Sierra Lori Cole's History of Adventure Games

[LESS T_T]

Too short for the subject.

 

[MRY]

Too short for the subject.

It's really cool to listen to a veteran developer talk about history that she lived through, and she comes across as a genuine and genuinely nice person.

That said, the speech was pretty non-rigorous. For example, she:
(1) oddly credits LSL with introducing "amusing death sequences," rather than SQ, seemingly because she was looking for something to say about it other than sex;
(2) mostly ignores PQ (arguably Sierra's most prolific franchise) while claiming that GK "brought the mystery back into the game";
(3) says that LucasArts "stole the adventure game crown" from Sierra, which is ahistorical (Sierra games were way more popular, LA ascended only in retrospect/retrogaming); and
(4) misidentifies GF as LucasArt's final adventure game (Escape from Monkey Island came later).

She closes by gushing about TellTale, but it's not clear to me that TellTale even satisfies her definition of adventure games ("exploration and puzzle solving").

I also think her point about Sierra making "the first games to have female protagonists" is overstated. Sierra didn't introduce a playable female character until after several major console franchises had already done so (Metroid, Super Mario Bros., and Phantasy Star, at a minimum), and Infocom had already featured a female protagonist (in Plundered Hearts). Moreover, as far as I remember only four Sierra titles (KQIV/VII and the two Laura Bows) featured female leads, which probably puts it at a rate of < 10%. On the other hand, Sierra *does* seem to have promoted female *designers* in a way very uncommon for the time (or for any time, really) between Roberta Williams, Jane Jensen, Lori Ann Cole, and Christy Marx (are there more?).

The speech made me morose since it reminded me how diverse adventure games used to be in genre and how unfortunate it is that the Coles have had such struggles with Hero-U.

 

[Infinitron]

Too short for the subject.

It's really cool to listen to a veteran developer talk about history that she lived through, and she comes across as a genuine and genuinely nice person.

That said, the speech was pretty non-rigorous. For example, she:
(1) oddly credits LSL with introducing "amusing death sequences," rather than SQ, seemingly because she was looking for something to say about it other than sex;
(2) mostly ignores PQ (arguably Sierra's most prolific franchise) while claiming that GK "brought the mystery back into the game";
(3) says that LucasArts "stole the adventure game crown" from Sierra, which is ahistorical (Sierra games were way more popular, LA ascended only in retrospect/retrogaming); and
(4) misidentifies GF as LucasArt's final adventure game (Escape from Monkey Island came later).

She closes by gushing about TellTale, but it's not clear to me that TellTale even satisfies her definition of adventure games ("exploration and puzzle solving").

I also think her point about Sierra making "the first games to have female protagonists" is overstated. Sierra didn't introduce a playable female character until after several major console franchises had already done so (Metroid, Super Mario Bros., and Phantasy Star, at a minimum), and Infocom had already featured a female protagonist (in Plundered Hearts). Moreover, as far as I remember only four Sierra titles (KQIV/VII and the two Laura Bows) featured female leads, which probably puts it at a rate of < 10%. On the other hand, Sierra *does* seem to have promoted female *designers* in a way very uncommon for the time (or for any time, really) between Roberta Williams, Jane Jensen, Lori Ann Cole, and Christy Marx (are there more?).

The speech made me morose since it reminded me how diverse adventure games used to be in genre and how unfortunate it is that the Coles have had such struggles with Hero-U.

This widespread ignorance about the nature and history of adventure games even among their own developers is quite frustrating.

Somebody needs to write a book called "The REAL History of Adventure Games" or something like that, dispelling all the myths.

 

[MRY]

The strangest thing for me in retrospect is that the assertion that adventure games died when Sierrra and LucasArt stopped making P&Cs.

A few points. First, if you'd asked me what was the last P&C that Sierra made, I'd probably have said KQ7 (in 1994), even though it turns out that Torin's Pasage, SQ6, GK2, GK3 all postdate it. If you asked me when the last good Sierra P&Cs were made, I'd say 1993 (GK1, QFG4, SQV), though I suppose people of bad taste would put it in 1995 (GK2). In any event, many of the great LucasArts titles post-date Sierra's last good year: Full Throttle, The Dig, Grim Fandango, and Curse of Monkey Island.

So even though popular consciousness links Sierra's demise with LucasArts' demise, that's just incorrect. Moreover, there was no great die-off of other adventure game companies either. It's true that by 1995, many of the great third-party adventure games had come and gone (Kyrandia, Dragonsphere, BASS). But after Sierra's effective end came The Last Express, Sanitarium, the Broken Swords, the Discworlds, etc.

Okay, so what if we fix the date of death at 2000, when EMI was released, or 1999, when Grim Fandango was released? By that date, hadn't everything run its course? Even The Longest Journey (1999) had come and gone!

Not really. There are plenty of good and successful post-2000 adventure games. Even excluding the Myst-likes, you have Syberia (2002) and Syberia 2 (2004), two Broken Swords (2003 and 2006). That gives Revolution a consistent two- to three-year release schedule from 1992 to 2006. (Also, there are like a bazillion other licensed titles that I never played, since I mostly stopped playing adventure games in 1999.)

Anyway, by 2006, TellTale and WEG were already in full swing. So if you credit them with reviving the genre, the most you can say is that there was a lull from 1999 to 2006. By 2008, Daedelic is in the mix.

What's striking to me is that this seven-year span (1999 to 2006), while long, is actually not that much longer than the six-year span from Sierra's last good year (1993) to LucasArts' last good year (1999). In other words, two "events" (Sierra's downfall and LA's) are treated as simultaneous despite a six-year gap, and then a seven-year gap is treated as an interminable dry spell. It seems kind of weird -- weird in the same way that the relatively short VGA era (1990 to 1995?) has become synonymous with graphical adventure games.

All of history is like that, though, not just video game history. Our understanding is totally distorted by what matters to us, when we learned it, etc.

I nominate Korgoth of Barbaria to write the history. He has the clear eyes of the depressed and encyclopedic knowledge of this stuff.

 

[Infinitron]

MRY Qualitative differences between the games that come out before and after them can make these timespans of "decline" seem longer than they are. RPGs have this with the famous "mid-90s slump", which was fairly short all things considered, but seems like an epoch because of how different the RPGs that came out after it were.

But FWIW, my feeling as a kid during most of the 1990s was that adventure games were already dying/dead. LucasArts did not a genre make.

 

[MRY]

But FWIW, my feeling as a kid during most of the 1990s was that adventure games were already dying/dead. LucasArts did not a genre make.

At a guess, I'd say there were probably 20 great third-person adventure games prior to 1995, and 10 from 1995 to 2000. The decade from '89 to '99 is definitely the best.

 

[Infinitron]

But FWIW, my feeling as a kid during most of the 1990s was that adventure games were already dying/dead. LucasArts did not a genre make.

At a guess, I'd say there were probably 20 great third-person adventure games prior to 1995, and 10 from 1995 to 2000. The decade from '89 to '99 is definitely the best.

It's Sierra, really. They were the genre's living engine. A goddamn finely honed adventure game production machine. When that machine broke down, it became hard to have confidence in the genre. Everybody else was artisans, dilettantes.

 

[MRY]

Fewer than half of my top 30 would be Sierra titles, I would guess. But you're right that they generated a lot of commercially successful games.

 

[Jaesun]

When Myst was released, what were the last titles from Sierra and LA that were released?

 

[MRY]

Myst was released in 1993, something of an annus mirabilis* for adventure games. (* The Codex monster in SitS totally should have been called an anus horribilis.) Sierra released Freddy Pharkas, LSL6, PQ4, SQ5, QFG4, GK1, and some shovelware. Lucas released Sam & Max and DotT. Westwood released Kyrandia 2, Interplay released Star Trek: Judgment Rights, Infocom released Return to Zork, Adventure Soft released Simon the Sorcerer, Micropose released Return of the Phantom. Other games included 7th Guest (bleh, but a big deal), Shadow of the Comet, two total throwback Legend Entertainment games (Eric the Unready and Gateway 2) and one more modern Legend Entertainment game (Companions of Xanth).

I think an argument could certainly be made that 1993 was one of the best years for adventure games, but I probably would go with 1991: MI2, SQ4, LSL5, PQ3, Heart of China and Willy Beamish, Gobliiins, and Conquest of the Longbow. (Hugo Whodunnit 2 also came out that year. Not a great game, but an important game to me because the Hugo series is what ultimately led to my making Primordia. Hugos 1 and 2 inspired me and my friend to make first a text adventure (Quentin Questor) and then a failed graphical sequel. From that point forward it was something I felt I had to see done, and Primordia was the final scratch of that itch.) Not quite as many games, but generally somewhat better. 1992 is pretty legit, too, including KQ6, QFG1VGA and QFG3, Kyrandia, Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, and others. 1990, too. Oh, what bountiful years those were!

 

[JarlFrank]

Whoa, the Hugo games. I vaguely remember trying to play those as a kid. I recently read an article about them on hardcoregaming101 and it seems like they were pretty horrible overall.

In what way did they inspire you, MRY? :D

 

[MRY]

Some random dude made a full featured adventure game. Made me think it could be done.

 

[Sceptic]

Anyway, by 2006, TellTale and WEG were already in full swing. So if you credit them with reviving the genre, the most you can say is that there was a lull from 1999 to 2006. By 2008, Daedelic is in the mix.

I think part of the reason they get this credit isn't so much because of the lull itself, but because it was pretty clear during that lull that the big companies, the same ones that became big because of adventure games, decided quite abruptly to stop making them. That lull corresponds not just to "fewer games released" but to the companies literally going "we are cancelling all adventure games, in each of these franchises, these franchises are now officially dead." You have the preceding years with SQ6's painful gestation, QFG5 going through cycles of dead-alive-dead-alive, and then in the late 90s the cancellations hit full swing: FT2 cancelled, Sam & Max 2 cancelled, SQ7 cancelled (then revived then cancelled again...), KQ8 comes out but it's an action game, LSL8 cancelled and Al Lowe fired despite LSL7 having been profitable, Legend gets bought and is forced into making FPS sequels instead... I think it's specifically this, the fact that even the successful franchises were being cancelled, that led to the "death of the adventure" feel. It wasn't just a lull, it was a conscious decision by the biggest members of the industry to kill off an entire, profitable genre, not even because it wasn't profitable enough, but just because it wasn't as profitable. The "lull" is really just those other companies going "alright, we'll take over instead". It worked pretty well for some time too. You listed the early Telltales, WEG, Daedalic, Syberia, and they're great examples of this: it's not a revival after a lull so much as a shift of which names are associated with the genre. Like you said yourself even the "lull years" had some releases, companies like Revolution and Adventuresoft never really stopped during it (quality notwithstanding - yes, I hate the 3rd games in both series), not to mention of course all the indie stuff and the Sierra remakes between AGDI's and Blackthorne's (though these don't count if you're only thinking commercial releases I guess; I do like to count them because quality-wise they might as well be commercial).

On the other hand, Sierra *does* seem to have promoted female *designers* in a way very uncommon for the time (or for any time, really) between Roberta Williams, Jane Jensen, Lori Ann Cole, and Christy Marx (are there more?).

I like to think of it as "promoting talent". Nobody ever cared when playing a Sierra game what the gender of the designer was, you just knew they were good and you knew you were buying a quality game. CGW would mention the designer, because that's what they did, but I can't remember Charles Ardai or Scorpia drawing attention to GK1's design by going "but she's a woman so it's different! I wish we could go back to this instead of today's "it's made by a man/woman so it's a sexist/SJW agenda" crap.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I watched the video earlier today, finished it again just now...and I'm cringing at what she's saying, especially towards the end.

At best she's cherry-picking examples, at worst she's either plain wrong or flat-out lying...but considering this is the GDC, that is somewhat to be expected. By the 1:30 mark I had spotted over half a dozen points that are vague and/or misleading, and as the video's lone YouTube comment points out, Grim Fandango was not LucasArts's last adventure game (Escape from Monkey Island was). By the end of the video I had a laundry list of points that don't ring right.

I'm starting to doubt that she wrote her speech herself, that she was just called in to read this to show 'Grrrl Power!' or something like that.

To use this video as a history lesson for Adventure Games is an insult.

 

[MRY]

Sceptic I think you're right that a big part of it was "if Sierra and Lucas Arts say the genre is dead, who are we to disagree?" I hadn't fully considered that angle, but it's a great point.

However, I think you're underestimating what Sierra did in terms of its female designers. By and large, Sierra's female designers outperformed the male designers, so I don't think Sierra was lowering standards to recruit or promote women. But there's no way that a company ends up having that many female designers -- given their incredible rarity at the time, and rarity even today* -- without it being the product of a special corporate culture. (* By "rarity" I don't mean "rarity among the entire population," I mean "rarity in the industry." I have no idea whether there are millions of Willa Huntings out lost in obscurity because the industry can't/won't find them.) And I suspect that this aspect of Sierra's culture can be attributed to Roberta Williams's being the company's co-founder and the designer on the flagship franchise. My guess is that she attracted, protected, and promoted women in a way that other game development studio leadership did not. And as a result, Sierra profited enormously. IMHO the best-designed Sierra franchises are QFG and Conquests, GK is generally regarded as the best written (I have my gripes with Jane Jensen, but I'll set my own feelings aside), and KQ was, as I said, the flagship. The male-designed franchises had their own things going (I love SQ4), but still. It's a pretty BFD that Sierra put those women in place to pull off those games.

That doesn't say anything about whether we should gush about bad, preachy Twine games in the name of equality. But since (1) I can't name any female developers of any other games I played in my childhood and (2) some of my favorite childhood games were made by women; and (3) all of those women were at Sierra, I think there's something praiseworthy that went on there. You're absolutely right that it's just "promoting talent" -- but it was also the ability to find, attract, and develop female designers' talent, something that apparently no one else could or would do. I mean, why should all the female-designed adventure games be from Sierra, not Lucas Arts? (Per Moby Games, it looks like Jennifer Sward and Sara Reeder actually did a some writing on LOOM, so there's that.)

(Once you get to the late 90s, there are more non-Sierra titles with female writers/designers I have high opinions of (like Amy Henning) But before then, I really don't know of any. Google tells me that Centipede was designed by a woman, and Archon was programmed by a woman. I guess I at least kind of liked those games, but they weren't much of a big deal in the way Sierra's games were.)

Unkillable Cat The most likely explanation, I think, is that she was mostly just working off her recollection without double checking via Google.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

The most likely explanation, I think, is that she was mostly just working off her recollection without double checking via Google.

I highly doubt that. The way she uses vague sentences to imply things that aren't true, like stating that Roberta Williams 'invented' the graphic adventure ( ), stating that Sierra having female designers and female protagonists led to a huge increase in female players (a statement that cannot be (dis)proven in any way) leads me to believe that someone is trying to frame a narrative where there isn't one.

The more I think about this, the more certain I am that someone connected to the GDC wrote the speech, and not Lori Cole herself.

 

[Infinitron]

MRY Unkillable Cat The impression I have of these Sierra veteran designers is that they were cogs in the Sierra machine. They were not systemizers, they did not have a broad overview of how things really worked. Which is why they've struggled ever since. Who at Sierra did have that overview? It's unclear.

 

[Telengard]

stating that Roberta Williams 'invented' the graphic adventure ( )

That one's been part of the Sierra story since time immemorial (Mystery House).

 

[Telengard]

MRY, Unkillable Cat... The impression I have of these Sierra veteran designers is that they were cogs in the Sierra machine. They were not systemizers, they did not have a broad overview of how things really worked. Which is why they've struggled ever since. Who at Sierra did have that overview? It's unclear.

There are probably any number of issues involved, but one of the major ones for a lot of devs from those ancient days (not just in Sierra) is they were not traditionally educated in their line of work. Which was perfectly fine in those old days when your work history and connections were everything. Then came the paradigm shift when big money and the suits took over, people who didn't even know anything about computers (early days of computers, remember), and then devs were suddenly only as good as their degree. Which none of these people have. To a suit's eye, these devs' prestige is about the extent of their worth. So a suit makes them project manager. But they're not project managers. They come from a time when the companies were tiny, where everyone did a bit everything - looking a lot like indies do today. They had Ken Williams as defacto head of everything, and probably a bean counter somewhere, and that's all they needed.

Until, that is, Ken Williams started making acquisitions and rapidly expanding the company. Which is when the cog-wheeling began.

 

[Infinitron]

My question is, why didn't we get a Black Isle->Obsidian situation? Or Cavedog->Gas Powered Games, or hell, even LucasArts->TellTale.

When a company is generally functioning well, but then collapses due to outside circumstances, you expect a core of insiders-who-have-their-shit-together to defect and set up shop in a new company. That didn't happen with Sierra, instead they just scattered to the four winds. That tells you something about the way things at Sierra worked.

 

[Telengard]

Since Sierra disintegrated in such a public fashion, there was a lot more info about it at the time than there usually is. The big names, of course, were quite visibly so fed up that they left the industry entirely. Of course, some of the lesser names lost a lot when the company got CUCed (sorry, had to do it!), leaving them not in a good position to fund a startup and famously struggled to find work. But then of course, amongst the subsidiaries - some core Dynamix people did reemerge as Garage Games. And some other people joined up as Monster. And then there was well-known Westwood's exes.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

stating that Roberta Williams 'invented' the graphic adventure ( )

That one's been part of the Sierra story since time immemorial (Mystery House).

It's not the fact that Mystery House is the first graphic adventure that I have beef with, but that they see a need to put a spin on it so that Williams 'invented' something which is only the digital equivalent of the logical step of putting images into a book. It's almost like claiming Benjamin Franklin invented electricity.

 

[Telengard]

stating that Roberta Williams 'invented' the graphic adventure ( )

That one's been part of the Sierra story since time immemorial (Mystery House).

It's not the fact that Mystery House is the first graphic adventure that I have beef with, but that they see a need to put a spin on it so that Williams 'invented' something which is only the digital equivalent of the logical step of putting images into a book. It's almost like claiming Benjamin Franklin invented electricity.

I agree. But Sierra was spinning it that way from the beginning. It was the story on their business front. It's a story several decades old now, oft repeated in magazines, and even today in online retrospectives. When Sierra told the story of itself back in the day, that's the story they told.

 

[MRY]

I think the stronger question might be why they weren't hired by the companies like Revoution that went on making games. Starting up one's own shop really wouldn't have been viable at the time. The cost of producing an adventure game, and the number of different disciplines involved, would've made it infeasible. I mean, even with all the new tools and distribution channels out there, WEG is not making games like late-Sierra/Lucas titles. It is make much smaller versions of the early '93-era Sierra/Lucas titles. But the companies didn't kill their main franchises in '93; there would be no reason for the major showrunners to jump ship. At the point where Sierra canceled the franchises, the quality of production* had gone way, way up. (* De gustibus, of course.) Now we have enough separation from '93 that we can enjoy chunky pixels with retro-nostalgia. But in, say, 1999, that was not the case: a game like, say, Thimbleweed Park would likely have been roundly ridiculed, not met with frantic excitement.

To be clear, I assume we're talking about the Two Guys, the Coles, and Jensen. By that point the Williamses were filthy rich and had no reason to slum into anything new. My understanding is that Jane Jensen basically wanted to transition into writing novels (and perhaps television), and so it wouldn't have made sense for her to try and start over at a new company, either. Chrissy Marx transitioned into other games, and was quite successful as a TV writer/showrunner.

I mean, one thing to bear in mind here, something I've mentioned with respect to Broken Age, is that even if we are desperate for more '93-style adventure games, the developers themselves may not feel some call of the wild drawing them back to it. Adventures games are fun to make, but they're extremely low-prestige as writing (and even designing) go. For designers who got to make top-of-the-line games in the 90s to start making low-budget successors in the 00s would not have been a step forward, but a plummet downward. If they could instead go into making TV shows, or novels, or AAA action games, or whatever, I can see why they would do that. By contrast, for me, making a '93-style adventure game was a big achievement -- something to scratch off the bucket list, etc. It's a dream made real! For the big-shot designers at Sierra, though, continuing independently wouldn't have been living a dream; it would've been living a shadow of what they'd already enjoyed.

Given that most of them seem to have had enough money or alternative job prospects, I guess I'm not so surprised they took them. But, yeah, I think a big part of it was probably just that there wasn't a viable way for them to make competitive games. From Mystery House through the very end, Sierra and Lucas Arts were always pushing cutting edge graphics and production. From the perspective of hindsight their games look retro, but at the time, they were always the prettiest and nicest sounding games out there. (Until they self-mutilated with the switch to 3D and FMV, but that itself was in the name of being cutting edge.)

Finally, at least some of the Sierra/Dynamix casualties did form their own company (Pipeworks), it just didn't make adventure games. :/

 

[Infinitron]

I mean, one thing to bear in mind here, something I've mentioned with respect to Broken Age, is that even if we are desperate for more '93-style adventure games, the developers themselves may not feel some call of the wild drawing them back to it. Adventures games are fun to make, but they're extremely low-prestige as writing (and even designing) go. For designers who got to make top-of-the-line games in the 90s to start making low-budget successors in the 00s would not have been a step forward, but a plummet downward. If they could instead go into making TV shows, or novels, or AAA action games, or whatever, I can see why they would do that. By contrast, for me, making a '93-style adventure game was a big achievement -- something to scratch off the bucket list, etc. It's a dream made real! For the big-shot designers at Sierra, though, continuing independently wouldn't have been living a dream; it would've been living a shadow of what they'd already enjoyed.

At this point, I'm not even talking about them reforming in a new company to make oldschool adventure games again. They could have used their production know-how to make other sorts of games. (Obsidian didn't exactly go on to make isometric RPGs throughout the 2000s, after all.) There was a lot of institutional knowledge at Sierra that just got flushed down the toilet.

Unless, as I suggested, they were so highly specialized that there actually wasn't any knowledge there that could be applied outside of Sierra.