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So what's all the fuss about?
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Who IS Roger Wilco?
Well, there's the short answer, and there's the long one. I'll start with the short one. Roger Wilco is the eponymous hero of Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers, just one of a long running late 20th Century computer game series.
Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers also bore the name Space Quest IV. And that's really where we should start explaining the long answer to the question. The Space Quest Series of 1986-95 spanned 6 games and has produced a small but vibrant community of fans who loved the comic Sierra adventure games of the late-80s to early 90s. Roger Wilco was the leading man.
Roger is a janitor. Between stints as a saviour of the universe, getting lost on a desert planet, scoring with StarCon officers and battling dysfucntional androids, Wilco just loves to clean. So, we first saw him in Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter, way back in 1986. He's been sleeping in a closet, the ship's been overrun with aliens and as he hasn't got anything better to do, he might as well save his planet and possibly the galaxy in the process. Roger is most definately a victim of circumstance, but that's all part of the fun. An epic battle ensues over the decade, Roger managing to survive changes in video resolution, sound cards, the loss of a key writer, and many, many sci-fi and pop culture references which landed writers Messers Murphy and Crowe in a lot of trouble over the years.
Roger Wilco, quite simply, IS Space Quest. We see him evolve as we see the technology evolve in the computer business. His hair changed colour, his uniform became more sophisticated, he gained a voice, he found love, he found a partly digested twinkie - to explain Roger Wilco is to explain Space Quest. Roger's harmless - like Space Quest.
One of the great things about the series is that it managed to balance being rather satirical towards sci-fi in general and yet be family friendly. Roger is likable as a character - like Space Quest. SQ never shirked the responsability of providing a good story. There was always a plot and, unlike many episodes of Star Trek or other computer games, the ending didn't seem bolted on at the end because the tape had run out. Each one lent itself perfectly for a sequel, and each one worked on so many levels due to the incredible attention to detail in every scene. Only in Space Quest could you laugh at the description of a rock. I have yet to play a game series yet which makes you want to stay tuned for the next episode like the great TV series of my time. There's only so much you can do with Doom. Space Quest's limits, however, were the limits of very warped imaginations.
And that's what sq7.org are attempting to do. Bring back that crazy janitor and the deep universe in which he resides back to life. The community and the love of the series has produced a number of fan projects and, quite bizarrely and rarely for the modern world, some have been finished. Therefore, the 1986-95 tag that looks almost like a tombstone is not true. SQ:TLC and SQ:0 have proved that that number can extend at least a decade past that and, we hope, even further.
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