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Sierra Lori Cole's History of Adventure Games

MRY

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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.
Who are you talking about? Many Sierra developers did continue making games. I assumed you were specifically talking about the famous project leads. Among them, I know that Mark Crowe went to Pipeworks, Jane Jensen took a five-year hiatus to write novels (and then returned to game work), Jim Walls (PQ) went to Westwood (after working at a couple Sierra splinters that never amounted to anything), the Coles went to Legend to make Shanarra, etc. So, I dunno, I think maybe the premise of your question is wrong? (BTW, I may be misunderstanding or missing something, not trying to be argumentative.)
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
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.
Who are you talking about? Many Sierra developers did continue making games. I assumed you were specifically talking about the famous project leads. Among them, I know that Mark Crowe went to Pipeworks, Jane Jensen took a five-year hiatus to write novels (and then returned to game work), Jim Walls (PQ) went to Westwood (after working at a couple Sierra splinters that never amounted to anything), the Coles went to Legend to make Shanarra, etc. So, I dunno, I think maybe the premise of your question is wrong? (BTW, I may be misunderstanding or missing something, not trying to be argumentative.)

I mean reform collectively under the banner of a recognized successor company, not scatter to a multitude of them. You mentioned Pipeworks, that's something. But I have something more ambitious in mind.

The Sierra people thought of themselves as a company that makes games with great stories, but some of them (like Al Lowe) seem to have the idea that non-adventure genres are still like they were in the 80s and 90s, with no significant narrative. One can't help but feel that if they had been exposed to the right sort of game, they might have thought to themselves "Hey, we can do this, we can make a narrative-heavy RPG/shooter/whatever at a new company with the disciplines we learned making adventure games at Sierra."
 

MRY

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Maybe, except that the last hurrah at Sierra was an effort to make hybrid adventure/FPS games and they were generally reviled (KQ8/QFG5), so I'm not sure that it would seem like a promising tack.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Maybe, except that the last hurrah at Sierra was an effort to make hybrid adventure/FPS games and they were generally reviled (KQ8/QFG5), so I'm not sure that it would seem like a promising tack.

Yes. Again, it seems like there was a company culture problem at Sierra. They lacked flexibility, they didn't know how to transfer their skills to other genres and still keep their fans happy (akshun means our games have to look like shit and have shit stories now! HEY GUYS WHERE'D YOU GO). I mean look at something like, I dunno, Alpha Protocol. It was an unfamiliar genre for the developer and a total shitshow, but you look at that and you still see an Obsidian game. This seems to have been a difficult concept for a lot of these old developers to wrap their heads around. Dinosaurs destined to go extinct.
 

Telengard

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Al Lowe is a music teacher who became a dev at a time when self-taught people could just walk into the industry. He might have been able to score some writing gigs somewhere, but why hire him when you can hire a college grad yes man? Other than the pull of his name, of course. Unlike a lot of post-devs, he actually plays games for fun, and is probably well aware of the stories going on in them. He also probably doesn't care. The kind of "deeper games" and "deeper stories" (and probably funnier stories) that he normally talked about in interviews, thinking that that was one day where the industry would head, are not the kinds of stories being used today. Outside of the indie scene, of course. The stories today are shallow, grimdark, me-too things when he always talks about wanting humor and depth of character.

And as for Garage Games, it was founded by the founder of Dynamix with all of his favorite people, funded by severance checks, and we all (supposedly) recently played a Torque game. Or at lease should have done. They've done a few games, some educational software, and one of their people did an electric car.
 

Barbarian

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Someone mentioned Christy Marx in this thread. Man I had forgotten all that lady. She did one of my favorite sierra adventures(Conquests of the Longbow). I always found it funny that I loved that game so much even it being such a subversion of the Robin Hood mythos. Any other piece of fiction presenting Marian as a pagan priestess and other stuff like that and I would have hated it, but not here. Irresistible little gem.

Anyway I googled her up, she is still working on games but nowadays does nothing more than write content for shitty social smartphone games. Seems she didn't get to actually design anything after the conquest games. She does have writing credits in a lot of popamole console games though. I was also amused to see she wrote screenplays for many cartoons I watched growing up.

A pity she didn't try her hand at adventures again. Also her husband passed away years ago, he was responsible for all that awesome art. :(
 

MRY

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The fact that she was the creator of Jem and the Holograms and wrote an episode of Babylon 5 is what blew my mind.
 
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Aeschylus

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Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Divinity: Original Sin 2
I mean reform collectively under the banner of a recognized successor company, not scatter to a multitude of them.
Based on the interviews I've read, the end of Sierra was pretty brutal and left a lot of the top designers and brass (Al Lowe, Scott Murphy, Ken + Roberta Williams) very disillusioned with the games industry and where it was heading. I'd imagine the reason people splintered rather than going off to form a new company was a combination lack of cohesive leadership, and a number of extreme cases of burn-out.
 

Taluntain

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I would assume that the fact that Sierra consisted of a bunch of small, more or less isolated teams working on their pet projects would have been the biggest contributing factor to the scattering to the winds. Plus, from what I remember, they weren't all let go (or left) at once. To an extent, all the "top talent" were one-trick ponies, happy to stick to the little universes of their own creation, which some of them are still clinging on to to this day. Back then the prospect would have to have been to leave all that behind and start from scratch on something new, very likely unrelated or only vaguely related to what they've been used to since forever, under very uncertain circumstances, with other Sierra people they might not have even really known or worked with to an extent that they would have been comfortable forming a new company with.

Then there's also the fact that none of them really had a clue about the business end of making games and working with realistic budgets and/or timelines on their own, as aptly demonstrated by the Coles and the SQ guys... and this was all in the era when you couldn't just stick your recognizable dev hand out and expect nostalgia-driven money to start raining down upon it from every nook and cranny in the world over the Internet like it can these days.

Honestly, it would have been stupid if they HAD attempted it, not the other way around.
 
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I put Sierra's last great year as '95. You had SQ6, Torin's Passage, GK2, Phantas, Shivers, Caesar II (a huge hit), SWAT. Not a banner year like 92 or 93, but not a bad set of games either. All reasonable successes (Phantas, even if a bad game, was a masssive hit). 96 was okay for them and 97 is when the drop in quality output really became noticeably bigger. LucasArts' last great year was '98 with GF.
 

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