If you've played either of the King's Quest remakes by AGD Interactive (better known by their original name, Tierra Entertainment), you already know this team is dedicated to quality, tradition, and finishing what they start. Britney Brimhall and Christopher Warren, also known as Anonymous Game Developers 1 and 2, have been promising for years that they would ultimately turn their efforts to commercial projects. That venture is now well underway. Brimhall and Warren, along with a few other AGDI alums and many fresh faces, have regrouped under the name Himalaya Studios to create original adventure games in the traditional, point & click style. Their first offering, Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman's Mine, will be released later this year. But before I get to that, a little backstory.

From the early days of their collaboration, Brimhall and Warren viewed their VGA remakes of classic Sierra titles as learning experiences that would someday help them move to commercial projects. The response to their fan games convinced the team that a well-made adventure game could still be commercially viable—in spite of recent cancellations from large, high-profile companies. "It is difficult for a company to justify taking the time, energy, and money to make a complex adventure game when they could make a lousy yet more common game that will appeal to a wider audience," Brimhall explains. "For this reason, it is a prime time for small development teams to create adventure games—the teams who have a love for the genre, the passion, and do not have to worry about bringing in enough in sales to support a huge, multi-million dollar firm."

Although the team is still comparatively small, around 20 programmers, background artists, animators, and composers—distributed across three continents—are contributing to Himalaya's first commercial project. "We continue to push ourselves to new limits," Brimhall says. "We're striving to 'one up' our previous work." To do this, Himalaya is building off the "tried-and-true" model of their remakes (and of the classic titles that came first) with additions such as lip-syncing, dynamically changing music, professional voice acting, intricate animations, and 3D cutscenes.

Al Emmo, the team's first original endeavor, is a classic tale of a stranger in a strange land with his sights set on finding fortune and getting the girl. I've played a portion of the game, and I think it will appeal not only to old-school Sierra and LucasArts fans, but to anyone who enjoys humorous and heavily story-driven games. Al Emmo is a George Costanza type (mid-forties, balding, lives at home with his parents) who has traveled to the western town of Anozira to acquire a mail order bride. In the game's opening cutscene, Al is spurned by his would-be lover and left behind in the small desert town, with a week to kill before the next train comes through. Discouraged by this turn of events, Al pays a visit to the local saloon and catches a glimpse of Rita Peralto, a buxom lounge singer and the town's most eligible bachelorette. Winning her heart becomes Al's top priority. He sets out across the Anozira countryside looking for gifts to help him win Rita away from Antonio Bandana, a dashing Spaniard who's looking for a wife himself. Ultimately Al's quest will lead him to the "lost Dutchman's mine," a place brimming with riches, according to local legend—and, as luck would have it, connected to Rita's family.

Brimhall and Warren came up with the game's premise, then handed the story over to lead writer Daniel Stacey, whose participation in the King's Quest 2 project played a large role in that game's success. Stacey has fleshed out the script to portray a world that lives and breathes in nearly every pixel on every screen. Can you remember the last game you played where everything you clicked told you something new about the environment? That's the kind of game Al Emmo is shaping up to be—one where every character, scene, and conversation works to inform and entertain the player. The wealth of narration results in a world that's much more immersive than the stark, hotspotless shells to which we've grown accustomed in the past few years of adventure game releases. This abundance of information may not be to every player's taste, but as someone who's starving for interactivity, I'm thrilled to see Himalaya Studios escorting players back to the jam-packed environs of days past.

In spite of its small-town setting, Al Emmo weighs in with around 70 locations and 35 characters (humans and animals). "The game is its own little world," Brimhall says. "It will take a lot of time exploring to exhaust all the options." Having already spent a good many hours poking around the countryside and puzzling through the game's first four chapters, I can vouch for the exploration value. Players can look forward to all types of puzzles, including inventory, logic, and conversation-based challenges. "Being not only adventure game developers, but also players, we've gone to great lengths to make puzzles that people are going to enjoy," Brimhall explains. "We've included tons of puzzles to keep the game interesting and challenging from beginning to end." The portion I played included the collection and use of a variety of items, a clever (and easy) arcade sequence, and multiple challenges that required several tiers of problem solving to reach the final solution. The puzzles aren't overly difficult, but they're well constructed and definitely kept me thinking.