The Amber Shield

Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel

This isn't the first game I ever finished but that one's from the Commodore 64 so this is the first PC game I ever finished.

Growing up, a friend of mine's Dad worked for the government. A geologist if I recall. He had to do some kind of work at home that justified him having a computer provided by his work. He got a brand new IBM XT 5150 PC with an amber phosphor display and a 10MB hard drive. The thing was a hulking beast that took about 5 minutes to do its 640K RAM check when you powered it on but it was a monolith of possibility to me.

My friend got a pirated copy of Police Quest 1 and invited me over to try it. I'd seen a Sierra demo disk running on a computer in a mall but didn't know how they worked. He said "You know those text adventure games? This has that but also graphics and you move the character around." I didn't get it until he showed me the game and then it made perfect sense. First generation Sierra adventure games had this hybrid system where you moved the character with the arrow keys but had to type your commands because most computers didn't have mice at that point so there was no such thing as point and click. The commands would usually apply to whatever your character was standing near and looking at.

Since this was a work computer, it had an amber monitor as my friend's Dad didn't need colour for what he did. But it was also EGA compatible, meaning you could set the game to run in 16 colour mode and though the monitor could only display shades of amber (basically orange), it could interpret the 16 colours in a way that still made it completely playable and actually looked quite striking. This first generation IBM PC was sloooowwww and not only did Sonny Bonds take a while to traverse the screen even on fast mode but it took a good 10 seconds or so to load each screen transition, and that was off the hard drive. You had to have patience to play these games on this hardware but we were kids and in no rush so we didn't care.

These old school adventure games were famous for their obtuse "moon logic" puzzles that were used more often to pad out the length as without them, the games could be finished pretty fast. The first Police Quest was pretty light on this in comparison to other series like King's Quest and Leisure Suit Larry. You still had to keep a lot of saved games handy and be prepared to go back a way if you messed something up because these old games had no guardrails and it was possible to miss something earlier in the game that could soft lock your progress later on but I remember we never needed a hint book or to call Sierra's famous hint line. We either put our heads together and figured the puzzles out ourselves or were able to ask his Dad for help. He used to beat old Infocom text adventures by keeping a notebook beside him so these were child's play in comparison.

We were amazed when you got into your cruiser and had a whole city to drive around, even though your car was just a rectangle and the city wasn't that large, plus it was easy to wreck yourself by making a turn a couple of pixels too early. To us though, it felt like experiencing an open world game for the first time many years later, where the possibilities were endless. In adventure games like this, new art was the big reward for getting to a new area or solving that puzzle you were stuck on. Getting to a new environment or one of the scenes where there was detailed close up art of the characters was a dopamine rush akin to completely finishing a game today. The base art in these games was primitive at best because early PCs were strictly business machines as opposed to other home computers from Commodore, Atari etc. that had hardware much more suited for games to take advantage of. But when you saw a dedicated character scene that you could tell an artist put hours and hours into, it was a sight to behold.

Sound cards did barely exist at this point in time but though Sierra go heavy into supporting almost every different one in their later titles, none of these 1987-era games used anything but the PC speaker, which could just make different tones of beeps, which admittedly the designers used to some pretty good effect. I won't say it sounded good, even compared to other home computers at the time but they were still able to add a lot to scenes with a very limited piece of hardware.

We finished the game probably 5 or 6 times and spent I don't know how many hours just driving around the city or trying to do various scenes the wrong way to see what kind of dumb things we could make happen. Sierra knew people would try this and you could fail in some pretty hilarious ways if you thought of them.

I also beat the VGA remake of the game that came out a few years later and was a multi-generational leap not just in terms of sound and visuals but usability with a mouse-first control scheme that was intuitive but didn't remove any of the challenge either.

This is not only what truly got me into PC gaming (which is still the main way I play today) but got me into Sierra games. I've played and finished I don't know how many entries across their adventure line from this to King's Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Quest for Glory and more. My favourite series is still Space Quest and I've long since lost touch with that friend but the memories he and I made with Police Quest 1 on that amber display will be part of my core forever.