The first time I saw Space Quest 3 was at the house of the literally richest kid in town. I mean really, his dad owns a factory and even a a theme park! So they had this computer called the "PC", with a nice sound system and an expensive Roland sound card. I was standing there while he was playing SQ3 and I was blown away, not even really thinking I could ever own such a system myself.
Later I got an Amiga 500 computer, which looking back kicked the PC's ass when it comes to gaming. I was so happy that Space Quest 3 was available for it, now I could actually play it myself. Of course with all Sierra games there were several disks that you had to change during the game, and you often spent more time waiting for things to load and swapping disks than actually playing. I couldn't afford to get an extra disk drive, let alone a "hard disk" (I had read about those in a computer magazine, apparently it was a device that eliminates changing disks!).
Well, actually I once thought that the disk swapping might come to an end. In that magazine they were talking about this new type of disk, which is readable in a normal floppy drive, but could store as much as 10 megabytes on it. With that I could possibly store the entire game on a single disk and actually afford it! It was called "bubble memory", the technique was apparently that the data was stored as the state of a layer of bubbles on the disk. I was so excited I could hardly contain myself. Then I found out that it was an april fools' day hoax and... I cried.
The most emotional moment from playing Space Quest 3 was definitely walking around in a space scrap yard in the game, discovering something that looks like a ship, then actually getting it turned on and flying off with it! After that discovery I didn't want to fly off right away, but rather I called a friend over and we continued from there together. I think I was so excited I hit my head on my loft bed when getting up from my computer.
Thank you Sierra for all those great moments!
