15 Facts About Jim Walls

Jim Walls is notable for having designed the successful Police Quest series of adventure games for Sierra On-Line.

In 2013, Jim Walls planned to develop Precinct, a spiritual successor to Police Quest, but the crowdfunding campaign failed.

Jim Walls worked as an optician for seven years before graduating from the California Highway Patrol police academy in December 1971.

In January 1984, while conducting a traffic stop, Jim Walls was involved in a shootout.

Jim Walls retired from the CHP in 1986 after 15 years of service.

Williams asked Jim Walls to condense his experiences in the CHP into a short story, preferably around two pages long.

Jim Walls wrote the story and showed it to Williams several days later; Williams was impressed, and asked Jim Walls to detail it into four or five pages.

At the time, Jim Walls was unfamiliar with computers, and was unsure if video game design was a viable career.

Jim Walls considered fan mail sent in by players, ranging from active police officers to children that wanted to become police officers because of the game, as the "ultimate reward".

Jim Walls made self-insert cameos in the Police Quest games; he appears in name only in each game's police database as an officer or criminal, his mugshot appears in the intro cutscene of Police Quest II, and he physically appears in Police Quest III's intro and game over sequences.

In 1992, Jim Walls joined Tsunami Media, which largely consisted of former Sierra employees and was housed in Oakhurst.

In 1996, Jim Walls was contracted by Las Vegas-based Westwood Studios to work on 1997's Blade Runner.

In 2003, Westwood Studios was bought out by Electronic Arts and merged into EA Los Angeles, with most employees, including Jim Walls, let go as part of the company's acquisition.

On February 2,2013, during a podcast hosted by Chris Pope, Jim Walls announced he had plans to develop a successor to Police Quest, using Kickstarter for funding.

The game, following police officer Maxwell Jones in the city of Fraser Canyon, California, would be developed by Jim Walls Reloaded, led by Walls and Sierra developer Robert Lindsley.