You gotta wait for your guy to cross the screen, etc, without having any game element that was really part of the graphics.

I'm not sure how anyone who's played the games can say that. The graphics were very integrated with gameplay. You actually had to find items on the screen, instead of depending on the game to tell you "there is a pitchfork here." You had to navigate obstacles (as mentioned above) and deal with characters that actually moved around. KQ1 came out in *1984*. That predates even the horrid Zork Zero by 4 years.

Also, the first Indy game that could be called an adventure game (The Last Crusade) didn't come out until 1989, by which time there were already 4 titles in the King's Quest series. The previous Indy games were platform games.

I'm not saying that by today's standards the *.Quest games are riveting and spellbinding.. But you seem to be mish-mashing all of the mid-to-late eighties into one big ball, and unfairly trying to compare the early Quest games (particularly the Roberta WIlliams ones) with the next generation stuff. There really was no comparison between the early Sierra titles and anything else that was out there, which is why they sold so well.