A Sierra Retrospective - ongoing article series

Boleskine · May 16, 2017

So far there's one article from a couple weeks ago, but more will be coming.

https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/32711

A Sierra Retrospective: Part 1 - The Pioneers of Adventure
Written by Shawn Mills — May 5, 2017

King’s Quest. Space Quest. Leisure Suit Larry. All seminal games in adventure game history. All created by the same company.

Dig deeper into the catalog and there are dozens more equally memorable titles. Quest for Glory. Police Quest. Gabriel Knight.

Delve further still and there are more hidden gems. Manhunter. Eco Quest. Laura Bow.

These games, and many more, were created out of the Oakhurst California studios of Sierra On-Line, in a hectic period between the release of King’s Quest in 1983 and the early ‘90s when the effects of the public float began to be felt.

It was a golden age for Sierra and adventure games.

The story of Sierra is unique to its era. The Apple II was released in 1977 and brought personal computing to the family home. With that, a new industry was born. Computer games.

At the forefront of these games was the adventure.

Mystery House, the first graphic adventure
Roberta Williams had been playing text adventures on her Apple II, but she felt something was missing. What the games needed were pictures. She convinced her husband Ken to help and between them they created Mystery House, the first graphic adventure game. It was a massive success and led to the founding of Sierra On-Line and a catalog of dozens of adventure games.

Along with Williams herself, who went on to create King’s Quest, Sierra also developed an enviable stable of talented designers, people such as Jane Jensen (Gabriel Knight), Al Lowe (Leisure Suit Larry) and Lori and Corey Cole (Quest for Glory). They employed the best musicians, writers and artists available to create their games. And they also worked with some of entertainment’s biggest names, like Disney and Jim Henson.

At a time when there weren’t established rules for how to make games, development was pioneered by Sierra and its contemporaries. Each new advance in technology pushed production in new directions and allowed for more expansive storytelling.

Ken and Roberta Williams
In 2014, Ken and Roberta were honored with the Gaming Industry Award: “With multiple highly successful franchises, Sierra was renowned for pushing the boundaries of writing, game design, animation, sound, music, and with the advent of CD-ROM, even acting. Today’s gaming storytellers stand on Sierra’s shoulders.”

Over the course of this ongoing retrospective article series, I’ll delve into a few specific areas of Sierra’s history. My hope is to shine light on some of the unique aspects of this company and share some stories about those times from the people who lived them.

One such person, although a lesser-known name among Sierra luminaries, is Guruka Singh Khalsa. Guruka was Sierra’s first producer, a creative and administrative role which also gave him broad oversight of the production for all the company’s games.

“There was this peak where the creative juices drove Sierra. It was very much about the soul of the game. A game that can touch you deeply and make you go wow,” Guruka claims.

Christy Marx, an accomplished author and TV writer, wrote and designed two adventure games for Sierra, Conquests of Camelot and Conquests of the Longbow. She agrees about the creativity of Sierra at the time.

“When I first got there, everything was open and free and the creativity flowed. We had a good time making games. We had fun. Nobody knew entirely what they were doing because games were so new, so we got to experiment.”

Christy Marx graces the cover of Sierra Magazine
Adventure games start with an idea. Sometimes that idea came from the designer, sometimes it came from elsewhere. For Christy, the idea for both her games came from the person who practically invented the graphic adventure genre, Roberta Williams.

“I believe it was Roberta who said they'd been thinking about a King Arthur game. I quickly said that we'd be happy to do that type of game, and we agreed upon that,” Christy says.

For Conquests of the Longbow, the process was more amusing. “I was in the earliest stages of thinking about a game based on Greek mythology using goddesses. I was aware that a number of Robin Hood movie projects had been announced, but when Roberta mentioned them to me I didn't pay attention. It didn't relate to what I was thinking about.”

“A day or so later after the first mention, Roberta said to me, ‘I had this dream last night that you were doing a Robin Hood game.’ I suddenly realized that what she was really doing was dropping hints that they wanted me to do a Robin Hood game.”

Josh Mandel had a different experience. As Director of Product Design, he and the other designers would meet with company owner Ken Williams and Creative Director Bill Davis weekly to discuss game proposals.

An imposing Josh Mandel
“Every week we would submit two game proposals. We learned to make these proposals very short because Ken didn’t have the patience. He would read a couple of paragraphs and if you hadn’t grabbed his interest by then you probably weren’t going to. Bill Davis wasn’t this way; he was thoughtful and would read through the proposals and work to understand them.”

It was out of one of these meetings that Josh developed the initial idea for Laura Bow 2: The Dagger of Amon Ra, a game which Bruce Balfour would go on to design and develop.

“My proposal was about a museum. I didn’t have a name for it but it was a museum with a display of a ceremonial Egyptian dagger that gets lost. Basically, the game, but summed up in a couple of paragraphs,” Josh explains.

Once an initial concept was approved and a designer assigned to develop it, a producer would be added to the mix. While the designer concentrated on the game design process, the producer’s job was to handle the production side of the equation, along with providing an oversight role for the creative side.

The producer and designer worked together in an almost symbiotic way. When the producer was assigned a rough budget by management, they would be required to break it down into the individual parts necessary to create the game. How many artists should be involved? How many programmers? What musicians would be needed?

But these positions couldn’t be defined until the designer had started to form their ideas together into a coherent design.

Producers like Guruka Singh Khalsa were deeply involved in the early stages of design. He has vivid memories of working with designer Christy Marx on Conquests of Camelot.

Senior Producer Guruka Singh Khalsa (post-Sierra)

“Sitting on the grass. Outside. Under a tree. Christy and I with a legal pad and pen. Sketching stuff out. Talking about puzzle logic and getting really excited about twists we could make in the puzzles. Mapping out the sequence of the character arc in the game and sparking each other creatively. It was very informal,” he says. “That was before we did formal storyboards up on the wall. It was the creative game ideas in the early stages where we would answer questions like ‘How can we make this game more fun?’ ‘How can we make the puzzles more fun?’”

Mandel’s first role at Sierra was a Junior Producer, so he has unique knowledge of both sides of the process. He says the two most important roles would be filled first: the art designer or lead artist, and the lead programmer.

“Once the designer had some definite ideas about what the game was going to entail they would meet with the lead artist and discuss the style of the game. They might also meet with the lead programmer and talk about the larger issues of the game. Was it going to need any special programming sequences? Would it use the in-house (SCI) engine?”

As the designer progressed further, the producer would work with them to refine the number of staff required to create the game.

Josh goes on to say, “You’d have a record of all the programmers and a guide to when each one was expected to come off of whatever project they were currently on. You looked to see who was going to be available around the time you were going to need them. They might not be available when the team was being formed but they might come on later. The same thing for the artists and the musicians.”

Codename: ICEMAN was not one of Sierra's finer achievements
This casual design relationship between designer and producer contributed to some big hits for Sierra, but it also caused some problems, as Guruka says happened with Codename: ICEMAN.

“Iceman was the worst designed game ever. In fact, the rooms didn’t make any sense. If you actually mapped out the rooms there was no way to get from one to another. And it had all kinds of graphical bugs and logic bugs in it.”

“Around that point, we said everything has to be storyboarded out, every game has to be mapped out. We actually completely changed our production methods. A lot of this was because it was early days. It was learn by making mistakes,” Guruka says.

This was a symptom of the company’s design philosophy at the time, Mandel explains. “A designer would get a game and then they would go off and do their own thing,” he claims. “Nobody really checked it over. Nobody said, here’s the flaws in your design, here are your dead ends and so on.”

With all the pieces in place, production of a game followed a standard process. The designer would develop a section of the game and the artists would create the background and animation artwork to go along with that design. These assets would be delivered to the programmers who would implement them into the game, again using the design document as a guide. This same process would be repeated for the musicians and the writers.

With so many moving parts, everything didn’t always go to plan. There was a constant pressure for producers and designers to deliver their game on schedule and on budget.

Teams were always under the gun, including the staff on Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist
The possibility of people having to be laid off was a constant. According to Mandel, “it was normal for every team to be told that if we don’t pull this in on schedule and on budget we’re going to have to lay people off,” he says. “That was always the threat that was hung over us to keep things on track.”

Things were just about never on track.

“There was constant juggling of personnel. If things had gone too far off schedule then the programmer I had working on the game… they might pull him off and say, nope, you gotta work on the next game now. That would just increase the delay of my game,” says Josh.

By the end, though, a game would be created.

Mandel describes his best memory from his time at Sierra. It was at the end of production on Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, his first design credit, and he vividly recalls watching the boxes come off the production line.

“Watching the boxes of Freddy Pharkas coming off the assembly line, filled and shrinkwrapped and put in cases to be sent out. Maybe that memory is the one that comes to mind above almost everything else because I wasn’t getting enough sleep for the duration of the project or at least the crunch time. I have never felt such a strange and powerful mix of emotions. Most of those emotions were positive, seeing the game in physical form for the first time. What a sense of accomplishment and dread that now it was out of our hands; they were going to go out and the first person who bought it was going to get a crash bug that everyone else was going to get. So there was abject horror, there was pride, and sleepiness and confusion. I really cherish the vibrancy of that memory.”

The philosopher Plato once said about music that “It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, and flight to the imagination.” Believing this same principle, music was a vital part of Sierra’s development process, even as the technology changed from PC speakers to midi and later to digital music along the way. In our next article, we’ll take a closer look at how Sierra prioritized music as an important way of bringing players into its game worlds.

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Boleskine · May 19, 2017

Might as well put this here:

Boleskine · Jul 7, 2017

Part 2

The philosopher Plato once said about music that “It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, and flight to the imagination.” It was this flight to the imagination that was most relevant to Sierra’s adventure games.

Sierra had an unrivaled music department that produced many groundbreaking adventure game soundtracks during the ‘80s and ‘90s. “The level of talent they had within the music department was just unbelievable,” says Robert Holmes, composer on the Gabriel Knight series. “All of these guys in the music department, they were really, really, really good. There just wasn’t a slacker in the entire group.”

He says that working with such a talented group of musicians helped to bring everybody’s work up to a higher standard.

“The way Sierra would work was once a quarter there would be a company meeting and everyone would show off a demo or something that was part of their current project. You knew at some point your music was going to be shown as part of that to the whole company, so you really wanted it to be good.”

While music was certainly seen as a vital ingredient in the game design process, the composers and music team were usually brought in towards the end of production. Ken Allen, composer on many Sierra titles including King's Quest V, The Colonel's Bequest and Space Quest IV, says that “Music is often an afterthought in games, so I've been brought into the project late in the process. I have heard of some games where the music was chosen at the beginning and the game was designed around that, but those tend to be games out of Japan.”

Once a composer had been brought onto a game, they would meet with the designer to get a feel for the project and what the designer had in mind for the music.

Mark Seibert
Mark Seibert was Sierra’s first staff musician and composed the soundtracks for games like Quest for Glory I, Conquests of Camelot and King’s Quest V. He explains that when he was first hired there was no design format for building a game soundtrack, so developing that system was an early priority. “Since we were making adventure games, I approached it like scoring a movie. Yes, of course the order in which things happen might be different, and the lengths of each scene might change (or even some of the story elements might be slightly different), but in general we could break it down into a series of events like a story or a movie. So that’s where I started with the designers,” he says. “Creating this framework helped us understand the big story arcs, and I think it also helped our designers to see their design in a new and different way.”

Ken Allen explains that as well as understanding the story arc, the composer also needed to get an understanding of what the designer was looking for. “I talked with the designers to get a feel for the musical style they imagined, and to see if they had any preconceived ideas for the music in cutscenes, or if they wanted characters to each have a theme,” Ken says. “I was looking for the psychology everywhere music is needed.”

While working through the game design document looking for the musical cues required – a process called spotting – the composer would also listen to music the designer liked or felt was similar to what they envisioned for a particular scene. This process helped to clarify for the composer what the designer wanted and why they felt a particular style of music would be appropriate.

Ken Allen
Using the information gathered from this spotting process, the composer would then start to develop concept pieces. While sometimes they might have the luxury of a fully designed game with a script for inspiration, it was usually sketches, storyboards or scene descriptions.

Allen says he would work on proof of concept pieces to make sure everyone was on the same page, while also choosing instrumentation based on emotions the designer wanted to evoke.

“If we decided on a certain musical style, the instruments I select would support that decision.”

The process was a little different for Robert Holmes when he composed the soundtrack for the first Gabriel Knight game. Holmes and designer Jane Jensen had become romantically involved prior to working together on Gabriel Knight, so in a rare situation, Holmes was part of the process from the very beginning.

Together, they would take daily walks around Bass Lake in Sierra National Forest and talk about ideas and how Jensen envisioned the series.

“We both watched movies together and talked about various influences, so I had a pretty good sense of what she was attracted to and what she was trying to achieve. And I brought my film music education to the problem and thought about what some of the guys I respected in the film world would do,” Robert says. “I think what I was trying to do was make music that was darker, more dramatic, and a little more emotional than had been done in games.”

Composing music for Sierra’s early games was also a different process for each system that the company released on.

Music in games today is generally a digital creature. An MP3 of your favorite artist could be a recording of drums, guitar and keyboards. These instruments are recorded on separate tracks which are then mixed together, or layered over each other, to form a complete song. A game soundtrack is created in the same way.

Turn back the clock to the 1980s, however, and the situation was vastly different.

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Before the PC became the dominant home computer system, Sierra published its games in a wide variety of formats, the most common being the IBM PC, the Tandy 1000, and the Apple IIgs. As each system had its own technology which wasn’t compatible with the other systems, every game soundtrack had to be recreated for each.

The PC speaker in most IBM-compatible computers was only capable of playing a single beep which could be made to approximate different musical notes, as well as only playing a single track at a time. The Tandy 1000 copied the improvements IBM had developed in their short-lived PCjr system by allowing three tracks to be played at once, although these were still system-generated tones. The Apple IIgs was arguably the most advanced of the three systems, as it allowed for digital sampling of sounds to be recorded and played back. This allowed the composer to sample real instruments and compile those samples together to make a more layered and realistic sounding score.

(For a fuller appreciation of the differences, check out the Leisure Suit Larry themes on PC Speaker, Apple II and Tandy 1000 at designer Al Lowe’s website.)

By the mid-‘80s, sound technology had further developed with the advent of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), which allowed a composer to store commands in a very small file format. These files weren’t music files like an MP3, but rather a collection of commands that directed a computer’s sound card to play a certain sound at a certain speed for the specified amount of time. The most common MIDI cards at the time were the Adlib and later the SoundBlaster.

Robert Holmes
In his first role at Sierra, Robert Holmes was tasked with making soundtrack conversions for different systems.

“I would do the conversions for [fellow Sierra composer] Dan [Kehler]'s stuff, which was a great way for me to learn the ropes and get into the technology. I spent the first few months just doing the Mac and SoundBlaster conversions.

“For me it was different because while I had had some exposure to MIDI I really wasn’t a keyboard player and I really wasn’t well versed in MIDI. It took a while for me to really get into that. I never really got to the same level as some of the other guys who were really amazing MIDI composers. It was a good education.”

Recently, Holmes had the opportunity to return to his original Gabriel Knight soundtrack for the 20th Anniversary Edition, an opportunity not many game composers get.

“There were parts of it that I still like, and actually it was really interesting to listen to. I hadn’t heard some of it in quite a while. I was actually really pleased with some of it and thought, gee, if I had to play that right now I wouldn’t know how to play it,” he says. “A lot of it, in having to go back and review it, I would think, well, I would probably make a different decision now. It’s really tricky when you do something like that, because on one hand people expect something different, because that’s what they’re paying for. But on the other hand they don’t want you to mess with what they love. It was a really big challenge but also a lot of fun.”

The biggest advance in MIDI for Sierra was the adoption of the Roland MT-32 Sound Module, a hardware peripheral that generated ten MIDI tracks simultaneously. Sierra supported this module, which they believed offered the best listening experience for their games, selling it through their mail order system with an incentive offer of two free games.

While CEO and company founder Ken Williams was a strong advocate for the MT-32, the cost of the device (over $500) was a concern for some of the staff at Sierra, as producer Guruka Singh Khalsa recalls.

“I remember Ken being so excited about the Roland because MIDI was so compact. It didn’t take any space on disk to do MIDI code and the sounds were generated by the Roland box. I said to him people aren’t going to spend several hundred dollars on a MIDI box and he said, ‘We’ll include it with every game!’”

Williams wasn’t serious, of course, but the conversation does show the importance Sierra placed on their music. Through the technological changes from PC speaker to MIDI, and later to digital music, a game’s soundtrack was always seen as a vital ingredient in the adventure game process, allowing players to be immersed in the latest Sierra adventure.

While it’s common knowledge that LucasArts is now owned by the Disney corporation, it was Sierra who developed the early Disney computer games. Producing a line of children’s adventure games and a movie tie-in, Sierra was at the front of Disney’s early moves into the computer game market. In our next article, we’ll take a closer look at this relationship between the two prominent giants in their respective industries.

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Great Deceiver · Jul 9, 2017

No Aubrey Hodges? His QfG4 soundtrack is one of the best.

Boleskine · Sep 8, 2017

Part 3

A Sierra Retrospective: Part 3 - From Atari to the Magic Kingdom
Written by Shawn Mills — September 8, 2017

When you think of Sierra you might not necessarily think of the Atari 2600 or the Commodore 64, but both systems had a big impact on the fortunes of the company.

From the earliest years of its life, the Atari 2600 console was the biggest video game platform in America. By 1983, six years after its release, the revenue from game sales had skyrocketed and an ever-growing number of third-party developers had started producing games. Sierra, or Online Systems as it was then called, was one of those companies. The market quickly became oversaturated, and with few quality controls in place, a string of high-profile flops such as Atari’s infamous E.T. ensued.

On the personal computer front, the ongoing price war between Commodore and Texas Instruments (TI) hit new heights in 1982. Commodore reduced the price of their Commodore 64 computer to only $300, rocking the fledgling game industry. Customers suddenly wanted a full computer system, not just a game console, and could now get one for a similar price.

TI’s TI-99/4 personal computer was an early casualty of the price war and was discontinued in 1983. This, combined with oversaturation and the growing list of poor quality games, caused what is now referred to as the North American video game crash.

With TI pulling out of the game market, Ken Williams, CEO and founder of Sierra, bought their license to create computer games based on Disney characters. Acquiring the license allowed Williams to bypass the usual up-front licensing payment Disney required and only have to pay royalties to them on sales.

At that time, entire companies were folding with warehouses full of now worthless Atari, Vic-20 and Colleco cartridges. Sierra didn’t go under like so many of its competitors, but the business suffered a major financial crisis.

Al Lowe, creator of the Leisure Suit Larry games, remembers the time clearly. “One morning I went to work and there were 120 employees and that afternoon there were 40. So it was a tragic blow.”

When Lowe was let go like so many of his colleagues, Ken Williams made him a deal to keep him employed though he couldn’t afford to keep him on staff.

“A lot of those guys were given the same offer I was given, which was you’re not going to get a salary but I will pay you advances against future royalties,” Al says. “As you finish parts of the game, bring it in and we’ll give you more advances, just like a book author would do. You get an advance up front and additional checks as you go along and you finish it.”

While a lot of people didn’t take Williams up on the deal, Lowe did. He recalls, “I went home and worked my ass off. There were several other guys that did too.”

Ken had always envisioned Sierra as being a combination of Disney and Microsoft, so the Disney license was a natural fit at the time. Their initial contract allowed for four games based on major Disney characters.

Donald Duck's Playground
In 1984, Sierra released three educational games under license to Disney. While Donald Duck’s Playground would best be described as a skill-based game for children, and the Goofy Word Game was never released, both Mickey’s Space Adventure and Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood were adventure games in the style of Sierra’s earlier titles (games such as Cranston Manor and Timezone).

Al Lowe worked on the all the Disney games. He composed the soundtrack for Mickey’s Space Adventure and was the sole designer and programmer on both Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood and Donald Duck’s Playground.

Disney had no prior experience with computer games; the industry was barely a few years old, after all.

Not being sure how games fit into their structure, Disney assigned their educational department to act as liaison with Sierra. The department, whose usual work was in educational film strips and workbooks for schools, was not a good fit and struggled to understand what Sierra was creating.

“They had these two former elementary school teachers who had no clue what a computer was and they were assigned as our liaisons. Everything we did went through them,” Al says.

Both Mickey’s Space Adventure and the unreleased Goofy Word Game became bogged down in the interactions between the production team and their Disney liaisons. The team would show their updates for approval and would return with a new list of changes required.

Mickey's Space Adventure
As composer on Mickey’s Space Adventure, Lowe watched the process unfold. “They wouldn’t make improvements or have even good suggestions. They would just say, ‘do this differently or make this a different color.’ It was just so that they had some input into the development process. Basically, it wasted our time.”

It was during the production of Mickey’s Space Adventure that the production team encountered Disney’s protectiveness of their properties – in this case their most valuable asset, Mickey Mouse.

Sierra’s first producer, Guruka Singh Khalsa, recalls the original opening scene to the game: “In the opening scene Mickey comes in and he stops mid-screen, he turns his head and looks at the player, pauses and taps his foot before he goes to walk across the screen.”

It was here that one of the production team had inserted a joke, hoping to amuse his teammates. At that moment if you typed in ‘Look at Mickey’ the game would respond with a coarse joke at the character’s expense. Unfortunately, the joke was left in and got through QA (Quality Assurance) to the Disney representatives.

“The game goes through QA and we get a letter back on Disney letterhead which has a gold magic castle at the top and everything. It’s from the Disney lawyers. It says, basically, you may not use the following words in a Disney product,” before listing out in three columns all the profanities that couldn’t be used.

That wasn’t a problem for Roberta Williams, designer on Mickey’s Space Adventure and co-founder of Sierra with her husband Ken, who wasn’t impressed by the team’s oversight. “Roberta didn’t like that sort of thing in her games. Disney was really her inspiration in her early games,” Guruka says.

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When it came to designing Winnie the Pooh, Al worked on his design by reading all the Pooh books and synthesizing what he could. He then created a map of the Hundred Acre Wood, the setting for the Winnie the Pooh tales, and worked out the story and puzzles for the game. Then he decided to take a different tack in working with Disney’s liaisons. “I just went ahead and did the entire Winnie the Pooh game, got it finished and then showed it to them,” he recalls.

Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood

“They said ‘Can you change this or can you do that?’ and I replied that if we did that it’s going to get behind and I have other projects that I have booked ahead, so I don’t know how. I just kind of rammed it through; I did an end-around them and scored. I knew I had Ken’s (Williams) ear and I knew Ken would support me on it because he was interested in shipping the game and selling copies. He wasn’t interested in futzing around with this guy’s shirt color and that person’s feet color and stuff.”

“I basically said ‘Here it is, wanna sell it?’ So they did. They took the money.”

It worked. Disney were so happy with the success of the three games that they offered Sierra the opportunity to create a game based on their new animated movie, The Black Cauldron.

Lowe again agreed to design the game, this time with Roberta Williams, and accepted an offer from Disney to visit their studios and view an early cut of the film.

Seated in a private theater by himself, Al was impressed with the movie and could envisage creating a game based on it. “I got to see The Black Cauldron when it was the midst of production. Parts of the scenes were gorgeous finished and finalized stuff. Parts of it were pencil sketches. Parts of it were just a backdrop hanging on a piece of pipe in a basement. Literally you could see the pipe and a piece of wall and they zoomed in on it because it was going to get replaced with the final product. They would pick classical or some other sort of music and play a record behind it. The dialog was all in, though. So I got to see the film ahead of time and I said ‘Yeah, I can work on this.’”

After watching the movie, Lowe was sent to the archives, expecting to see something grand and opulent like the national archives in Washington DC. Instead he went down a set of exterior stairs to a door where he rang the doorbell and was led into a basement hallway by the archivist.

Al recalls, “As I stepped inside she said ‘Oh hang on, the phone’s ringing and there’s nobody else here. I’ll go get it, just wait here.’ So I stood in the doorway there waiting to start our conversation, and leaned my hand against the wall. I looked over and my hand was on the original pencil drawings for Sleeping Beauty. I was like ‘Oh my God! Seriously?’”

Sierra's The Black Cauldron
In this basement hallway, with sewer pipes, water lines and sprinklers overhead, sat open industrial shelving with original drawings for every movie from Mickey Mouse’s first cartoon, Steamboat Willie. With no protection other than manila folders, the pencil drawings were stored on a steel shelf, so it was an easy process getting access to The Black Cauldron’s to take back to the production team for use in the game. Al took away copies of Elmer Bernstein’s original score and some pieces of background art.

Lowe also remembers his great surprise when he was taken to a gigantic mound of poster boards, each with an original background watercolor from The Black Cauldron. “They were just thrown in a giant heap and I said, ‘So, what’s with this?’ and she said ‘I have to go through this and decide which ones to keep.’ I said ‘You don’t keep them all?’ and she replied ‘Oh no! We’ll throw 98% of this in the garbage.’

“That was my introduction to Disney. But working on The Black Cauldron was fun. It was a fun project. There was very little oversight from anybody down there. We pretty much made the game that we wanted to and it was a really fun project to do.”

Still working at a reduced scale after the video game crash, the team worked out of the study at Ken and Roberta’s house. A large, relatively empty room, it had a shelf which sat about desk height and ran for close to 30 feet around the room.

“We just all kind of moved in there and worked on that shelf. That became our desks. We sat in his house every day and night. Because I lived down at Fresno, he just gave me a guest room at his house. I’d work until I couldn’t stay awake anymore and I’d go and have a lie down upstairs and come back and do it again. That was how we wrote that game!” Al says.

Al’s team, which included Ken Williams, Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy, worked hard to keep each other’s spirits up. Crowe and Murphy also discovered they were both science fiction fans, and while working on The Black Cauldron developed what became Space Quest, another major series for Sierra.

While The Black Cauldron marked the end of Sierra’s relationship with Disney, with Sierra moving on to concentrate on their own properties and Disney developing their own computer games, Al Lowe still has a reminder of those days on his home office wall.

“I ended up becoming a big Lloyd Alexander fan. He’s the guy who wrote the Chronicles of Prydain; they’re five kind of youth novels I suppose you’d call them. But boy, they’re really good books and good writing. One of my favorite things on the wall here, I have a signed letter from Lloyd Alexander talking about how much his nieces and nephews enjoyed my game. Pretty cool.”

Graphic adventure games. The name itself establishes how integral visuals are to the gaming experience. When Sierra started with Mystery House, backgrounds were crude and animations were non-existent, but through the years, they developed games that ranged from four colours to 16-bit colour, full motion video to pre-rendered 3D, and animation styles that ran the gamut from simplistic to Disney-esque. Next time, we'll explore Sierra's rich graphical odyssey that kept the company at the industry forefront throughout its heyday.

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Boleskine · Nov 11, 2017

https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/33750

A Sierra Retrospective: Part 4 - Works of Art
Written by Shawn Mills — November 10, 2017

From the earliest days of Mystery House’s black and white stick figures and line drawings to full-colour 3D presentations, Sierra always tried to stay at the forefront of graphics technology, innovating as they went.

In their early 16 colour games, the artwork would be drawn either by hand, then plotted into the computer using coordinates as if drawn on a piece of grid paper, or it would be drawn directly into the computer using a tablet device. These vector-based graphics were all coded within the game, a line would be drawn between two sets of coordinates, and a colour would fill the spaces between lines. It wasn’t an easy process but it worked well and saved a lot of disk space, which was always at a premium.

For Sierra, one of the biggest challenges in graphics came in the early 1990s when 256 colour VGA graphics cards reached the PC market.

The industry has come a long way since the humble beginnings of the first graphic adventure, Sierra's Mystery House
“Once VGA came in, we actually took a little different turn than most of the studios working at the time and realised that because you only had 256 colours, if you worked in a digital paint program like Deluxe Paint, everything looked very pixelated. It was very difficult to make anything look smooth or to imply colours,” says Bill Davis, Sierra’s first Creative Director.

Hiring Bill was a major coup for Sierra, bringing his highly-acclaimed talents and extensive experience as an artist, graphic designer and painter into the fold.

“When I came up there, they had a handful of artists, about five artists I think; most of them there were self-trained. I realised they had no production system; no one in the business did,” Bill claims. “In other words, they would just put some artists together with some programmers and they would start making a game. In many cases they would design as they went along, they would try different things and go from there. The first thing I realised we needed to do, because we were looking at really growing the company, was I had to hire a lot of people for what we wanted to do because we knew VGA was coming down the pipe and my plans for that were a lot different from what we’d been doing.”

It was at this point that Bill decided they could draw backgrounds and animations with traditional media and then scan that work into the game, giving a much more realistic and less pixelated look than their competitors.

“We started painting with traditional media and then had our programming team develop some amazing codecs to scan the artwork in. That also allowed us to key scenes for other people and send them overseas to places like Korea and have them paint them. So we could really up the production because we [alone] never would have been able to raise the quality of production that we wanted.”

A clear indication that the changes made to the design process for 256 colour games was successful was the recognition Sierra received from their competitors, as Bill Davis recalls.

Sierra’s first Creative Director, Bill Davis

“When we came out with King’s Quest V, the first VGA version of the game, we heard through the pipeline that LucasArts was furious, saying they’ll never be able to sustain that, they’re going to go bankrupt trying to build games of that kind of quality. So we were doing what we wanted to do, we were hitting nerves with the other companies and trying to surprise them. It was pretty competitive so you had to do that.”

Something else Bill looked at changing was the ever-evolving art styles of the games. He wanted to bring a consistent look to the games, so each series, while distinctive in itself, would have a unified approach, as Josh Mandel, Designer and Writer for Sierra, explains. “[Bill] had previously worked at NBC and had an Emmy and he was high up there. And he felt that Sierra games should have a definite graphic flavour through the series. He looked at King’s Quest and every King’s Quest looks different, and every Space Quest looks different. He really wanted to unify that and stop the chaos.”

“I’m a big believer, especially when you’re doing art styles, in suiting the style to the genre,” Bill says. “There was a lot of thinking in the beginning, especially with the newer games and resurfacing the older games, [about] kind of picking what style is really going to be the optimum style and have the most wow factor for these games when they come out. I don’t think they were doing that in the industry, they were just doing art.

“So I would do things, like, with Leisure Suit Larry, why don’t we do cubism? We could do it, it would be great and it would suit the kind of wacky world that Larry lived in. When we started doing the edutainment titles, games like Twisty History [working title for Pepper’s Adventures in Time], we had a game that was going back in time to be with Ben Franklin. I thought about Grant Wood, a great American artist who painted a lot of revolutionary scenes in America, so we styled it that way. So it was that kind of stuff.

Instead of ever-changing art styles within series, Bill Davis encouraged a more consistent internal approach. Leisure Suit Larry was given a fuller, more cartoony style to better suit its comic sensibilities when the 256 colour remake was released.

“I really get bored with – and I’d get bored with today if I was still at Sierra – this kind of game realism that goes on now that everybody copies. It’s in most of the shooters. Each game does it a little better but they all look the same. You don’t have to do that; they can all look completely different, so that’s what I always seek out,” Bill says. “That’s what I’d be trying to do at a company like Sierra – trying to apply the best look for each game.”

Another change Bill made was to introduce the role of Art Director to the process, giving one person oversight of the art for a game, something that was now required as the number of artists had grown enormously since their earlier games.

The Art Director’s job was very extensive and required a lot of preparation, as Marc Hudgins, who held that role on Quest for Glory IV, describes. “You’re basically given the design document, whatever shape it was in at the time the project was spun up. It was usually a list of what we used to call rooms – you know, screens – and a rough outline of the progression through the game.”

Marc goes on, saying: “Part of it is like, well, what are the environments here? What needs to be designed? What’s the tone of this? What’s the visual approach to take to this? What characters need to be designed? And then breaking out animation lists. I’d started out as an animator so that was always a big thing for me, a very animation-focussed approach. I think it was different because a lot of the previous Lead Artists were more illustrators who did the backgrounds. As an animator, my concern was making sure the backgrounds supported the animation and not the other way around. So I would try to compile as much as I could about every scene. What the animation needs were and stage that. And sketch out background designs that would accommodate the action that needed to be supported.”

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Rotoscoping was a process that Bill Davis had introduced to Sierra at the start of the VGA era as, with only 256 colours, using any shortcuts would be more noticeable. “The animation was pretty crude and I realised once again with 256 colours it could look better but we needed to animate better so I started hiring real animators – we didn’t have any – to do squash and stretch.”

VGA games like KQ5 used two types of animation: rotoscoping and "squash and stretch"

Bill elaborates on the differences in the two animation styles: “You’ve got two different kinds of animation, even in features. You’ve got the way Snow White moves in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and you’ve got the way the Dwarves move. So Snow White is rotoscoped, but the dwarves are done with what they call squash and stretch animation. So they’re very exaggerated. The reason they call it squash and stretch is when their weight comes down on a step they squash down like a rubber ball, and when they jump up they’re very elastic and they stretch so it gives a varied look to the way a character moves. They’re much more bouncy and animated and the rotoscoping is much more subtle.”

“What I wanted to do, I wanted our characters like King Graham to be rotoscoped so he moved in a very real way, but then I wanted any dwarves or trolls or other characters in the game to be squash and stretch.”

Creating a setup for rotoscoping was left in the hands of Dan Foy, a programmer at Sierra who came up with a unique way of dealing with the issue.

“I needed to find a way we could rotoscope walkers,” Bill recalls, “So we set up a very dangerous treadmill without rails on it and [Dan] set up a system that could capture it. We’d take it into the tools and touch it up a little bit and that’s how we rotoscoped. It sped up animation, I tell you. Now it’s motion capture, but same kind of principle.”

Marc Hudgins also worked as the Animation Director on King’s Quest VII, a game that saw an increase in graphic resolution, something that brought greater clarity for the player but also caused more problems for the production team.

Marc Hudgins, Animation Director on King's Quest VII
“King’s Quest VII was our first 640x480, which was a bit of a problem,” Marc says. “I was actually concerned about that because we were getting to a point where there was enough resolution where the warts would begin to show. You couldn’t cover them up; you’re still making weird choices about what you could do to clean up a drawing. It wasn’t high enough resolution for you to do really clean animation, and it wasn’t low enough you could kind of make it fudged.”

The game turned out to be a massive job for Marc, taking on art responsibilities after the Art Director moved to the Seattle studio.

“That was a rough one. It was probably the most ambitious hand-animated thing we’d attempted there. Roberta’s idea for this thing, this was going to be full blown hand-animation like a Disney film. It was a big game. When I looked at the scope of it, and I looked at the time we had to get this thing done… I came on board in February, maybe January at the earliest, and it was going to ship by Thanksgiving. Less than a year to make the most ambitious game we’d ever tried in terms of hand-drawn animation stuff.”

Marc says his most enjoyable part of working on King’s Quest VII was in populating the game: “I designed all the characters. Between 80 and 100. That was fun; I love character design.”

Another issue Sierra encountered due to the increase in quality was that animations required more frames than had previously been needed, so a lot more work was required of the artists.

“We didn’t have enough in-house staff to do the animation so we had to contract with some outsourced type of thing. The first thing we did was we got this company in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and they said, yes, we can take it on. So we went over to Saint Petersburg and set them up with our tools and explained the process to them. We started getting stuff back but after less than a month they said, ‘you know what, we can’t do all of this’,” Marc says.

Taking some of the work away from the Russian studio, Sierra contracted the animation work to three other studios, which caused other problems.

Animations for KQ7 were outsourced overseas to help with the hugely ambitious demand
“We had a studio in Croatia, we had a studio in upstate New York, and we had a studio in South Carolina,” Marc remembers. “We had no time for revisions, so my job was to try and make sure that it looked, as best I could, like it was all drawn by one person. Which I don’t think I really succeeded at. Some were really tight, some were a lot looser than others. It was a real challenge. That was the first time I had really encountered that level of management in my life. I spent my life on fax machines because we didn’t have the internet yet, not in any meaningful way. I would fax drawings off to these studios and I would make phone calls at weird hours because I’d be calling Saint Petersburg, Russia. It was nuts.”

“Everything would come into the studio raw from these places and we basically took people off every single project and had people cleaning up the animation for the game. So I probably had about 30 people in the studio actually working on it. Just taking this raw stuff in and cleaning it up and making it appropriate to use in the game. There were no retakes. Everything went in, we fixed what we could. I think those studios did the best they could but we were all under enormous pressure to get that thing out on time,” Marc says.

As was the usual situation with game production at Sierra, there was a lot of stress and a lot of challenging issues to overcome, but in the end the game that was released went on to become one of Sierra’s biggest hits that year.

A legacy is something that is handed down from one generation to the next, and Sierra has certainly left an enduring impression on the industry and the many gamers who grew up with it. As a groundbreaking genre pioneer, the company’s influence is still keenly felt in the many adventure games today, a lasting heritage that everyone who worked there can be proud of. In our final article in this Sierra retrospective, we look at that legacy and the people that created it, as well as those who continue to be inspired by it today.

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Boleskine · Mar 13, 2018

I forgot to post part 5.

https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/34318

A Sierra Retrospective: Part 5 - The Shoulders of Giants

Written by Shawn Mills — December 31, 2017

“With multiple highly successful franchises, Sierra was renowned for pushing the boundaries of writing, game design, animation, sound, music, and with the advent of CD-ROM, even acting. Today’s gaming storytellers stand on Sierra’s shoulders.”

Those words were used to introduce Ken and Roberta Williams at the Gaming Industry Awards in 2014, where they were honored with the prestigious lifetime achievement award. It’s well-deserved recognition, as Sierra and its husband-and-wife founders are considered to have left a deep legacy on the computer gaming industry in general, and adventure games specifically.

But how do we define ‘legacy’?

Mystery House is an obvious point to start from when defining Sierra’s enduring imprint. It represented, after all, a momentous evolution of an entire genre, which certainly qualifies as the start of a legacy.

Quest for Glory's Lori Cole was one of several influential women in game design at Sierra

The cause of women in gaming also owes a lot to Sierra. Roberta Williams, credited with creating the graphic adventure game, also developed the King’s Quest series and pushed the boundaries of acting in games with Phantasmagoria. Jane Jensen designed and wrote the Gabriel Knight series, bringing more mature themes and stories to adventures, while Lori Cole co-designed and wrote the award winning RPG/adventure series, Quest for Glory.

In a male-dominated industry, consider for a moment that of the six flagship adventure series Sierra produced, three were designed or co-designed by women. Of the other three (Police Quest, Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry), Tammy Dargan was mainly responsible for the design of Police Quest: Open Season and the first SWAT game, while Leslie Balfour co-designed the unreleased Space Quest 7.

Regardless of gender, it was the people employed by Sierra who made the company so unique and so successful, and while some, like Ken and Roberta, have retired from the industry, others have remained active and gone on to create new titles independently.

Along with a remake of the first Gabriel Knight game, Jane Jensen designed Gray Matter and Moebius: Empire Rising. Lori and Corey Cole developed the critically acclaimed Shannara and are currently working on Hero-U, a spiritual successor to their Quest for Glory series. Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy, the two guys from Andromeda most responsible for the Space Quest series, are in the final stages of their eagerly-anticipated SpaceVenture. Josh Mandel has lent his talents to numerous games, both as a writer/designer (Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, Insecticide) and actor (Asylum).

Not all alumni have stayed in adventure games, but many who got their start at Sierra have since moved into senior positions within the gaming industry. Marc Hudgins, whose artwork credits include the Quest for Glory series, went on to work on Sid Meier's Civilization and The Elder Scrolls Online, while Chance Thomas, who composed the soundtrack for Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire, went on to work for Oscar- and Emmy-winning projects and has continued to create music for games such as The Lord of the Rings Online and DOTA 2.

When considering Sierra’s legacy, we must also look at the pioneering use of technology. Always seeking a way to make their adventure games more immersive, the company became the first to commercially create a game that supported the AdLib sound card and external sound devices such as the Roland MT-32. For King’s Quest IV, released in 1988, players were offered the choice of hearing the soundtrack composed for the cheaper AdLib card or the top-end Roland MT-32. Both versions were vast improvements over the single sound-generating PC speaker that came with the IBM PC and its clones.

Sierra’s adoption and support of CD-ROM technology allowed far greater immersion in adventure games and helped popularize the new medium. The 1990 remake of Mixed-Up Mother Goose was one of the earliest games produced on CD-ROM, allowing for voice acted speech to replace (or complement) the text in the game. It should be noted, however, that Sierra was not the originator of this trend. Although Mother Goose or King’s Quest V are both regularly credited as the first CD-ROM games, Cyan’s The Manhole was released in 1989 on CD-ROM, a full year before both Sierra titles. Still, Sierra was far more prominent at the time than the fledgling pre-Myst Cyan, so the company’s role in fostering acceptance of the new technology was highly instrumental.

Jane Jensen with Mark Hamill, one of several Hollywood voice talents cast in Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers

This support for CD-ROM technology progressed to the point that it enabled the now-common use of Hollywood talent in games, actors such as Robby Benson in King’s Quest VI and John Rhys-Davies in Quest for Glory IV. The cast of the first Gabriel Knight game included thespians of such calibre as Tim Curry, Leah Remini, Mark Hamill and Michael Dorn, showcasing Sierra as the early leader in computer game vocal talent.

Another measure of lasting legacy is to look at the dedicated fans, those who not only bought the games but became personally invested in the characters and worlds created. One such fan is Rudy Marchant, who in 2008 began his own attempt at preserving the rich history of Sierra through his website The Sierra Chest. When asked if he believes today’s gamers still benefit from Sierra’s legacy, he says “Yes, but they mostly don't know it. It's like asking a kid these days what the influence of the Lumiere brothers was on movie making, and they answer ‘Who?’, completely unaware of the fact that they invented motion picture.”

Rudy goes on to say that, “Just because most current-generation gamers haven't heard about Sierra doesn't mean Sierra has lost its legacy. In many ways they pioneered new technologies in gaming and nothing can ever change that. Even in 100 years, Sierra will still be the first developer to use a Roland sound module and the first studio to play games over a modem.

“As a lifelong Sierra fan, there's always some disappointment when a young gamer doesn't recognize the classic Sierra titles, but at the same time I always enjoy the opportunity to explain how things came to be – how the games they play these days would not exist if it weren't for the often-groundbreaking developments of the old studios, many of which no longer exist.”

In the early 2000s, there was an upswing in interest for all-things-Sierra. Somewhat ironically, at a time when Sierra had closed their internal development studios and were no longer pursuing their landmark adventure game series, the internet gave rise to what was to become a field of fan-produced games. Some groups of avid adventure gamers harnessed the spirit of the golden age and succeeded in making their own entries in the worlds Sierra created.

Phoenix Online Studio's The Silver Lining was released only after much legal wrangling

One of those groups was Phoenix Online Studios, who started working on their ultimate fan-project, King’s Quest IX: Every Cloak Has a Silver Lining. A group of committed King’s Quest fans, their game was an attempt to tie up the King’s Quest stories after what they considered the lacklustre official final installment, Mask of Eternity. Running afoul of then-Sierra owners Vivendi Universal, they eventually negotiated a fan licence to continue the game episodically as The Silver Lining.

Katie Hallahan Rahhal, designer and PR Director for Phoenix Online, believes that part of the enduring legacy of Sierra is that fans, like themselves, grew up and matured along with the games.

“These were some of the first games that came out when computers were becoming household items. So I think in a way a lot of people remember them so strongly because they were their first exposure to it. It’s kind of the thing that’s been with them the longest,” she says. “And also at the time, although they might have flaws looking back now, they were fun games. They were things that you could play with your kids, your whole family could get involved with playing. Since those series were successful you just continued growing up with them, I think. They had characters you could become attached to.”

Comparing the King’s Quest games to another major adventure game success of the ‘90s, Katie says, “Myst, as an example, was obviously very successful and a whole new kind of thing when it came along, but it didn’t as much have the characters and gameplay and graphics that Sierra did. You were playing yourself but you never saw yourself. You didn’t really have any other characters to interact with.”

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Phoenix Online was hardly alone in keeping the spirit of Sierra alive. Frederik Olsen worked on two unofficial free Space Quest fan games, Incinerations and Vohaul Strikes Back, and he says that another reason for Sierra’s endurance is that the games sparked people's imaginations with the potential of so many untold stories.

“Sierra crafted all these rich universes, always using cutting-edge technology to make them come alive, and they left us hungry for more. In comparison, most adventure game companies at the time had one flagship series. Depending on your disposition, Sierra had several. What happens to Sonny Bonds or John Carey when they've locked up the big baddie? Which supernatural phenomenon will Gabriel Knight brandish his Schattenjäger talisman against next time? Is Sludge Vohaul ever going to return to stain Roger Wilco's golden mop?

“There are stories left to tell. There are questions left to be answered. There's potential to be fulfilled. There are sequels to be made, commercial or otherwise. Ken and Roberta's vision is now pushing 40. I'm sure it'll continue to inspire fans the day it's pushing 50 as well.”

Robert Holmes, composer and producer of Gabriel Knight, agrees that part of Sierra’s ongoing appeal is the variety in its catalog. “One of the things I think Sierra did really smartly was they didn’t just make one kind of game. The people who liked Gabriel Knight were very different from the people who might like Space Quest or very different from the people who might like Laura Bow. There was a lot of great diversity. I come out of the film industry, so it was a lot like the early days of MGM; you would have entire film units doing certain genres and creating really good stuff in that genre.”

King's Quest II: Romancing the Stones is one of several popular fan remakes from AGDI

Another of the earliest and most successful fan groups was a team who dedicated themselves to remaking what were then unavailable games from Sierra’s catalog, eventually releasing updated versions of the first three King’s Quest games as well as a remake of Quest for Glory II. Calling themselves Tierra at first, they soon changed their name to AGD Interactive (AGDI) and also negotiated an official fan licence for their games. Their free King’s Quest I remake was remarkably successful, accumulating more than 1.7 million downloads, with their other three games downloaded in the hundreds of thousands.

Chris Warren, co-founder of AGDI, believes Sierra left an indelible mark in adventure games but says that it’s both positive and negative. “I think in today's smartphone/tablet era, the low-attention-span age, classic Sierra adventure game mechanics haven't really aged well. Adventure games with simpler, intuitive interfaces seem to resonate better,” he says. “Yet, at the same time, very few new adventure games can match the classic Sierra titles in terms of depth of interactivity and immersion into the game universe.”

Chris goes on, claiming “I'm sure that without Sierra pioneering the genre, the modern crop of adventure games wouldn't exist either, so there's definitely something still in place from Sierra's foundations, which all modern adventure developers have built on.”

Groups such as Warren’s AGDI and others have gone on to create their own original adventures since their fan game efforts, something former Sierra designer Josh Mandel says is a sure sign that the company left an enduring legacy.

“Those games are proof of that, aren’t they? So many people putting so much work into fan games and fan fictions and remakes and here it’s 20 or 25 years later, longer I guess. You don’t get that level of attention decades down the road unless you’ve done something tremendously right and struck a chord with so many people.

“I meet people who tell me they don’t personally remember playing Sierra games but they remember sneaking into the living room and seeing their father play Leisure Suit Larry or something like that. It’s going to be a long time before Sierra’s legacy fades, and with the current uptick in the popularity of adventure games in general, I think you’re going to see a renewed interest.”

King Graham returned for a final(?) send-off in The Odd Gentlemen's episodic King's Quest series, released more than 30 years after the original under the newly-relaunched Sierra label

Nowhere is that renewed interest more apparent than in the relaunch of the Sierra brand label and the surprising return of King’s Quest in 2016. Though designed by The Odd Gentlemen, the five-part episodic series was given a rousing endorsement from Ken and Roberta Williams and proved quite popular with longtime series fans who finally got an authentic final adventure with King Graham in Daventry. But will it really be the final one after all? The last episode left the door open for future games in the beloved franchise, and Sierra fans have proven themselves to be remarkably passionate about keeping the flame alive. So we shall see what the future holds.

Returning to those Gaming Industry Awards in 2014, another game honored at the time was DOOM, the benchmark first-person shooter that has been (unfairly) criticised by some adventure fans for killing their favorite genre. Even John Romero, co-founder of id Software and designer of the original DOOM as well as other classics like Wolfenstein 3D and Quake, acknowledges the pioneering work and legacy of Ken and Roberta Williams and Sierra. “[They] built a great company we all admired for a long time. He and Roberta are legends, even back then.”

“Graphical adventure games are still around! Starting with Mystery House there have been thousands of graphical adventures and they are still being produced all over the world. Not a bad legacy!” John says.

Whatever your defining measure of that legacy, one thing is certain: Sierra produced a prolific catalog of games that continue to inspire people and bring players joy several decades later.

Impressive legacy indeed.

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Boleskine · Mar 13, 2018

Boleskine said: ↑

Might as well put this here:

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Korgoth of Barbaria · Mar 16, 2018

Sierra just depresses me. They'll fade away and be forgotten completely in the next decade. Thank you CUC, thank you Odd Gentlemen, thanks to everyone who contributed to Sierra's rape and demise.

SerratedBiz · Mar 19, 2018

Nowhere is that renewed interest more apparent than in the relaunch of the Sierra brand label and the surprising return of King’s Quest in 2016. Though designed by The Odd Gentlemen, the five-part episodic series was given a rousing endorsement from Ken and Roberta Williams and proved quite popular with longtime series fans who finally got an authentic final adventure with King Graham
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Huh? Did I wake up in Bizarro World without realizing it?

another game honored at the time was DOOM, the benchmark first-person shooter that has been (unfairly) criticised by some adventure fans for killing their favorite genre.
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Citation needed? You'd have to be pretty short-sighted to believe it was Doom, and not Sierra, that killed off Sierra.

Blackthorne · Mar 19, 2018

SerratedBiz said: ↑

Huh? Did I wake up in Bizarro World without realizing it?

Citation needed? You'd have to be pretty short-sighted to believe it was Doom, and not Sierra, that killed off Sierra.
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Ha! Have you met some adventure game fans? You mention DOOM to them and they froth at the mouth, spouting off about how FPS killed adventure games. It's easier to blame something like that than to blame company mismanagement and poor choices. It's at least more fun to blame another game than boring business decisions. Like, if someone died from a heart attack, I'd rather tell the story of how they were fucked to death by a bear with six dicks. That's way more interesting.

Bt

Korgoth of Barbaria · Mar 19, 2018

IMO several things killed off Sierra:
-A lack of brand focus (before CUC). In 1995, Sierra bought around 10 companies, all in very different fields. They bought two racing game companies, a golf simulator company, a cooking simulator company and such. You had stuff like Print Artist, Cooking sims, and Hunting games coming out from the same company as the adventure games. Diversity is great but I think who Sierra was, and what they stood for, began to become a little blurred in the mid 1990s.

-Not absorbing the studios they bought. Sierra bought, between 1992 and 1997, a total of 12 smaller companies. In most cases with an acquisition, the bought company would be absorbed in some way into the buyer. Sierra allowed the subsidiaries to retain their physical location, brand identity and management. In an age before Skype, this caused communication problems along with financial problems (For example, Dynamix, despite being part of the hugely profitable Sierra, was financially troubled all through the 90s).

-Ken leaving so abruptly after the sale to CUC. He left but didn't leave at the same time. He resigned as CEO in July 1996 but at the same time accepted a promotion as Vice Chairman of CUC which put him above Sierra's President in power. I've talked to some former employees and they say in this weird transitional 1996-1997 era, middle management didn't know who quite to answer to because Ken was there, but not at the same time. He remained with CUC until November 1997. So you have this awkward year and a half where the boss is there...not but really...no clear boss...Then the guy who should've been Ken's successor (Mike Brochu, who had been Sierra's President and COO since 1995) leaves in October 1997. CUC responds to Ken and Mike leaving by splitting Sierra into three separate organizational brands and appointing three executives as heads of each studio...Making the management and communication problems all the worse. For example, KQ8 was meant to come out in December 1997 but ended up coming out a year later. A big reason for this was communication issues between Dynamix (who was developing KQ8's engine) and Sierra proper.

-Mismanagement by CUC/Cendant/Vivendi

-Rape of Sierra's financials by CUC in CUC's fraudaulent dealings. CUC bought several computer game companies in 1996 and 1997: Sierra, Davidson & Associates, Knowledge Adventure, and Gryphon Software. All but one of those companies no longer exists. Knowledge Adventure only survived because Vivendi sold it off to a private owner in the early 00s. Blizzard only survived because as a TINY company at the time, their accountants weren't used by CUC. Davidson & Associate's, Blizzard's parent company, was raped by CUC and like Sierra, does not exist.

-Sierra slowly losing its brand identity with mainstream gamers. Consider that Sierra published Half-Life in 1998 and then Half-Life 2 in 2004 and published some of Vivendi's most popular IPs like Spyro the Dragon but struggled financially regardless because people didn't know who Sierra was by the 2000s.

Boleskine · Mar 19, 2018

Korgoth of Barbaria said: ↑

-In 1995, Sierra bought around 10 companies, all in very different fields.

-Ken leaving so abruptly after the sale to CUC.
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That's the most important part. Buying those companies allowed Ken to put a bigger price tag on Sierra when he and Roberta began to plan for their retirement.

Ken obviously didn't want Sierra to get pillaged after he left, but he underestimated the kinds of people that his company's sale would attract.

Curious_Tongue · Mar 23, 2018

Blackthorne said: ↑

Ha! Have you met some adventure game fans? You mention DOOM to them and they froth at the mouth, spouting off about how FPS killed adventure games.
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Seems like two completely different populations to me (Adventure and FPS fans). They only thing they might have in common is that they owned computers in the nineties.

Blackthorne · Mar 23, 2018

Curious_Tongue said: ↑

Seems like two completely different populations to me (Adventure and FPS fans). They only thing they might have in common is that they owned computers in the nineties.
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Well, now they're two different groups of fans.... back when I was a teen in that era, there was a lot of crossover. There were some who liked and played both, and then of course some who ditched adventure games and played Doom, Quake, Descent, Hexen, Heretic et al. almost exclusively. Then there were some who stuck with Adventure Games and watched them kind of deteriorate in quality in the mid-late 90s as FPS games got better. Now, the two camps are almost entirely exclusive. But I do remember a time when people just liked to play PC games...

Bt

Korgoth of Barbaria · Mar 24, 2018

Boleskine said: ↑

Korgoth of Barbaria said: ↑

-In 1995, Sierra bought around 10 companies, all in very different fields.

-Ken leaving so abruptly after the sale to CUC.
Click to expand...

That's the most important part. Buying those companies allowed Ken to put a bigger price tag on Sierra when he and Roberta began to plan for their retirement.

Ken obviously didn't want Sierra to get pillaged after he left, but he underestimated the kinds of people that his company's sale would attract.
Click to expand...

The guy who bought Sierra was actually on Sierra's board of directors, you know. Ken was Chairman of the Board as well as CEO. Walter Forbes was the CEO of CUC and also a member of the board and shareholder in Sierra since 1991. He apparently abruptly stopped Ken after a board meeting in early 1996 and offered to buy Sierra for $48 per share (Sierra was trading at $27). It was, in essence, a corporate takeover from within, similar to what almost happened to Disney in the 1980s. While the meeting blind-sighted Ken, Walter was a guy who had been responsible in a lot of ways for Sierra's growth and success in the early 1990s. He trusted Walter. In retrospect, Walter was like a child predator, grooming Sierra to one day fuck it - but Ken couldn't have known that. As far as he knew, Walter ran an awesome, diverse company which would offer Sierra protection into perpetuity, and the international reach of CUC would allow Sierra's games much greater resources and a further reach in terms of sales.

How could Ken know CUC was actually a shell, bleeding money year after year? CUC used its acqusitions to inflate its own stock and income by inflating the books of the companies it bought. It was a shell-game. But to the outside observer, CUC was a future megacorp. It was massive.

I do not think Ken, at this point, wanted to retire. He seems to have wanted to take a more R&D role at Sierra - let other people do the corporate stuff while he focused on game quality. I don't think he wanted to cut and run from Sierra necessarily - like sell and be done with it.

Ken has said that Forbes' initial idea was to buy up Sierra, Davidson and other companies and merge them all into one monolith. Ken objected to this and the sale nearly collapsed. The negotiations were rather intense. Also, Forbes wanted the combined company to be run by Bob Davidson, the CEO of Davidson & Associates (an edutainment company which owned Blizzard). Ken respected Bob but objected to this. They worked it out that the companies would remain separate, but have a "parent company", CUC Software, overseeing the combined resources of all companies.

Ken apparently tried to put certain protections in place for Sierra:
-Ken would be made a Vice Chairman and member of the Office of the President of CUC. This would, in theory, put him above Bob Davidson on the food chain and curtail him somewhat
-There was to be a software board of directors established. This board would be composed of himself, Bob Davidson, Michael Brochu (Sierra's President and COO), and a few CUC people. It would decide on major issues such as acquisitions and strategic direction.
-Ken would remain responsible for Sierra's R&D

The sale closed in July 1996 and none of these conditions were met. Ken was given his two titles only to find they gave him literal practical power. The software board met maybe once or twice. Ken had enomorous clout within Sierra still, but Sierra's President Brochu ultimately answered to Bob Davidson. Ken was still CEO of Sierra, but he also had CUC duties to attend to. Ken has stated there were a lot of territorial battles with Davidson which wore him out. Bob and his wife were religious types and wanted certain "offensive" Sierra products like Phantasmagoria and Leisure Suit Larry taken off the shelves. They also wanted to combine creative groups and that was a no for Ken. For example, Stay Tooned was released late in 1996, published by Sierra, but it was developed by Funnybone Interactive, one of Davidson's subsidiaries; Sierra in turn in 1997 released Hellfire, which was owned by Blizzard, one of Davidson's subsidiaries but Sierra was given the contract to develop it. A lot of crossbranding of the two companies which in the end diluted the brands of both.

It was clear one would have to go.

Davidson, sensing there was something fishy about CUC, left in January 1997. Ken expected to be named the new CEO of CUC Software, but instead they gave the nod to some CUC executive who had no prior gaming experience. Incensed by this, Ken's interest in the game division diminished a lot. He would still come by the offices and help out but he was burned out. He was getting calls from depressed employees and such. He instead put most of his focus on CUC's project NetMmarket, which was their version of Amazon. Ken went to work as the project head. He was still the CEO of Sierra but there was a weird vacuum of power with 90% of his energy being focused on CUC stuff, Michael Brochu answering to a CUC lackey and such.

As soon NetMarket went up in November '97, Ken left CUC and Sierra completely.

SerratedBiz · Mar 26, 2018

Blackthorne said: ↑

Well, now they're two different groups of fans.... back when I was a teen in that era, there was a lot of crossover.
Click to expand...

And that was my experience as well. Loving Sierra games didn't stop me from buying and playing Wolf 3D, Doom 1/2, Heretic, Hexen, anything else. I enjoyed Duke Nukem and Captain Keen as much as I did any of the Quest series. Being a fan of computer gaming itself was the reason why I bought 3 separate copies of the Quest for Glory anthology in addition to every single game individually.

Honestly, I don't care much for the business side of things that led to Sierra's downfall. I know about Dynamix (what an amazing fucking lineup of games they had), I know about Vivendi, but when I say Sierra killed Sierra I mean that, intellectually, creatively, Sierra killed Sierra.

All of their series crashed and burned in the face of technological innovation and artistic burnout. Police Quest honestly died with SWAT and the huge limitations imposed by trying to make a game that was displayed entirely through FMV. Space Quest died with 6, after rehashing the same formula so many times even the familiar story of Roger Wilco was spent. Quest for Glory with 5 - although, to be honest, I don't hate 5 as much as other people do, but that's because I'm a fanboy - and its attempt to switch to 3D and add a multiplayer angle to the game. King's Quest - Mask of Eternity ('nuff said). Leisure Suit Larry MCM was released as a zombie without Al Lowe. GK3 - some people loved it, I thought the 3D was clumsy.

Sierra committed creative suicide and churned out as many sequels as it possibly could. By the time their financial troubles came to a boiling point, they were already dead inside.

Outlander · Mar 27, 2018

We would get our hands on whatever we could in those days, be it action / adventure / platformer / racing / strategy / RPG / whatever. No real responsibilities (other than school) = lots of free time = GAMING TIME.

Blackthorne · Mar 27, 2018

Yeah, exactly. And even school time was game time. I loaded Scorched Earth onto all the IBM PS/2's they had in the library/computer lab. We were all playing it. Then we started bringing in Wolf 3D. Good times!

Bt

Korgoth of Barbaria · Mar 28, 2018

SerratedBiz said: ↑

Blackthorne said: ↑

Well, now they're two different groups of fans.... back when I was a teen in that era, there was a lot of crossover.
Click to expand...

And that was my experience as well. Loving Sierra games didn't stop me from buying and playing Wolf 3D, Doom 1/2, Heretic, Hexen, anything else. I enjoyed Duke Nukem and Captain Keen as much as I did any of the Quest series. Being a fan of computer gaming itself was the reason why I bought 3 separate copies of the Quest for Glory anthology in addition to every single game individually.

Honestly, I don't care much for the business side of things that led to Sierra's downfall. I know about Dynamix (what an amazing fucking lineup of games they had), I know about Vivendi, but when I say Sierra killed Sierra I mean that, intellectually, creatively, Sierra killed Sierra.

All of their series crashed and burned in the face of technological innovation and artistic burnout. Police Quest honestly died with SWAT and the huge limitations imposed by trying to make a game that was displayed entirely through FMV. Space Quest died with 6, after rehashing the same formula so many times even the familiar story of Roger Wilco was spent. Quest for Glory with 5 - although, to be honest, I don't hate 5 as much as other people do, but that's because I'm a fanboy - and its attempt to switch to 3D and add a multiplayer angle to the game. King's Quest - Mask of Eternity ('nuff said). Leisure Suit Larry MCM was released as a zombie without Al Lowe. GK3 - some people loved it, I thought the 3D was clumsy.

Sierra committed creative suicide and churned out as many sequels as it possibly could. By the time their financial troubles came to a boiling point, they were already dead inside.
Click to expand...

Perhaps the company adventure game purists loved was dead inside. But they still had a ton of other IPs that were popular in the mid to late 1990s to non-adventure gamers like the Caesar series, the Nascar games, You Don't Know Jack, and such. Also, you say all these games 'crashed and burned', but they all sold well. SQ7 was greenlit because sales of 6 were good, but then cancelled by the new management because the 1997 SQ Collection didn't sell well. Quest for Glory 5's development was very troubled as well KQ8's. Both of those went through three separate designs and had a lot of changes forced upon them by the management after Ken Williams left. Both of those games were midway in development when Sierra was sold. LSL7 was a hit game - again, you have Sierra's new owners sacking Al Lowe in 1999 that brings an end to that series. Ken Williams' favorite game series was LSL - I doubt the company run by him would've done an LSL game without Al.

All these games you mention - SWAT, QFG5, KQ8, GK3, LSL7 - either came out during, or after, the financial troubles that crippled the company, or during/after the sale. LSL7 for example features a picture of Walter Forbes in it. It's impossible to say how Sierra would've fared out the rest of the 90s if they hadn't been bought out, or if the people buying them weren't scumbags. When Sierra was bought in July 1996, it was the market share leader in entertainment software for that year and the last 3 prior. A lot of the poorer quality of these late 1990s sequels - or some of the series coming to the end entirely - can be blamed almost entirely on the turmoil inside the company due to CUC/Cendant.

Boleskine · Sep 25, 2018

Hey guys! On Thursday October 11 2018, the Sierra Chest will be celebrating its 10th Anniversary with a video show, featuring many special guests. Yes, also Ken Williams will be there, and possibly even Roberta. The show will be published on Youtube, the Sierra Chest site, Sierra Chest Facebook page and Twitter. You're of course all welcome! Rudy Sierra Chest creator www.sierrachest.com
Click to expand...

Boleskine · Oct 11, 2018

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A Sierra Retrospective - ongoing article series

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