Space Quest 6: Roger Wilco in the Spinal Frontier is a point-and-click adventure game created and released by Sierra On-Line in 1995. It is the sixth and last game in the Space Quest series. Like the earlier games in the series, it includes many parodies of science fiction movies and shows.
Plot
The game starts with Roger Wilco being tried for his actions in the previous game, Space Quest V. He is then demoted to a second-class janitor on the SCS DeepShip 86.
Later, Commander Kielbasa of the DeepShip gives the crew a break on the planet Polysorbate LX. Meanwhile, an elderly woman named Sharpei plans to harm Roger. She wants to use Roger's body to help her live longer as part of "Project Immortality."
Roger is saved multiple times by Stellar Santiago, a humanoid alien who is Roger's friend and romantic interest. Eventually, Sharpei captures Stellar and tries to use tiny robots to move her mind into Stellar's body. Roger uses technology that shrinks him to a very small size to stop Sharpei's robots inside Stellar's body.
The game ends with Roger and Stellar reunited, and Stellar suggests that Roger has a "next assignment."
Development and release
Space Quest 6: Roger Wilco in The Spinal Frontier used the SCI32 engine, version 2.100.002. This allowed the game to display Super VGA graphics with 256 colors at a resolution of 640×480. Unlike other SCI games, it did not use a pull-down menu at the top of the screen. Instead, it used a "verb bar" window at the bottom of the screen, similar to the SCUMM engine used by LucasArts. The graphics style was more cartoonish than in earlier games and included many 3-D images. Gary Owens returned as the narrator.
This was the final game in the Space Quest series. After defeating the pukoid mutants in Space Quest V, Captain Roger Wilco returned to StarCon headquarters but was court-martialed for breaking StarCon rules while saving the galaxy. The game’s subtitle, The Spinal Frontier, refers to a part of the story where Roger undergoes miniaturization and enters the body of a shipmate and romantic interest, a parody of the 1987 movie Innerspace. The original subtitle, Where in Corpsman Santiago is Roger Wilco?, was not used due to legal issues with the Carmen Sandiego brand. The romantic interest creates a new challenge for Roger, as she is a friend and not the mother of his child, as described in Space Quest IV.
Josh Mandel designed most of Space Quest 6, with Scott Murphy working as a creative consultant. Mandel left the project before completion due to conflicts with Sierra. Sierra asked Scott Murphy to finish the game and promoted him as the sole creator, despite his objections. This change caused some puzzles in the game to be poorly designed due to communication issues. In a 2006 interview, Mandel mentioned that a comic book CD in Nigel’s room, which included hints for a puzzle, was removed from the game. He expressed disappointment about its absence and the need to include puzzle hints in the manual instead.
Sierra On-Line released a special CD-ROM version of a Space Quest 6 demo. It was included with Sierra’s Interaction Magazine, PC Gamer Disc 9, early copies of Phantasmagoria, and possibly other media. The demo included a story unrelated to the main game and featured full voice acting by the game’s actors (early versions had limited speech). The demo begins with Roger Wilco cleaning a viewscreen on a spaceship while others relax. Suddenly, a ship shaped like an Escher cube arrives and beams two toaster-headed mechanoids, the Bjorn (a parody of the Borg), aboard. The Bjorn turn the crew into lemon sorbet, except Roger, who hides behind the viewscreen. Roger must find a way to restore his crewmates and drive the invaders away.
Reception
According to Sierra On-Line, total sales of the Space Quest series exceeded 1.2 million units by the end of March 1996.
A critic for Next Generation stated that Space Quest 6 was very similar to the first five games in the series, except for the specific puzzles included. The critic gave the game three out of five stars and wrote, "If you liked the first five, you'll want this. If not, you probably aren't even reading this review." Gary Meredith of PC Gamer US wrote that Space Quest 6 was "not the best of the Space Quest series," as it regressed in graphics and voice-acting quality compared to earlier games. He criticized the game's narration, noting that he had also disliked it in Space Quest IV. However, Meredith believed that Space Quest 6 would still appeal to fans of the series.
Space Quest 6 shared third place in Computer Game Review's 1995 "Adventure Game of the Year" award category. The editors praised the game's "good voice work," "very nice animation," and its humor.