In 1980, Roberta Williams was packing floppy disks into Ziploc bags at her kitchen table and answering the phone to give players hints. Fifteen years later she was directing a 200-person team on a live-action horror game shipped on seven CD-ROMs. This episode covers the woman known as the queen of adventure games, from a shy childhood in rural Southern California and a COBOL programming job at Lawry's Foods, to buying an Apple II in 1979, falling for Colossal Cave Adventure, and deciding that a mystery needed pictures.

We explain how she drew over 70 images on a VersaWriter for Mystery House while Ken Williams wrote a vector graphics engine to fit them on a disk, how 10,000 sales funded the move to Coarsegold and the founding of Sierra On-Line, and how she refused a merger with Spinnaker Software during the 1983 crash even as the couple mor ...