Unsure of how this idea would turn out, the ending to King's Quest III was left with an open choice: As the game ends, King Graham realizes that it's time to pass on his adventurer's cap to younger blood, so he tosses it through the air towards Prince Alexander (Gwydion) and Princess Rosella. With the cap frozen in mid air between them, the game ends. Who will catch it? A very good ending to the game, since the symbolism of this action left the question open to who would be the main protagonist in the sequel and thus also made the demand for a sequel bigger. The fans could give their opinions and Roberta had some time to think about it.
In the meantime, Roberta designed Mixed Up Mother Goose, an educational game designed for young children. This game used the automapping system from King's Quest III.
The idea of Rosella as the main protagonist in King's Quest IV was presented to many people at Sierra. Some of them were extremely critical to the idea, claiming that it would destroy the customer base for the King's Quest series and indeed destroy the series itself, giving Sierra a bad reputation. Nevertheless, Roberta was getting more and more confident with the idea and finally decided to try it out.
Technical improvements had started to render the old AGI system outdated. Games with better graphics than AGI could produce was beginning to come out. Sierra had to keep up with the times and therefore decided to create a brand new system for their future adventure games. Developed mainly by the same people who made the AGI system, SCI (Short for the Sierra Creative Interpreter) was the new system that Sierra would use, and King's Quest IV would be the first game written in it.
SCI brought a number of major improvements
to the Sierra adventures. First of all, it supported full 320x200 EGA graphics,
doubling the resolution of the old games. Backgrounds were still drawn
with vector graphics, but support of color patterns, not unlike those used
in Sierra's old Apple II Hi-Res games several years earlier, made it possible
to draw graphics much more impressive than in the AGI system. Mouse support
was also introduced, allowing players to navigate on the screen by clicking
the mouse instead of pressing the arrow keys on the keyboard. The programming
language used to write the logic code for the game was also greatly improved.
Using object-orientation techniques, the programmers could create much
better code for the games. Although totally transparent for a player of
the game, this was a revolutionary technique that was way ahead of its
time. The SCI system was programmed in Assembler, C and itself.
A more obvious technological revolution
of SCI was that it introduced sound card support. The first PC-compatible
sound cards had just been introduced, but practically no one believed that
they would be popular among game players because of their high price. Ken
Williams thought otherwise, and King's Quest IV was to be the game that
made people realize the advantages of owning a sound card. King's Quest
IV would support the AdLib, IBM and Roland MT-32 music cards.
But
supporting music hardware wouldn't be enough. To make sure that people
would realize how much better the game experience became with a soundcard,
Sierra went to Hollywood and hired William Goldstein, a professional composer,
Emmy-nominated for his work on the Fame television series. With
a video recording of the action in the game, he was asked to write a musical
score for it.
Working with Goldstein was apperently not an easy process. Roberta had to sped a week at his house, practically "babysitting" him in order to get him to work on the music. But the stuff he made was great and really showed off the advantages of owning a sound card. With over 75 pieces of music (although many very short) including a theme for each one of the 35 most important characters in the game, it set new standards for music in adventure games. It was the first computer game for the PC to support sound cards, and Sierra used the game in a big marketing campaign that made lots of people go out and buy musical hardware for their PC:s.
Because of the great improvements
of the SCI system, it wasn't sure that enough people would have the required
hardware to play games written in it to make it profitable. Therefore,
King's Quest IV was developed in an AGI version parallell to the SCI version.
The SCI version required 384K of memory, while the AGI version only required
256K. The size of the game was really pushing the limits of the AGI system,
and it didn't look (or sound) nearly as good as the SCI version, as can
be observed in the pictures below:
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King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella didn't have more areas to explore than King's Quest III: To Heir is Human, but in reality it did have more areas, since the story took place over a 24-hour period and most screens had to be drawn in two versions: One in daylight and one by night. Thus, the game can really be viewed as bigger than any of the previous games.
Sierra invited press and industry representatives to Oakhurst for special demonstrations of the game and the new system. Many of them didn't believe in the buzz about the game, but the demonstrations of the game totally blew them away. The introduction of the game was something previously unseen in a computer game. It was very cinematic, almost ten minutes long, with different camera angles, close-ups of the characters and William Goldstein's music playing on the Roland MT-32. It was such an impressive and moving experience to the audience that it's even been said that one woman in the crowd burst out into tears and started crying when she saw King Graham's heart attack.
King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella was first released in September of 1998 in two versions: One written in the old AGI system and one in SCI. It turned out that most people could actually run the SCI version on their computers, and almost no one bought the AGI version. It was therefore quickly removed from the shelves and quickly forgotten. The few people who still own a copy of the AGI version can be happy to have such a rare item in their game collection.
The
sales of the game were sensational, so it seemed like the choice of a female
protagonist didn't hurt sales at all. Sierra did a survey to find out what
men and women of different ages thought about the game and what they thought
of playing a male or a female characters. The results were very unexpected/interesting.
It turned out that the men didn't care at all about the sex of the main
protagonist as long as the game had an interesting story and fun gameplay,
while the women actually prefered to play with a female protagonist. It
wasn't the other way around as one could have thought. Because of this,
Roberta went on by introducing another female protagonist in her next project,
the 1989 game Colonel’s Bequest: A Laura Bow Mystery.
With King's Quest IV: The Perils
of Rosella, Roberta Williams was once again heralded as a visionary
game designer. King's Quest IV even won the 1989 Best Adventure or Fantasy
Role-Playing Game award (sort of the game industry equivalent of an
Oscar) at the SPA Excellence in Software awards ceremony in May
1989, and it sold better than any of the previous King's Quest games.