The outline of the story was pretty obvious this time. Graham was now king of Daventry, but he was a lonely king and was in need of a queen. So the subtitle of the sequel became Romancing the Throne, and the goal of the game was a classic fairy-tale theme: You had to travel to a faraway land and save a beautiful maiden in distress. She would make a perfect queen for Graham. The prospect of an entire royal family in the future started to form in Roberta's mind.
The game had
to be bigger than its prequel, and feature more detailed graphics. It should
also have more music than the first game.
Many famous
Sierra On-Line names were involved in the production of the game: Ken
Williams himself was one of the programmers. Mark Crowe and
Scott
Murphy, who would later become famous for their own highly successful
adventure game series Space Quest, both worked on the game, Mark
as an artist and Scott as a programmer. And Al Lowe, creator of
the famous Leisure Suit Larry series, was responsible for the music.
The credits list of this game proves that back in these days it was still
possible to become responsible for any part of a Sierra On-Line game. This
game started a very successful company tradition of using the King's
Quest games as a sort of "training ground" for future game developers.
King's Quest: II: Romancing the Throne was made a bigger and better game than its prequel in almost every aspect. King's Quest: Quest for the Crown contained about 80 scenes. This game had over 90, and there were more puzzles in it. Al Lowe composed 14 musical themes for the game, including Tchaikovsky's love theme from Romeo and Juliet. It was considered a pretty impressive musical score for a computer game at the time.
The game was released in May 1985. The ill-fated PCjr was taken off the market in the same year. But instead, the PCjr-compatible Tandy 1000 quickly became popular and both King's Quest games sold like crazy on the new platform. On the PC, the game only had four-color CGA graphics and single-voice PC Speaker sound.
King's Quest
II: Romancing the Throne was re-released in 1987, packaged in a new box
on two 5.25'' disks and one 3.5'' disk. The new version supported 16-color
EGA graphics on the PC.