I credit my high WPM to Sierra

It might just look like a blob of blue pixels...but it's clover. Really.

When I type, my fingers dance across the keyboard like a trailblazing cowboy. I didn’t develop mad typing skills in keyboarding class…my Keystroke Kata began well before school required that as a part of the daily curriculum. And I owe it all to Sierra.

The early text-based adventure games like Quest for Glory (originally dubbed Hero’s Quest), King’s Quest, and…ahem…Leisure Suit Larry really helped to shape my typing techniques because this style of game required you to input verb commands in order to progress and complete quests. As the graphics technology of this era were limited (but still awesome), you couldn’t always get an in-depth view of your surroundings. Commands such as “look around” or “look at” followed by what you wanted to examine returned an in game pop-up panel that gave you a literary description of what you were actually looking at.

The early Sierra games really required you to think. You drove the story with your commands, and so you had to think about what or how you wanted to do something, tell the game what you wanted to do, and make it happen (or not – depending on your command). The text parser system within these games translated your command inputs into something the game could understand, making it easier for the player to react to the game’s response. For instance, if you issued the command, “get the gold key”, the game would strip the input and understand “get key”, resulting in your character picking up the key in the game.

The game developers at Sierra had a quirky sense of humor that often coincided with the players themselves. You could enter in some not-so-politically-correct commands and the game would provide humorous admonishments about your lack of manners. I can clearly recall one instance in Quest for Glory where I instructed my character to “pee on bush” (come on…I was 12) and the parser responded with “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” Sometimes this would turn into a personal conquest to determine how many insults I could fling at the game and get a response for.

When it comes down to the nitty-gritty, the complexity behind these early adventure games was almost mind-boggling when you stop to think about it. Every interaction, every consequential combination of objects, all of these aspects had to be carefully planned and coordinated by the game’s designer. The designer not only had to plan out the story’s sequence, but how the multitude of players would play the game and interact with the world. At some point, the designers of Quest for Glory anticipated the juvenile requests exploring the possibility of urinating in the woods.

The cool thing about text-based games is that you were really drawn into the game on an interactive level. These games weren’t just about mashing buttons mindlessly. They were about putting together the bits and pieces, unraveling the story one step at a time. You had to apply reason and conscious thought – if you got stuck on a puzzle, you couldn’t just Google the answer. However, on the flip-side of button mashing, if you were at the mercy of a non-intuitive puzzle, oftentimes you would end up typing out every combination of interactions with every item in your inventory. It’s tough to be the only kid in your sixth-grade class with carpal tunnel.

The introduction of mouse-driven game engines saw the decline of the text-based adventure game era. But thanks to games such as the hit titles in the Sierra lineup, it only took me 29.6 seconds to type this blog post.