43 Facts About Roberta Williams

Roberta Lynn Williams is an American video game designer and writer, who co-founded Sierra On-Line with her husband, game developer Ken Williams.

Roberta Williams is known for creating and maintaining the King's Quest series, as well as designing the full motion video game Phantasmagoria in 1995.

Roberta Williams has received the Industry Icon Award from The Game Awards, and the Pioneer Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards.

Roberta Williams met her future husband Ken Williams when they were both teenagers, and the two began dating.

In late 1972, Roberta Williams married Ken just a few days after his eighteenth birthday, and gave birth to their first son in November 1973.

Around 1979, Roberta Williams was an avid player of text adventures on her teletype machine, particularly as a fan of Colossal Cave Adventure.

Roberta Williams was inspired to speak to her husband Ken Williams about her vision for what a video game could be, drawing influence from Agatha Christie's story And Then There Were None, and the board game Clue.

Roberta Williams convinced Ken to provide the technical knowledge to program the game, while she contributed her experience with fiction and storytelling.

Roberta Williams drew the pictures using her Apple II and a Versawriter, a graphics tablet that could be used to hand-trace a piece of paper and input the image into a computer.

The game soon sold ten thousand copies, with Roberta Williams personally packing the disks and supporting materials in Ziploc bags, and answering her home phone to provide hints for the game's puzzles.

Roberta Williams quit his consulting job, with hopes that it would allow the couple to eventually move out of the city.

Roberta Williams's ambitions grew with the design of Time Zone, a time-travelling game spanning thousands of years, which was released on twelve disks in 1982.

Around this time, Roberta Williams's parents retired and moved to Oakhurst, California, and she hoped to move close by.

Around this time, Jim Henson approached Ken Roberta Williams to create a game adaptation of The Dark Crystal, before the film's release.

Roberta Williams was excited by the project, believing video games to be a facet of entertainment as much as film.

Roberta Williams designed much of the game adaptation on paper; it was finalized and released in 1983.

The high-profile game caused the company to attract mainstream media attention, and Roberta Williams hoped that the entertainment industry would not just recognize the value of games, but the value of the artists who created them.

Sierra was forced to downsize to 30 employees, and the Roberta Williams family mortgaged their home to pay their remaining employees.

Roberta Williams had wanted to build on her experience with The Wizard and the Princess with a fully animated adventure game, in a pseudo-3D world.

Meanwhile, Roberta Williams continued her role as designer of the King's Quest series, which earned a reputation for its unique style of storytelling, as well as its increasingly advanced graphics and technology.

Roberta Williams continued to design other titles, such as the educational title Mixed-Up Mother Goose.

In 1989, Roberta Williams released another mystery adventure game called The Colonel's Bequest, which iterated on ideas from her original Mystery House game with more detailed graphics and improved text parsing.

Roberta Williams released The Dagger of Amon Ra in 1991, a sequel to The Colonel's Bequest based on characters and concepts created by Williams.

Roberta Williams branched out from her work on King's Quest by designing Phantasmagoria, a realistic horror adventure game.

Roberta Williams had opposed the deal, and several other high-ranking Sierra employees had felt there was something suspicious about CUC's financials.

Roberta Williams ultimately acquiesced, recognizing that the terms of the deal were too favorable to refuse, and that she could be sued by their shareholders if she failed to maximize their value.

The company's management and decision-making dramatically changed under CUC, leading Ken Roberta Williams to leave his role at Sierra and work directly for their new parent company.

Roberta Williams took a sabbatical from the game industry, as the company released The Roberta Williams Anthology, a compilation of 14 games.

Roberta Williams returned to game development in early 1997 to work on King's Quest: Mask of Eternity.

Roberta Williams hoped to re-introduce some interactivity absent in Phantasmagoria, and to embrace the advances in 3D graphics technology.

The couple soon divested from the company, Ken resigning at the end of 1997, and Roberta Williams staying to finish Mask of Eternity.

The decline of Sierra had an emotional impact on Roberta Williams, who left the company in 1999.

Roberta Williams said that her role as a game designer was in the past, and that she was focused on writing a historical novel.

Roberta Williams has focused on travel, becoming an avid sailor with her husband.

Roberta Williams declined to work on the game, but did offer some advice.

In 2021, Roberta Williams self-published her first novel Farewell to Tara, set in mid-1800s Ireland during the time of the Great Famine.

Roberta Williams explained that this pioneering game from the 1970s had inspired her career, and she was excited to re-imagine it as an interactive 3D experience.

Roberta Williams earned the Pioneer Award at the 20th Game Developers Choice Awards in March 2020, for her influential work in the graphical adventure game genre with Mystery House, as well as her role in creating the King's Quest series and co-founding Sierra.

Roberta Williams has personally inspired the characters and artwork of other games.

Roberta Williams posed for the cover of the game Softporn Adventure by Chuck Benton, published by On-Line Systems.

Roberta Williams posed much later with her children as Mother Goose for the cover photograph of Mixed-Up Mother Goose.

Roberta Williams was a source of inspiration for the character of Cameron Howe in the AMC television drama Halt and Catch Fire.

The Roberta Williams family donated a collection of design materials to the International Center for the History of Electronic Games.