- Co-Creator of the Series
- Designer / Writer / Programmer for Space Quest 1, 2 and 3
- Director for the Space Quest 1 VGA Remake
- Designer / Writer / Lead Programmer / Voice Actor for Space Quest 4
- Designer / Writer / Voice Actor for Space Quest 6
- Designer / Writer for Space Quest 7 (project got cancelled)
Biography
"I didn't start out to make computer games my life's work. It was an accident. I saw an adventure game before I worked here [at Sierra], and I liked it. I had a job I hated and I kept bugging Sierra until they let me come and work as a dealer returns person. And I kept learning things. So I became a support representative for games and then for business products, then I ended up managing the support department.
Then the big crunch hit [in the mid-1980s Sierra On-Line weathered a bankruptcy threat through a major reorganization ] and I started doing QA (Quality Assurance) work as well as support stuff. As I got closer to where they were creating the games, I saw Mark Crowe and Doug MacNeill working on graphics for King's Quest 2 and Black Cauldron, and I was intrigued. I started bugging Ken to let me try a game. I saw people working on programming, and I knew that if they could do it, I could do it. So I kept bugging Ken, and finally he shut me up and let me try it. I put in a lot of free time over 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."
Scott and Mark Crowe (the other guy behind the Space Quest Series) first met each other during work on "the Black Cauldron" game. The two got together and decided to do a game of their own, in their favorite genre - science fiction. The Two Guys were determined and in their spare time programmed what later became the first four rooms the Sarien Encounter. Scott programmed, Mark did graphics and Ken loved the demo and gave them green light to proceed. And the rest, is history.
After work on Space Quest 4 was completed, Scott Murphy left Space Quest indefinitely. Scott Murphy tells it this way: "It wasn't so much 'running out of ideas' as it was that [Mark and I] needed some change.". After Space Quest 5 was released, Sierra decided they wanted another Space Quest and called upon Scott Murphy to do it. However, he was then busy programming for Police Quest 4, so Sierra recruited Josh Mandel instead. Scott later joined the team as creative consultant, but ended up having influences on storyline and design as well. Shortly before Space Quest 6 was finished, Josh left the project and Scott was left with the job of getting Space Quest 6 done.
Scott Murphy was working on Space Quest 7 for a short period of time, together with, Leslie Balfour, Jay Lee, Bill Shockley, Mark Aro, Richard Powell, Lori Lucia, Tim Loucks and Craig Alexander. Around February 1998, rumours spread that Scott was fired and would supposibly be re-hired if the SQ7 project was to be restarted. This indeed happend a year later in January/February 1999. However, on the 22nd of February 1999, Chainsaw Monday struck, and Scott Murphy had to leave Sierra as his contract was expired and was not being renewed.