page_title: King's Quest VI
section_title: Development
hierarchical_section_title: King's Quest VI / Development
caption_attribution_description: Peter with The Beast.
context_page_description: King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow is a point-and-click adventure game, first released in 1992 as the sixth installment in the King's Quest series produced by Sierra On-Line. Written by Roberta Williams and Jane Jensen, King's Quest VI is widely recognized as the high point in the series for its landmark 3D graphic introduction movie and professional voice acting. King's Quest VI was programmed in Sierra's Creative Interpreter and was the last King's Quest game to be released on floppy disk. A CD-ROM version of the game was released in 1993, including more character voices, a slightly different opening movie and more detailed artwork and animation.
  The name of this sequel is a pun on the common phrase "here today, gone tomorrow". This pun is related to the abrupt departure of Prince Alexander after the events of King's Quest V, where he was just rescued by King Graham along with Princess Cassima, who asked Alexander to come visit her at the end of that game. King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human also contained the word "heir" in its title and also featured Prince Alexander as the main character.
context_section_description: King's Quest creator and designer Roberta Williams first met with Sierra newcomer and co-designer Jane Jensen (who would go on to create the Gabriel Knight series) in May 1991 to discuss the design for the upcoming sixth title in the series. Williams began preliminary work on King's Quest VI in June, "laying out the basic story" and worked alongside Jensen throughout July and August on coming up with design ideas; after five months, Williams and Jensen finished the documentation for the design. Two key goals of the writers were to keep the game's tone consistent with its predecessors' while still making it a distinct title, and to make players connect emotionally with the game; Williams wrote the love story of Prince Alexander and Cassima specifically for this emotional attachment.
  Co-director and project manager Bill Skirvin and the artists created the storyboards and character sketches. John Shroades was responsible for sketching the 80 background paintings that would be used for the game. The method of motion capture was used to transcribe the movement of real-life actors shot on video to the over 2000 character actions in King's Quest VI on computer. Williams and Skirvin chose the actors and costumes for the shootings, and Michael Hutchinson led the animation team that integrated the footage into Shroades's backgrounds. The game's MIDI music was composed by Chris Braymen, who also produced the sound effects. The game's opening 3D-animated introduction was produced by Stanley Liu of Kronos Digital Entertainment, a company that did special effects for such films as Batman Returns and The Lawnmower Man. This sequence was present in all versions of the game (DOS, Windows, Amiga and Macintosh) albeit with different edits and narrations across versions.
  Jensen scripted the game, defining for programmers the game's responses for the player's actions and the over 6000 lines of written messages. Robert Lindsley served as the game's lead programmer. The game was coded on an updated version of the proprietary Sierra Creative Interpreter engine referred to as "SCI1". Robin Bradley served as the quality assurance tester; throughout July 1992 the game went through constant testing. Development wrapped in September, when Sierra's marketing and distribution departments began promoting and releasing the game. In an interview with The New York Times, Williams estimated King's Quest VI's budget to have been "about $700,000" and stated that the crew included over 20 people who worked for 14 months.
  King's Quest VI was initially scheduled for release in September 1992, but Sierra announced it would delayed until mid-October. It was then shipped on October 6 and launched on October 13 on nine floppy disks for DOS and Macintosh. The Amiga version was ported by Revolution Software. Sierra, which themselves converted their games for the Amiga prior to King's Quest VI, announced in early 1993 that they would cease releasing games for the computer; however, Revolution co-founder Charles Cecil offered Sierra for his company to make the Amiga conversion instead. The port began development in March 1993 and was released for the Amiga in December. It uses Revolution's Virtual Theatre engine instead of SCI1 due to better performance on the computer.
  A CD-ROM version of King's Quest VI, released in 1993 for DOS and Microsoft Windows, featured an extended version of the opening sequence, a full voiceover of every line of text in the game, and a revised soundtrack that includes a full version of the ballad "Girl in the Tower", which was composed by Mark Seibert with lyrics by Jane Jensen and serves as the game's love theme, playing in the end credits. Sierra sent a CD with the song to various radio stations and bundled with the game a pamphlet listing these stations and suggested fans to call them and ask for the song to be played. This resulted in Sierra receiving legal threats from stations bothered by excessive requests from listeners. Sierra co-founder Ken Williams responded to the stations by jokingly stating that the stations "were the criminals
caption: Robby Benson voiced the protagonist Prince Alexander
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