By James Hanback
It probably came as no surprise to the developers of mid-1980s computer role-playing adventure games like King’s Quest that some players might get impatient, frustrated, or just plain stuck while trying to decipher the varied solutions to the puzzles they encountered along the way. In fact, guides to completing such games, known as walk-throughs, became a clever way to make a little bit of additional revenue on the sale of a game. For many games, you could purchase a printed walk-through. Some of them even came with little red cellophane decoders that enabled you to reveal only specific clues to yourself as you followed along, thus allowing you to preserve some of the mystery of playing the game without a guide. Late in the decade, there were also some automated 1-900 hint lines you could call that, for a per-minute fee, would guide you through the particular part of the game that was frustrating you. These days, of course, you can get all the walk-through you need for free on the Internet. Back in 1984, the term Internet had only been around for a couple of years and the world’s first Web browser was still six years away.
