I learned English playing Leisure Suit Larry when I was about 6, with a dictionary next to me, painstakingly translating everything. This turned into a lifelong love of adventure games, with the Space Quest games being an especially fond memory. This was also how I learned the difference between ‘make knife sharp’ and ‘sharpen knife’, or ‘put can in bag’ versus ‘put can in bag’ (the latter of which actually worked if I recall correctly, with Larry stuffing the spray can and then dying, which frustrated me to no end for ages. I always kinda thought that this is more in the style of what an educational game should be like, exploring with aids and the tasks being somewhat unforgiving, at least that worked really well for me.

> or ‘put can in bag’ versus ‘put can in bag’ (the latter of which actually worked if I recall correctly

Both commands above say “put can in bag”. :) What was the correct command?

And that will teach me to proof read, if I recall correctly then this was Larry 3 and it accepted both putting an air sick bag inside a spray can and the can inside the bag, the latter being the correct answer. It has been more than 2 decades since I last played the old Sierra games, so I might be misremembering, but it was all part of a really worrying suitcase bomb disposal puzzle near the end.

Don’t ask me how Larry stuffed the bag inside the can, but there was the same animation and everything. I remember being extremely frustrated with that, since the Sierra games are otherwise quite flexible in terms of accepting input. This was also why it was useful for learning English, since you could tell it things like ‘look item’ rather than requiring it to be “look at item’ and so on.

So I really loathed those cases where you had to be super precise, since they felt immediately off compared to the rest of the game.

Regardless good times, I think the best Sierra game of that era is Space Quest 3, which had some decent puzzles, a fun story and a hero I really liked.

The central puzzle of Space Quest 3’s first “act”—how to repair the hyperdrive on your crashed ship—has to be one of the best designed and most satisfying to complete in any game of any era.

I’m not sure which is more frustrating: adventure games where you have to find the right command phrasing or games where you have to find the one magic pixel.

The limited grammar of these early adventure games had such a strong impact on me that I write my to-do lists now using the standard “VERB [ADJECTIVE] NOUN” grammar, as if I’m the character in my own game. :)

A slightly out of place geeky remark:

Note how "VERB.NOUN"/"ACTION.ACTIONABLE" is functional programming while "NOUN.VERB" is OOP. After 18+ years in the industry I still find the functional style more fluild: DO THIS, JUMP THAT, SEE HERE, etc. :-)

Now I see that it's the games that did this to me!

I learned to spell by playing KQ1 and SQ1. Well, playing the games and having parents whom I could ask questions like "how do you spell 'search body'".

It's not just kids without exposure to English who struggled with typed English interfaces!

On the brighter side: I lived through that period when the games transitioned from text-based interfaces to point-and-click ones. What a relief that was!

I understand the nostalgia for Infocom games of people like Jimmy Maher - I also have a soft spot for beautiful and polished writing, but this definitely was a way forward for games in general.

I think the next evolution on it was classic JRPGs, like Dragon Quest/Warrior. There was still tons of dialogue, but the point-and-click was replaced by speak-to-everyone-and-try-stuff. It was still mostly linear, but it felt more interactive than just finding the right screen region.

I hated the transition to point and click, because it turned into "hunt for the right pixel" -- with text based games you generally only needed to be in the vicinity of the object you were trying to manipulate.

Absolutely, but precision was also a bit of a problem for the text based games. I remember Space Quest was the king of this, requiring frequent saving to make it past certain sections where a single accidental button press could cause you to fall off a ledge or step on something that just killed you.

If you, say have a movement disorder, this happens all too often.

Still I have so many great memories of Sierra’s games from my childhood that I can’t bring myself to hate all the foibles.

My favourite pixel hunter was and still is Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis :-)

Can't imagine myself playing that kind of game again but back then this semi-serious and comfortably safe (no real danger and no sierra deadends as well) gameplay felt right for the 7-8 year old.

Oh, and Kyrandia..!

Both games are classics, Indy 4 is one of my favorite games of all time.

Yeah, the pixel thing... Not as bad as most parser-based games but still.

But did the industry find a better way to tell a story without resorting to action-packed gameplay? I mean, Grim Fandango kind of slow story supplemented by visuals?

No offense to Grim Fandango, which is a great game, but for Sierra-style adventures, I don’t want to be told a story. I don’t want to feel like I’m moving on tracks through a ride, flipping a switch or solving a puzzle to keep the train moving.

Like the best interactive fiction, in classic Sierra games you’re interacting with the developers’ world to create the story. Free-form text input is key to this distinction. Play-throughs of richly written games like The Colonel’s Bequest are much more rewarding because your character isn’t limited to exploring the world via “look/talk/touch/use”.

Well, some of that free range kind of feeling can be achieved by introducing local non-linearity into the game, i.e. make certains parts of the game independent of each other.

Then, as the player progresses to the next episode the non-linearity would become a single step to the next episode, without any cross-episode interdependencies. Most well-designed adventure games have this branch-narrow-branch-narrow structure, where bottlenecks make sure the player is ready to proceed to the next level.

What was no very good about Sierra-style design is that they did introduce this non-linearity but there were often inter-episode links introduced. (e.g. "had to pick up this item a couple of episodes back it's late now"). So resorting to walkthroughs was the only way to avoid this kind of meaningless backtracking. It a very shady way to lengthen gameplay time!

I agree, though in the better games (most of them, I would say) this kind of thing was a) hard to get yourself stuck in if you were making a careful play-through and/or b) not fatal, only costing you the "best" ending or some final score points.

The best games (again, I'd cite The Colonel's Bequest) had numerous game-stage dependent side-quests and optional puzzles or secrets that made for rich replay value.

Overall, I wouldn't undersell the value of the possibility of failure & the frisson it provides over a carefully guard-railed world.

There's certainly an aggressively evil way to structure games like this. The first that comes to mind is Infocom's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but it's hard to escape the impression that the sadism towards the player was meant to be part of its charm.

Thinking about it again... In the end of the day, these games are what made English easy for me. In the longer term this definitely worked well!