But I've did the research, that's why I came with the posts an everything.
Like I said, I was well aware of that. What I'm trying to say is that it was only a killing blow to a slowly decaying Sierra, not the thing that turned them from a glorious company to nothing.
Few things:
When Sierra was acquired in 1996, they were literally on top of the industry. They were consistently the market share leader in PC gaming even up to the time of the sale. They were a publicly traded company whose stock numbers were doing leaps and bounds yearly, which is what made them a hot buy at the time. Sierra as an adventure game company might have been in decline, but as a company they were on top of the world at that time. They were an aggressively expanding empire; In 1995 alone, Sierra acquired a dozen smaller companies to add to their development. So, they weren't decaying in the sense that they were in decline; they were on the way up. Business profiles from the time cited their main competition as being EA and Microsoft; They had over 1,000 employees located in 15 different studios around the globe in a time when a game company of that size, at least in PC gaming, wasn't that common.
Immediately after they were bought by CUC in the hostile takeover, CUC began using Sierra's accountants and Sierra's name in their illegal transcations. CUC's scheme was they (CUC) were basically broke and they used the companies they bought to inflate their income, making CUC appear like a monster in terms of profitability. This wouldn't come out until a year and a half after the acquisition.
Internal conflicts began. CUC had promoted the buyout to Ken as being a merger of Sierra and Davidson & Associates (who owned Blizzard), with Bob Davidson running the entire software division. Ken said no They then worked out a structure where there would be a software board of directors (which would feature himself, Sierra's President, Bob Davidson and a few CUC people). This board would make major decisions for the software division, including cutting product lines and such. He was also to be made a Vice President of CUC, which in theory would put him above Bob Davidson, and he would remain head of Sierra's R&D.
After the deal was done, none of this happened. Ken was 'promoted' but found his office gave him little power over the software end of the business. The software board only met once. He and Bob Davidson began having intense territorial conflicts. The Davidsons were religious nuts and they used their power to cut the advertising for Phantasmagoria (which was a megaseller, it had sold 1 million copies in just a month) and they even wanted to take the Leisure Suit Larry games off of store shelves. Within a few months, Davidson left the company, and instead of putting Ken in charge, they hired a guy named Chris MacLeod who had no prior computer game experience. Ken, seeing he had been duped and was now powerless, left the software division after a year in late 1997. Not long after, Sierra's President, who was Ken's handpicked successor, left. MacLeod then broke Sierra into three business units, each with a Senior Vice President, no clear CEO, which fucked up the internal structure of Sierra.
However, in the meantime (in 1997-1998), Sierra only grew. They acquired more companies, they signed Half-Life; they were considered in '97 to be the leader, the biggest developer in the industry. There were no lay-offs.
The adventure game corner of the company suffered. For example, KQ8 was conceived of as pretty much a traditional adventure game, with some limited action elements. The new heads were looking at Tomb Raider and Myst and wanting more and more elements of those games put into KQ. As a result, Roberta lost control of her project and became incredibly depressed and even wanted her name taken off KQ8 at one point because of all this crap. The new senior staff put a team of project managers above her, who told her team not to listen to her; it was a mess.
There was also the fact that Sierra's name began to be used by CUC for products Sierra didn't make. Stay Tooned was one such product. They had the idea of cross-marketing their various subsidiaries.
There was also the idea on the part of the new management that every adventure game had to be multiplayer. This is why SQ7 never really happened; there's no way to make a good SQ and have it be multiplayer. But, the rest of the company was doing very well. They had many year-to-year products like NASCAR and others as well as PrintArtist; they were very much in the black. Things were only looking bleak for the adventure side of the company.
Then in early 1998, the scandal was uncovered. And because Sierra's accountants and name had been used in the illegalities, Sierra as a company suffered a crippling blow to their profitability, and many Sierra employees' 401ks. Sierra went from being massive to crippled overnight.
Blizzard was saved from a lot of this because they were part of Davidson & Associates. Blizzard was so small at the time - having only 100 employees - their accountants weren't used. Davidson's were, and Davidson ceased to exist as a company not long after.
So, then, Sierra and Blizzard were sold again to Havas. Havas in turn was sold to Vivendi. Sierra got a new CEO who was at the helm of a massive but financially wrecked company, and so he shut down a bunch of studios and shut down the company's adventure game department. He also decided Sierra would no longer develop games in-house; they would become a publisher for third party developers to save money.
Then, he left and Vivendi hired yet another new CEO for Sierra. This guy's previous experience was working at Nabisco. So you had from 1997 through 2001:
-Ken demoted from Sierra CEO to 'sort of consultant', who then left.
-Sierra broken in late 1997 into three business units with no clear CEO, who reported to some guy who never had any computer game industry experience.
-The hiring of a CEO who had no love for adventure games and who was bottom line centered. He left after a year and change.
-Then the hiring of a CEO who worked for Nabisco, who left after two months.
So, you have Sierra ripped apart by illegalities on the part of its owner, which destroyed their profitability, internal instability caused by CUC/Cendant, Havas and Vivendi, layoffs which further crippled the company, and a rapid turnaround rate of CEOs, each of whom had differing visions, so you had turmoil because you had no one guy stay long enough to set a long term strategy, or even to provide short-term stability.
- Two Guys from Andromeda split up by Space Quest IV. Mandel left before the buyout (yes, I know he blames the suits as well, just like every tragi-comic artist developer in this fucking entertainment business). Space Quest 7 was in the works (with Scott Murphy back) but it was cancelled for various reasons. Sure, we can blame the suits again but let's not pretend it a smooth ride just until CUC bought them out and then it suddenly went mega-bumpy. The Space Quest franchise was already slowly drawing its last breath by that point.
SQ7 suffered from the new management for one lacking any interest in adventure games, secondly, they forced the game to be multiplayer; how can you make a true adventure game multiplayer, especially in 1997? They cancelled it because the SQ Collection in 1997 didn't sell as well as they wanted to. SQ5 and SQ6 had been financial hits and each title had outsold the other.
- QfG was released in 98 with Lori Ann Cole as designer. From what I've read on the Internet, Sierra didn't even want to do a new Quest for Glory but succumbed to fan pressure.
QFG5 went through a lot of hell due to CUC and Vivendi. There's an interview on youtube with the Coles about this.
- I've already covered Roberta Williams, King's Quest 8 and Phantasmagoria.
Phantasmagoria, like it or not, was a hit and was pretty well received critically at the time. It was the biggest selling game in Sierra's entire history, it brought them millions in revenue. KQ8 was troubled by many issues, but the resulting game we got was more the work of executives who demanded RPG elements and more and more combat to be like Tomb Raider. Roberta's idea before Sierra was sold was for a massive, sprawling Daggerfall-esque world in full 3D, but a pure adventure game. The only foes would be seven boss characters in each realm. The execs wanted none of that. So, KQ8 became what it became. There's a book which describes in detail how utterly depressed Roberta became over the course of that game's development, it's why she's never done a single game since.
After Cendant you get Vivendi, who micromanaged the shit out of Sierra, and because of this, you have a lot of key people leave. You also had 3 separate layoff events in one year alone which wiped out a 1/3rd of the company in a move to save the profitability of the company. You had crappy games developed by third party developers on the cheap because of this fiscal crisis. Even when Sierra would publish hits (such as Half-Life and Homeworld), Vivendi would only tighten the grip. You can read stories of Vivendi axing away at Sierra in the early 2000s and slowly asborbing Sierra, while "Blizzard is not affected by these cuts". By 2002, Sierra was a shell. Most of its functions were run by Vivendi; most of the core staff from the 80s/90s was gone; They only had two in-house development studios left, Dynamix was shut by Vivendi. In 2004, Vivendi decided to shut Sierra down as a real company and use Sierra's name on every Vivendi Games product. Sierra in essence became Vivendi Games, which is what Al Lowe refers to. Suddenly you see Sierra's name and logo on products like Spyro the Dragon and the like - stuff that had belonged to Vivendi beforehand.
- Jim Walls left after PQ3, long before the buyout.
Yes, but you had PQ become SWAT, which while different was successful in and of itself.
- Gabriel Knight in 99 by Jane Jensen.
And Sierra's new CEO declared that GK3 would be their last adventure game.
- Sierra was already trending towards the publishing business before the buyout. I recall both Dynamix and Impressions games were bought by the early 90s, as well as other companies. And this was Ken's doing, not the job of CUC/Cendant or Hamas or Vivendi.
Wrong. Sierra operated on a model that they bought companies to add to their development talent. Sierra had developers at Bellevue, at Oakhurst, and then at Dynamix, Impressions and about a dozen other companies. These were all in-house development studios; all of whom were "part of the Sierra family." They only started using 3rd party developers and acting as a publisher after 1999 (after Cendant and the new CEO shut down most of their development studios).
If you read some of the interviews and articles from the net about these games and Sierra games at that point, you'll notice how many of them thought it was necessary to go for 3-D graphics and/or multiplayer, or how the "low sales" of Grim Fandango just made everyone lose faith in the adventure genre.
I know, it's prettier to imagine that everything at Sierra was all sunshine, everyone was nicely developing beautiful and complex 2-D adventure games, bringing back a more complex parser and having fun all around. Then the evil corporate people burst into the door, put a gun to Ken Williams' head and took over the company, then shat on everything because they hated making money or something.
A lot of this push for 3D and multiplayer was on the part of the new management team(s). And a bunch of companies were jumping away from adventure games at around the same time. It wasn't fun to work at Sierra just before CUC, but that was more a result of the suits than anything else (as well as Ken becoming more and more businessman-like as time went on). Sierra was a public company whose obligation was to their shareholders. Basically, they were the Activision of the 1990s. What was once a fun, laid back easy going company had become pretty corporate by the mid 1990s. But this only sucks if you're a major adventure game fan. When you have an obligation to shareholders, you have an obligation to produce quarterly results, not what fans of an increasingly niche genre love, as sad as that is.
Look, I'm not saying that the suits were innocent or something, that's far from the reality. FFS, that guy Forbes is in jail as we speak, he was obviously a giant asshole. I'm just saying that Sierra people deserve a big part of the blame as well IMO. Again, I'm not the biggest fan of Blizzard but you can't deny that this company was under similar circumstances and managed to pull it off with more than grace. Starcraft was also delayed as fuck, filled with technological and development issues. They also cancelled an adventure game around that time. Both Sierra and Blizzard at the time were big, best sellers on the PC market yet only one of them thrived into the 21st century. It's a bit unfair to accuse Sierra of being 100% corrupted by empty suits, yet Blizzard was allowed to do whatever they fuck they wanted and make games millions of people love.
Blizzard's circumstances were radically different. They had a clause in their contract which allowed them to have full creative autonomy regardless of who they were owned by. This predated CUC - it was part of the agreement which they made when Davidson bought them. It stated they would have full creative autonomy, which is the only reason they accepted being bought by Davidson (who had made edutainment only); they were smart, as well and had that clause grandfathered in. They were also insulated by virtue of being a subsidiary of a subsidiary and by being so tiny; their accounts weren't used in illegalities and so their company wasn't crippled. Sierra was one of the main jewels in CUC Software's crown and was used as such. But, Blizzard had some rough times under Vivendi as well. A number of key Blizzard employees jumped ship due to Vivendi suffocating Blizzard's management, and in 2005, Vivendi ordered Blizzard North closed because they didn't like the looks of one game they were developing. Blizzard got lucky and happened to develop a cashcow called WoW, and due to the clause in their contract, they weren't micromanaged. It also helped that Blizzard's founding CEO remained with the company the whole time and is still there. Ken was gone within a year after CUC bought Sierra due to the reasons I've mentioned, and his hand-picked successor also jumped ship at roughly the same time.
Well, you're technically right. But it's not like Homeworld was developed and released in 1999, it started back in 1997 or so. Also, Sierra ws not doing better during the Havas/Vivendi years, that's when the actual layoffs started. Of course, the scandal with Cendant started everything but it wasn't that company that fired Al Lowe and Scott Murphy, it was the one that bought them next.
Sierra was doing great until 1998 when the Cendant scandal happened. Yes, Cendant fired Scott Murphy. Scott was fired in February 1998; Havas didn't buy Sierra until December 1998. Al Lowe was never an employee of Sierra in the true sense (nor was Scott). They worked on contract and were paid per game; they were not salaried full time employees. This was something which had been in place since the '80s mind you - Sierra's designers since 1983 were not employees, they signed multi-year or per-game contracts; Cendant and Havas decided not to renew Scott, Al or Jane Jensen's contracts. Even Roberta Williams was not an employee of Sierra. She was, prior to 1996, a major shareholder obviously, but she wasn't a fulltime salaried worker, and after the sale she was just a contracted designer like the rest.
but that's besides the point).
