Jim Walls

General Information

I first met Ken Williams (owner of Sierra on Line) in 1985 when he invited me to his house for a game of racquet ball (yes, he had a racquet ball court in his house). This was a period of time when I was off road patrol and on 4800 time with the California Highway Patrol. ("Forty-eight hundred time" is a government code for a period of time the department uses to evaluate an officer of injuries sustained "while on duty"). After racquet ball we retired to his game room, and over a couple of beers, he told me of his idea of starting an adventure game series with a police genre. All he needed was a real cop to be involved with the design in order to maintain realism.

When I first sat down in front of a computer to begin the design story of the original "Police Quest" I had to be shown where the on/off switch was. I typed the entire story with two fingers (after all, the only skills I had at the time were chasing people down and throwing them in jail). Well, the rest is history. Police Quest became a big seller, so naturally, along came Police Quest 2, then Codename: Iceman, followed by the final game in the series Police Quest 3.

The reason why the Police Quest series was such a success (I believe) was due to the realism in the games. A player had to think like a cop in order to make his way through the adventure, in fact there was one police academy that installed Police Quest 3 as a training tool.

Becoming a game designer was quite a learning process for me though the long hours of crunch were rewarded through the fan mail I received. Kids writing to say they wanted to become police officers because of their experience playing police quest was, for me, the ultimate reward.

Anyway, after Police Quest 3, I moved on from Sierra to work on other titles with other developers, most recently Westwood, the developers of "Earth & Beyond" a massivley multiplayer on-line RPG. Although I learned and grew in experience with these others, I would have to say that my time with Sierra impacted me the greatest.

Game Credits

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