Woman of the Week – Roberta Williams

Roberta Williams is an American video game designer, writer, and a co-founder of Sierra On-Line (later known as Sierra Entertainment), who developed her first game while living in Simi Valley, California. She is most famous for her work in the field of graphic adventure games with titles such as Mystery House, the King's Quest series and Phantasmagoria. Williams is considered one of the most influential PC game designers of the 1980s and 1990s, and has been credited with creating the graphic adventure genre.

She is often referred to as the “Queen of the Graphic Adventure.” She founded On-Line Systems in 1980 with her husband Ken. Together they created the very first graphic adventure game, Mystery House. The game was an instant success and they were able to leave the grind of Los Angeles and move to a small mining town outside of Yosemite National Park. They opened their first office here in a town called Coarsegold.

Source: Sierra Games

Mystery House would become part of a series of six adventures called Hi-Res Adventures. The first adventure that Roberta designed after Mystery House was The Wizard and the Princes (1980), which was the first game with colored graphics. Then game Time Zone in 1982, which was the first game where outside artists were used. The game was massive and involved about 1,400 rooms at a time when an average game had less than 100.

Her next series of work is what really put her on the map. At the request of IBM, she created the first in a series of the first animated 3D adventure game called King’s Quest.

The series detailed the adventures of the royal family of Daventry and would comprise eight adventure games. It sold millions, likely because it allowed adults to experience a fantasy world and took them back to adolescenthood, she said.

At the same time, she also designed Phantasmagoria (1995), a horror game with a $4 million development budget and 2 years of development time, that had a script of about 550 pages and was published on 7 CD-ROMS.

She remained active in the gaming world until the late 1990s, when Sierra was sold to a larger group.

Since her retirement in 1999 (stated at the time to be a "sabbatical," she has stayed away from the public eye. However, in a 2006 interview, she admitted that her favorite game she created was Phantasmagoria and not King's Quest: "If I could only pick one game, I would pick Phantasmagoria, as I enjoyed working on it immensely and it was so very challenging (and I love to be challenged!). However, in my heart, I will always love the King's Quest series and, especially, King's Quest I, since it was the game that really 'made' Sierra On-Line,” she said.

In 2009, after three years of research, she started to write a historic novel, tracing Irish history, the Potato Famine, and the Irish immigration to the US.