SCI (Sierra Creative Interpreter)
More info
- Owner
- Sierra On-Line
- Released
- 1988
- Type
- Game engine
- Predecessor
- AGI (Adventure Game Interpreter)
Sierra's adventure game engine from 1988 to the late 1990s, a bytecode interpreter that let the same game run on PC, Amiga and Atari ST.
SCI replaced AGI with King's Quest IV (1988) and raised the bar on almost everything: higher resolution, support for sound cards like the AdLib and Roland MT-32, and its own object-oriented scripting language whose syntax owed more to Lisp than to anything Sierra's designers were used to. Games compiled to bytecode run by an interpreter, so porting meant rewriting the interpreter, not the game.
The engine went through generations. SCI0 still had the text parser where you typed "look tree"; SCI1 moved to 256 colours and an icon-based point-and-click interface, and the last versions handled high-resolution graphics and video. Space Quest, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and Quest for Glory all ran on it. That they are still playable is down to volunteers who reverse-engineered the interpreter, work that now lives in ScummVM.