Sierra was captured, then killed, by an accounting fraud | Hacker News Reader

Sierra was captured, then killed, by an accounting fraud

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I worked for a game studio that was acquired by Sierra in late 1995. Being acquired by Ken and Roberta was surreal; they were two of my idols from childhood gaming and they were every bit as great to work for (via multiple layers of bosses) as you'd hope. They were gamers; they cared about people having fun playing games. They were also hard-nosed about their development teams creating product that would achieve that goal. I remember having to answer to Ken in person in a meeting about what my plan was to get my title shipped. He was firm and fair, but he didn't like my hand-waving at the schedule and task-breakdown. (He'd come to visit our studio in general, not to ream me out about shipping late, but he was spot on that I'd not been diligent enough in my prep and planning. We didn’t call it that, but my burndown chart was not tilted downward.)

Every step along the rest of the journey with Sierra was a nightmare for employees. CUC, Cendant, Vivendi, and maybe there was another link in the chain, but I got fed up and quit in spring of 1997. We had incredibly talented and passionate artists (2D and 3D) and along the way a lot of that got shipped out of country to artists who seem to have never seen an American auto race. Several employees sued over shenanigans with our stock options treatment; I didn't join in (though perhaps I should have as I think we were getting screwed). IMO, the acquirers just sucked all the fun out of the room and a lot of talented devs and producers left. If you're not having fun working in computer gaming, you might as well go not have fun someplace that pays well.

Ken and Roberta are two of the good ones in my book.

0 - Papyrus Design [IndyCar and NASCAR Racing]

Thanks for sharing! I played the Quest games as a kid and only heard in passing about Ken and Roberta and early Sierra (I was young enough to not know how unusual it was for a software company to be started and run by a married couple). In my completely presumptive head canon, Sierra petered out because LucasArts games were so much better, and Ken & Roberta sold out and moved into early retirement. I hadn't known Roberta was fighting to the very end for her vision on King's Quest VIII.

(Speaking of LucasArts: peeking at KQ8's Wikipedia entry, I see Roberta made the astonishing claim that KQ8 sold twice as well as Grim Fandango: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Quest:_Mask_of_Eterni...)

That actually was briefly true as I recall. It was an early sign of the problems of "preorder culture" in games (a lesson we're still relearning/refighting time-and-again today): KQ8 was a preorder darling with a ton of hype and anticipation. Grim Fandango was a sleeper that "no one" thought to preorder and the preorder shops (for their reasons) weren't pushing. Grim Fandango was considered a "flop" for a bunch of years, though obviously it's done far better in the long tail of post-preorder sales than KQ8.

I think with Sierra you are right but it was a slower build up imo.

I remember KQ6 being a big bit of pomp and circumstance with its production values etc, more promotion than you would see for a computer game at the time.

And then KQ7 happened. A victim of a bit of overhypeing and a LOT of WinG pain. Could never get it running on a pc our family owned, even proper pentiums.

Yes, there were at least two genres where LucasArts seemed to make games that were strictly better than Sierra's: adventures and (arcade-ish) flight simulators. Not only better, but the best. For flying games, Origin was a contender, but despite all the advanced graphics and FMV, flying and shooting in Wing Commander was not as fun as in X-Wing and TIE Fighter.

I played and still love many of the LucasArts adventure games: Sam & Max Hit the Road, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Grim Fandango. But the game which still holds the biggest emotional resonance for me all these years later is Gabriel Knight II: The Beast Within. Maybe there's just something about the full motion video format that allowed me to identify more with the characters or something, but I still find myself replaying scenes from it in my head every now and then. Robert Holmes's score added so much to it (and even the non-FMV predecessor) as well.

The X-Wing series were definitely hands down the best arcade flight sims though.

The biggest emotional resonance for me was the first Gabriel Knight - Sins of the Fathers. I still have memories of the scene where Wolfgang dies. Amazing game and I feel blessed that I had the opportunity to play games like these as a child.

Sins of the Fathers was great too! I even read Jane Jensen's novelizations of both games in the 90s.

you just made my day! I didn't know that these books existed. Now I have to find them and read them. Thank you so much.

Best of luck finding them! I think they're long out of print but maybe there are copies on eBay or electronic versions.

Yeah, that's what I quickly realized by searching around. Best bet is to try and find used copies on eBay or something.

These games would be such good material for feature films. With Hollywood so completely out of ideas and the huge popularity of occult horror I'm surprised it hasn't been done yet.

I played only Wing Commander: Prophecy (one of the last ones) and I found it way better than the older star wars games, probably just a normal passage of time thing honestly.

If you love those kinds of games and are missing them, check out Freespace, which you can get cheap on GOG, and the Knossos launcher, which allows you to download mods like the open source re-implementation of the game engine which vastly improves things, and some fan made campaigns/overhauls including a great Wing Commander style one.

Alternatively, EA (the owners of Origin's intellectual property) recently released StarWars Squadrons, which has a short campaign that certainly scratches that old itch. However I don't know how I feel about the multiplayer.

Wing Commander 3 and 4 were much better engines than the first two games. Even with some fondness in my heart for Privateer those early WC engines were awful. And modern patches and tweaks the controls still leave them feeling jerky and imprecise.

There have been fan efforts to port them to newer engines, though all look janky IMO. Here's hoping for a proper remaster.

This is not the first time I hear good things about Freespace. I had the first one, and I didn't think it was as good as X-Wing or TIE Fighter. Guess I should try the open source version of Freespace 2...

I spent so much time on Decent/Freespace. The other game that gave me the same feeling was MechWarrior 3 (I had just learned of derivatives in school and used to gawk that they showed the derivative for heat production in the HUD).

Modern games have beautiful graphics but just don't recreate the feeling. Alternatively, perhaps, I am a different person and unable to enjoy the simple pleasure.

Still remember those Hornet missiles from FreeSpace. So satisfying!

(Veteran pilot of Elite, TIE Fighter, X-Wing and Wing Commander here.)

Hmm, I thought Red Baron by Dynamics@Sierra was quite a critical and popular success as far as "arcade-ish flight sims" go...

Man, I forgot I owned that and both of the Aces Over games. I miss things that came with spiral-bound manuals.

No idea why though.

The spiral bound manual for Red Baron was great, learned a lot of of WW1 history from it

I was thinking of the "Aces" games which were not that great IMO.

When I was a kid I absolutely preferred Sierra's adventure games, especially the King's Quest series. They were so much more sincere and aesthetic, while the Lucasarts ones were more cartoony and full of corny jokes that broke the 4th wall. (To be fair Space Quests did this a lot too, and those were great.) I was always offended by the point-and-click interface which felt dumbed down compared to the bare text input. Even if the latter was of course severely limited and frustrated a lot of gamers, it always felt more open-ended and limitless to me. You never knew when some longshot idea you typed out would actually work, like yeah you really are on the same wavelength as the designers. I used to dream about making games like that with far more advanced parsers and dictionaries (but like so many, I tended to get sucked into the rabbit hole of building the engine and development tools rather than the actual games).

The curse of the programmer! The one game I finished recently: a polyomino puzzle game, but of course had to make a solver from scratch first. But at least I finished it :)

Privateer, though... I loved the hell out of that game.

I don't think we had a Star Wars variant but that would've been something.

Never had more than a passing interest in IndyCar or NASCAR races, but I remember enjoying both of those on a 486 DX with the turbo button on the case when I was a kid. Links: The Challenge of Golf was another one.

Daytona USA was released around the same time... and had a karaoke mode so you could sing along to the soundtrack while racing. That was Papyrus' true downfall, they never identified karaoke as a critical feature in any of their games. :)

Ironically, Daytona was actually one of our downfalls or at least a thorn in our side. Sega had the license to the Daytona name and usage for electronic games and that’s one of the most well-known tracks and events. We had every other Cup and Indy circuit, but couldn’t get Daytona.

(For our in-house racing series, we had a “Florida” circuit that was the first and middle race in the schedule. For some reason, it was surprisingly close to Daytona International Speedway in design.)

We’d have probably sold more boxes and surely would have gotten more online subs if we’d been able to offer Daytona. (Some of the Papyrus crew went on to form iRacing and they’ve got a great product over there; still no karaoke though...)

I guess that doesn't surprise me too much for a sim, though the future of racing games may be the other way around. Some of the most loved tracks in racing games are fantasy ones where you have full control to iterate on the experience and scenery.

Would be nice to see next-gen racers returning to that in a big way and eventually have people wanting to license the tracks for real-world construction after they've been battle tested by millions of virtual drivers.

I'm a foreigner, we don't have either. But Indy 500 was groundbreaking at the time, and then came IndyCar. The graphics and all around racing was really great.

I worked for several game publishers as a developer, and would be called in to firefight games at other developers in danger of not shipping or shipping past a critical deadline. The Sierra productions were typically nightmares, at least the ones that needed publisher bailouts. I never interacted with Ren or Roberta beyond introduction, as firefighting a failing production tends to be upper management scarce.

I have a very vivid memory of Papyrus' NASCAR game in the late 90s. I was in the sales and service industry, I was realy just a couple years into it, still 17, and had sold a beefy system for gaming to a guy who was a NASCAR fan. The day I was supposed to deliver it I dislocated my kneecap. I cslled him, let him know, and came home from the ER with him in my driveway waiting for me. When I got out of the car in the leg brace, he said "Oh thank god your'e hurt! I thought you were trying to rip me off!" I will always remember that game for reasons unrelated to gaming. :D

> NASCAR Racing

Oh man I spent so many hours on that. Thanks for the good memories!

Oh wow, I totally forgot about that game. I was not very good at it, but eventually I figured out that I could drive the car in reverse and because there was no hitbox on the bumper, the racetrack's wall just kind of guided me along while I accelerated to maximum speed. Fun memory

Haha, yes, backwards was the best way to play Nascar!

I remember being absolutely blown away that the game kept track of tire rubber on the track, and you could see your own spinouts and stuff on the next lap.

The former NASCAR engine still exists in a new simulator called iracing. You can still notice the same graphics style. Lots of famous real race drivers using it.

Totally off-topic, but did you work on Road Rash at all?

E&Y strike again! Any record that includes both CUC and WeWork betrays a deep rot. The Big 5 became the Big 4, not too long after the events of TFA. Why shouldn't E&Y be killed by the courts?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24802741

Ernst & Young also, of course, audited Wirecard.

Usually after Googling with the letters and some context I can figure out most acronyms but I've failed on this one. What's TFA?

The F——ing Article. Slashdot-speak for the article being discussed here.

HN search is often helpful:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

"The fucking article". As in, "RTFA".

Also sometimes "The Fine Article".

I think good manners version is 'The Featured Article'

The /r/Games thread on this is interesting, as Ken himself is commenting on it: https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/jkbg4g/how_sierra_wa...

Ken Williams' initial comment there:

"It does seem obvious that I was fooled by Walter Forbes, but so were most people. He was the Jeff Bezos of his time. He had a big-four accounting firm who signed off on their financials every 90 days. Henry Silverman (Avis, Howard Johnson's, and many other companies) believed in him, as did everyone. He had been on Sierra's board for five years. I thought I knew him well. I also thought we had structured the deal such that the software business couldn't be screwed up. And, I had so much faith that Sierra's market dominance was so strong that no one could ever screw it up. As you might imagine, I've looked back on the crash many times, and still believe I made the right move based on what I knew at the time. The problem was that I was dealing with snakes and didn't know it. MANY people lost their jobs and had their net worth wiped out. It was indeed a sad event, but I wasn't the only person fooled by CUC. Tens of thousands of people directly or indirectly were hurt by the financial scandal."

There are others, too, that are worth reading for the interested.

I think he's right. Consider this: if you were the person who managed to sniff out that Forbes was bad news, you would be someone sniffing out $3B in fraud. That kind of makes you a wizard.

The reason these people are so profound is specifically because they can fool a lot of people in a con over many many years.

I'm amazed people still trust audits.

Funny you say this, my reaction upon reading it was “why wouldn’t they?” and reflecting on how I would absolutely trust an audit from a reputable company.

I know very little about accounting and company financials, but I work in security, and quickly remembered how much time I spend trying to convey to people that 3rd party compliance audits are not even worth the paper they’re written on, yet people still have confidence in them.

Kind of a Gell-Mann amnesia effect I suppose.

Funny you say this, my reaction upon reading it was “why wouldn’t they?” and reflecting on how I would absolutely trust an audit from a reputable company.

Every financial scam or scandal you read about in the press has at some point been signed off by a reputable accounting firm. Every single one.

The unusual thing about the Enron case is that there actually was some blow-back on the accounting firm too. Business as usual is that the accountants are like teflon.

> I made the right move based on what I knew at the time.

its such a hard thing to really obsorb, but in business and life, we can make "the right decision" and still fail... its tough...

"Had they done so, they’d have found only confirmation that CUC was a healthy, hungry start-up well-liked by Wall Street. While CUC wouldn’t let Sierra see its internal financial data, it did have assurances from the Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young that the books were not just in order but reflected a company so fabulously wealthy that it could pay for Sierra not with cash, but pieces of itself." 2 weeks ago on WSJ & HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24802741 "Firms That Imploded Have Something in Common: Ernst and Young Audited Them"

I wasn't much of a gamer but oh boy, did I love all the quest games, they totally appealed to my tastes. I loved the 2D-ness of the games, the attention to details, the scripts, the colors, the music. You could tell there was a talented team behind those games. Games have now gotten so complex graphics-wise but it seems to me that they lost something it's very hard to pinpoint, maybe the limitations of that age was what made the games more creative? Or maybe it's pure subjectivity on my part.

Games are richer in terms of both content (“things to do”) and visual imagery, but the stories and gameplay are much more uniform now than 20 years ago (which is long after my childhood video game playing period ended). There is some subjectivity here of course, but I occasionally replay games from when I was in college or even elementary school (hello Apple II, Atari and Nintendo). The graphics and limitations are clear, but within those constraints it’s hard to say games have improved that much.

For all the advances in the tech we’ve had I don’t believe we’ve seen equivalent gains in actual gaming experience.

See IggleSniggle's comment above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24944816

I would recommend Outer Wilds (2019) for a game that displays a real advance in gameplay mechanics. There is alot of exciting stuff happening in the indie game scene.

Outer Wilds does some amazing stuff. Utterly brilliant in how it constrains your path through it’s small, polished world, and makes it feel incredibly dense.

Hades is also utterly amazing, with similar attention to repeated play.

Game mechanics is definitely one area that seems to have been lacking.

Aside from that, there's a certain homogeneity to games these days. I think that's attributable to the fact that there are more of them and that to reach a broader audience there has to be some generalization that occurs.

Going 3D is a huge limitation on what kind of mechanics you can do. Decent was reasonably popular, but showed how much difficulty many people have given full freedom in 3D space. Sonic style fast scrolling or precise platforming games really don’t translate well.

VR is even worse in that respect as people get seriously disoriented much more easily.

Going 3D (and HD) also consumes far more budget for art and level design, so companies are less willing to take risks in other areas.

These games still exist today, but come from small passion studies (much like early-mid Sierra)...and today, the number of games published is much, much greater than it ever was then. That is to say, generally only indie- or genre- enthusiasts know where to find the "good stuff" for any given category good, because the small studios don't have the marketing dollars to compete with the larger players or to cut through from "sleeper genre hit" to "genre hit," let alone from "genre hit" to "mainstream hit."

The genre games that do make it to mainstream are typically backed by distasteful in-app purchase schemes.

Many people have heard about "Dwarf Fortress" at this point since it's been around so long, but mostly only the "traditional roguelike" fanbase is even aware of games like "Cogmind" (an ascii game with incredible attention to detail that extends beyond being just a great game to things like thoughtfully implemented accessibility features and lovely crafted ascii graphics using its own open sourced ascii engine, RexPaint). Within that enthusiast crowd, though, it's one of those obvious 'oh yeah I know that game' games.

(Okay so my reply started out in good faith but then I couldn't help but use it as an excuse to gush about Cogmind[0] and the work of its author.)

But anyway, as a genre- enthusiast I don't really know what the best forums are for finding other hits in other genres. But occasionally I watch YouTube videos reviewing games similar execution to, say, King's Quest 6, and I really do think there's a rich library of high quality new games coming out in that genre.

Steam's recommendation engine has gotten better at helping you find what you're looking for, fwiw, but you still have to go looking.

A bookstore is probably a good analogy for the experience today. If you only looked at the books in the front of a bookstore, or only read the "popular" books, you might come to the conclusion that most books being written are crap. It helps to go into a bookstore armed with knowledge of what genres you like and which authors are respected for quality before you even get to the browsing stage.

[0] - https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/

This is mainly a mirrored effect from movies. AAA games / blockbusters are so much safer than they used to be, but there is so much more that is so much better (by any metric) than there used to be, as well. You just have to dig beyond sales.

I don't really know what the best forums are for finding other hits in other genres.

Find a reviewer who loves some of the same games you love, see what else they like. Personally I like Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

I'm not a gamer, either, but I might say that Space Quest was my one dip into games, and I played that a lot. That was a long time ago.

As someone who adored the old Sierra games as a kid (the _Quest ones, mostly), as well as LucasArts ones (Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones), can anyone recommend great modern games in the same vein? And maybe iOS ones? I'd love games of those style and quality to be my 7-year-old's daughter's first experience with video games.

The two most kid friendly adventure games I'd recommend are:

- Anna's quest would be great for kid. Based on fairy tales, where a little girl tries to save her grandfather. Expect Evil Witches

- All the adventure games from Humongous Entertainment: Pajama sam, Spy Fox and Freddi Fish. Those are children point and click games created by Secret of Monkey Island's creator Ron Gilbert.

- Broken Age

- Machinarium and Chuchel. In general all games from Amanita Design are just cute and fun to play

- The Book of Unwritten Tales (1 & 2 + the critter chronicles), I think this would be more appropriate for 10-12 years old but this is a great homage to fantasy books

I'd recommend you visit https://adventuregamers.com/, they have great reviews of point and click games

I went looking and it seems like a bunch of these are on sale until Nov 2nd on Steam.

> Anna's quest

Is on sale on steam for $1.99

> All the adventure games from Humongous Entertainment

Entire bundle is 50% off, 49.99

> Machinarium and Chuchel

65% off. %5.24 for Machinarium, $3.49 for Chuchel

The Blackwell games hit the right nerve for me: https://www.gog.com/game/blackwell_bundle

Disco Elysium has it's roots in the old school point and click adventures, but has a more dynamic storyline. It would easily be the best point and click game I've ever played.

why not go with the classics? Tim Schaeffer somehow got the rights to his classics back from Lucasarts/Disney and has published remakes of Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango and even Full Throttle, and he has a new one that is very age-appropriate for your daughter called Broken Age. All the Monkey Island games are available in one for or another, and Ron Gilbert has a new-ish one called Thimbleweed Park.

There's also an "episodic adaptation" of King's Quest from 2015 that was surprisingly well-received. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Quest_(2015_video_gam...

FTL would have been game of the decade if it came out in that time period, and it easily could have.

Check out Thimbleweed Park. I haven't finished it yet, but I heard about it on HN. Its a great flashback, and i've enjoyed it so far, I'm taking it it small slow pieces to fully appreciate it which is why I haven't finished it yet.

+1 for Thimbleweed Park, though I probably wouldn't recommend it for a 7 year old.

But Tim Schaeffer's studio Double Fine did Broken Age which I think would be great for a younger audience. Otherwise a lot of those games mentioned have been remastered in recent times, like Grim Fandango adding a non-tank control scheme or Full Throttle.

Yes, "The Hidden World" by Fire Maple Games are probably more appropriate for a younger audience, my kids played that game around that age.

Broken age is one of the darkest games I’ve ever played... MAJOR SPOILER: The great Mogs stand for pregnancy...

There's an Easter egg for anyone who's intro to Javascript was The Good Parts in the game. The game was a lot of fun. I played the mobile version on an iPad.

I learned recently that Crockford had been a colleague of the Thimbleweed Park core team at Lucasfilm Games.

Corey and Lori Cole, the Quest for Glory designers, kickstarted and published a game set in the same universe: https://www.hero-u.com/

I really recommend that game, it's a fresh take on the original Quest for Glory games and is really fun to play.

Otherwise for people who prefer games that copy more the Quest for Glory concept, there's:

- Heroine's Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok

- Mage's Initiation

- Quest for Infamy

Those 3 games are also good but honestly Hero-U is just more fun to play and feels fresher, it's just a copy of the old formula.

Yeah, Hero-U is actually a "time management in school setting" game, like Bully or Persona or Fire Emblem: Three Houses.

I tried the Heroine's Quest, but it was just too hard, the puzzles too obtuse for me that I gave up on it.

Gonna check out those last two though, thanks for the tip!

Good description, it is closer to Persona than to QFG... Somehow I never made the connection. I would say there's still some part of QFG in it though and the humor and writing does really feel like the Coles.

And yeah, Heroine's Quest is super hard, the other two are definitely easier.

The 2015 King's Quest is quite enjoyable. It's a great deal less obtuse than the adventure games of old, which is probably a good thing.

I loved "Pillars of the Earth" by Daedalic. Also Memoria, same company.

Wadjet Eye Games does more retro adventure stuff. Unavowed sits comfortably alongside old adventure game classics for me in terms of presentation and story. I've heard good things about their other games as well but haven't played them yet.

I wouldn't recommend Unavowed for a 7-year-old, though, as it can get quite dark.

Fair warning about the Daedalic games, they can be misogynistic. I've played a few and found the female characters too stereotypical.

I liked the Deponia series, which has a similar look and comedy tone to Monkey Island 3.

However, I wouldn't recommend it for a 7yo. The puzzles are a bit tough, and the protagonist is a complete asshole (for comic effect, of course).

I still think Sierra created some of the best games that have ever been made. If I saw a Sierra logo on a game as a kid, I knew I wanted it and I knew it would be quality. Lots of interactions, puzzles, and outcomes especially compared to what I was playing on console. I still think about how I could have plotted my course on Codename Iceman more accurately. I miss these games, I miss the style, I miss the casual aspect of not being a button mashing or accuracy god which I am no longer.

A very interesting article, indeed, but wow was it edited by a human? Parts of it seemed located in the wrong section, and there were lots of howlers like a photo caption "Robert and Ken Williams".

By accident I bought: Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conquests_of_the_Longbow:_The_... ]

Didn't know what "an adventure game" is, at that time. So many good memories.

What a great game.

My perception has always been that that game was under-appreciated. Nice to run into a fellow appreciator. I think it's also the only DRM[0] I've ever encountered that was a genuine pleasure to use (not that it would work today).

[0] - Conquests of the Longbow required you to use the book that came with it to look up lore like coats of arms, to identify plants by their leaves, find out about superstitions around gemstones, etc in order to solve the puzzles in the game. At the time, people generally pirated by passing around floppy disks, none of the kids pirating had access to xerox machines, and the information in the manual was obscure, so you really kinda needed to have the manual. But if you did have it, it almost felt like a natural part of the game, and the information was fun to learn. Of course, now you can easily find it online: http://www.sierrahelp.com/Documents/Manuals/Conquests_of_the...

The BBC game Exile had a "novella" that came with it - the story of how things came to be before the player arrives. The copy protection had you look up a page number, line number, word number to proceed. Fun stuff. (I just found the text! http://inventivity.co.uk/exileami/novella.htm) (And the game! http://bbcmicro.co.uk//jsbeeb/play.php?autoboot&disc=http://...)

In fact, how they squeezed what they did out of the BBC B is amazing.

I definitely encountered other games for which you had to look up stuff in the manual, and maybe it wasn't done as well because I always hated it.

I enjoyed it for Ultima VII, where the manual was written as a holy book / biography of the main religious figure (antagonist) of the setting. You needed to answer questions from the book to be allowed out of the starting town.

I think in King's Quest it was looking up some specific code word in a random grid or something, before it would let you launch a boat?

King's Quest 5's copy protection (floppy version only) was enforced with a requirement to use a magic wand to cast a "spell" at various points in the game, where the "spell" is a series of letters that the player matches to symbols in the printed manual. Launching the boat was one of the points in the game where this was required.

https://kingsquest.fandom.com/wiki/Crispin%27s_wand#Behind_t...

Yup, CotL was uniquely well done.

Wing Commander made you look up ship schematics to answer trivia. I was maybe 10 years old and got a copy from the son of a family friend but he only gave me photocopies of a few of the pages, so it sometimes took a while before I could get in!

Loved that part too, was really confusing at first, because I was not aware that the manual might have a use at all. I think the files are on the game creators webpage, there was even a photo of her at the back of the box.

If you'd like some further/alternate reading on parts of this story, a guy has recently released part 1 of his story of Richard Garriott, Origin, and his Ultima series. The name of the book is Through the Moongate.

It's fascinating to me that a company that became such a huge impact in the computer gaming industry started in, and kept a dev office in Oakhurst.

Is it normal to be acquired using stock? From a naive perspective, it seems like a conflation of 1: Getting paid, and 2: Gambling on a stock. Was there part of the agreement that stated the Williams' couldn't immediately liquidate upon deal completion?

It's not unusual. Some acquisitions are all cash, some all stock, and some a mix.

I think the opposite is more unusual. If you get aquired by Facebook you generally switch your own stock for FB’s one, at least in most of the deals I’ve heard of.

Much better for the company to keep their cash free.

There is usually a blackout period after acquisitions to prevent the new hires from quitting immediately.

Sierra On-Line's initials, SOL, proved prophetic.

One of my favorite youtube channels, Metal Jesus Rocks, had an interesting episode or two about his time at Sierra and the end:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmNCFtAlYN0,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hyAYjM8Ssg,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkQgL9s42WY

I have fond memories as a little kid playing Sierra games, so all that was news to me what happened to Sierra and where did they go.

Why was Sierra called "On-Line" if none of their games were online games?

It started as a business software play called "On-line Systems". It seems doubtful that Ken Williams was considering actual networked software on Apple II at the time (though the machine could do it) but probably it sounded advanced and cool. In 1979 "on-line" would have been recognizably computery, but not mean much else to most people, who would never have seen a computer network.

Says Jimmy Maher, who should know, On-Line Systems was "a name fairly typical of the vaguely futuristic, vaguely compound, but essentially meaningless names (Microsoft, anyone?) that were so common in the era." https://www.filfre.net/2011/10/ken-and-roberta/

"Online" used to mean "not batch-processed". Most of their games reacted immediately to player input, so in that sense they weren't batch programs.

This plausible explanation might not have anything to do with the actual reason for the name...

"Online" used to mean "not batch-processed".

Computer scientists still refer to "online algorithms" as meaning "algorithms which process each input as it comes in". The obvious algorithm for "find the minimum element" is online for example, since you can stop at any point and say what the smallest you've seen so far is; however finding the median takes more work (you need to maintain two heaps, vs. simply collecting all the data and sorting it at the end).

Here’s something I don’t understand: Sierra was a money-printing machine, earning easy profits and on a natural growth path. With a trajectory like that, why go public, why sell the business at all? There was nothing to gain really, whatever growth they would have gotten from going public and from the CUC deal (even if it had been on the up and up) they would have seen naturally. Gaming is not a winner takes all market, they had no need to grow more quickly.

this subject is covered at length in the article.

TL;DR Ken Williams had had a bad experience early on where the company was nearly bankrupt from a bad move, and he thought selling to a conglomerate would bulletproof the company, and was something of a duty to his shareholders. If the article is to be believed, they did so without being permitted to do due diligence on their buyer.

If you want to read up on Cendant and the fraud that was this [0] is a good story on the subject. This covers CUC and HFS (Hospitality Franchise Services) and shows how that merge uncovered the dirty accounting at CUC

[0]https://www.econcrises.org/2016/11/29/cendant-corporation/

I can't help but read this article dwell on how everyone but Ken stated their misgivings about the deal. If ownership and decision-making of the company were more equitable, then this specific decision would have gone the opposite way, and thousands of people might have had chance at a better outcome from deciding to work for them.

In case anybody is interested, Ken Williams has just published a book.

https://kensbook.com/

That’s the first line of the article :)

I wonder how much of Sierra's demise was due to CUC vs. just the change in gaming landscape. Compared to the early 90's adventure gaming is non-existent minus nostalgic kickstarters. Sierra may still be alive today, but it may be on the same shelf as Nancy Drew mysteries.

By the mid- to late-1990s, Sierra's publishing output was far more diversified than just adventure games. They owned a large number of subsidiary development companies (such as Dynamix, Impression, and Papyrus) that were creating games in a wide range of genres.

They also published a little-known game called Half-Life in 1998...

If not for the events in the article, we might have ended up with Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Portals.

Half-Life came out just about when I started gaming, and was when I first really picked up on Sierra’s existence.

Then right after, they were just gone. No more new games with the Sierra logo (that I saw anyway)

Great point. I forgot HL was originally Sierra. It seems they were able to adapt to the new market, so CUC can probably be blamed for their demise.

The cause and effect is really tough to straighten out.

There's certainly an argument to be made that Sierra's demise was the final nail in adventure gaming and the genre might still be alive if Sierra themselves had survived (and/or if Roberta Williams was left with the budgets to keep making them). Sierra helped push the budgets of adventure games to the point where no one could compete with them (except maybe LucasArts, and LucasArts didn't seem interested in competing to the same costs) and then after setting that unreasonable market perspective of what a AAA adventure game "should" be, they died. Even today most of the controversy with the "nostalgic kickstarters" is that a Kickstarter can't approximate (adjusting for inflation) even a tenth of Sierra's final few adventure game budgets (much less a quarter to a half of LucasArts' last few).

I don't know, look at what sells well: massively multiplayer games, and FPSes. As I mentioned in a previous comment, there are exceptions, but as a rule it seems if you're a game developer you're more likely to make a reaction-based shooter or real time thing, versus a subjectively-paced adventure game with point and click puzzles like Sierra or LucasArts games were.

It might be gaming culture changed as consoles got big and more people got interested.

It's not a zero sum game, however, as players typically buy from a variety of genres (sometimes in the same purchase) and play a large variety of genres over their lives.

It's a bit like saying that Hollywood should never make another romcom because all the blockbusters are superhero movies. While there are some crazy enough in Hollywood to suggest exactly that sort of thing, romcoms aren't generally directly competing for superhero dollars (usually; there are some films that some suggest are superhero romcoms), and exist just fine alongside them. It's not likely for a romcom currently to be considered a blockbuster or to be budgeted or pitched as such, but it's also not impossible, and it certainly doesn't mean that the romcom as a genre is dead because it generally won't be a "summer tentpole blockbuster" any time soon (no matter how much clickbait editorials want to disagree on that).

It's probably unlikely for an adventure game to again be that "summer tentpole blockbuster", and I'm of the opinion that they were only "summer tentpole blockbusters" very briefly under the reign of Sierra in part because of the Williams' and Sierra's reign, because they managed to make it so, in budget and in attitude. Now that the blockbusters are FPSes and such, people are still disappointed and generate so much vocal controversy when kickstarters are merely aiming to build "romcoms on a romcom budget" adventure games and can't afford the summer blockbuster spectacle that Sierra did at its peak. That's what I think "killed" the genre and keeps it "dead", far more than the competition with other genres or some "shift in gaming culture".

(And yeah, I've seen and reject the arguments that gaming culture as it grew mainstream grew a lot less "intellectual" as the computer and consoles went from being niche things only owned by "smart" people to everyone could own one to everyone did own at least one. First of all, that's just terribly reductive and generally far too dismissive of the average game player. Second of all, there's plenty of evidence the other direction: Ask a hardcore "twitch" gamer some day about minutia in Destiny 2 or Dark Souls or WoW and be prepared for flow charts and long detailed narrative digressions and spreadsheets full of math and raid puzzle solving. Talk to the gamers still pouring hundreds of hours in lovingly complicated simulations like Civilization 6. The "intellectual pursuits" in games never went away; some of it dispersed and migrated and changed shape, a lot of it is still around almost unchanged in some genres like simulation that managed to successfully curb expectations and resize budgets as fashions shifted.)

It would be awesome to have the old Sierra games like King's Quest, Police Quest, Space Quest, etc. re-born as first-person adventures with photorealistic graphics.

I directly disagree for both King's Quest and Space Quest. So much of the worldbuilding and aesthetic value in those games was their animated styles.

King's Quest was about adventuring through fairy tales, and most of our cultural vocabulary around that has been built by Disney animated movies. I very much believe that KQVII hit nearly the epitome of the King's Quest "perfect" aesthetic with its hand drawn art (even if it went sometimes a bit too "Looney Tunes", and some of the embedded 3D effects did not age well) that evoked playing through a darker Disney or Bluth film. (That KQVIII exists right next to it as first-person and 3D stood even then as a stark contrast for why King's Quest is probably a terrible fit for first-person 3D, even if Roberta hadn't been kicked out of the project and it had tried for a better KQ storyline.)

Space Quest's aesthetic similarly had a lot of "Saturday morning sci-fi cartoon" in its DNA (such as Battle of the Planets, as one example to mind). Admittedly, part of Space Quest's aesthetic was all over the map if they could find a good joke for something they'd swap aesthetics on they fly for that joke (that's a big part of SQIV after all), but the tonality of the series very much never would fit with "photorealistic graphics" at least not for more than a joke or three. (Two Guys from Andromeda's SpaceVenture went 3D for cost reasons, but still seems to have settled on cell shading/cartoon styling over "photorealistic".)

Space Quest was a spoof on a bunch of shows - Buck Rogers comes to mind, but I'm probably older than you. Space Quest took itself a bit less seriously than KQ in that regard, with its many sci fi tropes.

Loved them both for different reasons. I thought Space Quest was really funny and intriguing as a kid. King's Quest V along with Monkey Island II are the first games I owned when my parents bought me a 386 SX with a VGA card. At some point later I got a Sound Blaster and suddenly had non-speaker-beeping music.

No it sounds like we're in a relatively close cohort age-wise.

I specifically tried to mention cartoon references and skipped mentioning any live action influences/parodies to Space Quest as the point was specifically that Space Quest is as much a cartoon influenced aesthetic as it is influenced by live action or "photo realistic" works (of which there are very many, too many to list), because the point I was making was that specifically I don't think Space Quest itself would work the same in live action/3D/"photorealism", and you would lose a lot of the intentional aesthetic moving to it. In addition to parodying live action works, Space Quest was a cartoon, not just for technical reasons but for art reasons.

I don't know, man. You might be onto something with the image of a first person cartoon-ish world. That aesthetic might be very cool and interesting. The quest for the most real realism will get boring eventually, right?

The painted and cartoonish world of the 2D adventure games was very cool (in fact I'm playing the Leisure Suit series now, that while not great, fulfills that nostalgic itch), but who knows what comes next.

Sure, if they retain the think-and-click feel versus becoming reaction-based hack and slash / shooters. In that case an emphatic yes.

Think of another company affected by this merger - Blizzard.

In what way? Sierra had its head cut off (with the ouster of both Williams), Blizzard did not. It's very hard to compare the outcomes of both companies, because the internal political battles were a Highlander-style rochambeau where only one was likely to come out a winner. The article here even details how Blizzard was a direct contributor to Sierra's murder (via their past CEO Davidson) and a part of how Sierra's head got cut off in the first place.

Almost everything is a FPS or multiplayer... I mean all the big budget releases. Cyberpunk and Wasteland III are exceptions, as is Divinity OS and games like that. My theory is people want reaction-time games versus think-and-do games.

Or maybe I'm old and don't like the reaction-based (and certainly not multiplayer) games anymore.

Is Cyberpunk really an exception though? Isn't it an FPS in an open-world environment just like most big budget releases? Like GTA, Watch Dogs, Tomb Raider, The Witcher, Assassins Creed, Red Dead Redemption, etc, but with a cyberpunk theme instead? All previews and gameplay bits I've seen are basically just like those games and with nothing really truly unique or new except for the cyberpunky environment. I'm hoping for maybe a fantastic one-of-a-kind story that will make it justice but with all the hype around it, if it doesn't end up becoming the best thing since sliced bread, I'm afraid it may end up being a big disappointment, although I hope I'm wrong.

It kind of boils down to whether a battle is reaction-based or turned-based (the 'shooter' part) for me. The idea of first-person open world is still lovely, but it doesn't mean that everything has to require adrenaline and concentration and reflexes. For example, Fallout. Then some try to retain a classic feel with a top-down like Baldur's Gate 2 and D:OS and could one day be first-person.

> I'm old and don't like the reaction-based (and certainly not multiplayer) games anymore.

I still like them, but I have no time to train myself every afternoon and evening any more, so they’re mostly exercises in getting shot and/or killed all the time.

Stop looking at AAAs and get yourself some indies.

Current Halloween sales are a good time to get 10 titles for $50 or something like that. If you look at the descriptions/reviews you're likely to like at least 2-3 out of the 10.

Steam has so much volume, it's tough to pick the signal from the noise.

I think it's interesting that the development team wanted to turn King's Quest VIII into an RPG, despite Roberta Williams' attempts to direct them back toward the adventure genre.

As much as I look back on the adventure genre with a lot of fondness, it's definitely looking back; it's a pretty tiny part of the market these days.

This is a great article, except for the parts where it intimates that Sierra games were good. While their games _were_ beautiful technological marvels, the design of most of the games (especially Roberta's) was just so incredibly bad. The games are some of the worst I've ever played in terms of actual gameplay.

Jimmy Maher at The Digital Antiquarian (https://www.filfre.net/) has written a fair bit about their games and the design issues with them, as well as their place in gaming history.

While I like Jimmy Maher's writing, I would say that he's rather biased in the way he describes those games and it's a matter of opinion.

And there are a lot of great games from Sierra: Conquest of the longbow, the ecoquest serie (aimed at a younger public), Quest of Glory, Leisure Suit Larry (but then I played that as a teenager) and yes I'd say King's Quest 6 & 4.

I wouldn't call him "biased". He has a strong opinion, but it's not based on nothing nor is it a product of some sort of ulterior motive. He has a strong opinion about these games that I agree with.

I had a C64 growing up so I didn't really play any of the Sierra games til I had a PC in college, and I remember feeling really confused about why people liked them so much. They felt unplayable and frustrating to me.

The massive popularity of many of those games proves you wrong by example.

So popularity = good design? That's a weird assertion.

Like I said, they were technological marvels, and I think people bought them because of that. I do wonder how many people who purchased them actually finished them.

Doesn't that also depend on how and why you play them? Back in the day, I couldn't finish any Sierra (or LucasArts) adventures without a walkthrough. I did finish them with a walkthrough, because for me the fun was in seeing how the story would go. They were interactive stories.

If being able to finish the games would be all that important, I would personally have to consider pretty much any arcade game badly designed. I've never been able to finish Super Mario Bros, DOOM, Quake, any of the Ultimas. But I think all of those games are well-designed and, more importantly: fun to play.

And ultimately, I had lots of fun playing Sierra's and LucasArts' adventures. They may not be the pinnacle of game design, but that enjoyment alone makes then good games in my book.

I think the difference between Sierra games and the others you mentioned is that it's possible to finish them without a walkthrough. And really, there's nothing in those games that entirely defies logic. They might be very hard, but they're fair within the rules they lay down, and you can't end up in a situation where the game is unfinishable.

Sierra games have a lot of "dead man walking" scenarios where you end up in a situation where an action you took hours earlier locks you out from finishing the game. They also have lots of instant death scenarios that you can only find by trial and error. Is your last save several hours old? Too bad, you get to play that part again.

Their games also feature a lot of "dream logic" puzzles where you really have no way of figuring out the intended solution short of clicking on everything. The "cat hair mustache puzzle" is a great example of this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_hair_mustache_puzzle. To be fair, that one wasn't created by Roberta Williams, but I think it typifies much of the Sierra design approach.

Again, Jimmy Maher at The Digital Antiquarian has gone into a lot more depth on these issues in Sierra games (and plenty from other companies), comparing them to better designed games from companies like Infocom and others.

Pretty sure all the comments above you are intimating is that there's no such thing as "better designed" without a "to what (specific) goal?". If the goal was enjoyment, then Sierra games were well-loved by lots of people, and like the guy says, that's proof by itself that the design goal was met. You can (and Maher does) argue that there are ways to take frustration out of the experience, or highlight other parts of the experience more (parts that people generally find enjoyable), but that still doesn't allow an authoritative, non-subjective, statement about "better" without some sort of qualifier.

I agree. My comment that the games were poorly designed is clearly very subjective, as are nearly all opinions are better/worse anything.

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