Roberta Williams is an American video game designer, writer, and a co-founder of Sierra On-Line (later known as Sierra Entertainment), who developed her first game while living in Simi Valley, California. She is most famous for her work in the field of graphic adventure games with titles such as Mystery House, the King's Quest series, and Phantasmagoria. She is married to Ken Williams and retired in 1999. Roberta Williams is one of the most influential PC game designers of the 1980s and 1990s, and has been credited with creating the graphic adventure genre. 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. 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. 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. 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. In 1980, they founded the company On-Line Systems, which later became Sierra On-Line. The companies biggest success came with the the King's Quest series, which featured a large expansive world that could be explored by players. After retiring in 1999 (stated at the time to be a "sabbatical"), 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. Ars Technica stated that Williams was "one of the more iconic figures in adventure gaming". GameSpot named her as the number ten in their list of "the most influential people in computer gaming of all time" for "pushing the envelope of graphic adventures" and being "especially proactive in creating games from a woman's point of view and titles that appealed to the mainstream market, all the while integrating the latest technologies in graphics and sound wherever possible." n 1997, Computer Gaming World ranked her as number 10 on the list of the most influential people of all time in computer gaming for adventure game design. In 2009, IGN placed the Williams at 23rd position on the list of top game creators of all time, expressing hope that "maybe one day, we'll see the Williams again as well."

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