Woman of the Month: Princess Rosella

Princess Rosella from King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella
 and King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride

Behold: the pixelated visage of the first playable female protagonist in a computer adventure game. I’m cautious not to say the first playable female protagonist in a computer game ever, since that honour goes to Mother Kangaroo in the Atari game Kangaroo, or perhaps Billie Sue in Wabbit, both of which were released in 1982.

But they were considered arcade games, not adventure games with structured stories and developed characters. With those criteria in place, Rosella was undoubtedly first when she appeared in King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella in 1988.

Yet even this wasn’t her first appearance; that took place back in 1986, at the end of King’s Quest III: To Heir of Human. It was not an auspicious start, as she was presented a standard Damsel in Distress who had been offered up as sacrifice to a three-headed dragon, saved at the last minute by her long-lost twin brother Alexander, who – as the textboxes are at pains to tell us – finds her super-hot.

But within hours of this ordeal, Rosella gets the chance to take an adventure of her own. Delighted at her safe return, her father King Graham decides to pass on his trademark adventurer’s cap to his children, only to keel over with a heart attack before it reaches their outstretched hands. Seizing the opportunity to be magically transported to a faraway land where grows a rare fruit that could cure him, Rosella is given twenty-four hours to save her father’s life and rescue the land of Tamir from an evil fairy.

Rosella only cameos in the next two games, not appearing until each one’s conclusion, but in King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride, she once against takes centre-stage. Here she’s reintroduced as a Rebellious Princess who chafes against the restrictions of her royal standing, instead longing for excitement and adventure. She even gets an “I Want” Song in which she conveys her disgust at the idea of marriage. So like Alice down the rabbit hole, she barely hesitates before leaping into a magical portal that opens before her during a walk in the forest, though which she can glimpse a castle in the clouds...

Eight years after the release of her first adventure, the graphics and sound engines had improved exponentially, granting Rosella a level of characterization (largely due to the voice-acting and animation) that could only be hinted at earlier – though in saying that, it’s amazing how much personality a collection of pixels was able to convey in The Perils of Rosella. But The Princeless Bride depicts her as something of a Disney Princess: brave, kind, impulsive, curious, stubborn...

There is a perfect blend of femininity and gender neutrality at work within Rosella’s story: on the one hand, she’s clearly a Proper Young Lady, who kisses frog princes, befriends the seven dwarfs, rides a unicorn, and visits the island of a fairy queen, but also someone who gets swallowed by a whale, steals the hen that lays golden eggs, finds Pandora’s Box, and goes graverobbing in the dead of night in a zombie-infested cemetery.

It’s difficult to understate the importance of her existence, or the impact she had on me as a child – namely, that I took it as a given that girls could have their own virtual adventures. It seems odd that things have gotten both better and worse since then, for as creator/designed Roberta Williams said in an interview: “I knew the female lead is just fine for women and girls who play the game, but wasn’t sure how it would go over with some of the men. And you know what? It wasn’t as controversial as I expected.”

If only that were still true today!