"Upscale" Sierra adventure game backgrounds in high resolution

Make King's Quest and Space Quest backgrounds look smooth and high resolution.

This is the opening scene of the Sierra classic adventure game, King’s Quest:

This is that exact same scene when passed through a new tool called agi-upscale:

Zoom in.

This tool works by taking the original artwork data — which is stored as vector drawing commands, as opposed to bitmap data — and re-renders it using modern drawing routines at a higher resolution than the original.

Thus we get scenes from these classic games… looking so much smoother.

To see a demonstration of how original Sierra games (using the “AGI” engine) drew scenes, see this Tweet which slowed down the process of drawing that same scene from above:

agistuff @agistuff

King's Quest: Quest for the Crown, Room 001 #slowmotion #AGI #Sierra

Just because it’s cool, here is an original scene from Space Quest:

And then here is the same scene ran through agi-upscale:

While I, personally, love the pixelated, low resolution look of the originals… I must admit to how cool it is to see the same scenes rendered like this. Kudos to the developer of this awesome little tool!