Space Quest... on the Game Boy Advance?!

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Features by Adventure Game Hotspot staff
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Outdated gaming hardware is making a remarkable comeback these days, with brand new games being released for venerable old machines that would otherwise still be collecting dust. It's too bad we can't play any similarly old adventure games on them... or can we?

Turns out, we can! At least if they run on Sierra's AGI engine.

In his latest video, the Space Quest Historian details his experience of playing his favourite series in a way that he'd never done before: on the Nintendo Game Boy Advance. (Well, technically on an emulator, but they can be played on actual GBAs.)

It's all possible thanks to a modded interpreter for Sierra's AGI engine called GBAGI, by Brian Provinciano, which allows any AGI game (including the first two Space Quests, King's Quest 1-3, the first Leisure Suit Larry and Police Quest games, and more) to run with a modified verb/noun popup interface with predetermined selections to choose from, rather than their original text parser interfaces. It's pretty slick, and MOSTLY works very well... so long as you don't need to "close" anything. Heaven help you if you do, which SQH explains in agonizingly frustrating detail.

The GBAGI interpreter is freely available to download – owning the actual games is required – but if you'd rather just watch the Space Quest Historian play some of these older games himself, you can do that too, as he has recorded full playthroughs of both Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter and Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge.

The 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 opinions expressed belong solely to the original creators.