
Elements from the game were later reintroduced in the Sierra On-Line game The Colonel's Bequest in 1989. One location from the game was a spooky house, whereupon his arrival the player is told, "He's killed Ken!" - that is Ken Williams - and must seek absolution for murder. Mystery House was satirized in the 1982 adventure game Prisoner 2. Applying graphics to an adventure game, however, was unprecedented as previous story-based adventure games were entirely text-based. Though the game is often considered the first to use graphics, computer role-playing game had already been using graphics for several years at the time of release. It was eventually released into the public domain on 1987 celebration of Sierra's seventh birthday and later developed into an application for the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

Mystery House was re-released in 1982 through the SierraVenture line, which produced a number of early Sierra games until 1983. In 1980, the Williams' founded On-Line Systems, which would become Sierra On-Line in 1982.
MYSTERY HOUSE GAME GAME SOFTWARE
Though Ken believed that the gaming market would be less of a growth market than the professional software market, he persevered with games. Eventually, it sold more than 10,000 copies, which was a record-breaking phenomenon for the time. To their great surprise, Mystery House was an enormous success, quickly becoming a best-seller at a first-release price of USD$24.95. The software was packaged in Ziploc bags containing a 5¼-inch disk and a photocopied paper describing the game and was sold in local software shops in Los Angeles County. Ken spent a few nights developing the game on his Apple II using 70 simple 2D computer graphics drawings done by Roberta. She thus conceived Mystery House, the first graphical adventure game, a detective story inspired by Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. Roberta Williams liked the concept of a textual adventure very much, but she thought that the player would have a more satisfying experience with images and began to think of her own game. Having finished Colossal Cave Adventure, they began to search for something similar, but found the market underdeveloped. He and his wife Roberta both played it all the way through and their encounter with this game would have a strong influence on video-gaming history. Rummaging through a catalog, he found a program called Colossal Cave Adventure. One day, he took a teletype terminal to his residence to work on the development of an accounting program. It becomes obvious that there is a murderer on the loose in the house, and the player must discover who it is or become the next victim.Īt the end of the 1970s, Ken Williams sought to set up a company for enterprise software for the market-dominating Apple II computer. Terrible events start happening and dead bodies begin appearing.

The mansion contains many interesting rooms and seven other people.


The player is soon locked inside the house with no other option than to explore. The game starts near an abandoned Victorian mansion. Mystery House (StarCraft) was also released in Japan by StarCraft in 1983. Because of its use of graphics, the magazine GamePro named Mystery House the 51st most important game of all time in 2007. The game is remembered as one of the first adventure games to feature computer graphics and the first game produced by On-Line Systems, the company which would evolve into Sierra On-Line. While not directly part of the Laura Bow Mystery series, ideas from the game were reused in The Colonel's Bequest. Mystery House (also known as Hi-Res Adventure #1 : Mystery House) is an adventure computer game released in 1980 by Roberta and Ken Williams for the Apple II as part of their Hi-Res Adventure line.
