King's Quest

Sierra experienced an explosion of growth before 1984 by churning out over 60 games that almost exclusively required very little design. They believed anything would sell and the market could not be saturated. They invested obscene amounts of money into the company and 200 new employees (they had 2 in 1981) Well, hundreds of other companies did the same and the rest made complex games. They had to rapidly down size but during their growth they'd acquired a contract with IBM. IBM was designing the PCjr and wanted a complex game with multiple ways to solve challenges and overall replayability. Since the PCjr had 128k, it could be done. Such a game would set Sierra apart from the crowd and possibly save it from debts. King's Quest required 128k, Commodore 64, Sierra's only profitable platform at the time, was out. Many other sub-128k systems (such as Apple ][) were out as well. But, while King's Quest was begin developed, companies introduced many 128k+ systems (such as Apple //c) prompted many users to upgrade their old systems (Commodore 64 was still out). King's Quest would eventually be ported. Before King's Quest IBM dropped support for the PCjr. This should have been Sierra's death blow. But Tandy had cloned the PCjr with the Tandy 1000. More than that, they'd added cheap but better graphics and sound than the PCjr had. Tandy saved Sierra. And people bought Tandy's to play Sierra games. Commodore eventual made the Commodore 128 (not a gaming platform) and made slow but suitable RAM expansion modules. Support for the RAM expansions were dropped which prompted 3 companies and hobbyists to developer their own expansions. None were sold in significant numbers to home users (some businesses bought them to avoid the expense of buying new PCs). Sierra never ported KQ games to Commodore 64.