I am your Great Game Guide. Let’s see what one of computer gaming’s earliest showcase genres has in store! I grew up as a PC gamer, largely because my parents made my brothers and I skip out on the Nintendo Entertainment System when it arrived and PC games were all we had to play. We did have an Atari 2600 when I was really young, but when our TV started going on the fritz, my dad blamed it on the Atari and that was pretty much the end of console gaming in our house. And my dad was so adamantly against the slop on TV that he got rid of cable on our family television and we were pretty much restricted to watching what was on the local networks or whatever we could find on VHS – PG-rated, of course. For a lot of people, this would have probably been a good signal to go outside, get some fresh air, explore the world around them. And I did! But we lived in the Midwest where it got way too cold in the winter and way too warm in July, so there were many days that we were stuck indoors, trying to find something to do. And since our computer time was limited to just a half an hour each per day, we’d usually burn through that before lunchtime. Being a PC gamer, one of the genres my brothers and I played a lot were adventure games, and it might have had a shaping influence on how we all think, because when I was a teenager, my brother and I figured out how to utilize an old RGB monitor to essentially become a TV, at least one we could watch VHS tapes on thanks to a VCR we’d hooked up that could play video through the composite video input and sound through some external speakers. But the VCR had a coaxial cable input, and that meant we could hook up a video game console – an absolutely perfect plan, because we had friends who were getting tired of their Super Nintendos and Sega Genesises and willing to sell them to us or even give them to us, and they worked great with that RGB monitor. What was particularly interesting about this workaround was that my parents didn’t fight us on it. We weren’t taking up the TV downstairs and preventing them from watching whatever they wanted, we weren’t doing anything that might harm the TV and we weren’t monopolizing the computer. Somehow, we’d solved this really illogical, arbitrary puzzle, and the reward was getting to graduate from being exclusively PC gamers to getting to be console gamers as well. I’ve had many situations in my life that are just like that, and I credit adventure games for teaching me to think outside the box. And for me, the adventures that were the most gripping weren’t the text-based games we covered over the last two episodes. It was the graphical ones where you didn’t just have to imagine what was happening around you from a bunch of text, but you could actually see things depicted on the screen and interact with the game world directly. The first adventure games I recall actually seeing were the trio of King’s Quest III, Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, and that’s because at the base exchange on the Air Force Base I lived on, those three games were running on a non-playable demo loop on the computers in the electronics department. I was captivated by them because each game featured its own world in which the characters could freely move around in what seemed like three dimensions due to the perspective, pick things up and talk to other characters. That might not seem like a big deal today, but in the mid-1980s, when a lot of games were sidescrollers or overhead action games with single button inputs, the difference was incredible. And what’s more, I liked fantasy, and I liked science fiction, so King’s Quest and Space Quest were right up my alley. As for Leisure Suit Larry… dancing with girls in a disco – eh, not so much for a kid in the first grade. But I remember being really curious what a “lounge lizard” was and, being only six or seven at the time, I had a pretty literal understanding of what that might mean. It wasn’t until I was a little older, hit puberty and the themes of Leisure Suit Larry were suddenly very interesting to me that I had the wisdom and maturity to understand figurative language. And sleaze, which Leisure Suit Larry delighted in, though I maintain to this day that the game’s not nearly as filthy as people made it out to be and that it was actually a parody of all those truly sleazy XXX adult games and graphics disks you’d see advertised in computer magazines. If you know the history of Leisure Suit Larry, you know I’m not far off the mark, either, because it’s actually both a parody and a remake of an earlier 1981 text-only adventure game called Softporn Adventure published by a company called On-Line Systems. The game was written by Charles Benton in BASIC for the Apple II, and Benton happened to meet an enterprising software publisher at a trade show who eventually decided to help him reach a wider audience. The game’s box art features a now-infamous cover where three nude women are sitting in a hot tub sipping champagne while a mustachioed waiter stands behind them with a tray and bottle. Just the hint of sex and nudity in a computer game was shocking enough for the 1980s, a time where the Moral Majority was in full force trying to censor anything even remotely provocative, but there’s an even more interesting detail about this cover. Two of the women, on the left, worked for On-Line Systems. Their names are Diane Siegel and Susan Davis. But the third woman, sitting alone on the right, has long brown hair and bangs, and it’s not only her home in which the photo for this cover was taken, but also her influence that led to the rise of graphical adventure games as one of the genres through which video game stories could be told. Her name is Roberta Williams, and she and her husband, Ken Williams, had co-founded On-Line Systems two years before this version of Softporn Adventure debuted. While they’d started the company to write business software, they’d also used it to publish Roberta’s hobby project, a game called Mystery House, in 1980. It kicked off a series called Hi-Res Adventures that would become the very foundation for graphical adventure games not just in the United States, but around the world. I don’t know if you saw it in early 2023, but a company nobody had heard of called Cygnus Entertainment released a game called Colossal Cave that offered a full 3D remake of Will Crowther and Don Wood’s Adventure … and with graphics, of course, since the original game didn’t have those. You can even play it in VR if you want, which is a pretty amazing option given that the game it’s based on is now 50 years old. The Steam page lists Colossal Cave as being “by the award winning designer of King’s Quest and Phantasmagoria”, and no, that’s not a fake-out. This remake was directed by Roberta Williams, creator of both of those games, and Cygnus Entertainment is co-owned by her and her husband, Ken. And it makes sense that they’d put out a visual reimagining of Colossal Cave Adventure, because as Roberta Williams says herself, this is the game that inspired her to become a game developer. And by the way, this leads me to want to add a little bit of detail to the story of the creation of Adventure, because I was not aware until I watched Roberta William’s video about the origins of Colossal Cave Adventure that Will Crowther had originally mapped the caves in the Mammoth cave system with his wife, Particia. In fact, it was Patricia who first discovered the passageway linking the Mammoth Cave to the nearby Flint Cave system, and the two worked together to digitize their maps on a teletype terminal they had at home connected to the PDP-1 at Will’s workplace. So, why does Will get so much credit for mapping the caves? It’s probably because the two separated before he wrote the game that made his exploration of them famous. But it just goes to show, behind every major accomplishment made by a man, there’s usually a woman who deserves more credit. That’s never been the case with Ken and Roberta Williams, though. They’re gaming’s first true power couple and they are abso
