King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! dropped in 1990 and blew minds because it was the first game in the series to ditch text parsers for a point-and-click interface—huge deal back then. Sierra pushed the VGA graphics hard with 256 colors, full-screen backgrounds, and even a soundtrack that sang if you had a Sound Blaster or Roland MT-32 hooked up. You played as King Graham, trekking through icy mountains, deserts, and dark forests to rescue Castle Daventry after it literally vanished. It hit DOS first, then rolled out to NES in 1992 and Windows CD-ROM in 1993 with full voice acting—yep, they went all in on the “talkie” version. For a ton of us, this was the game that made PCs feel like the future of adventure gaming.