In 1980, Roberta Williams was packing floppy disks into Ziploc bags at her kitchen table and answering the phone to give players hints. Fifteen years later she was directing a 200-person team on a live-action horror game shipped on seven CD-ROMs. This episode covers the woman known as the queen of adventure games, from a shy childhood in rural Southern California and a COBOL programming job at Lawry’s Foods, to buying an Apple II in 1979, falling for Colossal Cave Adventure, and deciding that a mystery needed pictures.

We explain how she drew over 70 images on a VersaWriter for Mystery House while Ken Williams wrote a vector graphics engine to fit them on a disk, how 10,000 sales funded the move to Coarsegold and the founding of Sierra On-Line, and how she refused a merger with Spinnaker Software during the 1983 crash even as the couple mortgaged their home to make payroll. Then comes King’s Quest for IBM’s PCjr in 1984 with its pseudo-3D masking, the female lead Rosella and the nearly 40 percent female audience that registration cards revealed, Phantasmagoria’s $4 million budget and million-plus sales, the billion-dollar CUC International buyout that ended in fraud, and her 2022 return with a VR-capable remake of Colossal Cave.

• Why text parsers frustrated her and how visuals changed the adventure game paradigm
• How dynamic masking along the y-axis let King’s Quest characters walk behind trees and castle walls
• Why peers warned against a princess protagonist and how registration cards proved them wrong
• How CUC management forced real-time combat into King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity over her objections
• Her cultural footprint, from Ellie in The Last of Us to Cameron Howe in Halt and Catch Fire