The relaunch of King's Quest has been announced

As part of Gamescom, Activision announced that it is reviving the Sierra brand. The new entity, acting under the old IP, will become something like an incubator for independent projects. One of the first games to be developed with the support of Sierra will be King's Quest.

A bit of history

Both Sierra itself and the King's Quest series are extremely iconic for the entire IP gaming industry. But due to the fact that both have their roots in the late seventies, they are rarely remembered, unlike, for example, LucasArts and Microïds and their products. 

Sierra released Mystery House in 1980, which is considered the first graphic quest in history. Then she also created the first animated color quest, which just became King's Quest: Quest for the Crown (1983). Some of the solutions first used in it are still in use within the genre. 

In other words, if you have recently played some kind of quest, like Broken Age, or hidden (this genre also grew out of adventure games), keep in mind that without Sierra, they could easily not exist. 

A series of products under the Quest brand, including King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest (then transformed into a series of tactical Swat simulators), were successfully distributed by the company until the mid-90s, when it was sold by the owners — the Williams couple — to the conglomerate CUC International for about $ 1.5 billion. 

After that, Sierra had difficult times, she changed hands, constantly went through restructuring, having managed, however, to publish Half-Life, Homeworld and World in Conflict, but a couple of years ago she disappeared from the radar altogether.

The rebirth of a legend?

Now Activision is reviving the brand as an indie publisher that will help independent developers create, PR, market and distribute games. Of course, it is not entirely clear whether it will be possible to call the developers independent after providing this assistance, but apparently Activision representatives did not see any terminological contradictions in their announcement. 

One of the first such projects will be the relaunched King's Quest. In what capacity this "rebirth" will take place is not entirely clear. The studio The Odd Gentlemen, the authors of the platformer The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom, will make a new game under this IP. The new product will be released next year. 

So far, it has been stated that Sierra projects will be released only on "big" platforms, but if — suddenly — the new King's Quest is still a quest, I think we can hope for its mobile advent.

Activision is one of the oldest video game publishers. It has been operating on the market since 1979. In 2008, it merged with Vivendi Games, which owned Blizzard, which led to the creation of Activision Blizzard. In 2013, the company bought back its shares and became independent again. Currently owns the rights to the Call of Duty and Skylanders series.