Sierra Creative Interpreter – Scripts
benshoof.org
benshoof.org
I’ll die on the hill that dead-end game states and “just in case” save game histories were a critical part of the magic.
And the games were never the same when the text prompts were replaced by point & click.
Maybe I just hate the feeling I’m on rails.
The first time I ever loaded a game was on my dad's IBM PC XT when he wasn't around. He had those old slide-out floppy disk drawers. One of them was labeled "games". I had watched him put floppies into the disk drive and switch on the computer. One day he was out and I cheekily decided to try out his computer without permission. I must have been around six years old.
I opened the games drawer and pulled out a floppy of King's Quest I, put it into the drive, and switched on the PC (with glorious CGA graphics). It loaded successfully. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do anything in that game and the first eureka moment was when I was standing in a field and typed "pick up carrot".
The most notable takeaway from that experience was, I thought there was a real world running inside the computer and from that day the only thing I really wanted to do was mess with computers. I played all the king's quest games, KQ4 (The Perils of Rosella) came quite a bit later, and I loved it.
Good innocent exciting times!
It's gotten to the point where cloud services and search interfaces are being pushed so hard that the actual filesystem is a mystery to people at a high school/college level.
I really wish someone would point AI at this problem and generate a whole bunch of AGI/SCI games. SierraGPT.
Leisure Suit Larry (Sierra) was being played by my older cousin and introduced me for the first time to a lot of new concepts haha.
I was grateful for the move to point and click adventure games. Pixel hunting was honestly less frustrating.
A bunch of step stones going across a swamp, if I recall correctly, which needed to be navigated in order to get to the next screen.
I repeatedly tried stuff like "jump on stone", "jump across", "swim".
"YOU CAN'T DO THAT HERE"
It took weeks to figure out that all I needed to do was type "jump" without any additional text. Oh, the good old days.
I both loved and feared those moments in early adventure games: all good, moving on with the story and then... am I an idiot? Is this part of the game puzzle, or I have to iterate all the dictionary words again?
It's not just kids without exposure to English who struggled with typed English interfaces!
I understand the nostalgia for Infocom games of people like Jimmy Maher - I also have a soft spot for beautiful and polished writing, but this definitely was a way forward for games in general.
If you, say have a movement disorder, this happens all too often.
Still I have so many great memories of Sierra’s games from my childhood that I can’t bring myself to hate all the foibles.
Can't imagine myself playing that kind of game again but back then this semi-serious and comfortably safe (no real danger and no sierra deadends as well) gameplay felt right for the 7-8 year old.
Oh, and Kyrandia..!
But did the industry find a better way to tell a story without resorting to action-packed gameplay? I mean, Grim Fandango kind of slow story supplemented by visuals?
Like the best interactive fiction, in classic Sierra games you’re interacting with the developers’ world to create the story. Free-form text input is key to this distinction. Play-throughs of richly written games like The Colonel’s Bequest are much more rewarding because your character isn’t limited to exploring the world via “look/talk/touch/use”.
Then, as the player progresses to the next episode the non-linearity would become a single step to the next episode, without any cross-episode interdependencies. Most well-designed adventure games have this branch-narrow-branch-narrow structure, where bottlenecks make sure the player is ready to proceed to the next level.
What was no very good about Sierra-style design is that they did introduce this non-linearity but there were often inter-episode links introduced. (e.g. "had to pick up this item a couple of episodes back it's late now"). So resorting to walkthroughs was the only way to avoid this kind of meaningless backtracking. It a very shady way to lengthen gameplay time!
The best games (again, I'd cite The Colonel's Bequest) had numerous game-stage dependent side-quests and optional puzzles or secrets that made for rich replay value.
Overall, I wouldn't undersell the value of the possibility of failure & the frisson it provides over a carefully guard-railed world.
There's certainly an aggressively evil way to structure games like this. The first that comes to mind is Infocom's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but it's hard to escape the impression that the sadism towards the player was meant to be part of its charm.
Both commands above say “put can in bag”. :) What was the correct command?
Don’t ask me how Larry stuffed the bag inside the can, but there was the same animation and everything. I remember being extremely frustrated with that, since the Sierra games are otherwise quite flexible in terms of accepting input. This was also why it was useful for learning English, since you could tell it things like ‘look item’ rather than requiring it to be “look at item’ and so on.
So I really loathed those cases where you had to be super precise, since they felt immediately off compared to the rest of the game.
Regardless good times, I think the best Sierra game of that era is Space Quest 3, which had some decent puzzles, a fun story and a hero I really liked.
The limited grammar of these early adventure games had such a strong impact on me that I write my to-do lists now using the standard “VERB [ADJECTIVE] NOUN” grammar, as if I’m the character in my own game. :)
Note how "VERB.NOUN"/"ACTION.ACTIONABLE" is functional programming while "NOUN.VERB" is OOP. After 18+ years in the industry I still find the functional style more fluild: DO THIS, JUMP THAT, SEE HERE, etc. :-)
Now I see that it's the games that did this to me!
The point-and-click UI was less frustrating, but there was also something lost compared to the text commands.
Sounds so surreal in retrospect.
In hindsight, they're annoying, and IMHO kind of bad game design. Getting to the end, and finding out that to win the game, you needed some random item from level 1, and now you have to go back and do it all over again..
Despite having an original Nintendo (w/ Rob!), those text based Sierra games were the highlight of my game playing youth. There was a perfect blend of imagination, interaction, frustration, that just felt so intimate.
however, the funny thing is, when eventually a film maker comes along and makes a film that is both new, unique, and outlandishly successful, then suddenly its "obvious" and Hollywood starts to copy that, but it takes forever for the right person to be in the right place for that to get moved forward, so you end up with rinse wash repeat stuff for the longest time.
For example, HBO taking a risk on Game Of Thrones or the initial conception of the new Marvel movies (I'm talking about Iron Man, the first one from 2007, and so on, when it was still novel), Breaking Bad was novel when it came out too. Same with The Walking Dead (the plot elements, not so much the idea of a zombie horror)
Its so weird how this industry appears to work from the outside
What’s annoying is the studios still buy up the rights to tons of properties and then never develop anything. So you can’t even have a small studio/independent film on something like (for example) the Penny Arcade comic, because someone owns those rights and won’t sell
Feels like a riskier play vs any number of fully formed fantasy settings.
I think one of the reasons Hollywood avoids many video game franchises that people would sort of expect them to adapt or sequel is a lingering hangover from the FMV craze of the 90s. Hollywood Producers worked hand in hand with a bunch of videogame companies, lost a ton of money in the process, and seemed to come out of that distrustful of two-way working relationships with videogame companies.
That reason seems directly relevant to GK in particular: GK2 was quite successful in Sierra terms, but still somewhat unsuccessful in Hollywood (accounting) terms and likely still on some Hollywood producer's books as an old loss.
This alone would be worth the price of admission. But Who plays GK?
Overall I would have loved to have had this programming language available to me as a general purpose language in the 80s and early 90s.
Although, in truth, it now feels more mundane than mysterious. Reams of code that is just walk and hitbox positioning, animation, "if player has item do A, otherwise do B".
I have to wonder if there was another tool or a DSL within Script generating the more lookup-tably stuff.
The 80s film "Terminal Entry" featured a 'futuristic' version of a Sierra style game, control by voice prompts. I thought this is what the future has in store for us...
I was under the impression that this was not the case, and that the reason Sierra games run poorly on Amiga/Atari was that they could not use the custom chips in those machines.
Compared to the Lucasarts interpreter that ran really well on all kinds of hardware, and even allowed the switching of old-school graphics to special-edition to be easily implemented.