This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity.
Last week, when
GOG.com announced that
Quest For Glory was the newest addition to its collection, I was delighted. In fact, I'm not sure that there's a game series that could have induced as much joy. I think some others, like
Wizardry or a collection of old SSI games, might have been better and more important, sure. But I have more love for
Quest For Glory than those other games. I'm not the only one, either: The
Quest For Glory games are great games, yes, but they're also special games.
Quest For Glory is a five-title series of adventure/role-playing hybrids, with the first release in 1989, and the last in 1998. They were published by Sierra – a company whose fate was recently detailed to Joystiq by
Leisure Suit Larry creator Al Lowe – and used similar interfaces and graphics as other adventures, such as
King's Quest or
Gabriel Knight, combined with combat systems that varied from game to game.
Being a genre hybrid is one of the surest ways to become a beloved game.
Panzer General,
Deus Ex, and
Mass Effect are all crossover hits, thanks in part to combining role-playing with other genres. Quality hybrids manage to feel both fresh conceptually and comfortable to actually play, a winning combination.
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