Police Quest: In Pursuit of The Death Angel - SCI VGA - fullplay longplay - by Sierra On-Line, 1992

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Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel - SCI VGA version (from Wikipedia):

Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel (also known as Police Quest I or simply Police Quest) is a police procedural adventure video game developed and published by Jim Walls and Sierra On-Line. Police Quest follows police officer Sonny Bonds as he investigates a drug cartel in the town of Lytton, California.

First released in 1987 as a command-line interface game built on Sierra's AGI, Police Quest was remade in 1992 using 256-color VGA graphics and the SCI engine and used point-and-click gameplay. Designed to effectively be a police simulator, Police Quest features relatively simple puzzles, but relies strongly on strict adherence to proper police procedure, as detailed in the game's manual.

Police Quest was a moderate critical and commercial success, spawning the successful Police Quest series, which later evolved into the SWAT series of shooter games. A direct sequel, Police Quest II: The Vengeance, was released in 1988.

Prior to Police Quest's conception, Sierra president Ken Williams wanted to develop a police adventure game, preferably with an actual police officer serving as a technical advisor, overseeing the game's design to ensure authenticity and realism. In 1985, Williams met California Highway Patrol (CHP) officer Jim Walls, who was on administrative leave to treat trauma he had received from a shooting a year prior. Following Walls' retirement from the CHP in 1986, Williams befriended Walls and asked if he could write a short story about his experiences in the CHP; this short story eventually developed into Police Quest's plot.

Development commenced after Walls' story grew enough to be partitioned into a design document and game components for development. The game's designers were Williams, Walls, Roberta Williams, Mark Crowe, Scott Murphy, and Al Lowe. At the time, Walls was unfamiliar with computers, so the other Sierra developers assisted him until he could develop on his own. The game's protagonist, Sonny Bonds, was loosely based on Walls' son (also named Sonny), and many incidents in the game were based on actual incidents encountered by Walls during his time in the CHP.

Police Quest was released for the IBM PC, Apple II (128K), Amiga, Atari ST, and Apple IIGS. An SCI 1.1 enhanced version in 256-color VGA was released in 1992.

Between October 25 and October 27, 2022, digital historian and archivist Jason Scott uploaded the source code of Police Quest to GitHub as a means of video game preservation. Several other Sierra games were preserved by Scott in that period, including Donald Duck's Playground, The Black Cauldron, King's Quest III, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (and its VGA remake), Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places), Leisure Suit Larry III: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals, and Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work.

The first four Police Quest games totaled 850,000 sales by late 1995. However, Markus Krichel of PC Games noted that "interest on the part of the gamer fell slightly" with Police Quest: Open Season, which led Sierra On-Line to experiment with a new direction for the series with Police Quest: SWAT. According to Sierra, combined sales of the entire Police Quest series (including SWAT) surpassed 1.2 million units by the end of March 1996.

Computer Gaming World recommended Police Quest, praising some of the graphics as "the most terrific this reviewer has ever seen". Antic said of the ST version that because of the realism and need to follow procedures "there is a strong sense of actually becoming the cop on the beat". Macworld was less positive, stating that the game "plays like a long version of a routine cop TV show, and you can't lose if you just follow the manual. The game begs for a challenging mystery".

Police Quest was reported to have been used as a training tool for police officers:

[Police Quest] has proven to be a practical, effective training tool officers enjoy using. It safely demonstrates to rookies the consequences of failing to observe proper police procedures and can serve as a valuable refresher course for experienced officers.

— Rich DeBaun, InterAction, Winter 1992