Hero-U - It Takes a Team

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Corey Cole explains why you need a team to make a game and why Hero's Quest became a humorous one:

Why So Serious?
Look at the original Hero's Quest (before it became Quest for Glory) team, for example. You would never know it now, but Hero's Quest started out as a serious high fantasy game. There was no mention of humor or comedy in the original description. What changed? The team.

First came the art. Lori envisioned a beautiful medieval town in a pastoral forest setting. We got the forest, but the artist assigned to the town took Lori's crayon and pastel sketches too literally, so Spielburg had a much more "cartoon" look than we intended. The characters also had simplistic, cartoon-like designs. Admittedly, it was hard to make them more realistic in 16 colors and relatively low resolution - 320 x 200 pixels on many displays.

While Lori and I debated how to handle this, programmer Bob Fischbach scripted the first prototype of a forest scene. Since our documentation didn't say anything about how to handle incidental objects such as trees, Bob came up with several amusing messages including a few puns.

Yes, Bob wrote the first puns in Hero's Quest; I just took the punishment and ran with it. After all, I went to school in Punsylvania, so it was a natural fit.

That solved our dilemma with the cartoony art style. Instead of trying to write a very serious game that would have been spoiled by the unrealistic backgrounds and characters, we redefined the game concept to be a tongue-in-cheek, humorous take on role-playing, but with a serious underlying story.​