Space Quest IV’s Really Fucking Gross You Know

Space Quest is a game franchise that was first released in 1986, and saw installments in 1987, 1989, and then we had the release in 1991 of Roger Wilco vs the Time Rippers. In this franchise, the fourth game includes something fascinating and interesting. These games had let you travel through space at light speed, eat intergalactic foodstuffs, save the universe multiple times, shoot down spaceships, create a star and travel through time and dimensions, but it was in Space Quest IV they let you have

half a conversation

with a woman.

Puttin’ a fold because cw: sexism and some transphobiaaaaa,

I’m not kidding. I have searched Space Quest 1 through 3 up and down,and in those games there are alien creatures coded male and there are dudes and it is not until the fourth game there’s any woman who gets dialogue.

It’s not a conversation, mind you: She talks at you and you try to get a word in edgewise but she won’t listen to you, because hey, women, right? Then she kidnaps you, and her and her coded-lesbian friend threatens to shave your legs.

Then you’re interrupted by a monster, save the day, and the women run off into the mall after forgiving you while ignoring what you’re saying (because women, right), then you’re left, in a mall, to consider this, this strange, space-wise adventure of having spoken to a woman.

I know what you’re thinking; this is a work created by some people who maybe, I dunno, don’t have a great relationship with women? When you consider that this is the first appearance of women, five years and four installments after the game started?

I’m not inclined to call work misogynistic unless it’s proactively advancing an actively anti-woman agenda, but this is a comedy game. This is what this game thinks of as funny, and the thing it finds funny is… this. That’s what this is, this is normal. This doesn’t need explanation or exception, the comedy is that Even In This Outlandish Place, WOMEN, RIGHT.

Then there’s the crossdressing bit.

You remember that hot girl, up there? The one with the blue one-piece and the cleavage? Well, turns out Roger Wilco can look exactly enough like her to fool her bank’s security software by putting on a black minidress and a wig.

And then the clerk at the store calls you a sicko for buying the dress.

Sssssso.

Yeah.

One of the underdocumented elements in the Golden Age of the Adventure Game is that it fucking sucked.