King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human

King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human
Apple II cover art by Greg Steffen
Developer(s)	Sierra On-Line
Publisher(s)	Sierra On-Line
Designer(s)	Roberta Williams
Programmer(s)	Al Lowe Bob Heitman Bob Kernaghan
Artist(s)	Doug MacNeill Mark Crowe
Writer(s)	Roberta Williams Annette Childs
Composer(s)	Margaret Lowe
Series	King's Quest
Engine	AGI
Platform(s)	MS-DOS, Apple II, Apple IIGS, Amiga, Atari ST, Mac, Tandy Color Computer 3
Release	October 1, 1986
Genre(s)	Adventure
Mode(s)	Single player

King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human is the third installment in the King's Quest series of graphic adventure games developed and released by Sierra On-Line in 1986. The game was originally released for the Apple II and PC DOS, and later ported to several other computer systems. It was the first title game in the series not to feature King Graham as the player character.

Most of the game's various lands and locations appear in the magic map. Once the protagonist Gwydion reaches a new region, he can use the magic map to travel to a previous region.

King's Quest III was markedly more difficult than its two predecessors. The player was required to type in magic spells line-by-line from a spell book that came with the game. The spells partially served as a form of copy protection, although the game already had a disk-based protection (it ran on a self-booter required disks to play, and could not be copied easily).

Gwydion's movements are controlled by the player using cursor buttons. In the original release version 1.01 (1986-11-08), using the AGI engine, the escape button pauses the game and there are no menus. Commands are accessed through the F keys, "Ctrl-", or manually typing; F1 displays a Help file listing all the commands. It has disk-based copy protection. The version 2.14 (1988-3-15) was included in many of the King's Quest collections over the years, with the disk based self-booting copy-protection removed. Pushing escape brings up a menu (arrow keys can be used to choose options), and the speed controls are included in the menu.

In King's Quest III, the story moves away from Daventry and King Graham to the land of Llewdor, where a boy named Gwydion is being kept by the wicked wizard Manannan. According to the introduction, for as long as he could remember, 17-year-old Gwydion has been held captive by Manannan as his servant, cooking and cleaning for him in his home atop a large mountain in Llewdor. From this vantage point, and with the help of a telescope, the seemingly all-knowing wizard watches the countryside, the shoreline and vast ocean to the east and an endless desert to the west.

Manannan takes a series of absences and Gwydion seizes his chance to escape. He breaks into the wizard's laboratory and reads Manannan's book of spells, then goes out in to Llewdor to collect ingredients for them. After solving many puzzles to obtain the spell ingredients Gwydion turns Manannan into a cat and is free. His journey then takes him across the ocean to Daventry to rescue a beautiful princess from a dangerous three-headed dragon. It is eventually revealed that he is the son of King Graham, kidnapped from Daventry by the magician at a young age, and the princess he has rescued is his sister, Rosella.