Obviously he wasn’t there for the tail end of things during the acquisitions and fraudulent period but what I found most interesting is how Sierra was bootstrapped in the first place.
Ken is a brilliant thinker and had the foresight to build a game engine that Roberta could plug and play her game content in because she admitted to not being a great coder.
Later Ken wanted his next generation games to be built as a virtual machine (The Sierra Creative Interpreter) which meant they only had to make the game once and build the VM for different architectures. Again a brilliant move.
Check his book out: https://kensbook.com/
Like Infocom did from the beginning with their Z-Machine VM.
The chapter on Sierra in Steven Levy's "Hackers" was much more engaging (in fact probably made me want to become a published game author).
Ken only mentions the Levy chapter in passing which is too bad — Levy did a fantastic job of painting a picture of the adolescent coding Mecca that Sierra was at that time. All night D&D, 2-liter's of Coke, coding, hot tubs and gaming....
Another favorite of mine was Conquests of Longbow. I think that one was a little more obscure?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/375440/HeroU_Rogue_to_Red...