8
Daventry and the Worlds of King’s Quest

Christopher Hanson

First indirectly introduced in the On-Line Systems’s early graphical adventure game Wizard and the Princess (1980), the mythical world of Daventry is perhaps best known as the place in which the original King’s Quest (1984) (later titled King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown in a 1987 re-release) and its subsequent series were set. As discussed below, the name “Daventry” is not used in Wizard and the Princess, but the game takes place in Serenia, a land that later becomes part of the world of Daventry. Daventry was constructed by Roberta Williams and is populated by original elements and familiar fairy-tale characters alike, weaving a rich and charming tapestry that transcends simple pastiche. Since 1980, it has served as the location for eight games in the original King’s Quest series, as well as in its 2015 reboot as an episodic adventure game series by the Odd Gentlemen.

Daventry has also served as the setting for a number of spin-offs. These include the appearance of Daventry’s world in other Sierra games and the re-imagining of Daventry numerous fan-produced games. These fan games are comprised of straight remakes with enhanced graphics, re-imagined versions of games. Multiple published novels and other works have also taken place in the imaginary world of Daventry, in addition to new numerous accompanying paratexts and other written content created by authorized authors and dedicated fans alike. At various times, “Daventry” has functioned as shorthand for several bounded areas in this fictional world: from the entire world to a continent to a kingdom to a town to a castle.

In this essay, I explore the world of Daventry through a number of its iterations to better understand its construction. I examine the complexities of its development through multiple versions and its expansion by multiple authors. Daventry exists across numerous articulations, including the games designed by Roberta Williams, the paratextual materials released in conjunction with these games, fan works, and the reboot of the game in 2015. As I reveal, this collective authorship reveals the fissures of a singular and coherent notion of “Daventry” by laying bare contradictions and inconsistencies. Building from its remediation and combination of a variety of fables, myths, and fairy tales, I argue that while Daventry’s multiple authors help to build and enrich its imaginary world, they also simultaneously reveal the limits of canonicity.

Roberta Williams, Sierra, and King’s Quest

Raised in LaVerne, California, Roberta Williams recollects being an avid teller of tales from an early age. She recalls that as a child, she was, “interested in anything that had to do with magic, or fantasy, like the Wizard of Oz or Alice in Wonderland. I always read a lot and fantasized a lot. I was always a story-teller. I used to tell my friends and my cousins stories, and I used to get in trouble for it”.¹ In high school, she met Ken Williams, whom she married.

Roberta Williams then co-founded Sierra On-Line (founded as On-Line Systems, and later commonly known as Sierra) with Ken in 1979. According to their recollections, Ken was programming an income-tax program in that year from home on a mainframe computer. He stumbled across a program called Adventure, which quickly captured his and Roberta’s imagination: “Within minutes I was calling over to Roberta to show her my discovery. No work got done that night”.² The game to which Ken refers is the influential Adventure or ADVENT, released in 1977 after Don Woods expanded upon Will Crowther’s Colossal Cave Adventure (1976). In Ken’s account, he recalls his and Roberta’s fascination with the game, which led them to more text adventure games developed by Scott and Alexis Adams and released by their company Adventure, International.³ He recalls that, “Roberta loved the games but wondered if they wouldn’t be better if, instead of a textual description, there would be a picture”.⁴ They subsequently purchased an Apple II in late 1979 and began working on Roberta’s vision for an adventure game which added graphics set in a mansion in which a murderer lurks among seven other guests.

In 1980, On-Line Systems released Hi-Res Adventure #1: Mystery House (commonly known just as Mystery House). The game proved popular and sold over 10,000 copies, and the company made several more games in the Hi-Res Adventure series, including Wizard and the Princess.⁵ However, On-Line Systems floundered somewhat before it partnered with IBM as that company launched its IBM PCjr, a version of its popular business computer designed for the home. IBM sought a game to showcase the technical abilities of the PCjr, and helped to fund the development of Roberta Williams’s vision of King’s Quest as an animated graphic adventure game that was released as a launch title for the PCjr in 1984.

While the IBM PCjr proved to be unsuccessful, King’s Quest was enormously popular — thanks to it being ported to multiple other home computers at the time including the Apple II, Amiga, and the Macintosh. The game spawned numerous sequels through the 1980s and 1990s and Sierra concurrently released other graphic adventure games which also eventually became their own series including the Space Quest, Police Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry series. As a result of these and other titles, Sierra became a highly successful game software company during the 1980s and the early 1990s and was sold in 1996 for around $1.5 billion (USD). In the year or two following its sale, however, both Roberta and Ken Williams left the company. Sierra was downsized and restructured multiple times and eventually dissolved in 2004, before resurfacing first as a Vivendi brand in 2005 and then later as an Activision brand in 2014.

The King’s Quest games take place in the world of Daventry, a mythical world that compiles elements from fairy tales, folklore, mythology, and popular culture. In the first King’s Quest, the player guides the animated avatar of the knight Sir Graham, who has been tasked with locating and recovering three treasures critical to the kingdom of Daventry and its ruler, King Edward. Graham becomes king at the conclusion of the first game after recovering the treasures and the sudden death of King Edward. The next game in the series, King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne (1985) follows King Graham as he travels in search of a bride to Kolyma, located on another continent in the world of Daventry. Subsequent games expand upon Graham’s family and further build out their imaginary world, or both.

The world of Daventry is constituted of multiple fictional lands, which grow, shift, and morph across the series and paratexts such as accompanying materials packaged with the games, related games, and works published separately from the games. Even within the main games themselves, certain ambiguities and apparent inconsistencies complicate getting a clear idea of the boundaries and dimensions of Daventry. For example, the manual for King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity (1998) describes the seven “Lands” of the game, which include physical locations such as the “Kingdom of Daventry” and “The Swamp” but also mystical realms such as “The Dimension of Death” and “The Realm of the Sun”.⁶ This is compounded by paratextual materials which add to the world of Daventry while also introducing internal contradictions.

Serenia and “Daventry”

Strangely enough, Daventry was introduced in an earlier Roberta Williams game but was not actually called Daventry at the time. As noted above, the imaginary world of Serenia was first introduced in Wizard and the Princess (1980), the second in the On-Line Systems’s Hi-Res Adventures series.⁷ Later in the King’s Quest games, it is revealed that Serenia is part of the world of Daventry.

However, the packaging and instruction manual for Wizard and the Princess offer scant initial description of Serenia, setting up the player as a “happy wanderer passing through a village in the land of Serenia” who learns that kingdom’s King George is offering half of his lands to anyone who can rescue his daughter, Princess Priscilla, from the evil wizard Harlin.⁸ Priscilla is said to be held captive “beyond the great mountains” that are so distant that they are not visible, but lie north of this village, beyond a “vast desert that seems never to end”.⁹ The game starts in the village described in the packaging, with a static color image of the town and a text description at the bottom of the screen (Figure 8.1).

FIGURE 8.1   Start screen of Wizard and the Princess (1980).

As is common in text adventures, the player enters one- or two-word phrases via the text parser at the bottom of the screen to navigate and interact with the game space. Movement is in discrete steps, with each location presenting another image in the top of the screen and a text description at the bottom. As the player must venture into the desert and other subsequent locations, these images may repeat with only minor variation and emulate the repetitive features of the area. This can be disorienting for the player and effect a maze-like experience which all but requires the player to draw a map as they play to help navigate the game world — a standard game mechanic in text adventures.

As the player explores Serenia, they discover numerous items and puzzles which must be solved in order to explore further. For example, the player encounters multiple instances of snakes with which must be dealt in different manners. The first snake that blocks the way must be killed by throwing a rock found elsewhere in the desert. The player may then encounter rattlesnakes which require a stick to scatter. Finally, aiding another snake trapped by a rock will reward the player with the means to transform themselves into a snake to traverse a small opening found later. As Henry Jenkins has argued, the “narrative architecture” of the adventure game is designed around spatial navigation in that solving puzzles opens up more areas to explore and reveals more narrative — and more puzzles.¹⁰

The imaginary world of Serenia expands far beyond the village and desert of the opening screens. Past the desert lies a chasm which can only be traversed using a magic word, allowing access to a house on the other side and labyrinthine woods inhabited by mischievous gnome, a parrot, and a lion. At the edge of the woods lies an ocean which must be navigated via rowboat to locate a desert island to explore, complete with jungle, a pirate, and buried treasure. Using more magic, the player flies to a distant mainland and finally reaches foothills that lead to the mountains which must be successfully navigated. In the foothills on the other side of the mountains, the player reaches the evil wizard’s castle, which is encircled by a crocodile-infested moat.

Inside the castle, the player then must negotiate an actual maze, beyond which lies the titular wizard and princess — albeit in animal forms. Upon transforming the princess, the player can then magically transport both of them back to the starting village with its familiar accompanying graphic. Curiously, this is identified in the game’s text as “YOU ARE TRANSPORTED TO SERENIA. . . .YOU ARE IN THE VILLAGE OF SERENIA”. This final text suggests that only the initial portion of the game involves the actual kingdom of Serenia, with the other areas belonging to some other realm.

Wizard and the Princess is acknowledged in a 1994 article in Sierra’s magazine InterAction as a “prequel” to King’s Quest games.¹¹ However, the events of Wizard and the Princess were later established to take place sometime before the events of 1990’s King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder!, and both games take place in Serenia. The Serenia in Absence Makes shares some similar geographical features with the Serenia represented in Wizard and the Princess, and the later game even recycles some puzzles from the earlier game.

World of Daventry & The Companion

The “world of Daventry” is generally used by fans to describe the imaginary world in which the games and canonical paratexts take place. One essential work in this process is Peter Spear’s The King’s Quest Companion (1989). This book performs critical work in world-building for the game series beyond the short stories that it offers based on each of the games in the series. First published in 1989, The Companion initially included material for the series up to King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella (1988). Four editions of The Companion were released, with each subsequent iteration including material from the most recently released game in the series. The fourth edition, published in 1997, covers the series up to King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride (1994).

However, only the first and second (1991) editions of the book include the “Encyclopedia of Daventry (Abridged)” section, which collects information from the games and other sources on key characters and other elements and links them to myths and fairy tales. For example, the entry for the beanstalk found in the first King’s Quest notes that, “In our world, we have the story of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’”, and provides a synopsis of the fairy tale as well as the story “Jack the Giant-Killer”.¹² The Companion functions primarily as an authorized hint book to the series, and content from the “Encyclopedia” serves to provide greater context to in-game elements, such as in the entry for “Castle Daventry”, which references elements from multiple games in the series.¹³ The disparate influences for the games are made apparent in this encyclopedia, which includes entries for “Castle Dracula”, “chicken soup”, “Cupid”, “Merlin’s Mirror”, “Riding Hood”, and “Seven Dwarfs”.¹⁴

The Companion’s encyclopedia supplies information about the different kingdoms and continents of the world of Daventry while also evincing the sometimes-confusing and contradictory nature of such information. For example, the entry on Serenia notes that the name refers to “three distinct places”, namely that of a continent, kingdom, and also a town.¹⁵ The entry for Daventry states that the name is given to a kingdom and a continent, but also that, “the name is sometimes used as a generic name for the universe that contains [the] kingdom”, before noting the existence of multiple towns named Daventry in the real world.¹⁶

Earlier in The Companion, it is explicitly stated that Serenia is actually a continent, in which the Kingdom of Daventry is located.¹⁷ The continent was named for the “Sovereignty of Serenia”, another area which borders Daventry.¹⁸ But further compounding this confusion is that the Daventry encyclopedia entry states that this is “the name of the continent of which the kingdom [of Daventry] is part”.¹⁹ However, the entry for Serenia declares that the continent of Serenia, “is broken up into many kingdoms and principalities, with two of the most significant ones being the Kingdom of Daventry and the Sovereignty of Serenia”.²⁰ The Kingdom of Daventry thus is identified as being in two different continents. Contradictions and inconsistencies can thus be found between texts which contribute to this imaginary world, but even within single texts such as the Companion. Fan culture notes that the continent of Daventry is “also known as Serenia at times”, indicating a recognition and tacit acceptance of such variability.²¹

Size, Mapping, & “Wrap Around”

After establishing the diegetic world of Daventry in the first couple of games, subsequent games gradually expanded its fictional boundaries, sometimes in quite literal fashion. As technological and storage capacities increased, so did the scope of the games. Larger-capacity storage media such as higher-density floppy disks and then CD-ROMs facilitated the capability to grow the games and allowed for larger maps. Roberta Williams had previously pushed the proverbial (disk) envelope in creating large games that spanned a number of disks. For example, her earlier Time Zone (1982) featured over 1,400 color images and shipped on six double-sided floppy disks (the equivalent of 12 single-sided floppy disks) for the Apple II.²² Games were almost exclusively shipped on a single disk at the time, including larger-scale games such as role-playing games (RPGs).²³ The size of Time Zone was highlighted in the game’s promotional materials.²⁴

Correspondingly, Daventry’s geography shifts and grows throughout the King’s Quest series. With the exception of the 3D Mask of Eternity, players traverse the game by navigating an animated avatar through a series of “screens”. Each screen represents a distinct location in the game and tends to connect logically and visually to adjoining screens. For example, the first King’s Quest begins the player outside of Castle Daventry, located on one side of the front of the castle (see Figure 8.2, top). By moving the avatar across the bridge of the crocodile-infested moat and exiting to the left on this screen, the player’s avatar moves to the next screen. Here, the player appears on the right side of a screen depicting the continued front side of the castle and its front door (see Figure 8.2, center). There, the player can exit via the side of the screen or gain access to the castle by approaching the door and typing “open door” into the text parser. Entering the castle leads to a depiction of an interior hallway of the castle, rendered in a linear perspective that shows the hallway leading away from this front door (see Figure 8.2, bottom). Each “screen” is connected to other screens, with some screens limiting navigation in particular directions via impassable barriers. The perspective of the standard screen of outdoor spaces in the King’s Quest games generally corresponds to the compass in that the edges of the screen correlate to directions so that the left side of the screen is west and the right side is east, while the top and bottom are equivalent to north and south respectively.

FIGURE 8.2   Start screen of King’s Quest (top); screen to left of the other side of the castle with the front door (center); and screen of interior hall of castle (bottom).

This construction facilitates coherently mapping the space using paper, a practice which the game manuals explicitly encourage and even visually model. The manual for the first King’s Quest suggests that the player, “Create a map showing objects and landmarks you see along the way. You’ll want to note dangerous areas, in particular”.²⁵ The manual then provides a sample map of how different screens connect. Hintbooks and guides for the games often emphasize this mapping and provide maps of each game. Donald B. Trivette’s The Official Book of King’s Quest: Daventry and Beyond (1988) supplies maps and hints for several games in the series. This book divides the first game’s map into quadrants and describes its layout: “The Kingdom of Daventry is small and compact; it is just eight screens from east to west (left to right) and six screens from north to south (top to bottom)”.²⁶ As Trivette explains in his book, each quadrant of Daventry in his book is composed of four screens east to west and three north to south. Maps for each quadrant can thus be clearly rendered on a page and hints for the different quadrants are described in subsections. As technology progressed in subsequent games in the series, the size of these virtual worlds would grow substantially over time; for example, the main area of King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne (1985) expands to a map of seven screens by seven screens and later games grow to dozens of screens.

Trivette describes a curious way in which the totality of Daventry is modeled in the first King’s Quest game. He states, “In almost every case, Daventry, like the real world, wraps around itself: If you go east (right) from Edward’s Castle, which appears [in the top right] on the northeast [quadrant] map, you’ll end up at the beautiful lake shown [in the top left] of the northwest [quadrant] map”.²⁷ In other words, it is possible to move in one direction long enough (i.e., six screens north or south) that one will eventually return to the same screen at which one started. Some barriers in the world such as a river or the castle’s moat may require one to circumnavigate the obstacles or solve puzzles, but the underlying circularly connected grid-like structure remains. Daventry, then, mimics a globe in that it is possible to travel in one direction far enough to return to the starting point. Echoing The Official Book, this effect is also described in The Companion as “wrap around”.²⁸ Players of earlier arcade games such as Asteroids (1979) and Pac-Man (1980), or even the pioneering computer game Spacewar! (1962), which utilize a single-screen wraparound mechanism, would already be familiar with it.

This “wrap around” game mechanic is directly addressed in the manual for the original 1984 release for the first game, which suggests that the world of Daventry is actually shaped in this way. The IBM PCJr manual states “Daventry’s world has a three-dimensional quality about it. Places ‘wrap around’ like countries on a globe. Imagine Daventry as a country so large that it bends around the world. Remember this when drawing your map”.²⁹ This manual then provides two suggested methods of mapping the game, one of which places a grid of locations around a three-dimensional globe.³⁰

Within the tales of Daventry found in The Companion, the “wrap around” is explained by a narrative conceit. This is referred to as a magical law of “containment”, wherein kingdoms in the world of Daventry (e.g., the settings for the first four games in the series) loop in peculiar ways. King’s Quest II transports King Graham to the continent of Tanalore and begins in the kingdom of Kolyma on a beach on the western shores. In the Companion’s narrativizing of these events, it is stated that, “the magical law of ‘containment’ operated in this western part of the continent. For reasons now forgotten — or perhaps it was whimsey on the part of the multiverse — movement to both the north and south in this part of Kolyma eventually turned back upon itself, contained as if inside some transparent cosmic doughnut”.³¹ This diegetic principle apparently operates in describing significant parts of game worlds as in the Daventry found in the earlier games in the series before King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! (1990).³²

Adding to confusion about this imaginary world are questions about where Daventry is actually located. In the instruction manual for the first King’s Quest, it is suggested that the kingdom of Daventry existed “a long, long time ago, when unicorns still roamed in the forests and the merfolk still dwelt in the shallow waters frequented by men”.³³ And in the manual for King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne, the manual is more explicit in describing the location of Daventry as being on Earth: “A long, long time ago, when creatures of myth and magic walked the earth openly with lesser mortals, there dwelt in the kingdom of Daventry a King named Graham”.³⁴ It should be noted, however, that this mention of “earth” in the instruction manual is complicated by the fact that the story in which it is mentioned is attributed to Annette Childs. Even relatively early in series, the complicated function of paratexts created by other authors — in this case, an introductory story written in the game’s instruction manual — is clearly indicated. However, other references to Daventry’s location on earth can be found in the games and have been confirmed by Roberta Williams herself. In a 1998 interview, she describes Daventry as being “somewhere on Earth”, and that Daventry is a “very old, very old city. . . from a long time ago”.³⁵ Her tongue-in-cheek claim that Daventry is located on Earth in an unknown location intimates that Daventry exists in a mythical past rather than an actual past.

Multiples of Daventry

It is difficult to construct a definitive and singular map of Daventry, due to the inconsistencies in, and resulting incoherence of, the various versions of it. One reason for this is a result of Sierra’s own practices in updating its games. Several titles within the original King’s Quest series were released in multiple versions. These iterations extend beyond ports to different platforms, and include versions which incorporated newer technologies. Both the systems used by the game developers and the capabilities of the platforms themselves changed significantly over the course of the game series. And, as the success of the series grew, interest in the earlier games was rekindled. As a result of these and other factors, there exist multiple versions of the earlier games, with varying differences between each in their representations of Daventry.

Sierra’s earlier adventure games were made using a development tool called AGI, the acronym for Adventure Game Interpreter. AGI was developed in conjunction with IBM in creating the 1984 IBM PCJr version of the original King’s Quest game, and it facilitated the porting of the game to similar platforms of the time such as the Apple II, the Amiga, the Atari ST, the Macintosh, and other IBM PCs. Used by Sierra from 1984 to 1989, AGI-based versions of each of the games appeared in the series up to King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella (1988). However, as newer computers, higher resolution graphics, and improved sound capabilities emerged during the 1980s, the limitations of AGI’s underlying technologies (such as its absence of mouse support) became increasingly apparent. Sierra developed SCI, the Sierra Creative Interpreter, as a replacement for AGI. SCI allowed for games with significantly increased graphical resolution and the use of other emergent multimedia technologies such as sound cards. Two versions of King’s Quest IV were developed, one in AGI for older machines and one in SCI which featured significant visual and aural improvements.

The original King’s Quest has been released multiple times with notable differences between some versions. In the original 1984 version, the game manual spells the protagonist’s name as “Grahame” and provides a cartoonish representation of this protagonist and other characters in the game.³⁶ Sierra released multiple versions of this game between 1984 and 1987, and then released a new version of the game made using SCI in 1990 called King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown. This later version changed aspects of the game including puzzles, character dialog, and some layout aspects of in-game elements.

Different versions of these games range from minor improvements to graphics and sounds to the development of more complex backstory and other narrative alterations. The changes made to 1990 SCI remake of the first game were substantial enough to the point that fans do not necessarily consider it part of the world of Daventry’s canon.³⁷ Fans have also remade this first game as Tierra Entertainment’s King’s Quest I: Quest for the Crown VGA (2001). This unofficial remake was then improved upon and re-released in a licensed version in 2009 by AGD Interactive (formerly Tierra), adding Enhanced Edition to the title. Notably, these fan remakes also update the graphics, sound, and other elements but stay closer to the original game than Sierra’s 1990 SCI remake. Other fan games such as AGD Interactive’s King’s Quest II: Romancing the Stones (2002) and King’s Quest III Redux: To Heir is Human (2011) are based on the original games, but are positioned as “retelling” and re-imagining the events of the original games while also updating them to use a graphical interface.

Daventry’s Author(s)

Among the numerous complexities in mapping the space of the fictional world(s) of King’s Quest are those that relate to issues of authorship and ownership. On the one hand, Roberta Williams can clearly be considered the primary creator of these imaginary worlds. Her King’s Quest games established the world of Daventry and its characters, just as her earlier Wizard and the Princess created the world of Serenia. On the other hand, however, numerous others are involved in building the world of Daventry, including those associated with the development of the main series games, the writers of supplementary materials that accompanied the games, authors of commissioned “official” paratexts such as game guides, and fans who play roles in the compiling of these sources and the building of Daventry.

Beyond these fictional worlds, the early original King’s Quest games established other key components for the franchise and broader adventure game genre, including thematic tendencies, and the interrelated domains of play mechanics and the incorporation of technological advancements.³⁸ That is, while the characters and settings spawn multiple games and transmedia articulations, the various texts that build and expand upon these worlds also share narrational tropes and themes, and even occasionally recycle puzzles from earlier Sierra games. Furthermore, games within the series iteratively build upon the first games’ text parser interface to integrate technologies such as color, sound, higher-definition graphics, and mouse-driven control schemes. In a sense, these games build their imaginary worlds both in content and in form.

Although Roberta Williams can be considered the primary designer of the King’s Quest series, several industrial and cultural factors must be recognized in the authorship of these games and the world of Daventry. As with the vast majority of digital games, the creation of any single title in the King’s Quest series was the result of a collaborative process between multiple people. Roberta Williams is unmistakably the driving force behind the series, but the actual implementation of each game inevitably required multiple developers to supplement Williams’s design, including programmers, artists, and so on. Furthermore, technological capacities of personal computers developed rapidly in the series’ initial years of development (1980–1998), spanning from the “prequel” Wizard and the Princess to the ninth game, King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, evolving from monochrome terminals to multimedia computers capable of playing complex sound effects, music, and video. Attendant to these expanding expressive capabilities was the growth of development teams, adding composers, animators, and actors.

The closest to single authorship in the series may well be the earliest game, Wizard and the Princess, in which only Roberta and Ken Williams are credited. In describing the development process for Hi-Res Adventure #1: Mystery House (1980), Ken Williams recounts, “Roberta wanted pictures of every room in the house and would write the story and draw the pictures, write the program”.³⁹ Using an Apple II with a monochrome monitor, the Williamses created the first text adventure to include supplemental graphics.⁴⁰ Wizard and the Princess, the second game in the Hi-Res Adventure series, had the same development team of two, but added color to the in-game illustrations. The development team size would grow considerably by the first official game of King’s Quest I for the IBM PCJr, which features a development team of five identified in the in-game credits: Roberta Williams, Charles Tingley and Ken MacNeill (programming), and Doug MacNeill and Greg Rowland (artwork). These development teams would grow considerably over time and eventually, mushrooming to dozens of people in the credits for Mask of Eternity.

Furthermore, multiple designers and writers were involved in the creation of some of the games. While King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! (1990) credits only Roberta Williams as its designer, later games in the series list multiple designers and writers.⁴¹ King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow (1992) credits Roberta Williams and Jane Jensen as writing and designing the game.⁴² Furthering this trend, King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride (1994) lists Lorelei Shannon before Roberta Williams under “Designed [b]y”, and credits only Shannon as its writer.⁴³ The final official sequel in this series, King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity (1998) once again credits Roberta Williams first, under “Designer/Writer”, but next lists Mark Seibert as “Producer/Director/Co-Designer”.⁴⁴

The original games were supplemented by other paratexts, including materials supplied with the games and guides such as The Official Book of King’s Quest and The King’s Quest Companion, as discussed above. Three “official” novels were also released from 1995 to 1996, ostensibly taking place within the world of Daventry: The Floating Castle (1995) by Craig Mills, and The Kingdom of Sorrow (1996) and See No Weevil (1996), both by Kenyon Morr. However, Roberta Williams was not directly involved in these licensed works, which take place in between the events of the games but also introduce confusing elements to the world of Daventry.

In 2015, the series was “rebooted” by game developers The Odd Gentlemen as King’s Quest: Adventures of Graham. The reboot was initially released episodically, with separate six separate “Chapters”, concluding in 2016. These games take many elements such as characters and settings from the original games’ world of Daventry, but stray considerably from the original series. Fans thus refer to this iteration of Daventry as “reboot canon” or “TOG canon” (an acronym for the development team).”

Fan Works

There is clear evidence that fan engagement with Daventry began shortly after the original games reached players’ hands. Sierra On-Line published its own magazine, which began as the Sierra Newsletter and changed its name upon the acquisition of Dynamix, Inc., before eventually being renamed InterAction. Fan art inspired by the King’s Quest games can be found in the earliest issues of the newsletter, in particular in the “Sierra Cartoon Corner”, which invited readers to submit cartoons about Sierra products. This includes a cartoon by a fan in which a television is shut off in favor of King’s Quest in the second issue of the Newsletter. Active fan engagement in the imaginary worlds of King’s Quest can be found in the next issue, in which a cartoon by Adam Paul depicts Gwydion, the player-controlled protagonist of King’s Quest III: To Heir is Human (1986), and jokingly imagines the hero contemplating the game’s “flying spell” puzzle after brushing away a dead fly.⁴⁵ Fan re-imaginings of the characters and settings of King’s Quest became regular features in the pages of later issues of the Newsletter.

Fan participation in Daventry has expanded far beyond these contributions, however. In addition to fan-driven remakes and re-imaginings of the original games by Tierra Entertainment/AGD Interactive above, fans have produced wholly original games such as Interactive Fantasies King’s Quest ZZT (1997). These fan engagements illustrate multiple aspects of the world-building that these games perform, and clearly demonstrate the existence of a committed fanbase eager to participate in the worlds of Daventry, Serenia, and the other fictional lands of King’s Quest beyond merely the games themselves. The fan cartoons and art also riff off the King’s Quest games’ uses of characters from fables, fairy tales, and other works of literature, as well as the tendency of other Sierra games to utilize characters from the King’s Quest games via cameos or joking references. Such playful intertextual references play a critical part in this aspect of world-building, as they provide numerous points of entry for fans to re-imagine and build upon the worlds of the games.

Parallel Universes

The multiplicities of Daventry may be contradictory, but they also mesh well with the suggestions made in the original games and paratexts that Daventry operates in a “parallel universe”. This positioning of Daventry acknowledges its function within a “multiverse” of numerous parallel universes, which intersect with and inform one another. This suggestion is posited by The Companion, which offers “novelizations” (actually more the length of book chapters or short stories) of the games of the series and further builds out the fictional backgrounds of the games’ imaginary worlds. These stories are dramatic accounts of the events of the games and themselves are positioned as artifacts from the diegetic world of the games.

The story “The Eye Between the Worlds” introduces “Derek Karlavaegen”, the fictional narrator of this and other stories in The Companion. The epigraph suggests that the story was “Compiled from Messages to this World from the World of Daventry, as Sent by Derek Karlavaegen”.⁴⁶ Karlavaegen describes himself as “a writer here [in Daventry], scribing stories about the current events of the day, which are then published for the information and amusement of whoever cares to read them”.⁴⁷ The character of Karlavaegen was introduced in the paratext of the Companion, but then becomes a character in King’s Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow (1992) and also the fictional narrator of the short book Guidebook to the Land of the Green Isles, which was written by Jane Jensen and packaged with the game. While some of the included materials packaged with the games and other licensed material stray from the world of Daventry represented in the games, other materials such as Jensen’s Guidebook function to bridge the game between paratexts and the games themselves.

In The Companion, Karlavaegen explains how he discovered the “Eye Between the Worlds”, which allows him to communicate directly to the reader, outside of Daventry and in the real world. Karlavaegen notes that the world of Daventry intersects with the real world through a structure of “multiverses”, in which Daventry exists as a “fantasy adventure — a made-up story intended as entertainment for people”.⁴⁸ The implication is that the magical imaginary world of Daventry is akin to a dream in the real world but is actually a real place. Furthermore, Daventry is realized in the real world via imagination and other mechanisms. Karlavaegen states, “our worlds touch together in a place shared by the head in this study and in certain of your machines”, obliquely referring to the computers upon which the King’s Quest games run.⁴⁹

As in many Sierra games, King’s Quest would also break the fourth wall with some frequency. Intertextual references are abundant in Sierra games, with characters, locations, and other elements from what might appear to be entirely separate worlds intersecting. For example, a Daventry-themed virtual pinball board can be found in Dynamix’s Take a Break! Pinball (1993).⁵⁰ In some versions of King’s Quest II, looking into a hole in a rock would let the avatar see elements from either the Space Quest games or a preview of King’s Quest III. Al Lowe, the designer of Sierra’s Leisure Suit Larry series also conducts a fictional interview with Daventy’s character of Rosella in The Official Book of Leisure Suit Larry.⁵¹ Such intertextual references support the fan theory of a Sierra multiverse, which allows for character crossovers (often in the form of hidden Easter eggs).⁵²

Conclusion

While the King’s Quest series unmistakably draws from a number of influences in myth and popular culture, Roberta Williams has acknowledged Andrew Lang’s Fairy Book series as being among the most prominent.⁵³ Lang was a literary critic and pioneer in cultural anthropology, helped to legitimize folklore studies as a discipline, and is credited with compiling a number of folklore works.⁵⁴ Among the most influential works of his oeuvre are a subset of a dozen volumes of these which became known as the “Color[ed]” Fairy Books, as each were named for a different color, and were published between 1889 and 1910. These books collected folk tales and myths from a myriad of sources, publishing many for the first time in the English language. While the books clearly sought to profit from the contemporary British interest in fairy tales, they simultaneously helped to concretize the cultural function of fairy tales and folklore.⁵⁵

Notably, Lang’s books were largely compiled from other sources, taking their source material from the myths of a number of different countries. Furthermore, as Andrea Day demonstrates, most of the work of collecting, editing, and translating the majority of Fairy Books was actually performed by his wife, Leonora Blanche “Nora” (Alleyne) Lang, but were instead attributed to Andrew Lang himself.⁵⁶ Day observes that while Andrew Lang acknowledges that much of the series was “wholly” the result of Lang’s wife’s labor in the preface to The Lilac Fairy Book (1910), Lang endeavored to minimize Nora’s work as being done under his supervision, “subordinating his wife’s intellect to his own”.⁵⁷

It seems fitting that Roberta Williams was influenced so heavily by these books in her storytelling, and in the recombinant nature of the world of Daventry. As Molly Clark Hillard argues in her analysis of Lang’s work, “All authorship is, of course, a collective endeavor between forms and across time”.⁵⁸ The remediation of these fairy tales is evident across all of the King’s Quest games, and is apparent in the ways in which players were encouraged to play. The instruction manual for one of the 1984 versions commands the player to “Look to the fables and fairy tales of yore for clues”.⁵⁹ When recounting the influence of Lang’s Fairy Books on her, Roberta Williams responds to a question about whether these stories and books were written by different authors: “I don’t even remember. Probably a lot of them are the same old fairy tales, just rewritten”.⁶⁰ Like the fairy tales from which it draws, the palimpsestic world of Daventry is one which has been — and remains — prone to revision.

Notes

1. 1 DeWitt, “Wizard and the Princess: Computer Fantasy Comes True,” 23.

2. 2 Williams, “Introduction,” 3.

3. 3 Williams, 4.

4. 4 Williams, 4.

5. 5 Trivette, The Official Book of King’s Quest: Daventry and Beyond, 6.

6. 6 King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity Instruction Manual, 28, 29.

7. 7 In a subsequent 1982 port for the IBM PC, the game was retitled Adventure in Serenia.

8. 8 Williams and Williams, Wizard and the Princess: Hi-Res Adventure #2 Instruction Manual, 4.

9. 9 Williams and Williams, 4.

10. 10 Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” 121, 122.

11. 11 “Then and Now (Sierra’s 15th Anniversary),” 45.

12. 12 Spear, The King’s Quest Companion, 1991, 442, 443.

13. 13 Spear, 448.

14. 14 Spear, 435–524.

15. 15 Spear, 506.

16. 16 Spear, 455, 456.

17. 17 Spear, The King’s Quest Companion, 1997, 32.

18. 18 Spear, 33.

19. 19 Spear, The King’s Quest Companion, 1991, 455.

20. 20 Spear, 506.

21. 21 “Daventry Continent”.

22. 22 Clark and Williams, “The Coinless Arcade — Rediscovered,” 87.

23. 23 Jimmy Maher notes this includes games such as Ultima (Richard Garriott/Origin Systems, 1981) and Wizardy: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (Sir-Tech, 1981), which began to use the second side of a double-sided floppy disk. For more, see Maher, “Time Zone The Digital Antiquarian”.

24. 24 These advertised the game as “Multi-Disk Hi-Res Adventure by On-Line Productions” and aped the style of film poster down to the rating of “UA: Ultimate Adventure” several decades before the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) instituted game ratings in the United States.

25. 25 King’s Quest Instruction Manual, 11.

26. 26 Trivette, The Official Book of King’s Quest: Daventry and Beyond, 41.

27. 27 Trivette, 41.

28. 28 Spear, The King’s Quest Companion, 1991, 324.

29. 29 King’s Quest IBM PCJr Instruction Manual, 22.

30. 30 It should be noted that this four-directional wraparound would actually not be a globe, but would actually be more akin to a non-Euclidean shape. See Wolf, “Theorizing Navigable Space in Video Games”.

31. 31 Spear, The King’s Quest Companion, 1991, 62, 63.

32. 32 Spear, 400.

33. 33 King’s Quest Instruction Manual, 1.

34. 34 Childs, King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne Instruction Manual, 1.

35. 35 Wilson, Roberta Williams interview.

36. 36 King’s Quest IBM PCJr Instruction Manual.

37. 37 “King’s Quest I”.

38. 38 Anastasia Salter has argued for the consideration of adventure games in relationship to interactive books: see Salter, What Is Your Quest? Laine Nooney, however, has suggested the utility removing the notion of “genre” in analyzing Sierra’s adventure games; see Nooney, “Let’s Begin Again: Sierra On-Line and the Origins of the Graphical Adventure Game”.

39. 39 Williams, “Introduction,” 5.

40. 40 At the time, the development team and the staff of On-Line Systems consisted of the same two people. The Williamses thus also served as their own distributors, personally delivering copies of the game, packaged in plastic bags, to software stores on US West Coast.

41. 41 King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! Instruction Manual, 1.

42. 42 Jensen, Guidebook to the Land of the Green Isles, 52.

43. 43 King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride Instruction Manual, 11.

44. 44 King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity Instruction Manual, 39.

45. 45 “Sierra Cartoon Contest”.

46. 46 Spear, The King’s Quest Companion, 1997, 1.

47. 47 Spear, 2.

48. 48 Spear, 5.

49. 49 Spear, 5.

50. 50 Sierra acquired Dynamix in 1990, so this game was released under Sierra’s ownership.

51. 51 Roberts and Lowe, The Official Book of Leisure Suit Larry.

52. 52 “Multiverse”.

53. 53 DeWitt, “Wizard and the Princess: Computer Fantasy Comes True,” 23.

54. 54 Hensley, “What Is a Network? (And Who Is Andrew Lang?),” 8.

55. 55 Hillard, “Trysting Genres: Andrew Lang’s Fairy Tale Methodologies,” 9–13.

56. 56 Day, “‘Almost Wholly the Work of Mrs. Lang’: Nora Lang, Literary Labour, and the Fairy Books”.

57. 57 Day, 401.

58. 58 Hillard, “Trysting Genres: Andrew Lang’s Fairy Tale Methodologies,” 7.

59. 59 King’s Quest Instruction Manual, 10.

60. 60 DeWitt, “Wizard and the Princess: Computer Fantasy Comes True,” 23.

Bibliography

1. Childs, Annette, King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne Instruction Manual, Coarsegold, CA: Sierra On-Line, 1985.

2. Clark, Pamela, and Gregg Williams, “The Coinless Arcade – Rediscovered”, Byte Magazine, December 1982.

3. “Daventry Continent” in King’s Quest Omnipedia. Fandom/Wikia, March 5, 2019, available at https://kingsquest.fandom.com/wiki/Daventry_continent.

4. Day, Andrea. “‘Almost Wholly the Work of Mrs. Lang’: Nora Lang, Literary Labour, and the Fairy Books”, Women’s Writing, 26, No. 4 (2019), pages 400–420, available at https://doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2017.1371938.

5. DeWitt, Robert. “Wizard and the Princess: Computer Fantasy Comes True”, Antic, Vol 9, No. 2 (November 1983) pages 23–25.

6. Hensley, Nathan. “What Is A Network? (And Who Is Andrew Lang?).” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, No. 64 (2013), available at https://doi.org/10.7202/1025668ar.

7. Hillard, Molly Clark. “Trysting Genres: Andrew Lang’s Fairy Tale Methodologies”, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, No. 64 (2013), available at https://doi.org/10.7202/1025670ar.

8. Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, pages 118–30. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.

9. Jensen, Jane. Guidebook to the Land of the Green Isles. Coarsegold, CA: Sierra On-Line, 1992.

10. “King’s Quest I: Quest for the Crown” in King’s Quest Omnipedia. Fandom/Wikia, April 18, 2019, available at https://kingsquest.fandom.com/wiki/King%27s_Quest_ I:_Quest_for_the_Crown.

11. King’s Quest IBM PCJr Instruction Manual. Boca Raton, FL: IBM Corporation, 1984.

12. King’s Quest Instruction Manual. Coarsegold, CA: Sierra On-Line, 1984.

13. King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity Instruction Manual. Sierra Studios, 1998.

14. King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! Instruction Manual. Coarsegold, CA: Sierra On-Line, 1990.

15. King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride Instruction Manual. Bellevue, WA: Sierra On-Line, 1994.

16. Maher, Jimmy. “Time Zone.” The Digital Antiquarian, available at https://www.filfre.net/2012/06/time-zone/.

17. “Multiverse” in King’s Quest Omnipedia. Fandom/Wikia, June 30, 2019, available at https://kingsquest.fandom.com/wiki/Multiverse.

18. Nooney, Laine. “Let’s Begin Again: Sierra On-Line and the Origins of the Graphical Adventure Game.” American Journal of Play, 10, No. 1 (Fall 2017), pages 71–98.

19. Roberts, Ralph, and Al Lowe. The Official Book of Leisure Suit Larry. Radnor, PA: Compute! Books, 1990.

20. Salter, Anastasia Marie. What Is Your Quest?: From Adventure Games to Interactive Books. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014.

21. “Sierra Cartoon Contest.” Sierra Newsletter, Spring 1988.

22. Spear, Peter. The King’s Quest Companion. Second Edition. Berkeley, CA: Osborne McGraw-Hill, 1991.

23. Spear, Peter. The King’s Quest Companion. Fourth Edition. Berkeley, CA: Osborne McGraw-Hill, 1997.

24. “Then and Now (Sierra’s 15th Anniversary).” InterAction, 1994.

25. Trivette, Donald B. The Official Book of King’s Quest: Daventry and Beyond. Greensboro, NC: Compute! Books, 1988.

26. Williams, Ken. “Introduction” in The Roberta Williams Anthology Manual , pages 3–8. Sierra On-Line, 1996.

27. Williams, Ken, and Roberta Williams. Wizard and the Princess: Hi-Res Adventure #2 Instruction Manual. Coarsegold, CA: On-Line Systems, 1980.

28. Wilson, Johnny. Roberta Williams interview. TalkSpot, December 6, 1998, available at http://sierrahelp.com/Assets/RealMedia/Roberta_on_TalkSpot_1-3.rm.

29. Wolf, Mark J. P. “Theorizing Navigable Space in Video Games” in DIGAREC Keynote-Lectures 2009/10, edited by Stephan Günzel, Michael Liebe, and Dieter Mersch, pages 18–48. Potsdam, Germany: Potsdam University Press, 2011.