Two Guys from Andromeda
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Image:Two Guys in front of Half Dome.jpg "Two Guys from Andromeda" is an alias for the designers of the Space Quest series, a popular series of adventure games published by Sierra On-Line. The two guys consisted of Mark Crowe, who created most of the music and visual art in the early games, and Scott Murphy, who was the bearded programmer.
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Scott Murphy
Scott Murphy was first hired in "dealer returns" and eventually ended up running Sierra's entire support department. During the mid-80s, Scott spent some time working QA, and was able to get in touch with the people that made Sierra's games. When he saw the programmers working on The Black Cauldron he knew immediately that he wanted to be a programmer. After some pleading, Ken Williams added Scott to the Black Cauldron team.
Mark Crowe
Mark Crowe was hired in 1983 and first used his illustration skills creating packaging and game documentation before moving onto early Sierra releases like Winnie the Pooh and the One Hundred Acre Wood and King's Quest II.
The "Two Guys" are formed
Scott and Mark's first project together was the Black Cauldron. Mark was already creating graphics for the game when Scott was added as a programmer. Scott slowly became the only programmer on the project: "I put in a lot of free time over a summer spending nights out at his house debugging Black Cauldron. And then I ended up being the only one working on it. After a while, Ken and Al Lowe bailed out on me. So I got Black Cauldron shipping, and I was hooked."
After Black Cauldron was finished the "Two Guys" wanted to work on an idea of their own, a science fiction story starring a janitor named Roger Wilco. After proving their idea could be fun, by creating a four room demo, Ken Williams let them finish the game. That short demo became the beginning of Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter. Space Quest I was the first game that Scott and Mark used their pseudonym.
The first four games in the series were designed by both Crowe and Murphy. After Space Quest IV, the team split up, and Space Quest V was designed solely by Mark Crowe. Space Quest 6 was designed by Josh Mandel, although later work on the project was done by Scott Murphy, making Mandel the "third guy from Andromeda".
There were also rumours of a "Gal from Andromeda", Leslie Balfour (a.k.a. Apollonia Jones), who was the co-designer with Scott Murphy on the cancelled Space Quest VII project at Sierra. Image:Twoguys.gif In Space Quest III, the "Two Guys from Andromeda" enter the Space Quest universe as internal game characters. They appear as unwilling employees of a game company where they created the games Astro Chicken and its sequel Ms. Astro Chicken. They are forced to work at ScumSoft by the Pirates of Pestulon until Roger Wilco rescues them. Roger brings them to Earth where Ken Williams hires them to work at Sierra, creating the Space Quest series.
When appearing as the "Two Guys", Crowe and Murphy wore mohawk wigs, sunglasses and animal-like snouts (which were presumably Andromedan attributes). The game package for Space Quest III included a cardboard Andromedan snout. Neither Crowe nor Murphy appeared in the Andromedan disguise in the last two games' packaging; it may be that they no longer considered themselves "guys from Andromeda" since the team had disbanded.
Source
- The History of Space Quest, included with the Space Quest Collection Series.