Roberta Williams

Roberta Williams (born February 16, 1953) is an American video game designer and writer, who co-founded Sierra On-Line with husband and game developer Ken Williams. In 1980, her first game Mystery House became a modest commercial success, and became credited as the first graphic adventure game. She is also known for her role in creating and maintaining the King's Quest series, as well as designing the full motion video game Phantasmagoria in 1995. A few years after her company was acquired for $1 billion, she left the game industry in 1999, focusing on travelling and writing historical fiction.

Roberta Williams
Roberta Williams at a celebration of On-Line Systems' first anniversary, 1981.
Born (1953-02-16) February 16, 1953
OccupationVideo game designer, writer
Known forKing's Quest
Mystery House
Phantasmagoria
Spouse(s)Ken Williams
Children2
Websitesierragamers.com
robertasbook.com

Several publications have named her as one of the best or most influential creators in the game industry, with several calling her the "Queen of adventure games". She has received the Industry Icon Award from The Game Awards, and the Pioneer Award at the 20th Game Developers Choice Awards. In 2021, she announced her plans to return to game development, with a game called The Secret.

Early life
Roberta founded On-Line Systems with husband Ken Williams, pictured, creating the company that would later become Sierra On-Line.

Roberta Heuer was born February 16, 1953.[1] She grew up in rural Southern California, the daughter of an agricultural inspector.[2] A shy child with a vivid imagination, she often created fairy-tale adventure stories to entertain her family.[3] She would sometimes lie in bed and imagine fantastical situations, which she sometimes described as her "movies".[2] As a teenager she met Ken Williams, and the couple got married soon after.[4]

By 1979, the couple had two children, and Ken was working as a computer programmer and consultant, working on large IBM mainframe machines.[3][5] Ken embraced the early days of home computing by procuring an Apple II computer,[5][6] which strained the family's expenses.[2] Roberta began her interest in computers by playing several text adventure games.[3]

Career

Mystery House
Main article: Mystery House
Roberta Williams (right) with fellow On-Line Systems employees Maria Stahl (left) and Diane Siegal (middle) at a celebration of the company's first anniversary in 1981.

Around 1979, Roberta Williams was an avid player of text adventure games on a teletype machine,[7] particularly Colossal Cave Adventure.[8] She was inspired to speak to her husband Ken Williams about her vision for what a video game could be,[7] drawing influence Agatha Christie's story And Then There Were None,[1] as well as the board game Clue.[8] At the time, Roberta's experience was in reading and storytelling, leading Ken to provide the technical knowledge to program the game.[7] Roberta drew the pictures using her Apple II and a graphics tablet,[8] a machine called a Versawriter that could be used to hand-trace a piece of paper and input the image into a computer.[5] Since no programs existed to read the Versawriter image, Ken had to write one,[7] eventually compressing nearly seventy images onto a disk.[8]

The result was Mystery House, an adventure game with black and white graphics for the Apple II computer.[9][10] At first, the game was distributed by mail order, advertised in the May 1980 issue of MICRO, under the name of Ken's computer consulting company, On-Line Systems.[2] The game quickly sold 10,000 copies,[6] with Roberta personally packing the discs and supporting materials in Ziploc bags, and answering her home phone to provide hints for the game's puzzles.[2] Ken began to personally distribute copies of the game to computer stores, leading him to quit his consulting job so that the couple could fulfill their dream of living in the woods.[2] Their second title, Wizard and the Princess (1980), added color graphics and dithering.[2][11] The game went on to sell 60,000 copies, and led them to hire additional employees for distribution and programming.[2] Encouraged by the success of their first two games, On-Line Systems switched its focus from consulting to game development.[11] Roberta's ambitions grew with the design of Time Zone, a time-travelling epic game spanning thousands of years, which was released on 12 discs in 1982.[2] That year, the company moved from Simi Valley, California to Coarsegold,[12] and changed its name to Sierra On-Line based on its location near the Sierra Nevada mountains.[13]

King's Quest breakthrough

Programmers, authors are going to be the future new entertainers ... It might be presumptuous to say they might be new Robert Redfords ... but to a certain extent [they will be] idolized. Tomorrow's heroes.

Roberta Williams[2]

Sierra's success started to attract investors, including venture capitalists.[14] Around this time, Jim Henson approached Ken Williams to create a game adaptation of The Dark Crystal, before the film's release.[2] Roberta was excited by the project, believing video games to be a facet of entertainment as much as film.[2] She laid out her vision for the game on a large white sheet of paper, and her game adaptation of The Dark Crystal was released in 1983.[15] The growth of the company attracted 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.[2]

Meanwhile, Sierra's new investors pushed the company to diversify into video game cartridges for platforms such as the Atari.[14] The video game industry experienced a severe crash, and the Williamses had to layoff the majority of their team, mortgaging their home to pay their remaining employees.[14] Around this time, 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.[11] This led to the 1984 release of King's Quest,[12] conceived as a blend of common fairy tales that could be directly experienced as a game.[16] While the PCjr was considered a failure, King's Quest was ported to numerous other platforms and quickly rose to bestseller status.[11] The game was considered revolutionary for introducing pseudo-3D elements in an explorable world,[17] allowing the player character to move in front of, behind, or over other objects on the screen.[6][11] It was also the first computer game to support the 16 color EGA standard,[11] setting a new standard for future graphic adventure games.[17] Also in 1984, Sierra's board of directors began to push a merger with Spinnaker Software, an educational software company. While Ken Williams was amenable to the deal, Roberta strongly opposed, and the merger did not proceed.[14]

Meanwhile, Roberta continued her role as designer of the King's Quest series, which had become notable as one of the only series created and maintained by a female designer.[18] The series was also known for Williams' unique style of storytelling, as well its advancements in graphics and technology.[12] 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,[19] and one of the first adventure games to support a mouse.[20] It was also one of the first games to feature a female protagonist.[19] While some of her peers cautioned that this might deter men from playing the game,[21] the game marked a dramatic increase in the series' commercial success.[20] She would recall that the female protagonist likely increased the audience for the series, a creative decision that she seeded by introducing Rosella in the previous game.[22] A post-release survey revealed that most men did not mind playing as a female protagonist, whereas many female players preferred the experience.[21] Sierra received registration cards for the game with a near 40% female audience, a gender dynamic that has been credited to Williams' voice as a female author.[18] King's Quest IV has been considered one of the most influential games created, with its impact felt on peers such as the Maniac Mansion and other LucasArts adventure games.[20]

Additional titles

Williams continued to design other titles, such as Mixed-Up Mother Goose in 1987.[9] 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.[23] The game deviated from the traditional adventure game formula to become more of an interactive mystery.[24] Meanwhile, 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.[25][11] The game was critically acclaimed, with Computer Gaming World remembering it among their greatest games of all time.[26] In the meantime, Sierra became a publicly traded company, and was generating one-hundred million dollars per year in revenue.[14]

Williams also lent her characters and concepts to The Dagger of Amon Ra in 1991, a sequel to The Colonel's Bequest that was less of an interactive mystery and more of a traditional adventure.[27] When King's Quest VI was released in 1992, it became recognized by several publications as one of the best adventure games, if not one of the best games overall.[28][29][30] By the mid 1990s, she was considered the company's most popular game designer, particularly for her success with the King's Quest series.[2]

With the rise of CD-ROM technology, Williams designed Phantasmagoria as a realistic horror adventure game, featuring graphic depictions of sex and violence.[17] Designed as mature title for adults, the game cost $4 million dollars to produce, with a team of nearly 200 people.[21] The game ultimately had a script of over 500 pages, and was published on seven CD-ROMs.[1] The full-motion video game was marketed as an interactive film,[11] and sold more than 1 million copies upon its release in 1995.[1] The game was considered a best-seller among adventure games, despite its mixed critical reception.[11] Roberta Williams recalls the game as her favorite achievement.[17]

In 1996, Sierra was sold to CUC International, in a transaction valued at more than $1 billion dollars in stock.[14][31] Roberta had opposed the deal, and several other high-ranking Sierra employees had felt there was something suspicious about CUC's financials.[14] But Roberta ultimately acquiesced, recognizing that the terms of the deal were too favorable to refuse, even recognizing that they could be sued by their shareholders for failing to maximize their value.[14] The company's management and decision-making dramatically changed under CUC,[13] leading Ken Williams to leave his role at Sierra and work directly for their new parent company.[14] Under CUC, Sierra experienced severe lay-offs.[11] Meanwhile, Roberta Williams took a sabbatical from the game industry,[32] as the company released The Roberta Williams Anthology, a compilation of 14 games that was also noted for showcasing a history of the adventure game format.[31]

Roberta Williams returned to game development in early 1997 to begin work on King's Quest: Mask of Eternity.[32] Her hope was to re-introduce some interactivity that was missing from Phantasmagoria,[33] and to update the game to embrace the advances in 3D graphics technology.[14] However, Sierra had changed significantly as a company, and its new management insisted on adding elements from popular role-playing games such as Diablo, to the detriment of the game's traditional adventure elements.[14][34] When she removed certain role-playing elements, the team would re-add them, leading to a power struggle with their management.[14] Meanwhile, Roberta's frustrations with her lack of control were coupled with suspicions of CUC, after allegations of financial fraud had surfaced about the company. She discussed with Ken about selling their stock before something happened.[14] Mask of Eternity was released in December 1998, the game was poorly received both commercially and critically, leading to further layoffs, and the sale of Sierra to Vivendi.[11] That year, CUC was convicted of financial fraud, having exaggerated their company's revenues by more than $500 million dollars.[14] The decline of Sierra had an emotional impact on Roberta,[14] who left the company in 1999.[35] The company was later acquired by Activision Blizzard.[17]

Retirement

After the release of King's Quest: Mask of Eternity, Roberta Williams described herself as taking a sabbatical from the game industry in 1999.[36] In hindsight, it became apparent that this was her retirement, after working on 20 games in the span of 18 years.[35] She has stayed away from the public eye and rarely gives interviews to talk about her past with Sierra On-Line.[37] In a rare 2006 interview, she expressed that her greatest achievement was creating Phantasmagoria, though she expressed her love of the King's Quest series for its influence on her early career.[16] Williams expressed that her role as a game designer was in the past, and she was focused on writing a historical novel.[16] She has also focused on travel,[35] becoming an avid sailer with her husband Ken.[12] Her family has homes in Seattle, France, and Mexico.[38]

In 2011, the video game website Gamezebo reported that she had returned from her sabbatical as a design consultant on the social network game Odd Manor.[39] By 2012, Replay Games had recruited Sierra veterans Al Lowe and Paul Trowe to return to the Leisure Suit Larry adventure game series, which led Trowe to try to persuade the Williams to return to the game industry.[40] Meanwhile, Activision hired Telltale Games to develop a new entry in the King's Quest series. Williams declined to work on the game, but did offer some advice.[41][42] The game was later cancelled in 2013.[43] Activision would attempt to revive the Sierra brand in 2014, leading developer The Odd Gentlemen to create King's Quest: A Knight to Remember.[44] According to the studio, they consulted with Roberta Williams "to make a game like they would make if they had continued making adventure games."[45]

In 2019, Vancouver Film School announced The Roberta Williams Women in Game Design Scholarship, in partnership with game studios The Coalition and Blackbird Interactive.[46] In 2021, Williams self-published her first novel Farewell to Tara, set in mid-1800s Ireland during the time of the Great Famine.[47] She and Ken announced plans to return to game development in June 2021 with the game The Secret, in collaboration with artist Marcus Maximus Mera.[48][49] In an interview that same year, she expressed caution that a veteran game designer could successfully return to the industry after an extended break, saying there are merits to ending your career at its peak.[34]

Legacy and accolades

In 1995, Next Generation listed Roberta Williams among their 75 list of power players in the game industry.[50] Computer Gaming World also included her as tenth on their 1997 list of the most influential people in computer gaming, praising her impact on the design of adventure games.[51] GameSpot likewise ranked her as number ten on their 1999 list of "the most influential people in computer gaming of all time" for "pushing the envelope of graphic adventures" and being "especially proactive in creating games from a woman's point of view and titles that appealed to the mainstream market, all the while integrating the latest technologies in graphics and sound wherever possible."[8] In 2009, IGN included her and Ken Williams in the 23rd position on the list of top game creators of all time, highlighting their role in co-founding Sierra Entertainment as "the company behind some of the best and most well known adventure games of the '80s and '90s."[17]

Computer Gaming World inducted Roberta Williams into their Hall of Fame in 2011.[52] Both Roberta and Ken were given an Industry Icon Award at The Game Awards in 2014.[7] She also earned the Pioneer Award at the 20th Game Developers Choice Awards in March 2020 for her influential work in the graphical adventure game genre with Mystery House, as well as her work role in creating the King's Quest series co-founding Sierra On-Line.[12][53]

Ken Williams has described her as a perfectionist, "extremely smart, intuitive and usually right. She can’t be managed."[4] Ars Technica has called her "one of the more iconic figures in adventure gaming", noting her as one of the first well-known female game designers, and praising her writing and design work on Phantasmagoria and the King's Quest series.[35] The Smithsonian Magazine has noted her as a pioneer of graphic adventure games, for creating the first home computer game to include graphics.[7] Multiple publications have referred to her as "the Queen of adventure games".[3][6][54][55]

Roberta Williams has personally inspired the characters and artwork of other games. She posed for the cover of the game Softporn Adventure by Chuck Benton, published by On-Line Systems.[35][56] She also posed much later with her children as Mother Goose for the cover photograph of Mixed-Up Mother Goose.[35] The end sequence of Leisure Suit Larry 3 features her as an in-game character.[57] She was also a source of inspiration for the character of Cameron Howe in the AMC television drama Halt and Catch Fire.[58] The Williams family donated a collection of design materials to the International Center for the History of Electronic Games.[46]

Works

Games

Novels
  • Farewell to Tara (2021)

Awards

References
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