The team already figured our audience would hate us for all the stairs. Add an unwinnable state, and we might not make it out alive.

"Throw bridle" (based on the snake-turns-into-Pegasus puzzle in KQ2) produces a response in the Stair Quest parser. :)

I played Sierra's early games using a Tandy joystick — and a fairly janky one at that. So they were all equally impossible.