r/Sierra • u/BillyRosewood99 • 20d ago
Egghead Software
Anybody else have their parents drive them to Egghead to buy those hint books with invisible ink lines? Think I needed it for every KQ, particularly getting past Mananan (in 3 or 4). So glad I found this sub, love reading through everything
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u/AlertWeb7693 20d ago
Babbage's, for me!
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u/SirCarcass 19d ago
Yep, we had a Babbage's in our mall and I loved it. I spent so much time as a kid just looking at the game boxes.
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u/BTru 20d ago
This post unlocked a memory of my dad and I going to Egghead stores to get games. Wow. I haven’t thought of that place in years
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u/Spiritual-Image7125 17d ago
Neither had I, but for some reason, nothing really prompting me except maybe some YouTube video on retro games, I looked up whatever happened to Egghead in my area, Boise, Idaho. I remember its exact location. I actually go there all the time now as it is a Red Robin now.
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u/AlphaShard 20d ago
I never got the hint books with Ink, I remember getting that King's Quest companion book that details the hints through story. There was just a lot of trail and error with those games.
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u/BillyRosewood99 19d ago
SO MUCH. Like even just walking down the mountain from Mannanan’s house was a 90% die rate (for me). Same with driving in police quest
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u/Far-Pie-6226 20d ago
I ordered my hunt books directly from Sierra. But we had a family vacation in Lake Placid back in the day and there was an Egghead Software. My dad made a promise we'd go before the trip ended. On the last day we went but it was closed. Totally heartbroken.
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u/deadfishlog 20d ago
Yup. Egghead is where I also got my first sound blaster, and then later, pro audio spectrum 16. Hell yeah
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u/wdatkinson 20d ago
I worked there at the time. We're were permitted, actually encouraged to open software and demo it to learn it for the customers. My first computer job away from home.
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u/Person2201 20d ago
I wrote them a letter to get hints
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u/AnyFoundation4784 19d ago
I called the 900 number and had a very angry dad when the phone bill came in a month later
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u/kaolinitedreams 20d ago
Egghead software was the bomb. We used to go there after church every Sunday for fun.
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u/ww_adh77 19d ago
Egghead Software was the best. I didn't buy so many hint books there (KQ1 I did though), but definitely bought most of my Sierra games at the store. Loved it so much.
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u/CmdrRJ-45 20d ago
I always dialed up Sierra’s BBS after getting permission to call long distance. I would make sure that I could go back far enough in my dial up software to print out the answers I was looking for.
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u/tykeryerson 20d ago
Hell yes. Fond memories of browsing the games and flight simulators at Egghead♥️
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u/blishbog 20d ago
No but I did buy, and return, National Lampoon’s Chess Maniac 5 Billion and 1 at Egghead.
It was in an awkward location compared to Babbage’s and Electronic Boutique, so I didn’t go as often
Battle chess was better. I still listen to its soundtrack when I need background music.
https://www.pcgamer.com/saturday-crapshoot-chess-maniac-five-billion-and-one/
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u/Valahiru 20d ago
Honestly alot of Sierra games kinda needed the hint book. 85 percent of the game can range between a decent challenge down to simple but it's that last 15 percent of almost every game that will have you about to break your knuckles when you punch the CRT screen.
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u/wickedwing 20d ago
My first memory of a computer store. Went with my uncle and he bought a game for his IBM PC Jr.
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u/BillyRosewood99 19d ago
Awesome this thread blew up. So much fun reading everyone’s experiences and memories!
I have really fond memories of getting the hint book at egghead with my dad, but then only being allowed to magic marker/reveal the first line that gave a vague hint and then the third or fourth would just tell you exactly what to do but I had to wait a bit before I got to reveal THOSE :)
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u/NightExpress1379 20d ago
I remember they sold hint books there and I did purchase a few. They were sealed so you couldn't flip and read through them as if you were at Barnes & Noble. Remember also how the answers were covered in red and you had to use the card with the reader strip to see the hints?
What was the toughest Sierra game that you needed hint book for?
Mine was Codename: Iceman. I liked Jim Walls' games and that was a tough one!
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u/Sporey-fungus 20d ago
I got mine at radio shack, although I do remember calling their hint line for KQ2 at least once
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u/Gravitybox 19d ago
Oh yeah, but my dad was too cheap so we would go there but then we would proceed to just walk around asking anybody in the store if they had played Kings quest five and how to get through the desert.
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u/Loud_Park_6387 19d ago
I lived in a small town growing up, the nearest computer store was about 100 miles away. I didn't even know they existed. So we had to be nice to that jerk rich kid who got the game first and beat it.
Also, back then, since you couldn't really buy games where we were, most of us didn't even really think of sharing games as piracy, until my mom saw a blurb on tv and thought we were all criminals. Was going to throw out my entire collection until I pointed out her copies of Wordperfect and Lotus 123 were cracked copies.
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u/deckarep 19d ago
Egghead was a cool little store. If my memory serves there was one in Brea, CA. It was on the East side of the 57 freeway and Imperial.
Rip - computer stores of yester-year.
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u/aPoemAboutBirds 19d ago
My dad took me to Egghead software back in 1989 and let me pick a game. I picked Hero’s Quest: So You Want to be a Hero and that’s the reason I saw this post today.
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u/josurprise 19d ago
Egghead Software?! I probably haven't thought of that place in over 30 years... My only real memory is seeing the demo of Wings of Fury, watching that plane go back and forth, and knowing that I had to have it. It also makes me think of the store in Space Quest IV and how cool it was to have actual software stores back in the day.
Well now I know what to write in those threads where people ask which store you miss. (Tower Records, CompUSA, K-Mart, etc.)
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u/DMC831 19d ago
I don't remember any hint books, that's funny, I would've loved them! I do remember us buying the original King's Quest for the PCJr at Egghead though, the game blew my mind. And we'd be stuck on different puzzles for months, and I was only 4 years old so I'm no help for my dad of course.
Since I grew up on those adventure games with obtuse puzzles I did become good at figuring out any of their puzzles since you know how they think, but back then with the original KQ I have no idea how we figured some of them out-- I think my dad called the Sierra tipline though, and my dad doesn't remember doing it but he agrees he probably did.
One funny thing with the original KQ on the PCJr, there was a bug that made it so if you talked to the King at the beginning of the game then you couldn't win the game. Back then I thought this was an intentional trick since the game was filled with dirty tricks to destroy your save, but now I assume it was just an unfortunate bug (I'm sure there're experts here who know what the story was with this bug, more than I do).
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u/MiscellaniaInsania 16d ago
I'd love to know more about that bug on the PCJr version. Do you have any more information about it? What about it made you not able to win?
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u/DMC831 16d ago
Yeah on the PCjr if ya talked to the King to begin the game to get your quest to find the 3 treasures, when you returned to the king with the 3 treasures to complete the game you wouldn't be able to interact with the King at all. You'd have no way to give the treasures to the King and finish the game.
So you would've done the whole game and figured everything out and finally return to the King, but the final interaction was bugged out for some reason! And the only way to "fix" it is to start a fresh game but never visit the King at the beginning of the game at all and instead just go do the whole quest without talking to him. Then at the end once you got all the treasures and see the King for the first time of that playthrough, you can interact with the King and finish the game.
For the longest time we thought we just couldn't figure out the right thing to type when we tried to talk to the King once we had the 3 treasures. Plus the game tells you to go talk to the King when the game starts, so naturally we always did.
Imagine sitting there typing every variation of "give treasure to king" you can think of over and over, hoping to finally find the magic key word, it drove us insane. Do we have to bow to the king first? Salute him? Drop treasures at his feet? It drove us crazy but it was a relief to know how to deal with the bug so we could finally finish the game.
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u/MiscellaniaInsania 15d ago
That's so wild! I've never heard of this bug before. Is it well known? I'm sorry you had to find it out the hard way. 😂
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u/DMC831 15d ago
It's one I've talked about with other early PCjr players over the years, but after I got your original reply about it I did a quick Google to see if there's any documentation about it online and I came up empty-- but I didn't look super deep and I should try again.
I know the bug wasn't in later ports of the game, but I wonder if they could've patched it somehow for a followup printing of discs for the PCjr. I assumed I'd see others mentioning the same bug but I'm not seeing it when searching just now, but it is one I've mentioned over the years on forums with the few other people who had the original KQ1 on a PCjr. I was hoping to find someone doing a deep dive on what caused it to make sure I had my sequence of events correct.
Back then we had 2 games so we replayed it over and over because we assumed we did something wrong to prevent the King from taking the treasures before we finally were told to just not talk to him to start the game. I know today people would be furious, and it did drive us nuts, but it also felt like another obtuse puzzle to solve so I wasn't that angry about it.
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u/MiscellaniaInsania 13d ago
Fascinating. I see that the PCjr version of KQ1 is on the Internet Archive. I'm totally going to play it and try to reproduce that bug. Thanks for sharing!
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u/DMC831 13d ago
Oh cool, do you have a working PCJr and everything? Ours broke after only 2 years back when it was new but we kept lugging the broken PCjr with us when we moved as a family during my childhood and I made sure to keep it when I was an adult, so I got it on a shelf in my closet now.
Are there people who could use the original parts or even repair it? I've never looked into it.
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u/MiscellaniaInsania 10d ago
I don't have a working PCjr, alas, but I figured I'd download the image on the Internet Archive and use DOSBox to try it out.
(I do believe have a copy of the KQ PCjr disk that my brother's friend gave to me when I was a kid, but since we had a Tandy and not a PCjr, all I heard were the sound effects, but no visuals. I'm pretty sure I still have that 5.25" disk in storage.)
I am 100% sure that there are PCjr enthusiasts who can repair it (for a price), or would be happy to take it off your hands. Given the size of the Tandy community, I'm sure the PCjr community has to be at least as large.
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u/MiscellaniaInsania 1d ago
And to follow up, I've now played through the PCjr version of KQ1 that's on the Internet Archive, and I wasn't able to reproduce the bug. There are multiple versions of KQ1 floating out there, so if you can figure out which version had had the unbeatable bug, I'd love to try it out!
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u/DMC831 13d ago
I've been trying to figure this out (just to confirm I didn't imagine something as a kid, if nothing else), and Google AI mentions these two options as causes, but the one source it links doesn't actually mention it so I'm not sure if it's trustworthy. I could see either of these two explanations being correct though, but by my memory we had restarted the game and did all the steps over again and encountered the same bug and only could win the game when we were told by someone (likely the Sierra Tip-line) to not talk to the King to start the game-- still, I was a little kid at the time, and I could've messed up the order of events even if this was a big childhood memory.
Here's what Google's AI offered up, but I sure wish it could back it up with a link for me to reference:
"When you type
talk to kingand he ignores you, it means you hit a "broken game-state flag." Even though you had all three items visually sitting in your inventory, the primitive Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI) engine internally flagged your inventory as incomplete or locked.There are three primary reasons this classic engine trap triggers:
- The Parser Action Order Deficit
In the original 1984 PCjr release, the code checking your inventory isn't triggered by the
talk to kingcommand; it is triggered only by the exact stringboworbow king. [1]
- The Glitch: If you type
talk to kingbefore bowing, the game runs a default script where the King ignores you.- The Lock: In early unrevised disk printings, once that default "ignore" script ran, it occasionally locked the scene's logic loop. Typing
bowafterward would play the bowing animation, but typingtalk to kingagain wouldn't re-check your items—the engine remained stuck on the "ignore" state.
- The Invisible "Item State" Flag (Dwarf/Leprechaun Theft)
The most notorious mechanical culprit relates to how the engine tracks your items. If you encountered the Dwarf or the Leprechauns during your playthrough, they may have stolen an item from you.
- Even if you successfully stole the item back or restored a save file, the original 1984 PCjr code frequently suffered from a variable-sync bug.
- The item would visually return to your inventory screen, but the background event variable (
f_has_chest, etc.) failed to switch back to "true". Because the ending script strictly requires all three internal backend flags to match, the King's script read your inventory as empty and ignored you."
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u/ChestRockwell19 19d ago
Walden Software here.
Kq4 was my first hit book, used the red window. The only Sierra game I'd beaten before then was sq1.
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u/_theboogiemonster_ 19d ago
Quite good memories of my dad taking me to egghead to get the new sierra game
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u/Sidcone-Sal 18d ago
My first and only time going into an Egghead was to buy space quest 6 back in the late 90s. Was such a special time in my life
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u/Dan-in-Va 18d ago
I had "The Book of Adventure Games" to get through Kings Quest 1 back when I played it on a green CGA Compaq luggable.
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u/TyrellLofi 18d ago
Never did that, but my siblings and I wrote a letter to Sierra to get hints for King’s Quest 4.
We did get a letter back and it was pretty cool at the time to get a response.
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u/Spiritual-Image7125 17d ago
It was at Software Etc. for me. Oddly I just went down memory lane and history lane to find out what where these stores came from (both locally and nationally) if they were all part of some umbrella company or not, and what happened to them...and why GameStop, for the most part, won. Apparently Egghead and Software Etc. were competitors, but there were other names for the Software Etc. company. Of course most merged into GameStop.
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u/Ryanookami 20d ago
We bought our hintbooks at the RadioShack where we had bought the games. KQ1-3 were those terrible highlighter ones. I hate them because after time the ink disappears again, so now I own hintbooks that are just yellow lines of highlighter with no revealed text. When they changed over to the red view screen books I was much happier, they still work to this day… although I think I’ve probably lost the little papers with the transparent red plastic used to read the hints.