King's Quest was for the most part always self-contained bubbled stories, with only limited continuity between only a couple of games at the most. The references or a character may return, but the story itself was largely self contained to the world/land being explored in the game.
I think that's the case for most adventure game series, though it's most visible with Sierra's series that often ran to five or more games. The games were never originally intended to tell any kind of overarching story; usually the challenge for the designers of each new game was finding a way to tell a new story that seemed fresh but wasn't TOO radically different from the previous one(s). In many cases more visible effort went into gags and puzzles and production design than plots per se.
I suspect this is why Roger Wilco keeps getting busted back down to janitor status despite repeatedly saving the galaxy, Leisure Suit Larry can't stay in a relationship, and the torch keeps getting handed to different members of Daventry's royal family. This type of game just works better that way -- adventures are about discovering and solving puzzles, and whatever storyline exists is usually just there to goad the player on to do so. Progress is more about the geography of the map than the soul; we have lots of choices for where to wander and what to try, but we don't have much say in how the story progresses.
At any rate, I agree that efforts to glue all the King's Quests into some sort of meaningful continuity are doomed to fail. That doesn't mean it isn't fun to try, though.
I think his point was that no matter how many times Roger saved the galaxy, he was demoted from his position of fame back down to a lowly scoffed at janitor that everyone was disgusted and fed up with.
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I think that's the case for most adventure game series, though it's most visible with Sierra's series that often ran to five or more games. The games were never originally intended to tell any kind of overarching story; usually the challenge for the designers of each new game was finding a way to tell a new story that seemed fresh but wasn't TOO radically different from the previous one(s). In many cases more visible effort went into gags and puzzles and production design than plots per se.
I suspect this is why Roger Wilco keeps getting busted back down to janitor status despite repeatedly saving the galaxy, Leisure Suit Larry can't stay in a relationship, and the torch keeps getting handed to different members of Daventry's royal family. This type of game just works better that way -- adventures are about discovering and solving puzzles, and whatever storyline exists is usually just there to goad the player on to do so. Progress is more about the geography of the map than the soul; we have lots of choices for where to wander and what to try, but we don't have much say in how the story progresses.
At any rate, I agree that efforts to glue all the King's Quests into some sort of meaningful continuity are doomed to fail. That doesn't mean it isn't fun to try, though.
Before that he was just a janitor, always a janitor.