Growing up, I always had a soft spot for police procedurals and detective shows. Early on, shows like Inspector Gadget would intrigue my elementary school mind, and later I would be exposed to it's spiritual predecessor, Get Smart. Two things I wouldn't learn for a few years -- both starred Don Adams, and Get Smart was an early project of the great Mel Brooks, but at this point, I had probably fallen in love with Spaceballs or Blazing Saddles without knowing the connection. Nick at Nite showed reruns of the classic Dragnet, and later, Adam-12.
Looking back, Adam-12 was probably a big inspiration for the game that I next played.
The first week of 6th grade, in a new school, with new classmates -- my school district had three separate elementary schools that funneled into one middle school, so when 6th grade came around, you would meet a lot of new people. Some of the stories are tragic. In the 5th grade, my class was pen-pals with one of the other school's 5th grade class. Near the start of 6th grade, my pen-pal would be in the car with an older sibling, who would proceed to break a lot of traffic laws and get into an accident that killed the pen-pal.
Other stories were much less tragic. On the second day of school, a kid in the lunchroom decided to start a fight with me. Instead of just taking it (a rule most schools have), I fought back, and as a result, we were both suspended. When I came back, I started going to the other lunchroom for lunch instead (our school had two). It was there I met my new friend George, and since he was also a PC gamer, we got to trading games. The first game that he was currently playing? Police Quest.
Retrospectively, a lot of reviewers hurl complaints at the games of Sierra On-Line for their puzzle structure, or the fact that you can easily be killed in-game and have to restore and replay sections to catch up for your mistake. At the time, it wasn't a complaint I had. The story lines were compelling to me, and I was raised by the adventure gamer's mantra, "save early and safe often." Also, "pick up anything that's not nailed down."
I won't claim that I was the best at this. Neither was George. I'm pretty sure that after a week or so, he invested in the hintbook, that we shared. An original hintbook, with the invisible ink that would be revealed when you use the special marker on top of it. sadly, many of these books are no longer legible. the ink that was revealed has turned dark colors. They later redid the book in the newer style, using the red window to view the hints. However, they didn't edit the book after this change. if you look closely, you'll notice that it references coloring in the hints to see them.
Police Quest, to me, is one of the stories that both highlights how open the field was for computer game design in the 80s, and also just a tale of luck. I've read the story before in books, but I can't find where I first read it. Wikipedia links to a bio written by Walls himself, how he got involved in game design to begin with:
I first met Ken Williams (owner of Sierra on Line) in 1985 when he invited me to his house for a game of racquet ball (yes, he had a racquet ball court in his house). This was a period of time when I was off road patrol and on 4800 time with the California Highway Patrol. ("Forty-eight hundred time" is a government code for a period of time the department uses to evaluate an officer of injuries sustained "while on duty"). After racquet ball we retired to his game room, and over a couple of beers, he told me of his idea of starting an adventure game series with a police genre. All he needed was a real cop to be involved with the design in order to maintain realism.
When I first sat down in front of a computer to begin the design story of the original "Police Quest" I had to be shown where the on/off switch was. I typed the entire story with two fingers (after all, the only skills I had at the time were chasing people down and throwing them in jail). Well, the rest is history. Police Quest became a big seller, so naturally, along came Police Quest 2, then Codename: Iceman, followed by the final game in the series Police Quest 3. [Note: this was written before the release of PQ4, it's from an old interview.]
Although I think I like Al Lowe's telling of the story better -- Al was always the better writer:
Yeah. Jim Walls [the police officer who co-wrote the games] had never written anything longer than a police report, but he had great stories to tell. Ken happened to be playing racquetball with him when Jim started regaling him with great tales of his highway patrol days. Ken said, “You should write a game!” Jim had just retired from the force after an incident where a perp came up to his car windshield, pointed a big .57 magnum pistol, aimed it right through the windshield at Jim’s face and pulled the trigger. All Jim could think of was, “I can’t get my damned seatbelt undone!” Fortunately, the gun mis-fired. But Jim had had enough and retired. So he had time to play racquetball, and then he wrote a game.
Nowadays, how many success stories start with a meeting over beers and a racquetball game, followed by a company investing thousands of dollars in development costs on a stranger? Not enough of them.
As I'm sure you figured out by now, this is not a playthrough post. This is game that I have probably played more than once in the last 12 months. Maybe 20 years ago, I was thinking about making a web page for this game or the series. Most of the content I had planned is now found in other sites, such as TCRF. Still, there are some fun little tidbits in the game. One of these is my favorite bug to recreate in a game, which I found all on my own.
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| Blondes really do have more fun... |
If you press the F4 key to sit while Sonny is walking towards the right, rather then the left, when he sits, he appears as the other cop, Steve, straddling the booth.
As I said before, the game was heavily inspired by 1960s TV cop shows. The opening sequence was very much a Dragnet/Adam-12 reference, as was the title music.
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| Just the facts, ma'am. |
And the gameplay very much feels more like Adam-12, because you are a beat officer (at least to start) and strolling along in your patrol car looking for crime at times in the game.
The drunk driver in the game is the game's programmer - Mr. Al Lowe.
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| Hullo, occifer... |
There's a lot of in-jokes in the game, but also the seeds are planted for the future. The music used for te chicken scene proved so appropriate that it was reused when a chicken made another appearance -- in Space Quest 3.
As for reuse -- the recycling of art from LSL1 was something I didn't notice at the time, because I had yet to play it. (Even if I had played LSL1 in 6th grade, I don't think I'd have understood enough of it for at least another year or so...) But you could purposely pull lawbreakers over in front of different types of buildings to get the three different locations -- the residential one, in the screenshot above of Art Serabian, is a common one.
A less common one would be the beach scene -- I tried to find a screenshot of this online, and couldn't find one easily, so I replayed for this.
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| Time to knock off for the day and get a tan |
This one is harder to get, because most players normally don't troll around the outer ring for criminals. It only shows when you pull over someone on the beach side:
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| Notice my patrol car, just to the right of the dialog box. |
But the other common one is a reused asset. I guess the disco finally closed it's doors?
When I did notice this, a couple of years later, I was disappointed to find I couldn't walk in there.
They kept that fun in-joke attitude for the second game in the series as well -- you can meet Larry there. But all the fun disappeared for number 3, and for the remake of number 1.
Of course, this is the future -- so back to the original game. In this case, the first Sierra instance of Poker I would play (but far from the last, as Sierra loves this game. See also LSL1. See also Hoyle's. See also the assorted other card or card-adjacent games you'll play in Conquests of the Longbow, Conquests of Camelot, Space Quest 1, Quest for Glory series, etc, etc, etc...)
In my research for this post, I was not shocked to find that many did not like this game. Without a walkthrough, I can see it being very challenging, especially by modern standards. But what amazes me is how people try to rewrite the past. Reviewers try to make the game intentionally racist (the man who wrote this playthrough also wrote one for the sequel, claiming that Walls was intentionally channeling the future of Blue Lives Matter with the personnel files of officers in the game. ("How cute. Of course none of these files suggests that one of Sonny’s fellow cops ever did anything worse than yelling too loud at a guy, and the guy in question was just so bad. In fact it’s impressive, really, that Walls’s little fictional cops restrained themselves so well!")
The Adventure Gamer was a lot kinder to the game, but after Trickster left the site, his replacements were less friendly to the series.
But in reality, the games were a product of the time -- both of the perception of police at the time, the perception of criminals, and the way those things were handled at that particular point in time. If we watch an episode of Dragnet, do we accuse Jack Webb of being racist because he never wrote an episode where he partnered with a black cop? It's a slippery slope to look at the past without considering context. I don't normally like to comment on these issues on this blog, because I feel that it's unfair to wear modern glasses while reminiscing about the past. I'm trying to keep in the mindset of myself at age 11, when I played this.
Another good Al Lowe quote, by the way, about the making of this game:
"You should've seen Police Quest I when I got onto the project. Oh my God ... Jim had written up this entire story, the programmer had implemented it, but without any of the things Jim didn't think of, therefore it was impossible to play! Jim knew the story and knew all the rules and what were you supposed to do, and the programmer had only put in the stuff that Jim had specified would happen. It was the most bizarre to game to play, because you'd get to a situation and say, what would I do? And Jim has this great wealth of knowledge of police work and he'd say, it's obvious! Well, it's obvious to you, because you'd been trained as a police officer! Nobody else is gonna figure that out! So the big project that summer was to go through and come with any kind of hints, some kind of dialogue and radio commands that would enable you to figure out what the hell you were supposed to be doing."
Essential reading: The Police Quest Casebook by Peter Scisco. Very well-written dramatizations of the games serve as walkthrough aids, and breathe life into a story that isn't always fully-fleshed out in the games, thanks to storage limitations and the technology of the time.
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