Released in 1986 for DOS, The Black Cauldron was Sierra On-Line’s kid-friendly adventure game based on the Disney movie of the same name, itself inspired by Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain books. Built on the same AGI engine that powered early King’s Quest titles, it ditched punishing puzzles and typing commands in favor of simple arrow-key controls and multiple endings—pretty forward-thinking for the time. Players guided Taran, an assistant pig-keeper, through quests to protect Hen Wen and stop the Horned King, with choices actually affecting how the story wrapped up. Sierra even dropped incremental AGI updates to improve graphics and compatibility across IBM PCs, Tandy, and early compatibles, making it one of those games that lived in floppy disk collections well into the ‘90s.