Scott Murphy (born October 13, 1954) is an American

video game designer Video game design is the process of designing the content and rules of video games in the pre-production stage and designing the gameplay, environment, storyline and characters in the production stage. Some common video game design subdiscipline ...

, programmer, and writer who developed several adventure games, mostly for

Sierra On-Line Sierra Entertainment, Inc. (formerly On-Line Systems and Sierra On-Line, Inc.) was an American video game developer and publisher founded in 1979 by Ken and Roberta Williams. The company is known for pioneering the graphic adventure game genr ...

. He is best known for creating the ''

Space Quest ''Space Quest'' is a series of six comic science fiction adventure games released between 1986 and 1995. The games follow the adventures of a hopeless janitor named Roger Wilco, who campaigns through the galaxy for "truth, justice and really cl ...

'' series, mostly with his fellow "Guy from Andromeda",

Mark Crowe Mark Crowe is an American video game designer, artist, and writer who developed several adventure games, mostly for Sierra On-Line and its subsidiary Dynamix. He later worked at Pipeworks Software as Studio Design Director. Crowe is best known ...

Biography

Murphy started out in Sierra's hometown of

Oakhurst, California Oakhurst (formerly Fresno Flats) is a census-designated place (CDP) in Madera County, California, United States, south of the entrance to Yosemite National Park, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. At the 2020 census, the population was 5,9 ...

by cooking at a local restaurant. When his friend Doug Oldfield joined Sierra, Murphy discovered his love for adventure games and soon joined the company himself. Murphy worked his way up from customer support to actually working on games. He first worked with

on '' The Black Cauldron''. Crowe was the Art Director for the game when Murphy was added as a programmer. Murphy slowly became the only programmer on the project: "I put in a lot of free time over a summer spending nights out at his house debugging Black Cauldron. And then I ended up being the only one working on it. After a while, Ken and

Al Lowe Albert William Lowe (born July 24, 1946) is an American video game designer, programmer, and musician who developed several adventure games, mostly for Sierra On-Line. He is best known for creating the '' Leisure Suit Larry'' series. He has also ...

bailed out on me. So I got Black Cauldron shipping, and I was hooked." During the development of ''The Black Cauldron'', Murphy and Crowe discovered their mutual fondness for

science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel uni ...

. Eventually, they created a four-room concept to propose to Sierra founder Ken Williams that would eventually become the beginning scenes of ''

''. First released in 1986, ''Space Quest'' was a quick hit among adventure game fans and Murphy worked with Crowe to develop another three games, ending with ''

Space Quest IV ''Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers'' is a 1991 graphic adventure game by Sierra On-Line. It was released on floppy disks on March 4, 1991, and released on CD-ROM in December 1992 with full speech support and featuring ''Laugh-In' ...

'' in 1991. During this time, Murphy also worked on games from other series, including ''

King's Quest ''King's Quest'' is a graphic adventure game series, released between 1980 and 2016 and created by the American software company Sierra Entertainment. It is widely considered a classic series from the golden era of adventure games. Following th ...

'', ''

EcoQuest ''EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus'' is an educational adventure game developed by Sierra On-Line. The original concept was developed by Sierra VP of Creative Development, Bill Davis. The game designers are Jane Jensen and Gano Haine. The game w ...

'', and ''

Police Quest ''Police Quest'' (or ''SWAT'') is a series of police simulation video games produced and published by Sierra On-Line between 1987 and 1998. The first five were adventure simulation games, the first three of which were designed by former police ...

''. After ''Space Quest IV'', Crowe moved to work at Eugene, Oregon, home of Sierra subsidiary Dynamix, where he developed '' Space Quest V'' without Murphy's input. ''Space Quest'' returned to Murphy after Sierra came to him with a ''

Space Quest 6 ''Space Quest 6: Roger Wilco in the Spinal Frontier'' is a point-and-click adventure game developed and published by Sierra On-Line in 1995. It is the sixth and final game in the ''Space Quest'' series. Gameplay Plot The game begins with Roge ...

'' that had been started by

Josh Mandel Joshua Aaron Mandel (born September 27, 1977) is an American far-right politician who served as the 48th treasurer of Ohio from 2011 to 2019. A member of the Republican Party, he previously was the Ohio State Representative for the 17th dist ...

before he was ejected from the project. In 1997, Murphy began work on a proposed ''Space Quest 7'', which was shelved and restarted several times until Sierra finally closed down its Oakhurst facility on February 22, 1999, in a layoff called "Chainsaw Monday" by Murphy. Murphy had been fired a month and a half prior, and as he had no formal education beyond high school, took up odd jobs and eventually moved to Alabama to support his mother. In 2012, Murphy and Crowe came back together, and were joined by Chris Pope to start their own company called Guys from Andromeda. Following a successful Kickstarterbr>campaign
they began work on a project called ''SpaceVenture'' as a spiritual successor to the ''Space Quest'' series.

References

External links

*
''Scott Murphy''
profile at MobyGames {{DEFAULTSORT:Murphy, Scott 1954 births Living people American male video game actors American video game designers American video game programmers Artists from Chicago People from Madera County, California Sierra On-Line employees Space Quest