King's Quest 2

King's Quest II is an adventure game set in the pseudo-medieval fairy tale-inspired fantasy realm of Kolyma, in which the player controls the character King Graham to complete a quest for three keys to rescue the imprisoned Valanice. The game world is divided into dozens of locations, or flip-screens, with one location visible at a time. These locations are presented in pseudo-3D as if viewed from the side, with the player moving Graham around the screen in front of and behind other elements of the location.

In addition to moving Graham, the player can interact with the objects, obstacles, and creatures within the location. , "use key on lock"). The allowable commands are contextual to where Graham is standing in the location; for example, "get stone" only has an effect if Graham is standing in a part of a screen where there is a stone present. Some locations have other characters which he can talk to or who may kill him.

The game has a minimal story, mostly told through the game's manual and an introductory cutscene. One year after the conclusion of King's Quest I, in which Sir Graham retrieved the three stolen treasures of Daventry and became the new king, he sees a vision of his predecessor King Edward in a magic mirror. King Edward advises him that now that the realm was restored to prosperity, Graham needed to find a wife to ensure the future stability of the realm. Graham hosts a celebration to meet all of the eligible maidens of the land, but is not enthralled by any of them. He laments this in front of the mirror, which shows him a vision of a beautiful young woman, Valanice, in captivity on the top of an ivory crystal tower in the land of Kolyma.

King Graham sets off at once to Kolyma to rescue Valanice. There he must travel around the land, as well as above the mountains, below the sea, and in the castle of Count Dracula to find the three keys that unlock the doors to the enchanted island where the witch Hagatha has imprisoned Valanice. Graham does so, in the process interacting with and outwitting figures such as the evil Enchanter and King Neptune, and rescues Valanice. At the end of the game, they are married in a ceremony attended by characters from the game and its predecessor.

Sierra On-Line was founded in 1979 by Roberta and Ken Williams as On-Line Systems, and over the next few years released several successful adventure video games. In late 1982, it was approached by IBM to develop a graphic adventure game that would showcase the graphical capabilities of the upcoming IBM PCjr home computer. Sierra spent 18 months on the game, titled King's Quest or later King's Quest I, with Roberta Williams as the designer alongside a team of 6 programmers and artists. Williams interpreted IBM's request for a game like Wizard and the Princess (1980) literally, and decided to write a game with a heroic player-character saving a kingdom.

She made the game world as a blend of common fairy tales that could be directly experienced as a game. Sierra later stated that the core elements of a King's Quest game were family-friendly humor, fairy tale themes, cute characters, a clear story, and non-violent solutions to problems.

King's Quest II sold over 100,000 copies by February 1987, and by mid-1987 the combined sales of the first three King's Quest games surpassed 500,000. Reviews of the game were generally positive, and the gameplay was compared positively to other games and to King's Quest I. Keith Campbell of Computer and Video Games said that it was "a totally new approach to computer adventuring", while a review from Computer Entertainer said that it had more depth and locations than the first game. Stefan Swiergiel of Aktueller Software Markt praised the text parser's understanding of player inputs, which Computer Entertainer noted as being better than King Quest I's.

Brad Kershaw of Antic and Nick Clarkson of ST Action additionally praised the design of the game world and character interactions. Stephen Pietrowicz of Amazing Computing, however, found the gameplay simplistic, though harder than that of King's Quest I.

The lowered development costs from the reuse of AGI from King's Quest I for projects like King's Quest II and The Black Cauldron (1985) led to success for the company in the following years. The King's Quest series, which has been described as Sierra's "flagship series", includes a further six games by Sierra, beginning with King's Quest III in 1986 and concluding with King's Quest: Mask of Eternity in 1998. King's Quest II has been released in several collections of games in the series in the 1990s and 2000s. It is also included in the modern King's Quest Collection on Steam and the King's Quest 1+2+3 collection released on GOG.

In 1988, after the release of King's Quest IV, Silicon Valley Books published The King's Quest Companion, a combination hint guide and novelization by Peter Spear of the games in the series. Updated editions were released through 1997 as further games were released in the series.