Editing Space Quest (section)

== Development ==
[[Scott Murphy (video game designer)|Scott Murphy]] and [[Mark Crowe]], who had already worked together on the [[Sierra Entertainment|Sierra]] game ''[[The Black Cauldron (video game)|The Black Cauldron]]'', wanted to create a humorous science fiction adventure game. They also wanted it to star a janitor (a choice possibly inspired by the mop-wielding main character from [[Infocom]]'s humorous sci-fi text adventure ''[[Planetfall]]'').

Murphy commented that "Sierra was in a mindset where everything was medieval and it was all fairly serious. I wanted to do a game that was more fun. We even liked the idea of 'fun death'! I mean, if the player is gonna die or fail, they should at least get a laugh out of it. So we came up with the idea of making death amusing. Let's face it, most adventure games involve a good deal of frustration for the player. But we felt that if we made failure fun, to an extent, you might have players actually going back and looking for new ways to die, just to see what happens!"<ref name=":1" />

Crowe noted, "We wanted to do two things for the player. One, we wanted him to feel as if he were in a movie, where he could just sort of kick back and enjoy the scenery. We also wanted the player to feel as if he really was the character on the screen."<ref name=":1">{{Cite web |title=Space Quest (Franchise) |url=https://www.giantbomb.com/space-quest/3025-340/ |access-date=2022-06-20 |website=Giant Bomb |language=en}}</ref>

Although skeptical, [[Ken Williams (gaming)|Ken Williams]] gave the idea a shot. Scott and Mark created a short demo, which ended up becoming the first four rooms of ''[[Space Quest I]]'', at which point Williams gave the project the green light.

Both ''Space Quest I'' and ''II'' were developed in [[Adventure Game Interpreter]], Sierra's own programming language. ''[[Space Quest III]]'' was written in [[Sierra's Creative Interpreter|Sierra's Creative Interpreter (SCI)]], which had [[3D computer graphics|3-D]] capabilities. ''Space Quest IV'' marked an evolution in terms of graphics by increasing the number of colors from 16 to 256.<ref>{{cite book|last=Champion|first=Jill|author2=Leinecker, Richard C. |title=The Official Guide to Roger Wilco Space Adventures|year=1991|publisher=Compute Books|isbn= 0-87455-237-0}}</ref>