Ken & Roberta Williams

that mom needed to get a babysitter. My parents both work. Anyway, that's not the point. The point is also had this, uh, this friend of the family. I guess it was my older sister's friend. And I knew a lot of them because it was small town and there's a lot of community theater and stuff. And she her mom invited me over to the house to play games on their computer. If I ever wanted to about this, yeah, and I

absolutely took her up on it. And even at the time, I think I felt kind of weird, just like going over and knock on the door and be like, hey, can I play games on your computer? And I would go up there and sit in their office myself playing games that I didn't you know, we didn't have those games. And I had a good time, but I was like, where am I and I've in a weird place? Is

thisn't even my friend's house. I mean, I imagine now that I'm an adult, and I think I must be close to what that woman's age, you know, probably older than she was at the time, the mom, And I'm thinking she probably just said it. I didn't expect. Look, a nine year old kid takes things very literally, especially

when it comes to video games. Maybe she did know, and she was just like, I mean, I got this computer, it was why not actually needed some damn company in the house or just to feel like someone was there. That was it. It's probably and this isn't very fair, but it's probably less creepy be since it was a woman. I feel like I'm an older man had been like, hey, come over to play. I'm a computer, I'd be like, why did you go over there? That's dangerous? Yeah, like

commander keen idea. Yeah, I know you have no idea, But somebody out there listening is like, yes, there were two games on my Grandfather's like Apple two or something, and it was Castle Quest. Did you play Castle Quest? It was like you were a vampire and you had to get from the top of the castle to the bottom or something before the sun came up and you couldn't see. I did not play this. I never beat

it. It It was so hard. I'll say. Um, when I was very young, this would have been like first or second grade, and I got pulled out of class for being a little advanced state of a ship. Oh wait, for being amazing actually, for being a special, special boy who was obviously going to be president one day or something, and um, look at you now. And they set me up with this computer game called Rockies Boots and it was like a logic puzzle gate game, playing with electricity

and switches and stuff. And it was the crappiest graphics you can think of, literally a little orange block moving around the screen. And man, I love that game and I played it recently and it really challenged me, I think more now than elastic mind back when I was a kid, back when you could have been president, nop did something to those brain cells many years. Got a dork though that, Like I loved educational games like ye, MAVs teaches typing, which is not even a game, but

it was kind of a challenge. I guess they were trying to make you like, type as many words as you could. I had to follow along or something. I don't even ruber now, but I used to really like that game, not really a game, homework your math Blaster one that I played all the time. I loved that ship and it looked cute, like the graphics of it really cute. How about Treasure Mountain Challenge of the Ancient

Empires one of the best games, so good. Obviously we're talking about nostalgic video games today, computer games in particular. And I'm Eli, by the way, I'm Diana's so good to have you back on the show. Love you guys,

Love you guys, love having you here. And this one's a really fun episode today again just dipping into the nostalgia factor here talking about a couple that for me personally had a huge impact on my life and uh and their their marriage apparently um was a big part of my childhood that I was totally unaware of at the time. Wow, I know, well, I know we've played I know you've mentioned The King's Quest games in this

podcast before. Oh yeah, I never stopped talking about the King's Quest games because these games they were not only I mean they were where I learned to read, write, and type was playing King's Quest. And they also were just like hugely formative in terms of my imagination, the kind of storytelling I liked, the kind of puzzles that I like today. I think they were just such a huge part of that. And there's such good games, and um,

everybody should play them. Still there's still totally worth it there. Yeah, but we wouldn't have those games without these people that were talking about today. So we're going to revisit the marriage of Ken and Roberto Williams and uh and how they brought to us to the world, because in the nineteen eighties, this young married couple with two pretty much completely different skill sets came together to revolutionized computer gaming.

They used Ken's programming brilliance and Roberta's imaginative ideas for storytelling, and they formed the company Sierra Online, and they released games like Mystery House, King's Quest, like we talked about Space Quest, which is a blast um dr brain. If anybody played those educational games or the Incredible Machine Leisure Suit, Larry Fantasmagoria, just all these titles that, if you're like me,

are blowing your nostalgic circuits right now. Um, but none of this would have happened if these young, shy teenagers hadn't come together. And even if you've never heard of

these games, Uh, this is a very interesting story. And if you have any connection to video games at all, whether you love Kingdom Hearts or if you're playing Elden Ring right now, or even those mystery search games on your phones with the little pictures we have to find things, play Seekers notes anyone, none of those might exist without Ken and Roberto Williams. So let's go back look at their story and find out how all this all happened.

I'm ready for this quest, Hey the French, come listen. Well, Eli and Diana got stories to tell. There's no matchmaking, a romantic tips. It's just about ridiculous relationships, a love it might be any type of person at all, and abstract concept are a concrete wall. But if there's a story where the second glance ridiculous roles a production of

I Heart Radio. Alright, so right off the bat, I got a lot of this info from a very cool book was called Hackers Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Stephen Levy and um most of the information came from there. Some of it didn't line up with other inner views and articles that I read with Kenna. Roberta Um so tried to kind of adapt there. But this is where a lot of this kind of foundational information comes from.

Roberta Hewer was born in February of nineteen fifty three in rural California, just east of Los Angeles, and her father was an agricultural inspector. Her mother was a homemaker, and her little brother was born a year after her,

and he had epilepsy. This really pulled a lot of her parents focus Overberta herself just developed this really active imagination and she would entertain her little brother and her parents with these elaborate, sort of fairy tale adventure stories that she would think up while she was lying in bed at night. Now, otherwise she was kind of shy and quiet, especially at school, where her sort of rural upbringing really stood out. She even said later in life quote,

I never really liked myself. I always wanted to be someone else. I love this idea of rural l a in the in the eighties right now, it's probably you, probably so. Kenneth Williams was born on October in Evansville, Indiana, but his family moved to Pomona, California when he was young. He had two brothers, Larry and John, and the three of them often shared a bedroom. I know that life,

not brothers, but definitely Sharon bedroom growing up. You know, it was fun and also an opportunity for ConfL many, an opportunity for conflict. In school, Ken was brilliant. He had no trouble skating by on his natural aptitude, but he refused to do homework in junior high. Also sounds very familiar. Yes, this was me. See this is the difference between you and I in school. I think we both had a bit of a natural aptitude. Kids skate by pretty easily. But I again, I liked mabis teachers

typing My homework was so fun for me. Well, if they had made homework video games, I would have been all over it. You know, in school, I love that. You know, we had computer lab in school kids. There was a point in schools where there was a whole separate room where they kept all the computers and you would go in for forty five minutes of time and learn how to type on them. Yeah. Or sometimes you could play Oregon Trail exactly on special days when the

when the yeah, when the teacher wasn't feeling it. It was like Oregon Trail, math blaster, learn how to use the arrow keys. Kid, I'm hungover, shut up spacebar, over and over again for an hour. So Ken was refusing to do homework in junior high. He instead spent his time compulsively reading whatever interested him the most. Now that

sounds like me. He loved The Hardy Boys and books by Harold Robbins, like The Carpet Baggers, which features a Howard Hughes like protagonist, and Ken said quote, that's where I got my role model. I don't know about Howard Hughes as a role model. I'm not. I'm just going to throw it out there. I mean it depends. I think you want to, you want to kind of have a limit on that, like his his ambition, his success. These are things I want wearing tissue boxes on my feet.

We'll stop before that, before we get there. So that was like a real rags to Rich's story, The Carpet Baggers, and because of that. When he hit high school, he stopped just coasting. He started like working extra hard to succes. Oh there's the difference. You needed to read the carpetbaggers like. Yeah, I continued to coast and not work very hard through high school. I kept it on cuse control. Yeah, Ken played in the school band. He quote learned how to

play the game of good grade is a game. It is a game, very true, And he came up with all kinds of clever ways to make money. Levy says, quote he won so many sales contests on his paper route that he was on a first name basis with the ticket takers at Disneyland. Man. I mean, I definitely also did not come up with clever ways to make money in high school. That was not my bag. If I'd had Disney World next door, I might have worked

a lot harder to be able to afford tickets. So that's true what we're prizes in Georgia, I guess right. I mean literally, my friends and I got jobs to save up money to buy pieces for the computers we were building so we could play better video games building. And when I got well, when I got the part that I needed, Uh, you know, hey, can I get somebody to cover all my shifts next week? I just pulled this computer. I want to play games. I don't need money anymore. Done working, I got the one thing

I wanted. Yeah. So, Ken did have a girlfriend in high school, and one time he went out on this double date with a friend of his and his friend's girlfriend was Roberta Hewer, and the two of them talked a little bit, but she said she wasn't really impressed with him. She said, quote, he was cute, but I thought he acted kind of dumb. He was shy, so to compensate he would go overboard, acting too aggressive. He carried cigarettes in his pocket, but he didn't smoke. Roberta

was like poser. After this double date, they didn't really see each other too much. Ken was so focused on succeeding that he actually graduated high school early at sixteen years old, and he went to the nearby California Polytech

Nick State University. And one of the reasons he chose this place because it was close to home, he was only sixteen, and also it only costs twenty four dollars per quarter, which sounds obviously insanely cheap, but You've got to imagine this was like nine seventy and if you translate that, let me get the calculator real quick here into today's dollars, that tuition would actually be a hundred and seventy seven dollars. You imagine going to school over

a hundred and seventy seven bucks per quarters. A hundred seventy seven dollars isn't even a parking passiously And and just to check, because I was like, well, maybe California Polytech is just, you know, an inexpensive school. I looked them up and they're in state. Tuition today is ten thousand dollars, so I think it's has surpassed the inflation

rate by a little bit. So if you're wondering where all the Ken Williams of today are there instead and saying that, and despite his confidence and intelligence, Ken was totally intimidated by computers at first. He was naturally good in grade school classes, but he was majoring in physics, and college level courses were taking a different kind of

focus and learning that he wasn't used to. In a four tram class, which is an old computer programming language, he struggled and fell behind, but that determination kicked in. He's like, I'm ana Howard used my way through this, and he set himself a goal simulate a mouse running through a maze. Okay, so like as a computer program. Yeah, he wanted to see if he could code that. But he could not wrap his head around the power of the computer. It was such a monster. It seemed so

much smarter than he was. That was new and scary. And six weeks into the nine week course, something clicked, Levy writes, quote, he came to a sudden realization the computer wasn't so smart at all. It was just some dumb beast following orders, doing what you told it to and exactly the order you determined you could control it. You could be God. So Ken got the mouse through the maze, and he very suddenly was a brilliant programmer. It was just magically easy to him now, and everyone

in the class could see that this kid was special. God. I wish, I wish we had the words to explain epiphanies like that, when you're just like nothing makes sense for weeks and weeks, and then all of a sudden it does, like there's nothing to really describe that very singular feeling. But Germany's got a word for it, you know what, They probably did a million letters long, right, but I would learn it. I feel that way when I'm doing puzzle games sometimes. I was just playing this one.

It's called Patrick's Parabox, and it's a cool little um, cool little game or I don't know. I'm not going to go into the description, but it's one of these games where I'm just staring at the screen, going, why the hell can't figure out what I'm doing for like twenty five minutes and then suddenly your brain just answers you, Oh my god, why didn't I see that twenty minutes ago?

It's so simple, it's amazing. And I've heard that a lot about computer programming, Like my dad's a programmer, for example, and he said, uh, you know, it's just that you kind of have to tame the beast and realize that the computer is working for you. You know, it's not actually any smarter than a person. I mean that might be different now, but that's true, I guess in the

seventies versus today. But if you can kind of learned to tame it and learn that it's you know, it's working, it's it's not doing anything that you're not telling it to do. It's an extension of your brain, you know. So if you can kind of wrap your head around that, it becomes much easier to sort of command. I'll take your word for it, because I don't want to do it. So, you know, school is getting a little bit easier for him.

He's starting to get by in class. And then out of the blue one day, Can just suddenly remembered Roberta, this girl from the double date, and he decided to call her up. He nervously reminded her who he was. You know, hey, remember that guy with the unlit cigarette hanging out of his mouth, you know, the one who was like kind of obnoxious because I was overcompensating for being kind of unsure of myself. Uh, do you want

to go out? She's like, I remember being kind of annoyed by you, and yeah, Roberta had dated a few boys, and she said, quote, all the boyfriends I'd had before were rather dumb damn, So you know, her bar for men was probably pretty low. She thought what the hell and decided to go out with him. She currently had another boyfriend who lived upstate at the time, so robert right, So at least this guy was closer. You know. She was a little nervous about seeing this kind of insecure,

sometimes pushy young college boy. And which is actually interesting because he was a year younger than her, but he was a college kid now because he graduated early. But one day they were talking and he really opened up to her. She recalled quote, he was talking about physics. I figured he was a really bright guy. He talked about real things, responsibility, and within a week of dating Ken convinced her to dump the other guy upstate and

go steady with him. Later on, Ken reflected about this quote, I just didn't want to be alone. Not very flattering. I mean, he's sixteen, he's in college. No one is his age probably, and he's like away from home a lot. And he's like, look, I'm not interested in doing this, Like let me try and keep dating people. Like I'm done. Just find somebody. I like you. You're cool. I don't want to figure this out anymore, and done, all right, like he said. Roberta was a year older than Ken.

As soon as he turned eighteen, he said to her quote, we're getting married and that's it. And Roberta was like, okay, And she told her mother quote, he's going to go someplace to really make it be something. And they married quickly. Within a year, Roberta was pregnant, giving birth to their first son, DJ in nine. But Ken is still struggling in his physics major, and he was worried about his

ability to support a family. Again, he's pretty young still at this point in his life, and I mean, those four dollars student loans aren't going to pay themselves off. He's drowning and two double digit debt. What did we

do to our children the seventies? So cruel. But he saw there were more and more jobs popping up for computer programmers than physics jobs anyway, So Roberta's dad co signed a loan for him to go to a trade school called Controlled Data Institute for fifteen hundred dollars and okay, that is over ten dollars today, but this is a highly specialized school, so the you know, competition, I mean, sorry, so the comparative tuition would be probably a million bucks

a semester today for for a school like that. Insane. And he still wasn't changing the world with his programming or anything. But he could get by. He could do whatever was asked of him. He had a real fake it till you make it style. He'd go into an interview and they'd be like, oh, we're looking for someone who can code in flurg nuts, and Ken will be like, Oh, I ad flert Nuts. That's my middle name, and I

am fluent in Florna. I dream in flirknets. Like that's basically when I talked flerg nuts comes out, you know what. And then he'd get the job and then go home over the weekend and be like, Okay, what the fund is flurgne And he would grab every book on the subject he could find and just learn it real fast and honestly, this is the way to get ahead. People cannot. I wish that's someone and sat down and explained to me more clearly when I was younger that that is

what most people do. No one knows what they're doing. Everyone pretends and then figures it out when when they're alone in the room at night. You know, Um, so so just lie, Everybody's what I'm telling you. Lie on your resumes, but you know you have to back it up. You have to be able to figure it out. If I put on my acting resume, like oh yeah, I can ride a horse. I better show up on day one knowing how to ride a horse, you know, instead of being like, now, how do you get your leg

around him? Again? Remind me how to ride a horse again? Real quick? Which one is the front? Which one's the horse? You're getting on a pig? And they're like, hoaground, Mr Banks, we have questions about your resume. So Ken's determination and his ability to learn quickly to you know, again, make something up and then figure it out real fast was working really well for him, and it put him on a fast track to just better and better jobs. So he's making more and more money. They moved to l

A and they ended up changing houses several times. Roberto would even say to Ken at night, Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we made two dars more a week? And can of be like, yeah, it probably would, and he'd go and pick up another gig. I definitely said that, here's another couple of hundred dollars a week. Yeah, but we're maxed out. There's no more jobs allowed, so you know,

he's working full time gigs. He's taken moonlighting jobs, and even Ken himself started to think, I wonder if we could retire at thirty the dream Now Roberto was pregnant with their second son, chris In, and Ken found himself working with these super teams of the best programmers in the industry. But his boss at this one job really kept him stymied. When Ken asked to head up a prog him and group, he was told, quote, you have no talent for management. That quote alone shows that his

boss had no talent for managing exactly. A good manager wants to create more managers, not just keep people employees.

Get your life right well. And also this probably really lit a fire under him, and eventually Ken's outside work was bringing him more money than his inside work, so he left the corporate world to be an independent contractor, and he worked with big companies like GM and Warner Brothers and even a few of the big banks at the time, like writing uh tax accounting code for them, and things like that really boring software that you and I don't even know exists, but that somebody like my

dad is working very hard on you until their eyes crossed. So Kennon Roberto would sit in there hot tub at night and fantasize about moving out to the woods, escaping suburban life. And just having fun. They're talking about like water skiing and getting a boat on the lake and all this stuff. Yeah, lake like the dream, but running the numbers it was really just a fantasy. There weren't enough hours in the day for Ken to make that kind of money. That's relatable. But Ken had a machine

at home called a teletype. It was like a glorified typewriter. But it hooked up to a modem with the late seventies version of the Internet, and it allowed him to work some from home. I gotta tell you about this thing. I mean, it is just like it literally looks like an electronic typewriter. It plugs into this They had an

Internet back in the seventies. It was not the Worldwide Web, obviously, but you know, you could communicate with computers in different parts of the world through coding and like very specific lines of text that kind of like sending a facts

through your computers sort of. I guess, so print out on the other end, and it well, it printed out on your end, you know, so I could type in like as I understand it, I could wrong about this, but I could type in, like show me the contents of dr D on the main frame and it would send the signal to Boston or whatever. And then the signal would come back, and my little typewriter machine would print out the list of files. Okay now, and then I'd say, okay, open this one, and it would print

out the code. Interesting, weird, weird time, so much paper, I imagine. Yes, so he's got this teletype, and Ken wrote quote. I was programming an income tax program on a mainframe computer three thousand miles away from my l a home. The machine was solely for that remote work, but that didn't stop me from exploring the main frame for anything else interesting to do. I will always remember the thrill of discovery when I saw something called adventure

and typed it just to see what would happen. The computer answered back, and it would change their lives forever. And we'll find out how right after this break, welcome back to the show. Even that is like later than they didn't have recorded voices, right. Well, if I could tell a type y'all and welcome back to the show, I would now. At this point in her life, ROBERTA Williams had put all of her fantasies behind her. She was a mother and a housewife in the nineteen seventies,

so you know she knew. Her understanding was that Ken was making money, and she stayed home and took care of the other half of their lives. And her shyness only got worse in these days too. She said she could barely make a phone call, and any creative fairy tales that were still floating around in her head were quickly buried away and told to no one. Her best escape was reading. She loved Agatha Christie novels and other mysteries and adventure stories. And Ken's whole world was computers.

But despite that, Roberta really never had much interest in them, and she also didn't really care too much for games, so after Ken typed out Adventure on his teletype, she probably rolled her eyes when he called her over and said, you gotta see this game. But Ken was fascinated by it. Everybody was. This game was blowing up. I mean, it was just changing what everyone was thinking computers could do.

Tim Anderson, who was a programmer back in the day who worked at m I T, said that when this game came out, quote, it's estimated that it's set the entire computer industry back two weeks because everybody just dropped what they were doing to play this game, similar to video games today. Back many a school, career, careers, whole industries. I mean, I know a lot of grown adults who stopped working when Elden Ring came out and their their whole industry probably got set back two weeks as well.

Everyone's like, where's the thing that I asked you for? So after some persistence, Roberta finally agreed to come look at whatever nonsense he was a pitch into her, and she sat down and saw the text that had been written back. Quote. You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully. These were the opening lines to the game Adventure also called Colossal Cave by Will Crowther

and Don Woods. It was one of the first video games and it was all text based, no images at all. It's kind of like a Choose your own adventure book. You would just type in what you wanted to do or where you want to go, Like you type in east and it would then print back. You are inside a building, a well house for a large spring. There are some keys on the ground. There is a shiny brass lamp nearby. There is food here, and you type take keys or whatever and try to find the treasure

in the cave. And if you're like me, you never heard of this game until you read the book Ready Player One, maybe saw the movie right right, because I mean this was this game was groundbreaking and revolution. It's definitely a point in history that you can look at and say like this is where it all changed. Yeah, absolute and everything. So yeah, it was a big deal

in the book. Yeah, of course, because it would, like you say, it was like the first video game, and it was all about people who obsessed with video games, so it was like a well and of course Ready Player One is the characters are based on the real life, like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and these guys who were who were literally at this time doing the same thing as as kenn of Roberta here like pulling up

these computers and saying, what the hell can it do? Yeah, they're having their their children's minds blown by this text game. And it wasn't long before Roberta was hooked on this game. And I know the feeling she said, quote, I couldn't stop it was compulsive. I started playing it, and I kept playing it. I had a baby at the time, Chris was eight months old. I totally ignored him. I didn't want to be bothered. I didn't want to stop

and make dinner. I wonder if Chris ever read this book and he was like, wow, yeah, so that's where my obsession with hugging comes from. Now. Roberta stayed up all night trying to figure out how to like get around the snake or where the stupid keys went, r various puzzles like that, And when she wasn't playing it, she'd be daydreaming about what steps she could take next. She started imagining maybe how the story would go if she had written it. Meanwhile, Ken kind of got bored

with the game quickly. Roberta thought maybe that was because he didn't like the game's sarcasm and humor, which I love in these old games. I was about to say that would be the best thing about it, but only if you're a certain I think for creative types. I think for very literal people, you might be like, Okay, I don't need all that. I want the data, I want the information. I don't need that. They don't want to play the game. Don't joke with me, don't have

fun with me, want to play this game. Levy gives an example of this in the game. If you typed out something like kill dragon, the game would respond, what with your bare hands? But if you typed back yes, then the game would say, congratulations, you have just vanquished a dragon with your bare hands. Unbelievable, isn't it? Take that? And that give that dragon the old one to write And that kind of sense of humor would definitely play

into Roberta's games. Later on, Roberta mapped out the game on paper, so you know, when it said go east and it would describe where you were at. Next she would draw a little circle and say, this is the room with the well, go west, this is the room with the path, you know, and she would sort of design the whole game visually when it was only giving you text, Oh my god, we did that when we

play a labyrinth. I remember, like months later, I found the white board we used or the piece of paper something. It just had all these little dots on it because you're just like this room that we've tried that one over, and I was like, if you didn't know what we were doing. You look like a madman. What are you doing on this paper? But this helped her kind of visualize the game as a whole rather than just room

to room. Text not helped her track her progress, and it brought a different kind of life to the game too. After a month of playing, she finally solved the Colossal Cave adventure. Then Ken's brother showed him this new, ugly beige box he'd gotten. It was a machine called the Apple Computer. Big deal, get it out of my house. And even though Ken called it quote a toy compared to the computers I had been using, a piece of junk, a primeval machine, he knew that it was going to

open new doors for programmers. And Roberto was excited at the gaming possibilities of a computer with its own screen. So let's just pause right there and talk to you about computers that did not have monitors. That's what I'm talking about with this printer, you know, this teletype machine, just like, oh, you can look at it. Wow. I wonder if anybody was like, also, it's so great. I don't have to throw out all this paper every five minutes.

So Ken and Roberta agreed that Christmas of nine, they would spend two thousand dollars for their own Apple two as a gift for each other. Now that prices stayed pretty much the same, the Apple computers still around two k or, which means it's crazy cheaper now because man, that would have been like seven grand back then. Ken had hired a team of five programmers to try and create a new compiler for the Apple personal computer that

he could sell to engineers and technicians. And when he wasn't using it, Roberta was picking up any other adventure style games she could get her hands on and playing through them. But they were all too simple and dull. Nothing lived up to Colossal Cave. She's like, give me a game that takes a month to solve. I know that feeling too. Sometimes you play through just such a good game and then you're trying to find that experience again and it's just like this sucks. That's easy, this

is boring, this is ugly, it's tough. It's like that with books too. Should read a really good book. God, all I want is that same experience, but a new book again. But playing these games, getting into these adventures,

something buried deep and Roberta's mind had been reawakened. Her imagination was just jump started, and she started jotting down ideas that she had for her own story, which was like a murder mystery kind of based on the Agatha Christie novels that she read, especially the book and then there were none for the first Agatha Christie that I read. Actually, yeah,

just like when she was playing Colossal Cave. She drew out maps and she sketched the lay out and create all these landmarks for each screen, and she wrote vivid descriptions. She fleshed out characters in her idea, and she started to develop plot twists and puzzles, and after a few weeks she had this big stack of papers that contained

her whole story. And she and Kenn went out to dinner one night and she started to describe to him how this game would go this old Victorian house where you start off looking for some jewels, but then you discover a body, and then people start getting killed off one by one, their secret passages, surprise twists, betrayals, until finally you need to uncover the murderer before you become a victim yourself. Gripping, and Ken is starting to think,

you know, there might really be something here. He thought, Hey, if we could sell this, like I don't know, we might be able to take a little trip, or maybe even get some new furniture for the house or something. Just little extra spending cash would be nice that week or whatever. But Ken knew that most people who owned

computers weren't trying to play games. Those were usually just temporary distractions for programmers when they needed a break, or maybe something to make their computer illiterate spouses comfortable with these sticker price Yeah right, honey, I spent two thousand dollars on the computer. But don't worry. You can type your way through this coloss you can. You can talk to the teletype. Yeah yeah, Like all right, I guess

that does sound like fun. But if they wanted it to really be worth something, he told her it really needed to be something unique. He told her to look for a hook, something that would stand out. And Roberta was like, you know, I actually had been thinking what if it wasn't just text? Like what if there was a picture there with it? I don't know, that sounds crazy. How do you put a picture onto a computer? Like? What am I talking about? For? I forgot I forgot

what is the science fiction picture on a computers? Two? Thou one a space Odyssey. Next thing you know, they'll be putting a calculator on your phone. Righteous, who would do that? Well Ken heard this and he saw a mouse and a maze. He was thinking about his own challenge that he had set himself back the day, and he was like going against convention, figuring out an impossible problem, learning how to do something I've never even heard of before. This is kind of his whole thing. It's like his

whole being right wrapped up into one project. And he told her, you know, I might as well give it a shot. So, using a new device called the Versa writer, which translated drawn images on a tablet into these very rudimentary shapes on a computer screen, they managed to put this game together, and Ken absolutely defied convention by manipulating the programming to get these images to fit on a

floppy disk. History link dot com writes that the Apple two had sixty kilobytes of memory, and the five and a quarter inch floppy disks of the time could fit about kilobytes of data on them. Um Just for reference today, if you're not familiar with file sizes, an hour long episode of this show, for example, compressed into an MP three file is about sixty thousand kilobytes, and you can

on this disc. So we could basically record ourselves saying speculation station and like halfway through that train whistle sound, that disc would explode. That's all you would get. How many discs for one episode of Ridiculous Romance? A lot more than there are left in the world today. We should do one just as a gag and call it Ridiculous Roman, Ridicculous Romance. Oh my god, order your box

set of this episode today. All this toll free, number five dollars, but it's dollars shipping and handle no for for For an easier example, one floppy disc might fit a small jpeg of like a board ape. It's like like a small jpeg. So it's very impressive that can actually manage to get this game size down to fit on this disc. And beyond the technical aspects, the game itself was revolutionary. Video game historian Lane Nooney writes, quote,

many designers began with what they could code. ROBERTA. Williams began by mapping out the space within which she would string up the components of a narrative. So she's basically like, you know, a lot of people are starting with, well, what can I program? I'll make a game out of that, And she's like, no, no, I'm gonna come up with the game and then you figure out how to make it how to program it, so totally different approach. They still the content rather than the capabilities of the computer.

Her lack of knowledge about computers is what let her break the limits of the computer's capabilities, and Ken's skills as a programmer let him find a way to make it work. So they're the perfect team to bring something totally new to this world of gaming and even just

to the world of tech. And you know, I love an expert opinion on anything, but that is so true that sometimes if you bring in a completely new, untrained eye, they will see things or think of things that you're expert training would not, simply because you're blinded by the conventions of your of your field or whatever. I mean. You even talked about that a little with Hector Burlios, because he was like, oh, I never learned the piano, and that's what made me less traditional than all the

other composers and my contemporaries. Whatever. So anyway, Roberta's game was called Mystery House, and there was no animation, no sound, owned no color that would definitely not fit on one disc. It was just black and white line drawings with the action in the text. After a few tepid offers from software companies, including Apple Kenna, Roberta decided to sell the

game independently. Roberto went to the grocery store and bought a few boxes of Ziplock sandwich baggies while Ken printed out the game's title and cover art on a half sheet of paper, and they slipped the disc in a baggy with the folded piece of paper, and they paid two hundred dollars for an ad in the computer magazine Micro the six five O two journal, A gripping piece of reading. I will say I had a couple of those.

They were vintaged by the time I had them, but it was pretty interesting to look at these old, like, you know, very late seventies, early eighties, little folded magazines about computers. Sure, I bet that was those of those. I mean, would be cool to again now talking about is going to change the world. And you were like laughing your ass as you dialed up a O l Yeah. I was in high school. My friends and I were building computers. We were saving up money for at eighty

megabyte hard drive. Eighty what word? Did you need megabytes? Just your phone is probably like thirty two gigabytes of storage, and a gigabyte is a thousand megabytes. So my my hard drive. I was playing Warcraft two on its circ Uh you know, could you could fit thousands of those your phone? Amazing? Well, they priced this game at which you know, it's the eighties, so that's what about? Yeah,

And they gave their home phone number. They directed customers to make their checks out to online systems at their home address, and the release date was May five. By the end of the month, they had sold eleven thousand dollars worth of copies. By June they had made twenty dollars. In July it was thirty thou dollars. That's a hundred k today, outrageous. Can I please make that much money in a month? I mean seriously, I would take it.

And for a while Ken kept his programming job full time, but before long it was clear they had their own business to run here. Roberta got to work on their next game right away, and later that same year, they released The Wizard and the Princess, which was more inspired by Tolkien's books, like it was that kind of fantasy. It was released in September and it sold more than

sixty thousand copies. They moved close to Roberta's parents to a rural home near Fresno at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and they considered their early retirement, but none of them were really willing to stop this money machine that they had develop. Roberta's father became their distribution manager. Ken's brother jumped in as their advertising manager, and on December one, they opened their first official headquarters in Oakhurst,

and they changed the company's name to Sierra Online. It's probably just a lot more fun work too than whatever he was doing. Like I was thinking about early retirement when I was bored as fun every day, but now

I'm making games. This is fun for real. And then just for that to come from from nowhere, like just totally unexpected, Like at the beginning of this year, we just assumed like I'll be doing this for the next thirty years, and then three months later, holy sh it, we have an incredibly booming business, right right, at our fingertips here. Very exciting, well, talk about exciting. Maybe the coolest thing that could ever happen to someone in that

year happened to Roberta Williams. Her phone rang, she picked it up. See are online. This is Roberta speaking on the other end, Roberta. Hi, this is Jim Henson. I would kermit flail all over that. Poll was that kermit it was my version And you're just saw the arms that looked right and this sounded like fozzy drowning. Well, Hi, I would fozy drown all over that. Oh my god, can you imagine it's two and Jim Henson calls you

forget it. If Jim Henson called me at any time, I mean, I know he's not alive, called me today, very startled. But if he was alive today and called me, I would still flip my ship. That's Jim Henson. There's not a year that Jim Henson could call where I would not be unbelievably amazed that he was calling. I would just be like a lot. I wouldn't be able to be like okay, never mind, I guess no, no, no, no,

I can speak normally. Please continue see Jim Henson had played the Sierra Games and he was a huge fan, and he wanted to create a video game out of a little movie he had coming out called The Dark Crystal Awesome. Roberta was probably like, gee, I ghost, We'll think about it. Yes, of course I want to do that. The movie wasn't even done being filmed yet, so he

sent her a script. Yeah you know that that'sn't like a glass case somewhere, and he invited her to attend the movie premiere in December of eighty two in Los Angeles. The game was released in three. It was also text based, but the accompanying images were more detailed and artistic. They had a few colors mixed right, you know, real high tech, very rudimentary graphics, but still a big step up from

Mystery House and Wizard in the Princess totally. But two was an equally exciting and tragic year for the will ames Is. Apple co founder Steve Wozniak was hosting a music festival in September and invited Ken and Roberta to come out cool. They dropped their kids off at a sitter and went to this probably amazing party. But while they were there, their house burned down. No one was hurt, but a lot was lost and they had to shift to working out of the office headquarters. That's a lot

like Frederick Douglas in their house burned down. He lost the entire, only complete archive of the north Star Look that he wrote. Everybody take note, if you're gonna be a famous historical person, please put your ship in a fire safe box or just in case you think you might bury it underground in your backyard. Something I think

about that. Steve Wozniak Party two also because of Ready Player one, the character Ogdenmorrow was kind of based on him, and I remember inside the what do they call it the Oasis, he had that DJ party or he was like the floating wizard rolling around, and I guess Steve

Bosniak was a party dude. I have to say. I think that's why I'm so derisive of metaverse is because I have this idea of what it should look like, and it's that it's like a wizard and you can like levitate and dance in the mid air and all this stuff instead of like these weird tin man looking oil had people maybe one day because you know, we had to have we had to have mystery house before we could have Elden Ring. So it's true, I guess I should get in on the ground floor. Let me

go ahead and get some crypto going, all right. But regardless of the fire, maybe even because of the fire, a new idea rose out of this tragedy that was gonna once again revolutionize gaming forever, one that would certainly, as I've said, change my life and set me on a course for probably where we are today. It was all about a night named Sir Graham and his king and a quest for three treasures. And we will go on that adventure right after this. Welcome back to the Quest. Okay,

So IBM, big computer company of the day. We don't hear their name batting around anymore like we used to. Um, But IBM had a new computer coming out in Ish and it had a whopping two hundred and fifty six kilobytes of memory that I'm just gonna throw. I love

these comparisons, they're so pointless to make. But but just for reference, the PlayStation five has sixteen gigabytes of memory or sixteen million kilobytes, so compared that to the two fifty six back in the days, We've come a long way, but tech tech advances exponentially, so it doesn't just double every year like doubles and then quadruples and then goes time sixteen. It's anyway, that's a whole other thing. It's called Moore's Law and it's fascinating, So okay, it's nine

eight three. IBM reached out to Sierra Online and was like, hey, you guys need to write a game that's gonna show everybody the absolute power of this beastly machine we're putting out, and they really wanted something highly replayable, but Roberta knew that her stories were mysteries, so they were kind of

inherently not replayable, like once you knew, you knew. But with IBM back in the project, with a bunch of money at their bags, a bunch of new technology, the couple was able to put out something revolutionary together anyway. It was a fully animated graphic game that allowed players to move their character through a three dimensional world, absolutely unheard of at the time, and they released King's Quest.

This game, of course, was a massive hit. If you haven't played it, dig it up you can find it and it's really I know, the graphics are obviously like forty oh god, forty years old, but they are very pixels. Yeah, but it's fun and you'd literally like, you know, your little this little dude, and you use the air keys to walk up, down, left, right, you go from screen to screen, You pick up items, you use them to solve a little puzzles as you're going get your way

through the story. And it's so good. It's pretty too, like the glass and all the trees and the lakes and rivers. Yeah, they all look pretty cute. Really. The artworks impressive, and um Ken talked about that at one point. He said Roberto was never really an artist, so she was really happy to be able to hire on artists once they started making these games and have some real money. And the artwork is gorgeous. I mean, if you can appreciate, you know, that kind of old computer art, they do

really impressive things with it. And the music. The music is so good too. So it's just beeps in a computer, but you can hear it's like the orchestra just fills into your head, right, and it's wonderful. So this game comes out and by the end of that year, the company's total sales had hit ten million dollars, making them one of the largest independent software companies in the world.

The next year, they got a call from another little startup company called Walt Disney Pictures, and they asked them to help them develop three educational computer games, and in four Sierra released Mickey's Space Adventure, which was the first video game to feature Mickey Mouse. So again, all your Kingdom Hearts players out there, it started here. That's right. You would not have Kingdom Hearts if it wasn't for Mickey's Space Adventure. So Ken was now full time managing

Sierra Online. To take that old boss who said he had no talent from management. Almost wish you'd send him a floppy disk. But when he put it in, it just said like a big middle finger finger with some gorgeous music. But yeah, it was like, my company's worth ten million dollars, you dick. That's his follow up, Floppy dosk too much for one kind of sixteen floppy disk set insult. He had to put them in separately to

get the whole thing. Roberto was developing games with their growing and talented staff, including Mixed Up Mother Goose and the tie in game for Disney's The Black Cauldron. Parent. Drum writes in I On Design magazine that at its start, Sierra was quote a rag tag crew of energetic misfits, some of my favorite kinds of cruise. Definitely being in Oakland meant that they didn't have access to the best programmers in their field. Right. Why is that? Were they

like in Silicon Valley? Right? Because, yeah, you know, Lucas Arts was up in San Francisco. You know, we talked about Merles County. You know, there's a bunch of other software companies are popping up at the time, and yeah, they sort of more centralized around San Francisco and the value up there. So if you wanted to be a programmer, you weren't going to move to this little town where

there wasn't a lot of action happening. So a lot of the best names are the quotes, best talent of the day were willing to even move out there, even if they were offered a job. Okay, So Sierra hired quote literally anyone who could program or pick up a phone or tape up a box. But of course, computer science was a male dominated industry even then, despite many women being very skilled. Weird how that happens? So wild companies like LucasArts and Infocom had few women on staff

and fewer still in upper level positions. Sierra Quote had a veritable army of women, including influential programmers and game designers like Jane Jensen, Christie Marks, Lora Le Shannon, and Laurie Anne Cole. And those women are amazing the minds behind games like Gabriel Night, Quest for Glory, Phantasmagoria, all things like this, um, super cool people in their day.

And yeah, it just goes to show like these women were probably more talented than some of the men who were getting hired by Lucas Arts, but they just weren't getting hired because they were women. So Sierra was like, we'll take you. Oh, look surprised because we were willing to hire these women. We have the best programmers. Yeah, we have amazing games, cool imagination, and buddies very motivated to do their best work. I wonder where that comes from.

Se Feminism benefits everyone. Hello, Hello, Hello. So Sierra continued to expand, including eight total King's Quest games and okay, all right, sorry, just give me a second here. King's Quest two pretty straightforward story of King Graham rescuing a Princess felinists from a tower and making her his queen, like you know, very standard fairy tale kind of stuff, very cool stuff, whole magical door floating in the middle of nowhere. There's a dolphin. Uh, there's some great stuff

in King's Quest Batman. Uh, there's a whole Batman think they pulled a lot of other stories and pop culture references into their games. Sometime Batman, where's the Batman? King's Quest crossovers in Quest too. I'm telling you well in Batman and the dc U, King's Quest three broke the storytelling mold and that shifted to a whole new time

and place. And then King's Quest four, The Perils of rose Ella, shifted the protagonist to King Graham's daughter, the Princess Rosella, who set out on an adventure to save her father from the help of a powerful fairy. And this was the first major adventure game with a female heroin. And it's one of the best games ever made. Side note, it's very good and you've got to play it. And then king Quest five goes back to King Graham, and the game's kind of goofy, and it's got a lot

of memes that have come out of it. There's a whole wizard Society storyline that's super dope. I think King's Quest six is one of the best fantasies ever told, with the most delightful and wonderful characters, and they throw references to classic fairy tales all the time, and it's just completely immerses you in this world. And then King's Quest seven is about the Queen and the Princess again, you get to choose between the two protagonists and it's just so good. And all I'm saying is, let me

make this TV show. I'm saying, Kenna Roberta, if you're listening, call me. We're gonna we'll figure it out. We're gonna get the rights, we're gonna go to HBO, and we're gonna make the next Game of Thrones, but better. He's very serious. I am not kidding. I have got it sketched out. I know what I'm doing, and I'm ready to go. College game is its own season I've seen not even there's I'm not gonna give it all the way, but there's some overlap because you have to play with

the timelines a little bit. It's gonna be very good. Just call me, Okay, I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm picturing the Charlie day me where Yarn, that's you. It is basically Quest, but it's better than that, but better so with King's Quest four. Roberta was worried about releasing a female heroin with Rosella, she thought guys would write in and say, I don't want to be a girl. I

don't know what made her be worried about that. It doesn't sound like something a lot of guys that like games do, but she said it was actually never really an issue. Fan Mail poured in, largely from women who Sierra estimated to be of their audience base, and Drum shares one of these letters in her article, quote, Dear Sierra, this is a love letter, pure and simple. I do not fit the profile for adventure gamers. I'm a forty five year old woman who works for L L Bean

and as a freelance writer. I love these games. I am addicted. There seems to be no known cure. I hope no one ever mines one. Please continue to create forever, Forever, yours, Elizabeth Hood and wherever you are, Elizabeth, right into HBO and ask for Eli show because you know it's true, and that that addictive quality. It was the same thing Roberto was talking about, and she just couldn't step away. And I think that's you get it in books, you

get it in TV. We see it a lot in TV now, where's just like I have to know what happens next. Yeah. Well, it's such a great thing about brain teasers because it literally teases your brain even when you're not playing. You're just like, oh, who do we do that? Well? And I was gonna say, and the fact that they're not just puzzles, but there's a story with them. You want to watch it unfold and you

have a hard time stepping away from that. And I think that also is what a lot of success with these games owes itself too, is that kind of addictive nature. I know they exploit that in games now, like literally they have psychologists working for game companies saying, how do we get people not be able to put it down? So, you know, trying to stay on the romance topic here, not get too suction at the detailed video game history

of it all. Roberta and Ken were just one of the ultimate power couples in the gaming industry and the tech world. So they came out with this controversial game, Phantasmagoria, and it made twelve million dollars. It was continuing to push the envelope as they did. It was the first game to include live action video. Obviously this was a CD ROM game, but it was literally grainy video footage of this woman. You know, you would tell her where to walk, and they just filmed her turning in every

direction you showed. You showed me some and they do look a little weird because I mean you have to animate her body, and it's very weird, like old, very kind of um not spotty, but jumpy. I guess CD I um, but I was just thinking about the acting gig for this person. Okay, now close the car door and turn your entire body at the same time, and then just stand there with your hands by your side while they make a decision. Okay, now walk forward. You know,

just a weird job, very weird stuff. It's a little uncanny on Canny Valley. I gets not really, but it just looks weird, like like that's not what I want. I wanted all animated or nothing animated. It's a weird combo. This game was also very controversial because it had like a rape scene in it and a lot of really bad violence. Um. I never played it all the way through,

but yeah, at this murder and all kinds of stuff. Um, but it did sell a lot, sure, and Drum points out in her article that these games were not just ROBERTA and Ken like. We need to remember that these games took teams and teams of people, and the stresses

of creating games was incredibly difficult. She writes that quote. Generally, many employees recount their time at Skara as some of the most fun they've had in their careers, but they also report being under tummendous, debilitating stress, and some people couldn't even talk about their experiences later on because it was just too much to think about. Yeah, and that

kind of still a thing. So that's a bigger thing, I think today than ever you hear about deadlines being pushed, especially the way game releases now are like movie releases, Like they set a date and they give you a trailer months beforehand, and they're like get ready, alight. Saying about Cyberpunk seventy seven whatever that is that they came out probably too early, and immediately people were like, oh it.

JOSEPHS glitch and it looks weird and it's not cool and whatever, and I think it's fine now, but again, it was like you you had to sort of really piss off your whole buyer base first, and it's an apologize later, like a better version. And that's the thing. It's a mix of corporate overpromising and trying to sell things that don't exist, that that they don't know will exist, and a mix of consumers being assholes and like just freaking out because something wasn't exactly what I thought it

was gonna be. It's like those people who tried to sue that movie because Anna to Armis was in the trailer but her scenes got cut and they went and saw the movie and sued for false advertising. And I'm like, shut up. If you only went to that movie because you saw Anna to Armis for two seconds in the trailer, then you deserve to lose your sixteen bucks or whatever. Like watch the movie, right, and then just go watch

Knives Out. You'll see a bunch of her great So by the fall of Sierra Online had five hundred and forty employees and fifty million dollars in sales and was still growing. Ken Williams said in a later interview that between n and NIX their revenue tripled, So yeah, a lot more than this uh little trip or some new furniture that they had originally made their goal. And then on February Walter Forbes said that his company see You see International or Internet, I wanted to buy Sierra Online

for one point five billion dollars. Holy sh it in the nineties to billions of dollars, like unthinkable money. It's in the sane price. It was totally unexpected. But Ken said, quote as CEO, I had a fiscal duty to shareholders to take the deal. So Forbes had this big idea, He's going to bring together all these big old companies, including Lucas Arts, broder Bund, Davidson and Associates, which owned

Blizzard Entertainment and also Sierra Online. He was basically going to like create a big game Monopoly Umbrella broder Bund. Broder Bund, by the way, the company that made Missed, also an incredible games. Well, of course the Lucas Arts deal fell through. Of course it did by Lucas Arts unless you're Disney, and even then you wait for pretty years to do it. For George to get tired. Yeah, okay,

remember our Marcia and George Lucas episode. And I had a bit of a control problem when he was younger, And yeah, he was not interested. And Sierra's software development got very little focus and attention. Bob Davidson became CEO for the whole publishing body, and he had like a stiff, dated, conservative management style that really clashed with Ken's bold, brash innovation. So Sierra became more of a publishing platform than a development studio. And not for nothing, they did publish the

Valve game Half Life, which is awesome. Okay, I've heard that one. People love half games out there. It's a great game. I mean, Half Life to one of the best games of all time. But half Life is great. Isn't there a big joke about Half Life Freeze coming out any day now? Half Life to half Life three will come out as soon as cars fly, as soon as pigs fly, all these things, that's when we'll see

Half Life three. Um. Anyway, Ken left the company in and Roberta stayed with Sierra until when King's Quest eight, the final game, Mask of Eternity, came out. Just like a first person game, they were trying. They're always trying something new, and this was like a first person action game. It's pretty fun. It's not as replayable as the others um But soon after that, a massive accounting fraud at COUC was uncovered and Walter Forbes was later convicted of

three charges of fraud by the SEC. So yes, that whole purchase thing probably a big scam like that was just a bunch of moving money around, somebody just trying to scan their way into more money, Totally fraudulent. The company ended up selling its computer entertainment division and Sierra was massively cut back. About two d and fifty people

lost their jobs. And then over the next couple of decades a bunch of mergers and acquisitions happened, and it just kept getting smaller and smaller and doing less and less. Sierra is still a round today, and in fact, they kind of had a little a little bit of a boost. Their website was revamped a few years back, and it's kind of got more of its original independent spirit now, I guess in some capacity, but it's just a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the scale that

it once was. They do even have a new King's Quest game out now, which I haven't played yet, but um, but it's just much smaller everything about it. Ken said in an interview with Wired that his logic in selling was right, but it was quote the absolute worst thing that could have happened. He said, with the information he at the time, it was definitely the right decision, but quote, I think of it as like someone crossing an intersection. When someone runs a red light, it was impossible to

know that the guy coming at you wasn't going to stop. Yeah, like, you did all the right things, so you can't say I should have done it differently. Right, but if they had kept the company and not sold, it might still be one of the biggest names in gaming today. Well, was no telling if they had focused on if they had let them focus on game development. I think that was really the main thing that happened was it was like they weren't interested in the kind of games they

wanted to do, So why did you buy him? They just wants a brand. Yeah, if you're like, that's what makes you so much money, But don't do that thing anymore. I mean, I don't know the fine details, and I'm no businessman, but you definitely see that sometimes where some of these high level execs are just like all that

matters is the brand. People will buy whatever I staple to the brand, and then you get, you know, fantastic peasts and nobody goes to see it just because it, says Harry Potter on it does not mean everybody's going to go out. Still got to make a good movie. Now. Ken has a book out called Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings, and he talks about maybe one day having a real documentary made about the story of Sierra.

He said, quote, the story doesn't have a happy ending, but neither did Titanic, and that movie was a success. People like a good shipwreck, and Sierra certainly was one. At least you got a sense of humor, right right. But Ken and Roberta they're doing just fine today. I mean, they did sell Sierra for over a billion dollars. In fact, if they burned through that, they really had to try. And Ken's got a blog about their sailing adventures around

the world. They've been seeing all kinds of different ports and countries. Sounds really nice. And during the pandemic, just like everybody else, they were kind of locked down and just had their own minds to sit with for a while, and they got to thinking and then out of nowhere. Just last month in March, they announced that they were coming back and they were putting together a brand new game.

For this they were going back to their roots and what their plan is is to recreate the text based game that started it all for them, Colossal Cave Adventure. So they reached out to the game's original creators for their blessing and they've started building a three D graphics based version of the game, including a VR version that's cool, which they said they were kind of against at first. The company Unity that's publishing it, wanted them to do a VR version. They were like, that's a lot, but

they're doing it. They're going for it because that's what they do. They figure it out. Kim Williams like Batman, Like, you give him a problem and what he does he figures it out. So, you know, if the VR version comes out, hopefully we get a chance to kill the dragon with our bare hands in real life. You can really see it happen. You can actually give the dragon the old one too. Yeah. But in an interview, Ken realized this project was quickly getting bigger than they anticipated

when they jumped in. He said, quote, I got blindsided by the fact that it's a humongous, complex, deep game. And I always told people I would never do anything where I had employees. Again, maybe he wasn't cut overmanagement, just had enough. It's like I did that. I'm done. I'm living on a boat now. This is great. I mean, true, that does sound pretty amazing, just sail around the world.

But it's taken them back to their early days where Roberta is obsessing over the adventure details and Ken is learning how to make things happen in new programming languages and breaking down barriers. So it's like they're both of their great skills coming back working back together on something new and exciting, pretty cool. Maybe they feel really young, or maybe they feel really old. It's probably both at

the same time, but I don't know. I mean, it's tough to sell classic games and independent games, you know, in a landscape where there is stuff like it again elden Ring taking up the spotlight. Um, but you know they said that don't really care about the money. Ken says quote if the game sinks or swims, it ain't gonna change our Life at all. So it's really about honoring the original designers legacy. And they've seen other designers kind of make a comeback and make less than perfect games,

and Ken says, we don't want to do that. We'd rather throw it in the garbage than do something that ain't good. Roberta said, yes, it has to be good, which is a great place to come from because again, so many people set out and they're like, here's an idea. Uh, if it doesn't work, here it is anyway, and they're like, come on, we're gonna try it. If it doesn't work, I'm not going to give you garbage another ten years

on something good like Half Life three. But I'm thinking now about how like, you know, it takes years, years and years and years and thousands and thousands of people to put together these big video games that dominate the market today. And I'm going back to you know, Mystery House had come out in May and Roberta had their next game out by September, The Wizard and the Princess, right, and it was just her and him. Um, so it's definitely a lot has changed. But that's kind of amazing too.

I Mean that's true of movies. You know, I mean, not not quite that scale, but back in the forties or something thirties, even what was a movie crew like twenty people total total, and now like ten of them are getting paid. And I watched the Marvel credits and it takes it takes three years just to watch the credits. And they're all over the world. There's a whole there's a London team, Plano team, and Norway to write anything. And here we had, we had people on the moon

working on this movie. Like why why they do it? It seems overly complicated, but it was really interesting to me to learn how much gaming had to do with making computers for personal use. Yeah, I hadn't really considered that before. I thought it was I guess if I hadn't even thought about it. But if you had pressed me on it, I would have been like, I guess it just got to a point where people were like,

I don't want to type on a typewriter. See if you can make a word process and I'll use that instead. Like I would have thought it was more about still business reasons, you know what I mean, for work reasons. But it's really interesting to think that actually this is this is what people might use a computer for put it in their house and actually want one, want to

spend the money. These companies like Apple and IBM and stuff were like, I'm gonna put a computer in every home, which was an outrageous idea in the seventies because computers were huge, you know, they were mainframes of like you had punched cards with holes in them, and you stuck them in a slot and then you punch holes in another card in a certain pattern, and like just I

can't even wrap my head around that. But this idea of like, well, how do we sell a game to everyone, Well, it's got to have someone for everyone in the house, right, everybody's got to have a reason to want it. Otherwise, you know, you're not just going to sell it to the program or dad his family is going to be pissed that he dropped two thousand dollars on this unk junk that just sits on the corner. And you've got

things like Atari coming out, you know. So they people were already into the idea of digital gaming um and computers were like, let's tap into that market. There's a there's a thirst for it, and things like King's Quest, Uh, everybody wanted that ship because it's so good because you're getting everything at once. You're getting a book and a movie and a game, and a brain teaser and and and a form of expression to some degree too, and education. Right like I said, I mean, Mom sat me down,

was like, let's try and play this game. What do you do? And you sure, you move around with the air keys and stuff like like an atari game. But think about it. What do you want to say to the game. What do you want the game to do? You tell it. I want the guy to open the door. I want the guy to climb the tree. I want the guy to fight the dragon um and you kind of had to work your way through these puzzles and then you're getting these storybook fairy tales at the same time.

So good. They are super fun. I'm very glad we spent part of our pandemic yeah them so that I could learn what we what with all the fuss was about. We had downtime obviously in and we downloaded all the old files and got like a doss emulator and started playing through the whole King's Quest series. We never got

to play seven. We have to figure that out because it wasn't working on and then we tried Space Quest or something, but it had like a glitch where we couldn't get out of a hallway or something, so we ended up not doing it. But Space Quest is also awesome. It's a bit funnier than King's Quest. It's like a lot of it's a you know, you're like a space janitor who ends up having to say of the universe. So it's real goofy and sarcastic and stuff, and it's

a lot of fun. But yeah, they were. It was fun to revisit those because they do look I mean, there's just nothing like that anymore, right that the games simply don't look like that. They just don't and they don't really operate that way either, So it was it was a nice little revisiting, I guess of childhood. And the artwork in the old King's Quest games is so beautiful. It was like little paintings. Yeah, it's like Thomas Kincaid a little bit. It's a very pastoral, you know, and

just pretty nature or whatever. But they are really pretty. Every like, uh, geriatric millennial and gen X are out there who played these games is nodding along with us right now, and everyone else is like, what the fuck are you guys talking about? Well, those of you are saying that, just go look it up, go find out, check it out. It's a good time. Yeah, it really is. Um. But I hope that the story is still really interesting

to you. I mean, I just think these are such cool people who just took their kind of disparate skills and found a way to make them work together, um, as a couple. And that's that's really something impressive to me. So many creative couples are very similarly minded. I mean, even you and I have that to a degree where

we sort of like are good at similar things. Um. But it's so cool to see like the the kenn of Robertas or the Susan and Robert Downey's people like that who come together with completely different skills and that marriage create something new altogether. I love those stories. Well, I hope you all were inspired by this story. I hope you love Kenna Roberta as much as we do. Kenna Roberta. I hope you're listening, and I hope you

loved this story too. I'm sure it's of a loose interpretation of your amazing lives, um, but thank you for this incredible body of work you've given us, and yeah, call me. We're gonna track down HBO. We're gonna make this work. We're gonna change that. We're gonna change a whole new medium, We're gonna change a whole other industry. Yeah, we get on board. Let's do it. Let's do this and make up billion dollars. It'll go viral. I'm just kidding. Please let us know what you thought. We'd love to

hear from you. You can email us at ridic Romance at gmail dot com right or we're on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Dynamite Boom and I'm at Oh Great, It's Eli and the show is at Riddick Romance. Thank you so much for tuning in again today and always, and we look forward to seeing you the next one. Love you by so long. Friends, it's time to go. Thanks for listening to our show. Tell your friends, neighbor's uncles and dance to listen to a show. Ridiculous Roll Dance m