Roberta Williams

Roberta Lynn Williams (born February 16, 1953) is an American video game designer and writer, who co-founded Sierra On-Line with her husband, game developer Ken Williams.

In late 1972 Roberta married Ken just a few days after his eighteenth birthday, and gave birth to their first son in November 1973.

The couple briefly moved to Illinois, where she was employed as a computer operator, soon moving back to Los Angeles where she took a job at Lawry's Foods as a computer programmer working in COBOL.

By 1979 the couple had two children.

Ken was employed as a computer programmer and consultant, working on large IBM mainframe machines.

They wanted to leave Los Angeles to fulfill their dream of living in the woods.

As Ken brainstormed ideas for a technology business that could become viable outside of a major city, Roberta purchased an AppleII computer for the family, which strained their expenses.

Roberta's love of computers grew as she played several text adventure games.

Around 1979, Roberta Williams was an avid player of Colossal Cave Adventure, a text adventure program running on a mainframe, 3,000 miles away, via Ken's teletype machine.

She was inspired to speak to her husband Ken Williams about her vision for what a video game could be, drawing influence from Agatha Christie's story And Then There Were None, and the board game Clue.

Roberta convinced Ken to provide the coding work to program the game, while she contributed her experience with fiction and storytelling.

Roberta drew the pictures using her Apple II and a Versawriter, a graphics tablet that could be used to hand-trace a piece of paper and input the image into a computer.

Since no programs existed to read the Versawriter image, Ken had to write one, eventually compressing nearly seventy images onto a 5¼-inch minifloppy disk.

The result was Mystery House, an adventure game with black and white graphics for the Apple II computer.

In 1980, her first game, Mystery House, became a modest commercial success; it is credited as the first graphic adventure game.

Released in 1980, the game was distributed by mail order, advertised in computer magazines under the name of Ken's consulting company, On-Line Systems.

The game soon sold ten thousand copies, with Roberta personally packing the disks and supporting materials in Ziploc bags, and answering her home phone to provide hints for the game's puzzles.

Ken began to personally distribute copies of the game to computer stores.

He quit his consulting job, with hopes that it would allow the couple to eventually move out of the city.

They released the Wizard and the Princess later that year, improving on their previous title with color graphics and dithering.

The game sold 60,000 copies, leading them to hire more employees for distribution and programming.

Encouraged by the success of their first two games, On-Line Systems switched its focus from consulting to game development.

Roberta's ambitions grew with the design of Time Zone, a time-travelling game spanning thousands of years, which was released on twelve disks in 1982.

Around this time, Roberta's parents retired and moved to Oakhurst, California, and she hoped to move close by.

With their company expanding, the couple was finally able to move On-Line Systems from Simi Valley, California to Coarsegold.

They also changed their company name to Sierra On-Line, based on its location near the Sierra Nevada mountains.

She is also known for creating and maintaining the King's Quest series, as well as designing the full motion video game Phantasmagoria in 1995.

Sierra was acquired by CUC International in 1996, leading to layoffs and management changes.

Williams took a brief sabbatical, and returned to the company in a game design role, but grew increasingly frustrated with CUC's creative and business decisions.

After the release of King's Quest: Mask of Eternity in 1998, she left the game industry in 1999 and focused her retirement on traveling and writing historical fiction.

In 2021 she released her historical novel, Farewell to Tara.

Soon after, she returned to game development with the 3D remake of the classic adventure game Colossal Cave Adventure, released in January 2023 as Colossal Cave.

Several publications have named Roberta Williams as one of the best or most influential creators in the video game industry, for co-founding Sierra, pioneering the graphic adventure game genre, and creating the King's Quest series.

Several publications have called her the "Queen of adventure games".

She has received the Industry Icon Award from The Game Awards, and the Pioneer Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards.

Born in Los Angeles, Roberta Heuer grew up in rural Southern California as the daughter of an agricultural inspector.

A shy child with a vivid imagination, she often created fairy-tale adventure stories to entertain her family.

She would lie in bed and imagine fantastical situations, which she sometimes described as her "movies".

She met her future husband Ken Williams when they were both teenagers, and the two began dating.

After high school she became a clerk at the Los Angeles County Welfare Department, in part thanks to her father's connections working in local government.