Page 6 Mission: Asteroid Roberta Williams is a country girl whose childhood revolved around fairy tales, magic and fantasy. She read a lot, fantasized a lot and told stories to her friends. Some years later, after getting married and moving to Los Angeles, her husband introduced her to an entirely new form of story telling – computer Adventures.
Ken Williams was a programmer on an IBM mainframe and used to bring a terminal home every night. As it happens, the computer had some games on it including the classic Crowther and Woods original Adventure! After playing it at home, Roberta said to herself "Gee, I could do that!". So she designed an Adventure called "Mystery House" and Ken did the programming. It was a fairly simple game inspired by the Agatha Christie novel "Ten Little Indians". It had black and white line drawings and was only available for the Apple, but it was a start.
They formed On-Line Systems (which later became Sierra On-Line) so that they could distribute the game. Before long they released a second game called "Wizard and the Princess". It had full screen, high resolution colour graphics and was heralded as a major breakthrough in Adventures. On-Line's success was now assured. See the full review