I ruined King's Quest V with AI

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Features by Adventure Game Hotspot staff
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Artificial intelligence is here to stay, and is slowly but surely infiltrating modern game development, which stinks for a host of both ethical and artistic reasons. But at least we can take comfort in the fact that it will never be able – unless AI invents time travel, at which point we have much bigger things to worry about – to retroactively go back and defile our favourite classics of yore, right? Wrong! It's not only possible, it's already started to happen, thanks to our good friend and fellow Adventure Game Hotspot Network partner Space Quest Historian.

Admittedly he would take more than a little exception to referring to King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder as a "classic," but SQH has set aside his utter revulsion of AI to apply it (merely as a creative curiosity, and because he was bored) to a game he similarly reviles to see what damage could be wrought. And let's just say... it's pretty extensive. SQH details the processes and programs he used for this egregious hackery, which won't be named here lest they give anyone any ideas, and the result really needs to be seen – and heard – to be believed, from bizarrely mismatched visuals to the "pretentious and grandiloquent script" using ye olde machine English, to overzealous audio clips, to the voice of Cedric the Owl on helium (though to his credit, SQH resisted using Snoop Dogg as narrator).

So if you want to see what might have been if AI was around back in 1990 and Ken and Roberta Williams completely lost their minds, watch, listen, and shudder.

Space Quest Historian is part of the Adventure Game Hotspot Network, a collective of talented, dedicated content producers who work entirely independently but have joined forces to promote each other’s efforts. All opinons expressed belong solely to the original creators.