Pixel Art Series #2 - King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human (1986, PC/DOS)

Good day to all Steemians from the Kingdom of Daventry!

I'll be starting a new mini-series of stories that take a dive into pixel art, an artform that is usually created through the use of computer software, in which images are edited on a pixel scale. Early computers and video games systems had limited graphics and display capabilities and through this constraint a new form of art called pixel art began, where every drawn pixel had a meaning and a place. Today this artform lives on as pixel artists hone their skills by contributing graphical designs, GIF animations, and indie game developers are looking to have that special 8-bit arcade style in their new creation. And yes, especially now the artform is experiencing a bit of a comeback.

Today we will be looking at Sierra's King's Quest III, an early adventure game from as early as 1986. It was advertised for it's hand drawn 3D environments and a text intepreter that could understand phrases. The early Sierra adventure games were a hybrid between text adventure games and point and click adventure games. You'd still command actions by entering simple commands in a text field, for example, "KICK CAT", and if the intepreter could understand what you were saying, the game would blindly obey with sometimes hilarious results (disclaimer: I do not condone animal cruelty :) Your character is controlled around the environment with the use of keyboard cursor keys or a Joystick. The game engine could reproduce an image of about 160 pixels wide and 200 pixels high and choose a color from a palette of only 16 colors (commonly known as the EGA palette). The detail level was limited due to the graphics capabilities of the time and storage space.

Title screen

Credit roll

The wizard's home. Your prison.

Exploring the lookout tower. One could see all the lowly peasants from here.

The wizard's secret underground laboratory.

The bear family going for a trip.

Exploring the countryside.

Visiting a store. Dog looks bored.

Bandit's lair.

Trivia: The game was the first to feature an automatic mapping feature. This magic map would allow the player to teleport anywhere in the game as long as it was explored.
Trivia #2: One could argue that King's Quest III is not true form of pixel art. The game produced most of it's environments by rasterizing vector graphics on a 160x200 canvas. Vector graphics were chosen to save disk space as there were a need to store closer to a hundred different environments in a single game, and single-sided 5.25" floppy disks at the time were limited to only about 0.36 megabytes of data. Objects and characters were still rasterized and were drawn pixel-by-pixel. Vector graphics live to this day with freely size-adjustable fonts and SVG scalable vector graphics*

Please be sure to upvote and follow my posts if you like what I'm doing. I'd love to hear comments for ideas, suggestions, or just general feedback. I will be posting more pixel art in different styles in the near future. Stay tuned!