Police Quest I: In Pursuit of the Death Angel

Specifics

FIRST RELEASE:	1987-01-01
DEVELOPERS:	Sierra On-Line
PUBLISHERS:	Sierra On-Line
GROUPS:	Police Quest Series
GENRES:	Adventure, Adventure: 2D animated
PLATFORMS:	IBM PC, Apple II, Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Apple IIgs
ENGINES:	AGI

Game menu

General

Police Quest casts the player as Sonny Bonds, a 15 year veteran police officer in the fictional town of Lytton, California, performing his daily routines as a street cop. Since recently Lytton has seen a significant rise in drug trafficking, gambling and prostitution. It looks like a new guy wants to take over the town as small-time drug dealers and pimps are either murdered or have disappeared. Lytton's high school in particular is hit hard as teenagers fall into drug addiction, including the daughter of Sonny's colleague, Jack.
Sonny is promoted to the narcotics division and assigned the task to investigate the case. He is assisted by "Sweet Cheeks" Marie, his former high school sweetheart who is now working as a prostitute and serves as a valuable source of information for the Police Department. Thanks to Sweet Cheeks, Sonny learns that a man named Hoffman and another man, known as the Death Angel, are taking over the Lytton crime scene. Tracking the lead suspect to Hotel Delphoria, an undercover operation is set up with Sonny infiltrating the criminals' hideout.

Written and designed by retired police officer Jim Walls, Police Quest was one of Sierra's first games which aimed to achieve authentic realism, making the game quite different from other classic Sierra adventure games where the task was to rescue damsels in distress, defeat evil wizards or save the universe. Police Quest was in fact so realistic that it was used as a real police training tool. The game comes with an indoctrination guide with police codes and procedures. It is also based on Jim Walls' personal experiences as a patrol officer, including a shootout which led to his resignation from the police force and brought him to Sierra to bring his story to the computer screen.

This game was made with Sierra's Adventure Game Interpreter engine (AGI), using text parser and was released for the IBM PC, Apple II, Amiga, Atari ST and Apple IIGS. It was remade in 1992 with 256-color VGA graphics and the SCI1.1 engine.

Collections and compilations

This title is also included in:

Police Quest Collection (Daryl F. Gates'): The 4 Most Wanted

Police Quest Collection Series

SWAT: Career Pack

External links

- Police Quest 1 (AGI) at SierraHelp
- Police Quest 1 (AGI) at MobyGames
- Police Quest 1 at Wikipedia