I Was a Teenage Adventure Gamer
The Evolution of Police Quest

By Matthew Desmond

Matthew Desmond recently joined our staff as coffee boy and toilet swabber. He showed a talent for writing, so we promoted him to Teenage Adventure Gamer. Luckily for him, it was the very day that Randy returned from Mexico with Montezuma's Revenge. Everyone told Randy not to drink the water ...

In 1987, a small company named Sierra published an adventure game called Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel. The game was widely popular in the civilian and police community. Nine (counting a remake of Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel) games and 13 years later, the series still continues to wow its fans and members of the police community.

I still remember the day I bought the Police Quest collection. It was a rainy afternoon in the summer of 1998, and I was bored and needed something to do. So I was on a business trip with my Mom anyway, and I went over to the mall, stopped in a little computer store, and there it was, the Police Quest collection. The box screamed "6 games! A $200 value!" I immediately purchased it.

So when I got home, I tried out the games, I was very impressed with them, and that started me getting more involved in the world of criminal justice. It's hard to believe how a simple computer game can get somebody involved in a field that is so vast and almost as old as mankind.

In this column, my first column, I want to pay tribute to Sierra and thank them for getting me involved in what will be my major at college when I attend a local university in the fall of 2002 for criminal justice.

Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel has good graphics for the time it was released, which was 1987. The game put you in the role of Sonny Bonds, a cop on the beat at the Lytton Police Department in California. He is just a regular patrol officer until one day, as he is cruising his beat, a call comes over his radio that there is a traffic accident and he should investigate it. When he arrives on the scene, he finds a man in his car, dead, a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. After a major investigation is launched, Sonny is transferred to narcotics to help take down a huge drug-dealing operation within the city. After a few successful busts, the game ends with you going into the only hotel in the city disguised as a pimp to meet up with the drug dealer, a guy by the name of Jesse Baines. You go into his penthouse suite and radio for backup. A few minutes later, your backup arrives, Baines comes into the room, your backup tells him to freeze, Baines draws a gun, your backup fires on him, and that is the end of the game. If you remember playing the game when it first came out, you might have thought that was the end of the series, but it wasn't.

A year or so later, Police Quest II: The Vengeance hit the streets. You still play Bonds, but he was promoted to homicide, and guess what? Remember Baines? He's baaack. And boy is he angry with you. And he's not only after you, he's after everybody that put him behind bars. That includes his former associates and the like who put him there. Even your girlfriend! The entire plot of the game unfolds within a span of two days. On day one, Baines escapes from the city jail, takes a guard with him, and kills the guard. So you go out investigating calls reporting that people have seen Baines or their cars have been stolen, possibly by Baines. This is the first game where you have a sidekick. His name is Keith, a guy who loves to smoke and crack bad jokes. By the end of the day, you do end up finding the guy Baines took with him. The guard is found at the bottom of the river with a bullet in his brain. The game promoted good police tactics and the like because one screw-up and you were dead, game over. On the second day, you manage to track down Baines, and in the end, you finish him off when he tries to kill you and your girlfriend. This game was widely used in the law enforcement community as a training device. And there were some friendly competitions in police departments to see who could finish the game with the most points. Some detective squad leaders and chiefs of small police departments were pleased to hear the squad room talk turn from the football game to the discussion of good police tactics and procedure.

Police Quest III: The Kindred again puts you in the role of Sergeant Sonny Bonds. He married his girlfriend, and while he is working, somebody stabs his wife. The rest of the game is devoted to him trying to find the person who tried to kill her. The graphics in this game are an improvement over the ones in the first two games. The storyline was good, too. And again, this promoted good police tactics and was highly enjoyed by fans of the series.

Police Quest IV: Open Season, on the other hand, is not so good graphics-wise. It uses full-motion video, and the faces of the actors cannot be made out at all. The storyline is good, though. You play Detective Carey, a detective in the LAPD's elite Robbery/Homicide division. A good friend of yours and a member of the force has been murdered. Over the next week, more cops turn up dead, and you have to take down a brutal killer and a Neo-Nazi gang member that could possibly be connected with the crimes. Again, the graphics are bad, but you can't beat sound police procedures.

This holds true for Police Quest V: SWAT. Sierra made a big mistake, though, by using full-motion video. The game is more like a movie with several interactive choices to make and a couple of arcade-style shooting sequences. The graphics are first-rate, though. The story is simple: you are a member of LAPD SWAT and you go out on calls with the rest of the team and make a few interactive choices to beat the game. This game also uses sound police tactics, because one mistake nets you a pine box that goes six feet under the ground, an American flag given to your loved ones, a 21-gun salute, and a bagpiper playing Amazing Grace. In other words, you die.

Police Quest: SWAT 2, on the other hand, is a little bit different from Police Quest V: SWAT. Police Quest: SWAT 2 allows you to control several SWAT teams at a time or several terrorists cells at a time. It's a good strategy game with an okay storyline and some good graphics. You are graded on how well you perform a mission. If you kill an unarmed suspect, points are taken away. And in a terrorist mission, if you fail the objective, the leader of the group gets angry and closes the group. The same was true for the SWAT team. If things get completely out of hand and hostages and cops die, every media source in the world calls for your persona (the Chief) to resign and for LAPD SWAT to be disbanded. While the game promoted sound police tactics, it was confusing to control several SWAT teams at the same time on the huge maps. This is a strategy game. But it was fun. I know of people who loved it and people who hated it. It's one of those games where you have to love strategy and cop stuff to enjoy it.

Police Quest: SWAT 3 is a game that is widely popular. You take control of an element in the year 2005. Your goal is stop the terrorist forces of the world from preventing a World Peace Conference in Los Angeles. It's a good tactical shooter that takes a lot of skill and patience to beat because, like the real world, one shot, one kill. You don't clear a room properly, and BAM! BAM! BAM! Some idiot fires his gun and you're deader than a doornail. The missions are first-rate in the game. They take place in places that we might visit or drive by every day, homes, churches, banks, sewers, convention centers, etc. And the suspects are unpredictable. Will they surrender in peace? Or will they unload their weapons into your body?

All in all, Sierra did a damn fine job with every one of these games. And I want to say one thing to the creators of the series: thank you. Thank you for showing me an entirely different career that I want to pursue when I graduate from high school and college.

However, before I end with that, I just want to think about what the next Police Quest game might be. Will it be another tactical shooter like SWAT 3? Or will it go back to its roots, a cop on the beat just trying to earn a living? Or will Sierra take it one step further and make it a massively multiplayer game from a first-person perspective where you can drive a police car around the city of Los Angeles and other people can play as cops or suspects and you hope you can live throughout the game. That would be very cool, and I can't wait for the next game in this fine series!