Police Quest 2: Vengeance

Police Quest 2: Vengeance was released in 1988 by Sierra On-Line as a continuation of its adventure series about police work. The record lists MS-DOS / PC, the year 1988 and the Police Quest line.

In 1988 Sierra was the dominant force in graphic adventures. Its games of that period combined a drawn scene the character walked around with a text line into which the player typed commands in their own words. Mouse-driven interfaces only took over in the following years, so this title still belongs to the era of typed input.

What set Police Quest apart was its insistence on correct procedure. The player did not merely have to reach an objective but to follow official protocol – a strikingly different approach to difficulty at a time when most adventures dealt in fantastical puzzles. Failure came not from missing an object but from doing the right things in the wrong order.

1988 was a transitional year on the PC. EGA graphics offered sixteen colours where older CGA had four, sound cards were only beginning to appear, and most machines still beeped through the internal speaker. Adventures benefited more than anything else, because a static scene could be drawn with a care that action games had no time for.

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