Roberta Williams

Biography

Roberta Williams was born in 1953 in California and in known for pioneering graphic adventure video games.

Her husband worked for IBM and she became interested in simple text-based adventure games on her Apple II computer. She designed a game and her husband helped her program it, the first adventure game to have graphics, Mystery House (1980). The founded On-Line Systems (later Sierra On-Line) and they began work on several more. They created the first adventure game with colored graphics, followed by the ambitions King's Quest: the first animated 3D (or 2.5D) adventure game in 1984.

Her next big accomplishment was Phantasmagoria in 1995, a horror game with a $4 million budget that sold over 1,000,000 copies. She remained active in developing games until the company was sold in 1996.

Further Reading

https://www.sierragamers.com/roberta-williams/