Roberta Williams

This stay-at-home mom created the first computer game with graphics and later sold her company for $1B.

In 1979, Roberta Williams was a stay-at-home mom with two young kids.

Her husband, Ken, was a programmer working on IBM mainframes.

One day, he brought home an Apple II.

Roberta started playing a text-based game called Colossal Cave Adventure… and didn’t stop for hours.

And one day she decided to create her own game.

She wrote a murder mystery inspired by Agatha Christie and Clue.

She sketched out 100+ hand-drawn scenes.

Her husband coded it.

They called it Mystery House, and it became the first-ever computer game with graphics.

She packed the floppy disks in Ziploc bags and sold them by mail order.

When players got stuck, they called her house, and she answered.

In its first few months, Mystery House made $20,000.

So they launched a company: On-Line Systems (later Sierra On-Line).

Roberta went on a run.

She released The Wizard and the Princess, the first full-color adventure game.

Then Time Zone, which spanned 12 floppy disks and thousands of years in-game.

Then a collaboration with Jim Henson on The Dark Crystal.
Then King’s Quest…

When IBM wanted a game to showcase their new PCjr computer, they went to Sierra.

Roberta had a vision: a fairy-tale adventure where you could walk around objects, explore freely, and control your character onscreen.

The result was King’s Quest (1984), and it was revolutionary:
- First use of animated 3D-like movement in adventure games
- First to use the new 16-color EGA standard
- First to let players walk in front of and behind objects
- First to blend storytelling and exploration at scale

It became a massive hit.

IBM’s PCjr failed, but King’s Quest was ported to dozens of platforms and topped sales charts.

In 1988, she released King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella.

One of the first major games with a female protagonist.

Everyone told her it was a bad idea.

Boys wouldn’t want to “play as a girl.”

She released it anyway.

It outsold the previous entries.

And it brought in a 40% female player base... unheard of at the time.

She followed with Mixed-Up Mother Goose (500,000+ copies sold) and Phantasmagoria (a full-motion horror game using real actors and 3D-rendered sets).

Phantasmagoria alone came on seven CD-ROMs, had a 500-page script, and cost $4.5M to produce.

It was banned in some countries for its violence, but still became Sierra’s best-selling game ever, moving over a million copies.

By the mid-90s, Sierra On-Line was making $158M a year.

They had nearly 1,000 employees.

And Roberta?

She was the only female game designer in the world running a top-selling franchise.

But then the crash came.

In 1996, Sierra was sold to CUC International for over $1B in stock.

Roberta was against the deal, but shareholders pushed it through.

Within a few years: CUC was exposed for fraud, Sierra was gutted by layoffs, and Roberta, frustrated and exhausted, walked away from the industry in 1999.

She and Ken disappeared for two decades, traveling the world by boat.

But in 2023, at age 70, she came back and released a modern 3D remake of Colossal Cave, the game that first inspired her.