Roberta Williams

In 1979, Williams was a housewife with two kids and no experience or particular interest in computers. Meanwhile, her husband, Ken, worked for a computer company on huge IBM mainframe machines. It was around that time that the Apple computer was becoming a popular item in people's homes. Ken saw the potential home computing could have for the future and brought his enthusiasm home with him. That got Williams interested in home computers.

She began playing video games, first a text-based adventure game called Colossal Cave. Before long she was hooked on video games—especially of the adventure-style genre.[4]

When Williams began developing her first game in the late 1970s, she had no experience with gaming or computers – only in reading and storytelling. She did not know how to program computers, but her husband Ken did. Their first creation was Mystery House, an adventure game with black and white graphics for the Apple II computer that was the first computer game to include graphics – predecessors had been text-only.[5][6] To create graphics the Williams used a machine called a Versawriter, which was basically a board of thick plexiglass that had an arm-like device with an electronic eye at the tip.[4] To the Williams' surprise, the game was met with acclaim and they went on to become leading figures in the development of graphical adventure games throughout the 1980s and 1990s.[7]

In 1980, they founded the company On-Line Systems, which later became Sierra On-Line.[7] Her second title, Wizard and the Princess (1980), added color graphics.[8][9] But their biggest success was the King's Quest series, which featured a large expansive world that could be explored by players.[7] King's Quest I (1984) was the first adventure game to have animation, and King's Quest V (1990) was the first to use an icon-based interface.[9]

Williams also designed such titles as Mixed-Up Mother Goose (1987), The Colonel's Bequest (1989), and Phantasmagoria (1995), which was the first in her career to be developed in the full-motion video technology.[5] Phantasmagoria featured extreme violence and rape scenes. The game has received mixed reviews.[10] Though Sierra was sold in 1996, Williams' production credits date to 1999, when she retired from Sierra On-Line.[11]

After retiring in 1999 (stated at the time to be a "sabbatical"),[12] she stayed away from the public eye and rarely gave interviews to talk about her past with Sierra On-Line.[13] However, in a 2006 interview, she admitted that her favorite game she created was Phantasmagoria and not King's Quest: "If I could only pick one game, I would pick Phantasmagoria, as I enjoyed working on it immensely and it was so very challenging (and I love to be challenged!). However, in my heart, I will always love the King's Quest series and, especially, King's Quest I, since it was the game that really 'made' Sierra On-Line".[3] Williams also said that designing computer games was in the past for her then and that she intended to write a historical novel.[3]

In 2011, the video game website Gamezebo reported that Williams had returned from her sabbatical as a design consultant on the social network game Odd Manor.[14] Williams and her husband Ken have a blog about their worldwide cruising adventures on their 68-foot (21 m) yacht Nordhavn trawler.[15] They have another website about their time at Sierra for fans, Sierra Gamers.[16]