Jim Walls is a retired police officer, who in 1971 joined the California Highway Patrol. He retired after 15 years on the force after a shooting incident that left him traumatized.
During his recovery from the shooting incident, Walls met Ken Williams, who was then a developer for Sierra On-Line. Williams asked Walls to his house for a game of racquetball, and over drinks after the game, Ken told Walls of his idea of starting an adventure game series with a police genre. Williams told Walls that all he needed was a real police officer to be involved with the design in order to maintain realism.
Following that meeting, Walls went on to become a game designer for Sierra On-Line (now Sierra Entertainment).
Walls claims "When I first sat down in front of a computer to begin the design story of the original Police Quest I had to be shown where the on/off switch was. I typed the entire story with two fingers (after all, the only skills I had at the time were chasing people down and throwing them in jail)."
Walls' best-known works were the first three Police Quest games (1987's Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel, 1988's Police Quest II: The Vengeance, and 1990's Police Quest III: The Kindred). Walls also created an espionage game called Codename: Iceman in 1989, but this sold poorly in comparison to the Police Quest titles. The games included real situations that he had lived through in his career.
The final game in the Police Quest series (Police Quest IV: Open Season, and the subsequent spin-off games Police Quest: SWAT and Police Quest: SWAT 2) were designed by Darryl F. Gates after Walls left Sierra.
Walls also created Blue Force, another adventure game featuring a police officer, in 1993 for Tsunami Games. He is also credited on Earth & Beyond, in 2002, for Electronic Arts Inc. and Pirates: The Legend of Black Kat in 2002, for Electronic Arts, and had a cameo, as a weapons handler in a police station, in the adventure game Blade Runner in 1997, for Virgin Interactive Entertainment, Inc based on the 1982 film of the same name. Walls is sometimes credited as James Walls.
Famous quotes containing the words jim and/or walls:
“Just kids! That’s about the craziest argument I’ve ever heard. Every criminal in the world was a kid once. What does it prove?”
—Theodore Simonson. Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr.. Jim Bird, The Blob, responding to the suggestion that they not lock up the teens pulling the alien “prank,” (1958)
“If a man, cautious,
hides his limp,
Somebody has to limp it! Things
do it; the surroundings limp.
House walls get scars,
the car breaks down; matter, in drudgery, takes it up.”
—Robert Bly (b. 1926)