Space Quest 6: Roger Wilco in the Spinal Frontier

The sixth Space Quest arrived in 1995 and is the last completed entry in the comedic science fiction series Sierra had been running since the mid-eighties. Roger Wilco, its hero, is a space janitor who keeps being handed the job of saving the galaxy, and the humour of the whole line comes from the gap between his station and the scale of the trouble he lands in.

Structurally it is a classic mouse-driven adventure: click on objects in the scene, combine inventory items and work out puzzle solutions. The CD release brought voice acting, far more animation and pre-rendered backgrounds, the standard adventure games moved to once floppy distribution stopped being sufficient for the amount of audio and art being produced.

The entry is remembered mainly for its second half, where the story shifts to a miniaturised scale and the player navigates the inside of a human body. The subtitle about the spinal frontier is a nod at Star Trek, and parodying well-known science fiction properties was always part of what the series enjoyed doing.

It was made while Sierra was gradually moving away from traditional adventures toward other genres, and a certain unevenness of pacing shows as a result. Even so it is a genuine representative of the genre's golden era, with a script full of jokes and puzzles that occasionally demand period logic rather than common sense.

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