It was Space Quest 1 for my family and friends. "Insert disk into computer"? "Insert disk into drive"? "Use computer to read disk"? Nope, turns out the magic words were "Insert disk into slot".
I both loved and feared those moments in early adventure games: all good, moving on with the story and then... am I an idiot? Is this part of the game puzzle, or I have to iterate all the dictionary words again?
Both commands above say “put can in bag”. :) What was the correct command?
Don’t ask me how Larry stuffed the bag inside the can, but there was the same animation and everything. I remember being extremely frustrated with that, since the Sierra games are otherwise quite flexible in terms of accepting input. This was also why it was useful for learning English, since you could tell it things like ‘look item’ rather than requiring it to be “look at item’ and so on.
So I really loathed those cases where you had to be super precise, since they felt immediately off compared to the rest of the game.
Regardless good times, I think the best Sierra game of that era is Space Quest 3, which had some decent puzzles, a fun story and a hero I really liked.
The limited grammar of these early adventure games had such a strong impact on me that I write my to-do lists now using the standard “VERB [ADJECTIVE] NOUN” grammar, as if I’m the character in my own game. :)
Note how "VERB.NOUN"/"ACTION.ACTIONABLE" is functional programming while "NOUN.VERB" is OOP. After 18+ years in the industry I still find the functional style more fluild: DO THIS, JUMP THAT, SEE HERE, etc. :-)
Now I see that it's the games that did this to me!
It's not just kids without exposure to English who struggled with typed English interfaces!
I understand the nostalgia for Infocom games of people like Jimmy Maher - I also have a soft spot for beautiful and polished writing, but this definitely was a way forward for games in general.
If you, say have a movement disorder, this happens all too often.
Still I have so many great memories of Sierra’s games from my childhood that I can’t bring myself to hate all the foibles.
Can't imagine myself playing that kind of game again but back then this semi-serious and comfortably safe (no real danger and no sierra deadends as well) gameplay felt right for the 7-8 year old.
Oh, and Kyrandia..!
But did the industry find a better way to tell a story without resorting to action-packed gameplay? I mean, Grim Fandango kind of slow story supplemented by visuals?
Like the best interactive fiction, in classic Sierra games you’re interacting with the developers’ world to create the story. Free-form text input is key to this distinction. Play-throughs of richly written games like The Colonel’s Bequest are much more rewarding because your character isn’t limited to exploring the world via “look/talk/touch/use”.
Then, as the player progresses to the next episode the non-linearity would become a single step to the next episode, without any cross-episode interdependencies. Most well-designed adventure games have this branch-narrow-branch-narrow structure, where bottlenecks make sure the player is ready to proceed to the next level.
What was no very good about Sierra-style design is that they did introduce this non-linearity but there were often inter-episode links introduced. (e.g. "had to pick up this item a couple of episodes back it's late now"). So resorting to walkthroughs was the only way to avoid this kind of meaningless backtracking. It a very shady way to lengthen gameplay time!
The best games (again, I'd cite The Colonel's Bequest) had numerous game-stage dependent side-quests and optional puzzles or secrets that made for rich replay value.
Overall, I wouldn't undersell the value of the possibility of failure & the frisson it provides over a carefully guard-railed world.
There's certainly an aggressively evil way to structure games like this. The first that comes to mind is Infocom's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but it's hard to escape the impression that the sadism towards the player was meant to be part of its charm.
The point-and-click UI was less frustrating, but there was also something lost compared to the text commands.