CROWN JEWEL
CONQUESTS OF CAMELOT proved Sierra adventure games could grow beyond goofy parody.
Conquests of Camelot introduced me to the merciless difficulty of old Sierra point-andclick adventures just a few minutes in. As King Arthur, I filled my purse with coin in preparation for a long journey to find the Holy Grail, picked up a magical lodestone from Merlin to guide me, and gave Guinevere a kiss before heading out the gates of Camelot – or trying to. The castle gate fell onto my head as I rode under it, crushing me to death.
“It is terribly unwise to start a sacred mission without the blessings of the gods,” Conquests of Camelot admonished. Later I’d be gored by a wild boar, skewered on the lance of the Black Knight, and fall through thin ice, freezing to death. As in most of Sierra’s adventure games, surviving to see the end of Conquests of
Camelot was a real challenge. Its puzzles were beyond my ten-year-old brain, but I didn’t care – getting to be King Arthur made Conquests of Camelot as mystical an object to me as the Grail itself.
A BUSY LIFE IN CAMELOT
By the late ’80s Sierra had expanded beyond King’s Quest and Space Quest to other adventure series like Leisure Suit Larry and Police Quest, but this game felt like a step towards maturity. Sierra hired Christy Marx, head writer of the cartoon Jem and the Holograms, who had no experience designing games but a long list of cartoons and comics behind her. Undaunted by that inexperience, Marx threw herself into research and wrote a game that even today feels unusually rich and devoted to its source material.
As a kid this seemed like the definitive Arthur story to me, an
adventure to get lost in once I’d worn out my tape of Disney’s The Sword in the Stone. I didn’t read The Once and Future King until years later, so Conquests of Camelot was my main introduction to knights Gawain and Lancelot and the legend of the Grail. Marx’s writing has a classical flavour to it, more approachable than TH White’s novel but still steeped in a bit of Ye Olde English. It’s not tedious like Police Quest or as silly as most of Sierra’s other adventures but still has a wry streak, like the text parser asking “Your bidding, M’Lord”.
Conquests of Camelot ambitiously tried to capture everything that would go into a classic Arthurian quest, including a jousting contest, a sword fight against a mighty Saracen, and magic riddles. The action scenes were as clunky and frustrating as you’d expect from an adventure game in 1990, but I didn’t know any better at the time – and neither did Sierra, really, which had only released one game in the Quest for Glory series at that point.
Thirty years later Conquests of Camelot may look rudimentary, and it sadly never got a VGA upgrade like many of Sierra’s other early adventures. But it was one of my most formative PC gaming experiences, and not just because it taught me to save constantly. My dad and I played it together, and for me it ignited a passion for games with storytelling and puzzles before I understood adventure games were a defined genre. Years later, when he upgraded the family PC to a Pentium, I got an IBM 486 of my very own and spent hours playing LucasArts adventures like Sam & Max and Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis.
Camelot also taught me that people went onto the internet and wrote FAQs with the answers to puzzles I could never solve myself. I printed out a guide and followed it to lead Arthur through Jerusalem and, at long last, claim the Holy Grail. The lesson about prayer didn’t stick, though. I’m still a heathen – I just know not to trust castle gates.
IT AMBITIOUSLY TRIED TO CAPTURE EVERYTHING THAT WOULD GO INTO A CLASSIC ARTHURIAN QUEST
It’s March, 1996 – England is knocked out of the Cricket World Cup by Sri Lanka, a young boy celebrates his fourth birthday (that’s me), and 3dfx releases the first of what would be a couple of game-changing graphics cards: the Voodoo. It’s a graphics card looked back on fondly by many in the PCPP office. Clocked at just 50MHz and fitted with a whopping 4/6MB of total RAM, the Voodoo was clearly the superior card for 3D acceleration at the time. The top spec could handle an 800x600 resolution, but the lower spec was capable of only 640x480. Despite its 2D limitations, it would prove a highly successful venture, and set 3dfx on a trajectory into PC gaming fame.
Note: the 3dfx Voodoo is often referred to as the Voodoo1, although that name only caught on after the release of the Voodoo2.
A GRAPHICS CARD LOOKED BACK ON FONDLY BY MANY IN THE PCPP OFFICE
INFO YEAR: 1996 / CLOCK SPEED: 50MHZ / MEMORY: 4/6MB / PROCESS NODE: 500NM
Now this is a 3D accelerator that requires no introduction. Known far and wide for its superb performance at the time, the Voodoo2 is famed for its lasting impact on the GPU market, great frame rates, and continued use of a multi-chip design. A smorgasbord of chips, the Voodoo2 featured a 90MHz core/ memory clock, 8/12MB of RAM, and – once connected via a port on twinned cards – the Voodoo2 could even support resolutions up to 1024x768.
Dual-wielding cards played a big role in the past decade of GPU performance. It was possible for a PC user to connect two cards together for better performance back in 1998 – and it was worth doing, too. 3dfx managed to stay on top with the Voodoo2 for some time, but it wasn’t long until it would make a few poor decisions and be out of the graphics game entirely. INFO YEAR: 1998 / CORE CLOCK SPEED: 90MHZ / MEMORY: 8/12MB / PROCESS NODE: 350NM
DUAL-WIELDING CARDS PLAYED A BIG ROLE IN THE PAST DECADE OF GPU PERFORMANCE
Once Nvidia rolled out the GeForce 8800 GTX, there was no looking back. Precursor to ultra-high-end, enthusiast graphics cards, such as the RTX 3090, if you want to talk about a card that really got peoples’ attention it’s the GeForce 8800 GTX. Launched back in 2006 to much fanfare, the 8800 GTX was the largest GPU ever built at the time. With 128 Tesla cores inside the G80 GPU, and 768MB of GDDR3 memory, the 8800 isn’t an unfamiliar sight for a modern GPU shopper. It bears the marks of many a modern GPU – even if it might be a little underpowered by today’s standards. Despite a pre-launch recall threatening to scupper the 8800 GTX launch plans, this graphics card ruled over the GPU market at launch and even stuck around for some time afterwards thanks to a unified shader model, which was introduced with the architecture alongside Direct3D 10.
Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX
INFO YEAR: 2006 / CORE CLOCK SPEED: 575MHZ / MEMORY: 768MB GDDR3 / TRANSISTORS: 681 MILLION / PROCESS NODE: TSMC 90NM