Lori and Corey Cole Retrospective Interview

Back in 2018, thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, Transolar Games released Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption – a spiritual successor to the Quest for Glory series that combined roleplaying with point and click adventures. Helmed by Lori and Corey Cole, the original creatores of the Quest for Glory games, that release is about to be followed by Summer Daze: Tilly’s Tale, a visual novel set in the world of Hero-U and currently scheduled for a March 28, 2023 release.

Which now brings us to this PC Gamer interview with the Coles where they promote their upcoming project by reminiscing about the good old days. As a result, we can learn a thing or two about the early days of Quest for Glory, the gradual evolution from text parsers to mouse-driven pointing and subsequent clicking, the early experiments with voice acting in video games, and more.

All in all, it’s a great read. So here’s a couple of paragraphs and you take it from there:

There were other benefits too. “It was much easier to create puzzles with the parser,” Lori says, “because you didn’t have to feed the player answers all of the time.” Without the parser, that changed. “You had to actually give the player a choice of possibilities, and one of those choices would be the answer. It became a multiple-choice thing rather than an essay question.”

Lori is a teacher when she’s not a game developer, in case you couldn’t tell. She’s also a proponent of games being accessible and immersive, and for those reasons ultimately came down in favor of the parser’s removal. “Our whole philosophy of games is that the game should be invisible, and you’re immersed in the world,” she says. “The problem with a parser game is you’re playing Guess the Parser. What are the words it understands? How do I phrase this? You’re constantly playing against the computer so you’re not immersed in the world. You’re trying to guess words. Going to the point-and-click style actually was more in keeping with our general philosophy.”