by Well, Hello There!
I’m Sean Chappell, one of the three creative members of Ramstar Games. I’d like to share with you one of the earliest experiences of RPG gaming that started me on my journey of love for the genre.
When I was a kid, things were a little different than they are today. Phones were simply phones and they came with a rotary dial. You had to change the television channel by hand and tune it in with a set of rabbit ears. And computers were tape and/or floppy disc driven. Yep. I’m old. Don’t judge me.
NOW, my phone is less a phone and more of a media delivery device: social media, youtube, mp3’s and all manner of text channels. My television is less a television than an entertainment center which doesn’t need a traditional television feed anymore. And computers, well, let’s just say that the Playstation has replaced any of the gaming that I used to do on computers. Things sure have changed!
But back when I was a naive, young lad, I played RPG’s on the computer and the one that introduced me to the genre was King’s Quest.
If it’s not painfully apparent, games were not as sophisticated back then as they are today but of course, neither was I so it all worked out. That tree in the scene there with a black spot on it? That’s actually a hole that you could look in to find something special like a key, or an egg, or a gnome (?). These games didn’t make a ton of sense.
But they were hilarious good fun so little of that mattered. One of the things that made games like this so challenging back in the (gulp!) 80’s was there was no internet to get help on. No Youtube play-throughs. No help forums. No cheats to download. You AND your friends had to rely on each other to figure out what the next step was. It was hairy!
Even with the challenges faced in the games by their nonsensical story lines, clunky mechanics and having to type in your actions (yes, type)—”Look at tree”, “You see a beautiful green tree. There is a hole in it.”—I continued to love the series and played all the way through to the very end. They actually got much better at storytelling, had better characters and some amazing graphics (for the time) by the end of the series.
This was a particularly difficult part in King’s Quest 6. It stumped me for a long time. The problem with the scene was that I could proceed to the next part of the scenario without actually completing this part, which meant I had to go back around to the scene previous and start again while not understanding what I missed. Of course, I eventually realized there were bones off to the right, that they were actually a bone xylophone and by playing it, I was able to get the key which was what I needed to move forward. Click the vid to roll them bones!
It’s amazing where my journey with RPG’s began and, of course, these experiences have helped to shape the enamel pin designs you see us working on today.
Just like King’s Quest 1 was a new and exciting foray into computer gaming, Scrolls & Daggers is our new and exciting foray into the world of enamel pins. As the series above evolved, so too will our designs. This is only the beginning!
Thanks for hanging out with me today and enjoying this part of the journey.
For now, that is all.
Rockin!
