Space Quest 5 Fun Facts
Shortly after Space Quest 4 was released the famous Two Guys from Andromeda (aka Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, the designers of the Space Quest series), broke up! According to Craig Alexander (general project manager of the first cancelled Space Quest 7), Sierra was swamped with projects in Oakhurst. Dynamix volunteered to do the next SQ, and Mark Crowe wanted to move to Dynamix anyway, so he grabbed the opportunity. Mark Crowe himself tells the story this way: "Let's see. It was back in '90/'91 that I was directing Police Quest 3 after Space Quest 4 was released. SQ4 had been a particularly stressful development (I still consider it to be my masterpiece product) and I was ready to move on to something different for my next project. I was impressed with the work Jeff Tunnel was doing at Dynamix, and was ready for a life change so I came on board there in Eugene, Oregon. I had a few product ideas in mind that utilized Dynamix' adventure gamer development system, but shortly after my arrival, I was asked to do SQ5 using Sierra's SCI." Scott Murphy stayed working in Oakhurst and they would never again work together on a Space Quest game. Mark Crowe continues: "I was aware that Josh Mandel (co designer of SQ6 -ed) was working on a design for SQ5 at that point of time. I don't know about all the politics surrounding that. They asked me to do SQ5, I had some ideas for a story so I said SURE!"

Have you ever wondered why Space Quest 5 doesn't have "voices"? After Space Quest 5 was released they were in fact working on it. Sierra's Official Hint Book confirms this. It says: "Finally, 14 months after the preliminary design meetings were held, SQ5 was shipped to eager Space Quest fans across the galaxy. But the story doesn't end there, The Next Mutation will be translated into five languages and converted to a full-voice CD-ROM version as well." Sean Murphy, an artist on the Space Quest 5 project adds: "I can't say for certain; I seem to recall that we had actually started work on doing just that [preparing a CD-Rom version of SQ5]. I think that politics and the fact that Dynamix was going through a very rough financial period at that time prevented us from doing any supplemental work on it... I suspect that the management was eager to move on to another "big profit" project instead of spending time and resources for a "gold" version of an already-released game."

Although Space Quest 5 was designed and created at Dynamix, the game utilizes Sierra's SCI system. This was because when Sierra CEO Ken Williams saw that Dynamix was doing adventure games, he wanted them to use Sierra's adventure development system instead.

It looks like Dynamix was working on Windows support for Space Quest 5. You see, some DLL files are included (supplied only with the beta version 0.028). Also, SCIWV.EXE is actually a ZIP file. If you rename it to SCIWV.ZIP and extract it, you have an EXE-file that will run under Windows only. Pointless, but pretty cool.

The Russian version of this game changed a lot. For instance, Flash Gordon's listing on the Grade Master in the Academy is changed to Boris Yeltsin, some music themes where replaced by those from old Soviet movies, and the word "buckazoid" is translated to "babking"; a derivative of the corresponding slang word for "money".

When using the transporter on the Eureka you would normally use the WALK cursor on the teleporter and then the ORDER cursor. However, in the Russian version, you need to use the WALK cursor and then the TALK version.

Somewhere, there a 32 colour version out there for the Amiga. The game lets you skip the crest scrubbing sequence because it's not possible to make any difference with using just 32 colours!

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