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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

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...)

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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 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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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