THE MAKING OF CONQUESTS OF CAMELOT and Conquest of the Longbow
THE PERFECT BLEND OF STORY, ACTION AND ADVENTURE, CHRISTY MARX’S CONQUESTS GAMES REPRESENT THE BEST SIERRA ON-LINE HAD TO OFFER IN ITS WILDLY INNOVATIVE NINETIES HEYDAY. HERE, THE CELEBRATED SCREENWRITER TELLS RETRO GAMER HOW SHE CRAFTED THESE UNDERAPPRECIATED GENRE CLASSICS
Sierra On-line’s graphic adventures are renowned among fans of the genre, but only true connoisseurs can name those lacking a ‘Quest’ in the title. That’s a shame, as there are some hidden gems in the company’s back catalogue, just waiting to be discovered by the more intrepid hunters for gaming treasure. Christy Marx’s Conquests Of Camelot and Conquests Of The Longbow are two such titles.
Christy, a successful screenwriter responsible for the animated series
Jem and the comic book series Sisterhood Of
Steel, brought complex storytelling, deep research and thoughtfully designed gameplay mechanics to her adventures in medieval legend. And yes, the word
‘quest’ is still in there… sort of. This is a Sierra game, after all.
Christy explains how her unexpected detour into the world of game design came about. “I was married at the time to an Australian artist by the name of Peter Ledger,” she remembers. “Peter and I had been doing a lot of different projects – comic book projects and so forth – together, and one day we got a phone call from a headhunter who had been hired by Sierra On‑line to find artists that would be willing to come up and live in this tiny little mountain town of Oakhurst, which is just outside of Yosemite Park, and work on their games. We were having a very tough time,
because there was a Writers’
“I LOVE DOING RESEARCH! IT’S ONE OF MY FAVOURITE THINGS. THIS WAS PRE-WEB, SO IT WASN’T LIKE YOU COULD JUST GO AND GOOGLE SOMETHING ” Christy Marx
Guild strike that had been going on forever, and it had hit us very hard. I’ve always wanted to jump at new opportunities, so even though I knew absolutely nothing about computer games and had never played a computer game, I said, ‘Well, he might be interested, but are they also looking for writers?’” After meeting with Sierra’s founders, Ken and Roberta Williams, the couple were quickly hired.
“The interesting thing about Sierra at the time was that there was no such thing as an established game designer role,” Christy says. “They would hire just about anybody to design a game for them, which was pretty hysterical. When they wanted to do a Police Quest game, they hired Jim Walls, who was an actual policeman! Al Lowe [designer of the Leisure Suit Larry series and Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist] was a programmer and musician. When they heard about my Hollywood background, writing for animation, TV and comics, that was bedazzling to them, and, of course, Peter was a fantastic artist.” Christy was reluctant to develop a new IP, given that Sierra would keep control, so she insisted on working with an established property.
The legends of King Arthur appealed to all involved and work soon began on Conquests Of Camelot, which was released in 1990.
Christy’s account of these productive days at the cutting edge of adventure game design captures Sierra’s endearing spirit of invention. “It was a lot of fun, and the reason it was so much fun is because it was a time of innovation and exploration. Nothing was set,” she remembers. “It was all so new, and everybody was still learning and figuring it out. When I got there, they gave me a team to run of animators and programmers and so forth. I knew absolutely nothing about designing a game, but nobody else did either, so I set about figuring it out on my own, which I did by going around to the other people there, like Roberta and
Jim and Al and the Space Quest guys
[Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe], and
I said, ‘Can you show me what game design looks like? What do you actually do?’ So they gave me these documents, and they were all completely different! Nothing was consistent. Everybody just came up with their own way of doing it. I drafted what was essentially the first game design document, which contained everything: