I'm gonna go seriously old school on you and take you back to a time before Al Gore invented the internet. This was a time when you bought a game it came in a box with 12 or more 1.44 megabyte floppy disks that were needed for installation (some games needed them for installation AND to play the game.) It was made by Sierra, who were a powerhouse of great game releases back in the day. Many years later they would be acquired by Activision and I have no idea if they function as a company anymore.
King's Quest took up a lot of my own and my friends' time back in the mid to late 80's and even though the graphics are very simplistic by today's standards. The story and the puzzles were engaging enough to keep us glued to the screen of our exceptionally weak (by today's standards) computers for hours on end.
This was back in a time when not just everyone owned a computer and purchasing one was far more expensive than it is now. Our first family computer was called a Sysdyne and it was more than $1000 US. We acquired it primarily for my father, who worked in database management at the time. However, us kids quickly absconded the machine and installed all manor of games on it.
I mean just look at that. Ridiculous as it may sound, that was really the best graphics that anyone could offer in 1986 and it was actually considered quite cutting edge. I had previously stated this was point and click but it didn't actually even use the mouse. You had to use the arrow keys and then other keys to interact with the surroundings. To make matters even more difficult it was require that you manually type in the name of spells that were listed in the manual that came with the game. This was a method of copy-protection but anyone with access to a copier could easily get around this.
King's Quest 3 was filled with lots of ways to do things terribly wrong and only 1 way to do each of the various steps correctly. Keep in mind that there was no way to get the answers other than to simply figure it out (due to the lack of google existing at the time) so this game would often times haunt my and my friends days and nights when we had reached an impasse. It was so glorious when someone would have a stroke of genius and figure it out.
nice video made by PushingUpRoses, but she should maybe turn her mic down a touch
King's Quest 3 actually received a great deal of bad press for being too hard but that was what made the game really interesting. You had a time-limit of sorts and me and my friends would work as a team to read the ingredients from the spellbook while the fastest typer clacked away at our then, monstrous and heavy keyboards.
We had a real sense of accomplishment every step of the way because this game required a great deal of thinking and a great deal of patience to complete it. I don't recommend you go back and play this game because you (like most people) will quickly grow bored of what is now crappy graphics. Also, since we now have the internet people are very likely to succumb to the ease of finding the answer with a quick search on duck-duck-go. There have been several unofficial remakes with updated graphics and if you find one of those, you can (for free) get a glimpse into what gaming was like back in the 80's.