A Tribute to Hero6

I would like to make a tribute to all fan games out there, especially those that were inspired by the King's Quest and Quest for Glory series.  It has been a long road for fan games, independent of the levels of success achieved.  And for the first fan game project (at least, the first that I ever heard of), Hero6 has had the longest road of all, as it never officially died until his past fall.  On October 30, 2011, the final active Hero6 member decided to make a final farewell speech, which would probably count as an official goodbye as well as anything.

The project started in 1999, and I found out about it very early on from the Sierra message boards.  I got involved for a brief time.  The project grew quickly.  There were lots of people wanting to be on the plot team, and plenty of people on the dialog, art, and programming teams.  I was interested in programming, so I spent time talking with the other programming people involved in the project.  The project (myself included at the earliest stages) toyed around with many ideas and game engines (both formal engines and ideas for custom engines).  At this point, I don't really know or remember how many different variants were considered.  Ultimately, the group settled on the AGS system, which was probably a good choice considering the organizational difficulties that the project had.

The group did release an early demo that looked really good.  I also remember thinking that the members of the project were well connected to many other projects.  I thought that this was a good sign of creative potential.  I wondered how much influence the successes and failures of Hero6 affected other fan game attempts, and vice versa.  I remember Ancient Frog Games, Struggle for Life and Honor, Tierra (now AGD), Project Katrina (no, not the hurricane), Infamous Adventures, Solar Crescent Studios (now Crystal Shard), Silver Sphinx Studios :), etc.  In fact, I have only just realized that the Heroine's Quest project has been picked up by Crystal Shard, which used to be Solar Crescent Studios!

Remakes of past games came quickly, but original games did not come so easily.  (In fact, the only new titles that I can think of that came from these groups were Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman's Mine (2006) and A Tale of Two Kingdoms (2007).  That is quite a long time after Hero6 started in 1999.)  There were many titles that were proposed but never completed, and many were abandoned.  Hero6 definitely fell into both categories.  The Hero6 project had its ups and downs, and then it really had its ups and downs.  For years I waited around for news from Hero6 and other fan game projects.  However, I stopped checking once I had a family and less time to play computer games.  It was only by chance that I heard the news about Hero6 so soon after that final announcement.  (On a somewhat related note, I am happy to see that Infamous Adventures is still working on their Project X, but I also remember them having a Quest for Infamy game project that I no longer see on their website.  I also found Crystal Shard's Quest for Yrolg to be quite fun.)

In any case, I salute the fan game movement!  I doubt that the indie game world of today cares too much for that short-lived fad, but I do wonder how much the two have played off each other.  In fact, I am curious when the term "indie game" became widely used (and what about freeware and shareware?!).  I'm sure that those Spiderweb Software games from the 1990s were never called indie games!  I also know that indie adventure games will continue the thread of the fan games of the 2000s, and we are all the richer for it.