Roberta Williams
Roberta Lynn Williams is an American video game designer and writer. She has been named by several publications as one of the best or most influential creators in the video game industry.
Williams co-founded Sierra On-Line with her husband, game developer Ken Williams. In 1980, her first game, Mystery House, became a modest commercial success; it is credited as the first graphic adventure game. She then became known for creating and maintaining the King's Quest series, as well as designing the full motion video game Phantasmagoria in 1995. Sierra was acquired by CUC International in 1996, leading to layoffs and management changes. Williams took a brief sabbatical, and returned to the company in a game design role, but grew increasingly frustrated with CUC's creative and business decisions.
After the release of King's Quest: Mask of Eternity in 1998, Williams left the game industry in 1999 and focused her retirement on traveling and writing historical fiction. She has since released her historical novel Farewell to Tara in 2021, and returned to game development with the 3D remake of the classic adventure game Colossal Cave Adventure, released as Colossal Cave in 2023.
Several publications have called Roberta Williams the "Queen of adventure games" for co-founding Sierra, pioneering the graphic adventure game genre, and creating the King's Quest series. She has received the Industry Icon Award from The Game Awards, and the Pioneer Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards.
Early life and career
Born in Los Angeles, Roberta Heuer grew up in rural Southern California as the daughter of an agricultural inspector. A shy child with a vivid imagination, she often created fairy-tale adventure stories to entertain her family. She would lie in bed and imagine fantastical situations, which she sometimes described as her "movies". She met her future husband Ken Williams when they were both teenagers, and the two began dating. After high school, she became a clerk at the Los Angeles County Welfare Department, in part thanks to her father's connections working in local government. In late 1972, Roberta married Ken just a few days after his eighteenth birthday, and gave birth to their first son in November 1973. The couple briefly moved to Illinois, where she was employed as a computer operator, soon moving back to Los Angeles where she took a job at Lawry's Foods as a computer programmer working in COBOL.By 1979, the couple had two children. Ken was employed as a computer programmer and consultant, working on large IBM mainframe machines. They wanted to leave Los Angeles to fulfill their dream of living in the woods. As Ken brainstormed ideas for a technology business that could become viable outside of a major city, Roberta purchased an Apple II computer for the family, which strained their expenses. Roberta's love of computers grew as she played several text adventure games.
Game design career
Early graphic adventure games (1979–1983)
Around 1979, Roberta Williams was an avid player of text adventures on her teletype machine, particularly as a fan of Colossal Cave Adventure. She was inspired to speak to her husband Ken Williams about her vision for what a video game could be, drawing influence from Agatha Christie's story And Then There Were None, and the board game Clue. Roberta convinced Ken to provide the technical knowledge to program the game, while she contributed her experience with fiction and storytelling. Roberta drew the pictures using her Apple II and a Versawriter, a graphics tablet that could be used to hand-trace a piece of paper and input the image into a computer. Since no programs existed to read the Versawriter image, Ken had to write one, eventually compressing nearly seventy images onto a disk.The result was Mystery House, an adventure game with black and white graphics for the Apple II computer. Released in 1980, the game was distributed by mail order, advertised in computer magazines under the name of Ken's consulting company, On-Line Systems. The game soon sold ten thousand copies, with Roberta personally packing the disks and supporting materials in Ziploc bags, and answering her home phone to provide hints for the game's puzzles. Ken began to personally distribute copies of the game to computer stores. He quit his consulting job, with hopes that it would allow the couple to eventually move out of the city.
They released the Wizard and the Princess later that year, improving on their previous title with color graphics and dithering. The game sold 60,000 copies, leading them to hire more employees for distribution and programming. Encouraged by the success of their first two games, On-Line Systems switched its focus from consulting to game development. Roberta's ambitions grew with the design of Time Zone, a time-travelling game spanning thousands of years, which was released on twelve disks in 1982. Around this time, Roberta's parents retired and moved to Oakhurst, California, and she hoped to move close by. With their company expanding, the couple was finally able to move On-Line Systems from Simi Valley, California to Coarsegold. They also changed their company name to Sierra On-Line, based on its location near the Sierra Nevada mountains.
After just two years Sierra had grown to nearly a hundred employees with $10million in revenue. Sierra's success started to attract investors, including venture capitalists. Around this time, Jim Henson approached Ken Williams to create a game adaptation of The Dark Crystal, before the film's release. Roberta was excited by the project, believing video games to be a facet of entertainment as much as film. She designed much of the game adaptation on paper; it was finalized and released in 1983. The high-profile game caused the company to attract mainstream media attention, and Roberta hoped that the entertainment industry would not just recognize the value of games, but also the value of the artists who created them.
''King's Quest'' breakthrough (1983–1994)
By 1983, Sierra's new investors pushed the company to diversify into video game cartridges for platforms such as the Atari. The video game industry soon experienced a crash, and Sierra's board of directors began to push a merger with Spinnaker Software, an educational software company. When Spinnaker presented their proposal to the Sierra board, Roberta proclaimed, "These guys are a joke. No one in the industry respects them. Can't we talk about something productive?" Although Ken Williams was amenable to the deal, Roberta strongly opposed it, and the merger did not proceed. Sierra was forced to downsize to 30 employees, and the Williams family mortgaged their home to pay their remaining employees.Sierra had cultivated a strong relationship with IBM as the IBM PC was being developed, and Wizard and the Princess was one of the first games released for the computer under the title Adventure in Serenia. Around the time of Sierra's financial difficulties, IBM offered to invest in the struggling company, with hopes of creating a game that could showcase the technical capabilities of their upcoming IBM PCjr. Roberta had wanted to build on her experience with The Wizard and the Princess with a fully animated adventure game, in a pseudo-3D world. This led to the 1984 release of King's Quest, conceived as a blend of common fairy tales that could be directly experienced as a game. Although the PCjr was considered a failure, King's Quest was ported to many other platforms and quickly rose to bestseller status. The game was considered revolutionary for its pseudo-3D elements, becoming the first adventure game to allow the player character to move in front of, behind, or over other objects on the screen. It was also the first computer game to support the 16-color EGA standard, setting a new standard for future graphic adventure games.
Meanwhile, Roberta continued her role as designer of the King's Quest series, which earned a reputation for its unique style of storytelling, as well as its increasingly advanced graphics and technology. The 1986 release of King's Quest III: To Heir is Human was larger and longer than previous games in the series, and earned a ranking on Time's list of 50 Best Video Games of All Time. When King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella was released in 1988, it was one of the first games to receive sound card support, and one of the first adventure games to support a mouse. It was also one of the first games to feature a female protagonist, a creative decision that Williams seeded by introducing the character in the previous game. Some of her peers cautioned that this might deter men from playing the game, but it was even more commercially successful than previous installments. A post-release survey revealed that most men did not mind playing as a female protagonist, whereas many female players preferred the experience. Sierra received registration cards for the game with a near 40% female audience, leading journalists to credit Williams with expanding the player base for personal computer games. King's Quest IV has been considered one of the most influential video games of all time, impacting the design of games such as Maniac Mansion and other LucasArts adventure games.
Williams continued to design other titles, such as the educational title Mixed-Up Mother Goose. The game went on to sell more than 500,000 copies, and the CD-ROM version earned the Software Publishers Association Excellence in Software Award for Best Early Education Program. In 1989, Williams released another mystery adventure game called The Colonel's Bequest, which iterated on ideas from her original Mystery House game with more detailed graphics and improved text parsing. The game was still rare for featuring a female protagonist, and deviated from the traditional adventure game formula to become more of an interactive mystery, putting more onus on the player to discover the plot. The 1990 release of King's Quest V became the first game to use an icon-based interface, continuing the series' innovations in game design. The game was critically acclaimed, winning several awards upon release, with Computer Gaming World including it in their 1996 list of greatest games of all time.
By the early 1990s, Sierra was a publicly traded company, generating $100million per year in revenue. The company released The Dagger of Amon Ra in 1991, a sequel to The Colonel's Bequest based on characters and concepts created by Williams. Meanwhile, Williams worked with Jane Jensen to design King's Quest VI. Released in 1992, it was recognized by several publications as one of the best adventure games, if not one of the best games overall. By the mid-1990s, Williams was considered the company's most popular game designer, particularly for her success with the King's Quest series. The saga is still remembered as the only video game series created and maintained by a female designer.