If you haven’t heard, The Two Guys from Andromeda (Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy), the original creators of the Space Quest series of adventure games, are back. They have teamed up for the first time in over twenty years to bring the world a brand-new SpaceVenture. They currently have only three days left on their Kickstarter campaign, so if you haven’t already done so, head over to their Kickstarter page to show your support.

The WingDamage staff are pretty big fans of the Space Quest games, as you might have been able to tell from our two part retrospective podcast from 2009 (Part 1, Part 2). I had the privilege of interviewing Scott and Mark this week for SideQuesting.com (and I had a blast doing it). What I came to realize during the interview is that the guys put so much of themselves into the Space Quest games, a series I spent innumerable hours with in Junior High and High School, that it felt like talking to old friends. It also got me thinking about what I loved about the games as a kid, and why they will always have a special place in this gamer’s heart.

Until Junior High, I had strictly been a console gamer. Computers were still expensive and I only ever got to use them in the library at school. Gaming on them was not something I even knew was a thing that people did outside of The Oregon Trail. Then one year, a friend of mine got a used Tandy 386, and the family friend that sold his family the machine had loaded a few games on there, including Police Quest. My friend and I spent hours trying to figure out how to solve the puzzles of Police Quest, playing and replaying the game until finally we got so stuck that we let it lie for a while. Talking about it in school one day, we discovered an acquaintance of ours not only had completed the game, but still had the hint book you had to mail away for. He was nice enough to give it to us, and we used it to finally finish the game. This left us hungry for more.

Once we found out a few other kids we knew had computers, we started to swap games. One of the kids, hearing we had enjoyed one “Quest” game, lent us his copy of Space Quest II: Vohaul’s Revenge. We set at it again, only this time we were able to complete the game without using any hints.

As it turned out, we weren’t up to speed with the latest PC games at the time by any means. The CD-Rom version of Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers was already on store shelves, and we longed to play it. Eventually my friend and I had new enough computers to run it, and found another friend who already owned the game and was willing to do a trade.

When we booted up Space Quest IV for the first time, we were floored. The graphical improvements were fantastic. The voice over work, especially Gary Owens’ work as the game’s narrator, left us rolling. We were officially hooked.

Lucky for us, were getting into the age when we could actually make a little pocket money from doing chores, mowing lawns, and in my case, working for my dad’s plumbing company organizing the warehouse inventory for $4.25 an hour (it was minimum wage at the time, so you kids today should count yourselves lucky). When I had enough money in my pocket and a ride to the mall, I hit up Walden Software to finally get my hands on more Space Quest. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could get not one, but five games in a recently released collection that Sierra had put out.

My friends and I made our way through the series from start to finish, helping each other along the way. We would discuss the games during our lunch break, then try to get farther than each other before the next day for bragging rights. Other times we would get together after school to play as a group. In other words, we were huge nerds and loved every minute of it. We eventually bought part six and did the same.

Much much later I was into webcomics. My brother Jeremy and I had started our own series, “Here There be Robots“, and had a modest fan following. A lot of people that read comics online draw their own, and one of the guys had been doing a comic about super heroes in the work place. He asked his readers if anyone knew what the symbol on his character’s coffee mugs was. I emailed back immediately that it was symbol from Space Quest V. That was how I became friends with Colin, who has contributed to WingDamage a few times and continues to make weird and wonderful comics.

For me, Space Quest was a pop culture touch stone along the same lines as The Simpsons, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Red Dwarf, and Mystery Science Theater 3000. It had an influence on my sense of humor, insides jokes were spawned because of it, and it’s the kind of thing I can go back to it over and over again. I even hope to share it with my daughter some day. I can help her figure out the games puzzles, and she can look up at me with those big blue eyes and say, “Dad, you are such a nerd,” to which I will reply, “I love you too.”

Tags: adventure games, Kickstarter, Point and Click, Sierra, Space Quest, spaceventure, Two Guys from Andromeda

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