Jim Walls: Question and Answer with the Creator of the Police Quest Series

It happened at night - A guy was driving a stolen car. I tried to stop him, but he didn't want to stop. I chased him around town, and he got up to around 55 miles an hour in a downtown area.

Then he came to an intersection and stood on the brakes. I was right behind him, but he was out of his car waving a .357 magnum before I could get out of my seatbelt. He blew my windshield out, then started running toward my car to finish me off. Just then his car started rolling, and that distracted him. He ran back to try and stop it, and that gave me the time to get out of my car.

We exchanged gunfire, and I hit him, though I didn't know it at the time. He ran behind a fence and I heard another shot, which turned out to be him trying to shoot the lock off the fence. That was his last round, and since he wasn't successful in shooting the lock off, he went over the top. Later we found blood on the top of the fence - that's how I knew I'd shot him. He ran a few blocks to a nearby shopping center, used his gun to commandeer another car and got away. The next day he checked into a hospital with a 'self-inflicted' gunshot wound.

From the time I called in the pursuit until the time backup arrived was only 40 seconds. It felt like it was a lifetime. Everything was in slow motion. I knew during those few seconds I was going to die.

The only thing I worried about was, was I going to feel that bullet go through my brain? After the shoot-out, I felt OK. After any kind of incident like that, you always have to see a psychologist, to see if you're all right to go back to work. The psychologist said I was fine, so I went back to work.

I was able to pick the suspect out of a 12 man photo lineup, I'll never forget his face, even now. While the suspect was awaiting his preliminary hearing, he escaped. They caught him right away that time. He was tried on 7 felony counts, found guilty on all of them and sentenced to 23 years in Folsom Prison.

While he was awaiting transportation to Folsom he told another prisoner that he was going to appeal all 7 counts and if he got a retrial he was going to escape and go after me. The guy got a retrial, came back, and sure enough, he escaped. For a while I didn't go anywhere without my gun. He was gone two years before they caught him in Florida.

Jim Walls has been designing hit games for Sierra since his groundbreaking Police Quest in 1987. His games have always been outstanding in terms of hard-edged realism in a market dominated by fantasy. We talked to Jim about his games and the real-life events that inspired them while he was working on his latest title, Police Quest 3.

We know you spent 15 years in law enforcement, but other than that, very little is known about you.
Walls: That's the way I like it (laughs). I'm a private kind of a guy, I keep to myself pretty much - I guess I was born that way.

What else?
Walls: I like all kinds of sports, outdoor activities like hunting and fishing, and diving. I've got five children, four of whom are grown up, and one at home who's 17. I'd describe myself as middle-of-the-road kind of guy. I'm the kind of person who likes to make up my own mind about things instead of letting other people decide for me. That's gotten me in a lot of trouble, (laughs) it's true.

You wrote the first Police Quest game while you were recovering from the aftereffects of a very traumatic experience - a shootout with an armed suspect. How did the shootout and the events that followed change your life?
Walls: Well, at first it didn't. After about a year, it started affecting me. I started having anxiety attacks - what they call a delayed traumatic response. It was making it difficult for me to do my job. I went on a leave of absence for a year, then retired.

While you were on leave, Ken Williams asked you if you could translate your experience into a game. Did it help, being able to get the experience outside yourself, so to speak?
Walls: Being busy, working - that was the biggest help. When I was on leave, all I could do was sit around and think about it, so keeping busy helped me a lot.

Do you feel you were able to do justice to the subject of modern police work in a computer game?
Walls: I think so, in a limited way. In the first game you had to follow strict police procedure to get through the game. I put as much in there as I could to make it authentic, but the memory was fairly limited at that time. Of course, that's gotten increasingly better with each game.

Police Quest was a big hit, even with police departments. Was it this authenticity that made it so popular?
Walls: Well, Police Quest was the first game of it's kind - a game based entirely on reality. At that time, just about every game around was a fantasy of some sort. I think the authenticity and that feeling of reality had a lot to do with the game's success.

We've seen some of the art from Police Quest 3. It has an entirely different look and feel from the previous two games, doesn't it?
Walls: Oh yeah, completely different. The new parserless interface is one of the big differences. It means you have to find a different way of telling the story, rethink everything you used to know about designing a game. But this kind of interface puts you in the game the way a typed-in interface can't. It gives you a more real feeling if you don't have to worry about what you have to type. It's more intense.

Speaking of "intense", there's a lot of talk about Police Quest 3; that it's the most realistic - not to mention the most brutal - game of the series. Do you feel that's true?
Walls: Brutal? I guess there are brutal things in the game, but it's just pointing out how the world is. These things are actually happening - these kinds of people are actually running around out there, even if we don't want to think about it. It's not like we're coming out in favor of brutality - the game is very much against violence and crime, like the previous two games. The game is intense, its subject matter is realistic, and with the tools we have now, the high-resolution graphics, the moods that can be created with the music and the sound - well it just increases the realism, reinforces it. It's not a game for the fainthearted, I guess.

Note: This interview originally appeared in a 1992 issue of Sierra/Dynamix magazine.