# Roberta Williams - Maker: Game designer - Date: b. 1953 - Houses: Sierra On-Line - Canonical: https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/roberta-williams/ > The Colossal Cave fan who drew Mystery House's pictures by hand, co-founded Sierra On-Line, turned fairy tales into King's Quest, and four decades later came back to remake the cave that started it all. **Why it matters:** Williams created the first graphical adventure game and the King's Quest series, co-founded Sierra, which also published Ultima II, and showed that computer games could tell fairy-tale stories to a broad audience. ## Quick answers **Who is Roberta Williams?** The Colossal Cave fan who drew Mystery House's pictures by hand, co-founded Sierra On-Line, turned fairy tales into King's Quest, and four decades later came back to remake the cave that started it all. **When was Roberta Williams born?** Roberta Williams was born in 1953 in Los Angeles, California. **What is Roberta Williams known for?** Roberta Williams is best known for King's Quest. **Why does Roberta Williams matter to fantasy and games?** Williams created the first graphical adventure game and the King's Quest series, co-founded Sierra, which also published Ultima II, and showed that computer games could tell fairy-tale stories to a broad audience. ## Life Roberta Lynn Heuer was born in Los Angeles on February 16, 1953, and grew up in rural Southern California, the daughter of an agricultural inspector. A shy child with a vivid imagination, she made up fairy-tale adventures to entertain her family and lay awake imagining scenes she called her "movies." As a teenager she met Ken Williams, and the two married in late 1972. She worked as a clerk for Los Angeles County, then as a computer operator and a COBOL programmer, while Ken built a career as a mainframe programmer and consultant. By 1979 they had two sons and a dream of leaving the city for the woods. ## Work Around 1979 Roberta discovered [Colossal Cave Adventure](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/colossal-cave-adventure/), first on a teletype connected to a mainframe and then on the family's new Apple II. She was hooked on [text adventures](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/interactive-fiction/), and she began to imagine one with pictures. Drawing on Agatha Christie's *And Then There Were None* and the board game *Clue*, she designed a murder mystery set in an old house and persuaded Ken to program it. She traced her illustrations with a Versawriter drawing tablet, and Ken wrote the routines to squeeze some seventy images onto a single disk. Released in 1980 through Ken's consulting company, On-Line Systems, *Mystery House* is credited as the first graphic adventure game. It sold about ten thousand copies by mail order, with Roberta packing disks into Ziploc bags and answering her own phone for hints. *The Wizard and the Princess* followed the same year, adding color and fantasy, and sold 60,000 copies. The company moved to Coarsegold, near the Sierra Nevada, and renamed itself [Sierra On-Line](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/sierra-on-line/). Sierra became a publisher to the new medium's pioneers. In 1982 it released [Richard Garriott](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/richard-garriott/)'s *Ultima II*, reportedly the only publisher willing to put a cloth map in the box. In 1983 Roberta designed much of the adaptation of Jim Henson's *The Dark Crystal*. But Sierra's investors had pushed it into console cartridges just as the market crashed in 1983; the company shrank to about 30 employees, and the Williamses mortgaged their home to pay staff. Roberta also argued forcefully, and successfully, against a proposed merger with Spinnaker Software. Rescue came through IBM, which wanted a showcase for its PCjr. Roberta's answer was [King's Quest](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/kings-quest/) (1984), conceived as a blend of familiar fairy tales that players could experience directly: Sir Graham's quest to recover three treasures for the kingdom of Daventry. It was among the first adventure games with an animated hero who could walk in front of and behind objects in a pseudo-3D scene. The PCjr failed, but *King's Quest* was ported widely and became a best-seller, and Roberta designed the series for fourteen years. *King's Quest III* (1986) grew larger and stranger; *King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella* (1988) was among the first games with sound-card support and put a princess at the center, and its success led journalists to credit Williams with widening the audience for computer games. *King's Quest V* (1990) introduced an icon-driven interface, and *King's Quest VI* (1992), co-designed with Jane Jensen, is often ranked among the finest adventure games. She also made *Mixed-Up Mother Goose*, the Laura Bow mysteries beginning with *The Colonel's Bequest* (1989), and the horror game *Phantasmagoria* (1995), a seven-CD full-motion-video production that became Sierra's best-selling game and, by her own account, her favorite achievement. In 1996 Sierra was sold to CUC International for more than a billion dollars in stock, over Roberta's doubts. Under the new owners she made *King's Quest: Mask of Eternity* (1998), struggling with management that pushed [Action RPGs & Hack-and-Slash](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/action-rpg/) elements in the style of [Diablo](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/diablo/) into the series. CUC's accounting fraud, the game's disappointing reception and the decline of Sierra drove her to leave in 1999. Non-compete agreements kept her and Ken out of games for five years, and by then they had moved on to sailing and travel. ## Legacy Williams is often called the "queen of adventure games." She showed that computer games could narrate a story in pictures, and that a fairy-tale world could reach players who would never have touched a dungeon crawler; her work sits at the meeting point of [Fairy-Tale Fantasy](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/fairy-tale-fantasy/) and the digital adventure, alongside the RPGs Sierra helped bring to market. Her honors include the Industry Icon Award at The Game Awards in 2014, shared with Ken, and the Pioneer Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2020. The protagonist Ellie in *The Last of Us* is named for the couple. She kept writing. In 2021 she self-published *Farewell to Tara*, a historical novel set in Ireland during the Great Famine. And in 2023, with Ken and their new studio Cygnus Entertainment, she released *Colossal Cave*, a 3D remake of the game that had first shown her what a computer could do, an attempt, she explained, to recapture how she felt playing it in 1979. ## Facts - Born Roberta Lynn Heuer on February 16, 1953, in Los Angeles, she married Ken Williams in 1972. - Her first game, *Mystery House* (1980), drew on Agatha Christie's *And Then There Were None* and the board game *Clue*, and is credited as the first graphic adventure. - She packed early copies into Ziploc bags herself and answered her home phone to give players hints. - *King's Quest* (1984), commissioned with IBM backing for the PCjr, blended common fairy tales into an animated world the player could walk around in. - *King's Quest IV* (1988) starred Princess Rosella, a rare female hero; Sierra's registration cards showed a nearly 40 percent female audience. - *Phantasmagoria* (1995), her full-motion-video horror game, sold more than a million copies and was Sierra's best-selling game. ## Sources and further reading - [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberta_Williams) - [Wikipedia: Mystery House](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_House) - [Wikipedia: King's Quest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Quest) --- From The Lantern Hall (https://www.lanternhall.org/), a museum of fantasy literature and roleplaying games.