Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Ah, hearing the name "Sierra On-Line" brings back some memories. Caesar, Earth Siege... Does anyone here happen to know where their licensing portfolio/copyrights/code have ended up?

View on HN

Vivendi Games (owned by Vivendi Universal, the huge french conglomerate) bought them (they also owned Blizzard, amongst others), then VG merged with Activision and were in majority control, then Vivendi (parent company) decided they wanted out of the gaming business to focus on other ares (one being telecoms) and sold their shares to Activision, making a nice profit.

In what is one of the most Vivendi "we don't know what we want to do" event, just a couple years later they then decided they wanted to sell their main french telecom company (SFR) and at the same time bought Gameloft and agressively bought Ubisoft shares (the two biggest french video games companies).

So right now Activision should be the rightsholder?

Too bad. I highly doubt Activision will ever release them. I tried to contact a bunch of companies via email, regarding the source code for EarthSiege 2, but never got a reply :(

If anyone knows anyone who worked on ES2 and might shed a light on some weird things I encountered during reverse engineering, please contact me!

It's also worth pointing out that the Gameloft acquisition was very much a hostile takeover. Gameloft and Ubisoft were both founded by the Guillemot family, and the Guillemots basically washed their hands of Gameloft after they failed to stop the takeover and dug in extra hard against Vivendi at Ubisoft.

You can find a bunch of the stuff that was actually developed by Impressions Games (Caesar/Pharoah/Zeus, Lords of the Realm) on GOG. I'm still waiting for a rerelease of Civil War Generals, though... I keep a Windows 98 VM around to play that once in a while...

Don't forget Starsiege: Tribes, the game literally a decade ahead of its time.

Funny, you just listed acquisitions. The proper Sierra studio didn't make either of those.

Activision bought Sierra a couple years ago. They revived the brand with a number of new titles and a new King's Quest, but it's been pretty underwhelming so far. :/

Much like Zork. Zork: Grand Inquisitor (1997) was true to its legacy, but Return to Zork (1993) was lackluster, and Zork: Nemesis (1996) could hardly be called a Zork game at all.

After Zork: Grand Inquisitor, I really thought that Activision finally had a handle on the brand they bought, but then they just... stopped. Until 2009, when they licensed the IP to Jolt Online to make a crap browser game.

So I wouldn't expect much from Activision with the Sierra IP.

I liked Return to Zork. I thought it was a really well put together game. Nemesis I never got through the first part, but this makes me want to go back and play it as well as Grand Inquisitor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com