Lawman for Hire

Lawman for Hire is not a commercial release but a fan project by Karl-Johan Lundberg, built in AGI — the engine Sierra used in the mid-eighties to power the first King's Quest. After the community reverse-engineered that engine and built free tools for it, dozens of amateur adventures in the nostalgic Sierra style appeared around the turn of the millennium, and this is one of them.

The premise is espionage: you are recruited as a secret agent for an underground organisation. What exists, however, is only the first chapter, because Lawman for Hire remained a demo — you meet your new boss, receive your first assignment and gather the necessary equipment. That is all there is; the story was never continued.

It plays exactly like vintage Sierra: you walk your character across screens drawn in sixteen EGA colours and type your intentions into a text parser. If you lived through the era of look at door and open door, you will feel at home immediately; if not, prepare for a lesson in patience, because the parser only understands what the author anticipated. That faithfulness to the source is the whole charm of the thing — slow walking speed and mid-action typing included.

Judging a demo as a full game would be unfair, so plainly: this is a half-hour taster, more a curiosity for fans of Sierra and the fan-game scene than a complete adventure. But as a window into the amateur movement that kept a dead genre breathing long after its commercial end, it works nicely — and fewer of these projects survive than one would wish.

You can run the demo on oldgame.cz right in your browser and try the Sierra-style parser for yourself.