SRQ Inc. had seen a significant amount of success with its TTRPGs Ruins & Rogues and Sorcerers & Sabers and spent the next few years in search of additional areas for expansion. Computer games, which were just coming into their own as an art form, seemed a natural fit, and SRQ created an in-house development team, SRQGames, in 1984.

Their first product, Ruins & Rogues: Castle of the Mad Wizard, was released in late 1984. Using parser technology licensed from Infocom, the game was a text adventure that featured a robust combat system, dialogue trees with skill checks, and other advanced features. However, with the rise of graphical adventure games, it was only a modest success at retail, and many of those profits went to Infocom as part of the license.

SRQGames next worked on an in-house sequel using their own parser and CGA graphics, released as Ruins & Rogues: Fortress of the Tyrant Princess in 1985. While graphically impressive for the time, the gameplay was relatively basic and lacked many of the nuances of the TTRPG on which it was based. The text parser was also notoriously bad, famously reacting to the command “ATTACK ENEMY” with the response “What enemy? The enemy attacks you!” Sales were, once again, modest.

Losing patience with its in-house team, SRQGames next licensed the Sorcerers & Sabers property to Yosemite Software which produced a series of very successful graphical role playing games from 1987-1995, bringing in a significant amount of money through royalties. The in-house team, left to their own devices, worked on a third Ruins & Rogues game, a sequel to Fortress of the Tyrant Princess called Lair of the Scheming Dragon.

Eventually, and belatedly, released in 1990, Ruins & Rogues: Lair of the Scheming Dragon was an ambitious role-playing game with full-color VGA graphics, animated sprites, a full GUI interface, and a near-complete version of the 2nd Edition Ruins & Rogues ruleset at its core. It was, in many ways, comparable to a home computer version of the wildly successful JRPGs taking Japan by storm at the time. It was also, however, very buggy. One game-breaking bug, the infamous Dead-end Dungeon, was so prevalent that SRQ had to resort to mailing patched floppies to irate customers. One of the most popular features of the first SRQ website, which debuted in 1994 just prior to the company’s liquidation, was a savegame file that began immediately after the problematic section.

The internal development team was disbanded after this fiasco, with SRQGames remaining only as a brand applied to the licensed Yosemite games made before 1994.