Unkillable Cat's Gaming Magazine Nostalgia Thread

[Unkillable Cat]

EDIT:

What is this thread?

This is an offshoot from another thread where I started doing some investigative work into old gaming mags and their history, which then evolved into me giving a short rundown of various issues of Retro Gamer, the UK's leadning retro gaming magazine. Think of it as part advertising/part history lesson, for it should be noted that gaming history is an unexplored jungle for 95% of "gamers", only occasionally brought into the spotlight by odd old-timers like myself.

Also, this isn't a one-man show, so feel free to bring in your own stuff as long as it follows these two broad guidelines:

# It comes from old gaming mags.

# It comes from retro gaming mags.

Below is the unaltered first post, my response to the news that the gaming mag C+VG was shutting down after 33 years of service.

---

C+VG was still a thing?

Yes, it was the first gaming mag I read. And bought. And still own today. But by 1997 everyone could tell that it was done for, the things that made it stand out and apart back in the 80s and early 90s were long gone. Julian Rignall had done the damage he intended.

Paul Davies is over at Retro Gamer now, and a few other C+VG alumnis occasionally pop in over there for a guest article or interview.

 

[Infinitron]

But by 1997 everyone could tell that it was done for, the things that made it stand out and apart back in the 80s and early 90s were long gone. Julian Rignall had done the damage he intended.

Explain?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

It's been a while (roughly 20 years) and I only have bits and pieces of the story, but by the end of 80s C+VG was in the front of gaming mags, at least in Europe. While they primarily focused on games, they also had segments about upcoming films and boardgames/tabletop RPGs. When it came to the games themselves they also had several dedicated sections; one for the arcade games, another for consoles and one exclusively for adventure games/text adventures, discussing them and giving out helpful hints. I remember that the Adventure game section was well praised because the same guy (whose name eludes me at the moment) had been running it for several years now. Reading C+VG from this era gave you an impression of people that were trying to cover video games on an equal level with other entertainment forms, and with an air of civility and professionalism. At this time Julian "JAZ" Rignall was just another reviewer at the mag, I believe.

Then in 1989 (IIRC) there's some reshuffling at the office and JAZ becomes the Editor-In-Chief. First order of business? Sack the guy running the Adventure game section with no advance warning. (The section itself was quietly discontinued several months later.) Then he went for a complete change in layout and style for the mag; the boardgames and film sections were axed, while the mail section was handled by some pseudonym called "The Yob" that sported an attitude for no reason whatsoever (an attitude that also made its way into some of the reviews) and garish colours were brought in to spice up review pages, up to the point that some pieces of text became unreadable due to colour clash. But I think it was the increased emphasis on consoles that got people miffed. The mag even covered PC Engine (Turbografx) games, even though while the system was available in the UK there was no official launch for it and no post-launch support. C+VG tried to start up a sister mag called Mean Machines that focused exclusively on consoles, as well as a smaller supplement magazine galled Go! that focused on the handhelds. I faintly remember those lasting for at least a year, maybe two.

Other noticeable elements were the occasional article that were basically the main staff of C+VG putting themselves in the spotlight (insider looks) and also the shift in the mag's coverage of the various home computers. Over a very short time period, they phased out coverage for systems that weren't the Amiga, Atari ST and the consoles of the time. Even PC titles only got the occasional look in, but I hear that they radically changed that once Doom rolled round. But by that time I had jumped ship and moved on to another gaming mag, I had had enough.

One can argue (quite well, in fact) that what JAZ was doing was modernizing the magazine and trying to bring in a younger audience to suit the new times. I was aged 9-13 while I subscribed to C+VG, and by the end I was not pleased with all the changes. The mag may have gained new readers, but they also alienated much of their old readerbase.

I remember reading Retro Gamer's interview with JAZ and some of the other C+VG veterans a few years ago, maybe I should dig those up to get a better image of this.

One more thing: Julian "JAZ" Rignall was on the secret GameJournoPros mailing list that got exposed during GamerGate back in September.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Just a minor tidbit, and I'm only mentioning this because of the Codex in-joke from last year - the latest issue of Retro Gamer is celebrating the 30th anniversary of Elite. The opening paragraph goes like this:

There can be very few people who have not heard of the masterpiece of programming that is Elite. Some have compared it to Citizen Kane, the Orson Welles film classic of 1941, but while we perhaps wouldn't go that far, there's no denying the sheer impact of Ian Bell and David Braben's game.

EDIT: I spoke to soon, there are bigger derps in the article further on, such as this one under the header "Eight games Elite influenced":

Grand Theft Auto 3: Considered to be Elite's natural successor, the explorative, sandbox, mission-based play of Grand Thefy Auto's first 3D foray was testament to Sam and Dan Houser's immense appreciation of Ian and David's game.

 

[Sceptic]

Summoning DraQ for much lulz.

(in before DraQ actually makes a point why this is so....)

 

[Luka-boy]

Grand Theft Auto 3: Considered to be Elite's natural successor

Jesus Christ.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

A couple of pages past I made a post where I go on about the Computer & Video Games mag, since it's finally shutting down after 33 years. I mentioned Julian "JAZ" Rignall and how he changed (or damaged) the mag during his stint as Editor, and how C+VG was never really a thing after that.

Well...I thought it would be good to check further on that - to see how much of it is truth and how much of it is my personal bias obscuring facts, and trying to fill in some of those holes that I mentioned. I figured the best way to do that would be to dig up the Retro Gamer mags that covered the C+VG, as well as check his Wikipedia page. Retro Gamer #106 has JAZ "in the chair" as they call it, where he goes over his career in gaming in standard interview style. It's a very interesting read as it sheds good light on a few things.

First thing first: JAZ isn't a journalist, or anything close to that. He's a gamer, through and through. He first rose to fame competing in "video championships", holding a couple of UK and World records for high scores, then getting his big break by winning the 1983 C+VG Championship. He used that to get his foot in the door by doing the Hints & Tips section at C+VG and at the Personal Computer Games magazine. In 1985 JAZ is invited to join the launch team for Zzap!64, a mag that focused only on the Commodore 64. Problem was, JAZ didn't own (nor had he touched) a C-64, so he bullshitted himself into a job as a staff writer and later became the editor of the mag. (Nice one, JAZ.) The RG interview mentions how the Zzap!64 team's approach to "gaming journalism" was more of "stream of consciousness", rather than anything resembling normal journalism - plus doing whatever drugs they could score. He recalls one time where Jeff Minter (you know, llamas?) came into the office and they all got totally baked and JAZ lay under his desk staring up at the underside while Minter got on the computers and mucked with all the articles they had written for the mag. Ladies and gentlemen, meet "Gaming journalism" 30 years ago. ;-)

In 1988 JAZ moves over to C+VG, probably as a staff writer. That's also where I first come in as a reader, first with only one issue in the autumn, but then another issue in the spring of '89 and then on a monthly basis shortly after that. In the spring of '89 issue JAZ has already made Deputy Editor, and in the same issue that I became a monthly subscriber he's made Editor, and right off the bat the mag itself connects him with consoles over home computers.

This is where I dug up the issues in question and had a look at things.

The '88 issue is at least 50% home computer reviews. The "big" reviews get colour pages but most of them are b/w. Then there's the Adventure Zone, a surprisingly large section which reviews a few adventure games and features not only hints, but even an adventure hotline to call! Then there's a section about movies (Big Screen), another about roleplay stuff (Fantasy Role Playing), then an arcade section and finally, almost at the very back, a section called "Mean Machines", which focuses on the consoles - two pages about some of the big titles on the NES! (Oddly enough, JAZ isn't involved there.) Except for those two pages, there's not one peep about consoles anywhere in the mag.

The '89 issue features a similar division - there are more colour pages and home computers still get the majority, but the Adventure Gaming section seems to have grown at the cost of the Big Screen section, while the console section - still at the back - has grown to encompass 3 pages (not counting the advertisements, which are mostly lists of retailers in the UK) but it's what comes next that surprised me a bit - there's a "Mean Machines" section for the consoles, and then a completely seperate PC Engine section after that, a whoppin' 5 pages! (Again, not counting advertisements). And remember, the PC Engine has no proper launch in the UK, and wasn't a supported platform there. That's a pretty interesting push...but then again, C+VG would later feature extensive coverage on the Konix. (Anyone remember that?)

(Another bit of interesting gaming journalism: The '89 issue featured the Weird Dreams game on the cover, and it's the opening review in the mag, yet the game only gets a 59% rating. Meanwhile Populous isn't even advertised anywhere and gets the "Game of the month" award and a 96% rating. Can you imagine something like that happening in today's gaming media environment?)

Then there's the issue where JAZ has risen to become Editor of C+VG. The first big news item is about Atari's new console, and there's a ribbon running down the right-hand page of that article where the mag is running an ad to win a PC Engine. Later on, the consoles get full-colour ads, spread out over whole pages. The Hints & Tips section now features stuff for the consoles, and the High Scores section (people would mail in their high scores for various titles) open up with the consoles. The Mean Machines section is now 6 pages (not counting ads) and is no longer the last section of the mag (that's the Previews section - upcoming titles). The Adventure gaming section is still there, but it won't be for much longer...

So yeah...I think it's pretty obvious that JAZ had a big influence in bringing the consoles to C+VG. But back to the RG interview, when JAZ is asked about the changes he brought to C+VG, he did so because he immediately saw that the publisher (EMAP, which were pretty big at the time) would run the magazine into the ground. To quote the man:

It was so backwards! That was where I cut my teeth on political and corporate maneuvering, because my options were either to keep doing things like they'd always been done at EMAP or try to find a way to slowly but surely get my own way.

What helped me in that regard was that C+VG had begun to lose momentum. It was a shitty magazine when I joined it, to be honest, very 'by the numbers' and completely lacking personality. So I was able to use that as leverage to bring in change, hire new people and get what I wanted. EMAP got sick of what was going on because it was a very valuable magazine; it had a big circulation and was bringing in a lot of money, and there was this big concern that it was going to go tits-up. I came in and had these endless ideas of what to do, that there were these new machines coming out called consoles, and that we couldn't just keep banging on about C-64s and Spectrums - things were really changing, and we had to lead that change.

To give an idea of how backwards EMAP was, he moved over from Zzap!64 where they had rudimentary PCs and basic word processors and had to fiddle with typesets and such themselves to get the mag out the door, to C+VG where he suddenly had to join the National Union of Journalists and was assigned a typewriter. It doesn't take a genius to see that he was right. JAZ saw that the "emerging consoles from Japan" were going to be the big thing, and the 8-bit home computers would soon fade into obscurity, and made changes to the mag accordingly. That still doesn't explain the garish colours that sometimes were used, nor the Yob character who handled the mail.

In 1990 JAZ saw that there was a market for a seperate console magazine, named "Mean Machines" after the console section in C+VG. The first issue was included free with C+VG (I still have my copy) and it focused on the "big" consoles of the time, plus the GX4000. (That would soon be replaced by the SNES.) One thing that Mean Machines (and C+VG) did that was "off" was that they would review imports of various console titles, months before they would be released in the UK (or the US for that matter). This is best shown in their review of Zero Wing - there's not a single word about the intro, which today is by far the most famous thing about that game in particular.

And the reason I previously said that I recalled Mean Machines only ran for a year or two? Because it did, but instead of going under it split into two magazines - one for the Sega consoles and one for the Nintendo consoles. That came after I cancelled my C+VG subscription, so I missed out on all that. As for JAZ, he left EMAP in 1993 because he realized that despite his changes and efforts, the magazines under his command were getting stale. It wasn't like he would be out of a job - he was a regular guest on various TV shows (like GameMaster) to talk about games and reviewing them. He went to the US to work with Virgin Interactive where he spent most of the time 'banging his head against the wall' because that was his first real experience with a large corporation. By the time VIE was bought by Electronic Arts, JAZ moved to San Francisco to try to further his career at IGN. Considering he's credited with making IGN into the "powerhouse of online networking" that it is/was, I'd say that he was successful.

So in conclusion, it seems that I was mostly full of personal bias. While the consoles were a non-entity to me and I didn't mind their addition in the mag, there was a larger plan at work and I was part of the "old dinosaurs" that were about to go extinct. But there's another RG interview with former C+VG staff that gives a different opinion - I'll try to dig that up and post another Wall o' Text.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Sometimes I feel like slapping the editors over at the Retro Gamer magazine. Their big story this month is about "point and click" adventure games, their origins, their evolution, where they are today. At a whopping 8 pages, there's plenty to see and talk about.

# They have a "selected timeline" which is one big lulzfest. The LucasArts/Telltale fanboyism runs rampant. EVERY SINGLE LucasArts adventure game is mentioned, even Labyrinth which pre-dates the SCUMM engine. They also bring up a large portion of the Telltale catalogue.

# There's also a British slant to the timeline, as Simon the Sorcerer, Lure of the Temptress and The Feeble Files manage to scrape their way on there.

# The first point and click adventure game was "Enchanted Scepters" on the Macintosh in 1984. It utilized the Mac's "drop-down" menu system to let players issue commands.

# Myst is included, which I felt was odd until I noticed that they also included Telltale's Walking Dead and L.A. Noire.

# The indie scene of adventure games is completely ignored, save for "The Adventures of Fatman" which seemingly only received acclaim because it used the Adventure Game Studio. The article harps on about old designers using crowdfunding to release old-school adventure games (you know who I'm talking about) and Special Editions of old games, but not a word on games like Primordia, or anything from Wadjet Eye Games or Daedalic Entertainment. That last one is a glaring omission, as they were making old-school adventure games before they became cool again.

# They ignore the Sierra On-Line catalogue entirely until 1990 with the release of King's Quest 5. Fair enough, as that was the first point and click adventure game that Sierra released (right?). But what does RG say about KQ5? "The first adventure from Sierra On-Line." I'm gonna give them the benefit of the doubt here and say that they forgot to put "point and click" in that sentence.

# Their "5 essential" adventure games are Monkey Island 2, Gabriel Knight 1, Beneath a Steel Sky, Blade Runner and Grim Fandango.

# The article has contributions from Ron Gilbert, Simon Woodroffe (Simon the Sorcerer), John Passfield (Flight of the Amazon Queen), Brian Moriarty (Loom), Charles Cecil (founder of Revolution games), Louis Castle (Westwood co-founder) and Al Lowe.

# (Louis does answer one question that has been bothering me for a couple of years, how come the first Legend of Kyrandia game box is chock-full of King's Quest references: The game was developed with Sierra On-Line in mind as a publisher.)

 

[felipepepe]

Fucking posers, everyone knows that Day of the Tentacle is the best LucasArts adventure.

Also, Grim Fandango as essential point & click game? I gonna bet they intentionally waited for the remaster to shoe in mouse controls for them to release the article.

 

[Infinitron]

Can't they just call them "graphic adventure games"?

Wait, maybe that's why they excluded all the Sierra games before KQ5, Unkillable Cat.

Although you could do some pointing and clicking in the first generation parser-based SCI games, for walking and looking.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Fucking posers, everyone knows that Day of the Tentacle is the best LucasArts adventure.

Also, Grim Fandango as essential point & click game? I gonna bet they intentionally waited for the remaster to shoe in mouse controls for them to release the article.

I'm thinking this as well, as both the original (1998) AND the remaster are on their timeline.

Can't they just call them "graphic adventure games"?

Wait, maybe that's why they excluded all the Sierra games before KQ5.

Re-read my post. The article is clearly only discussing point and click adventures (its title is "From point to click") yet brings in KQ5 as Sierra's first "adventure".

You're right on the SCI pointing and clicking, but the parser was still required.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Fucking posers, everyone knows that Day of the Tentacle is the best LucasArts adventure.

Also, Grim Fandango as essential point & click game? I gonna bet they intentionally waited for the remaster to shoe in mouse controls for them to release the article.

I have to disagree, fate of Atlantis is bestest adventure game from lucasarts by virtue of my Island being featured in it as a location.

 

[Blackthorne]

It's always a bunch of reject-posers that do this kind of stuff. They were never really into the scene and they always fuck up the details. Oh well.


Bt

 

[Unkillable Cat]

What's really bothering me about the article now is the omission of Daedalic Entertainment, they've done so much for old-school adventuring in the past 10 years. They kept at it when everyone else had bailed on it. They deserve a mention along with Telltale, as both companies were doing the same thing at the same time.

We've had some amazing indie adventure games released in the past 5 years alone, but I can't even recall a single one of them being mentioned in the mag. Maybe it's time someone had a word with them about that...

 

[MRY]

Blackthorne: What would your top five be? With the caveat that I've mentioned before that my top X lists often just turn into "X examples of the genre that pop into my mind," I would probably say:

(1) Monkey Island 2 (probably the best at everything except the narrative's conclusion, pathos, and multiple solutions)
(2) Quest for Glory VGA (multiple solutions, charm, fun)

Wow, that about runs me out of ones that I can really get behind. Somewhere after that I might do Loom (charm, setting, elegance), Fate of Atlantis (multiple puzzle solutions, handling of a beloved franchise), and Grim Fandango (writing, art design, production values). There are others I like out there, but for everything I like about them, there's something that knocks them down a notch. Probably DotT should be on the list, but I never could get into it. :/

 

[Blackthorne]

Boy, it's hard to do a top five. I mean, some games I consider milestones in their time, and they shaped the genre, but it doesn't always mean they'd appeal to players of today. But, honestly, we're not always trying to appeal to players of today. For instance, I love the old parser Sierra Games. They were monumental in my early computing years.

If I had to go with something, and like you - it's subjective and off the top of my head, not due to exhaustive research - it'd probably look like this.

1) Quest For Glory IV
2) Space Quest III
3) The Secret of Monkey Island
4) Sam and Max Hit The Road
5) King's Quest V


I love DoTT, too, but for a top five, it'd probably be number six. I do find a significant lack of Sierra games and even Sierra knowledge amongst so called "Adventure Game Fans" in the "journalism" community. People have it right when they say they're always stroking the old LucasArts/Lucasfilm Games and Telltale pole. I love LucasArts games - but I also love Sierra games and I grew up in a time where they were the apex of gaming. For me, I've always been primarily concerned with "Was I entertained? Did I have fun?" when I play a game. In that end, Sierra got me almost always. (Except for Codename: ICEMAN, WHAT THE FUCK, DUDES???)


Bt


EDIT: Also, the omission of Daedelic is just... well, that's just stupid and if you've done that in an article about adventure games where you are trying to tie it into the present, you have just failed. Hard.

 

[Blaine]

Boy, it's hard to do a top five. I mean, some games I consider milestones in their time, and they shaped the genre, but it doesn't always mean they'd appeal to players of today. But, honestly, we're not always trying to appeal to players of today. For instance, I love the old parser Sierra Games. They were monumental in my early computing years.

If I had to go with something, and like you - it's subjective and off the top of my head, not due to exhaustive research - it'd probably look like this.

1) Quest For Glory IV
2) Space Quest III
3) The Secret of Monkey Island
4) Sam and Max Hit The Road
5) King's Quest V

When I was a kid, nearly all of the adventure games I received were Sierra On-Line adventures, and only for Christmases and birthdays—typically Quest for Glory or King's Quest for birthdays, and Space Quest for Christmases. I believe I received Turin's Passage one year to break the pattern, and my grandmother also sent me the Myst games as they were published. The first adventure game I ever played (near as I can recall) was a shareware demo of Space Quest IV. I expressed an interest in it and received it for Christmas that year, along with a subscription to InterAction magazine.

The only issue of InterAction I specifically remember today was the one with Roger Wilco and WD-40 on the cover, advertising the Space Quest V making-of article in that issue. Man, was I excited. I even remember what was playing on the radio in my room when I started reading that issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZLBZ3eD7wI

For some reason, we all (me, my parents, everyone else I knew) missed the LucasArts train entirely. I didn't play any of them until after I turned 18. That was fortunate, because it meant I had the entire LucasArts catalog to play through with SCUMM.

QfG II-IV, SQ III-V, GK I, and KQ VI are definitely my favorites. If I had to drop two to achieve a top 5, I might drop either QfG II or III, and either SQ III or IV, but it would be a hard choice. Personally, QfG IV is my favorite, but objectively, GK I is probably the best of them.

Interesting that you favor KQ V over VI.

 

[Blackthorne]

Yeah, I'm a V'er over a VI'er when it comes to King's Quest. Despite all it's flaws, I like it the best. King's Quest VI is basically just an overly-emo remake of King's Quest II. Don't get me wrong; it's a lovely game, but I thought V, playing as Graham (and, at the time, in that beautiful and amazing 256 colors? HOLY SHIT THAT WAS THE BALLS IN 1990) and facing off against an evil wizard. Just very King's Quest-y for me. I've actually always had a secret hankering to "remake" KQV; going back and changing some of the dead ends and crap like that. (The stuff that was designed to sell hint books) I'd be nice to have a "remastered" version. I'd use all the same graphics and sound.... maybe have the soundtrack redone digitally instead of MIDI... but get rid of all the walking deads, etc. If I had the time and no need for money, heh, yeah, I'd do that. I think that version of King's Quest V would be pretty freakin' awesome.


Bt

 

[Blaine]

The "remake" I want and will never receive is a bug-free version of QfG IV that runs flawlessly with no timing errors or sped-up animations on today's computers, and a digitally touched-up voice track for the characters.

I'm about to go poking around right now to see if someone's finally managed to get it working properly with the bugs fixed on SCUMMVM. Not expecting much, but it's worth checking every few years.

 

[MRY]

One thing I've always liked about KQV is that the protagonist is on the wrong side of middle age. It's true that this is never really dramatized in terms of him having any physical limitations on his questing abilities. But a grown-up going on a quest to find his family felt different from the usual "youth looking for his wife" kind of story. Also, I liked the flavor that maybe Graham's Ulysses-like wanderlust had caused him to neglect his family, though, again, the story never did much with this.

 

[Blackthorne]

The "remake" I want and will never receive is a bug-free version of QfG IV that runs flawlessly with no timing errors or sped-up animations on today's computers, and a digitally touched-up voice track for the characters.

I'm about to go poking around right now to see if someone's finally managed to get it working properly with the bugs fixed on SCUMMVM. Not expecting much, but it's worth checking every few years.

You know they patched that game up really well. I think some guy called "New Rising Sun" created a bunch of QFG IV patches that make it run fine today. I haven't had a problem with it any time I've played it recently - I use DosBox, though - not SCUMMVM for that one.

The sad problem with the voices on old games is they are compressed, and especially for Sierra, the original recordings were lost when everything was chucked in the dumpster. Digitally touching up the tracks really isn't possible.

Heh, yeah - see, with King's Quest, I'm not looking for anything that heady in the material. I mean, there's a time and place for those kinds of themes of responsibility, aging and family, but King's Quest was always more fairy tale like - where the values were simple and not overly complex. We had Gabriel Knight for that!


Bt

 

[Redlands]

Also, I liked the flavor that maybe Graham's Ulysses-like wanderlust had caused him to neglect his family, though, again, the story never did much with this.

Probably because I don't really think it's there and you're reading too much into the opening cinematic. Graham only ever went adventuring when he was compelled to do so. Granted in 2 he was compelled by his dick, but his only irresponsibility there was to the governance of his kingdom and not his family (who didn't exist by then). The only two points I can see arguing for him neglecting his family are that his son was kidnapped, and that he let his daughter get sacrificed to the dragon; and in both of those cases, there's no real demonstration of it happening because of his neglect.

Heh, yeah - see, with King's Quest, I'm not looking for anything that heady in the material. I mean, there's a time and place for those kinds of themes of responsibility, aging and family, but King's Quest was always more fairy tale like - where the values were simple and not overly complex. We had Gabriel Knight for that!

Yeah, but if we didn't have the complex and darker but still fairy tale-esque (because they could get fucking dark) KQ6, we wouldn't have had GK: not only because it showed that there was a market for more maturely-themed adventure games, but because it gave Jane Jensen a good enough reputation to get to work on her own game.

And just to bring this all back to the thread topic via Gamergate: in all of the talk about gamers being sexist, there was barely a mention of Sierra (a once huge studio with a lot of women in very important roles, including the co-founder) who made KQ4 an adventure game:

• with a female protagonist, main villain and in numerous supporting roles
• who goes off to save the life of her father
• and turns down the hand of the handsome prince at the end
  
• in a game that is over 25 years old.

Probably because gamers didn't burn down the fucking industry because they were sexist, rape-thirsty monsters. Then again, back when this game came out games were actually being reviewed properly. By people like Scorpia (who just happened to be a woman).

I looked up Scorpia online, in fact. Interesting review from a few years ago that's relevant today: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ArinnDembo/20100812/87847/Gamazon_Seven_Questions_for_Scorpia.php. Then again, it's Gamasutra so be prepared for idiocy.

 

[Decado]

The very first Hero's Quest (Quest for Glory) was point and click. You could use the mouse to move around, examine stuff, etc. That was 1989, a year before King's Quest V. Their list is wrong.

 

[MRY]

Probably because I don't really think it's there and you're reading too much into the opening cinematic. . . . two points I can see arguing for him neglecting his family are that his son was kidnapped, and that he let his daughter get sacrificed to the dragon; and in both of those cases, there's no real demonstration of it happening because of his neglect.

You're probably right. Still, it seems like both of his kids being kidnapped, then his entire family being kidnapped, means either he's at least a little neglectful or he's Liam Neeson.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Decado We know, the SCI-games from Sierra had a limited point and click interface (KQ4, SQ3, PQ2, LSL2 & LSL3, HQ1, Conquest of Camelot, Codename: Iceman, etc) but still relied on a parser - so technically they don't count.

The Labyrinth adventure game, however, starts out as a basic text adventure game but then changes later on into a very basic graphic adventure with an even more basic "rolodex" parser - yet Retro Gamer counts that as a "point and click" adventure.

EDIT: Had a look at the Retro Gamer forums - the forums look like they're running on 10-year old software. There's a feedback thread for the latest issue, and the last post does mention "small things bothering me" from the poster about the LucasArts bias.