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A Sierra Retrospective - ongoing article series

Curious_Tongue

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He forced Roberta Williams to learn code so she could have a part time job and bring in extra money.

He quotes Ayn Rand multiple times.

Roberta loved Colossal Cave Adventure so much that she decided to make a game herself. Ken was focused on other things at his job and wasn't really interested in games, but he helped her out when he saw it was a serious project for her. He started coming around when her game was selling thousands of copies with virtually no expenses.
 
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Blackthorne

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You know my partner at IQ, Shawn Mills, turned the articles he wrote above into a full length book "The Sierra Adventure". It's a good read if you're a fan.
 

Silentstorm

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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.

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
Or just the genre itself, i have tried to get people into it, but old adventures games, particularly Sierra, are a really tough sell, the puzzles are generally really hated and no one wants to spend weeks or months stuck in a puzzle with a bad solution or learning they made the game unwinnable a long time ago without any warning, i notice Space Quest I and the way you obtain the jetpack particularly gets some hatred from newcomers.

And the idea that looking at a walkthrough and finding the solution ridiculous is just bad game design and that a properly designed game wouldn't make you feel like you need to use a walkthrough so much...or have to just try to use everything at everything when no solution seems logical anymore, puzzles seem to be what killed the adventure game genre, RPG's and other stuff like...FMV games show that gamers never hated story based games, but i swear a ton of people hate the puzzles and designs of adventure games, when the games are easier or with less Moon Logic puzzles they enjoy them just fine.

Way too often the response i get is "Sierra is charmful as fuck but i want to punch Roberta Williams and others in the face" and "Lucasarts is amazing, but some puzzles are just annoying, fuck the maze forest puzzle in Grim Fandango" and so forth, LucasArts is the best bet but it was kinda ignored at the time over Sierra...and some puzzles still annoy people who try the genre, but the lack of unwinnable situations is seen as a major plus, the people who really love obtuse puzzles and unwinnable scenarios turned out to be a vocal minority at the end of the day seeing how adventure games became a niche genre.

Looking at the way they designed puzzles and their games for a long time, i really believe Digital Antiquarian's theory of saying that Sierra never looked at or played other adventure games, and barely if ever read reviews because they wanted to make their own games without being influenced by anything, and it just led to an echo chamber refusing to notice that more and more people were getting tired of their puzzles.

It makes so much sense i am willing to believe that.
 

SerratedBiz

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I think it's a little unfair to look back 20 years (30? 40...?) at Sierra game/puzzle design and say 'oh yeah they totally fucked that up'. At the time, especially before the 2000s, adventure game design was pretty much in the air. There was a significantly higher degree of innovation, creativity and risks being taken by game designers compared to today. Sierra had its own design philosophy which made it one of the biggest powerhouses in the genre, including deaths, faulty logic and end states and whatever else. LucasArts may have eventually moved away from the harshest of these practices but funky logic, pixel hunting and deaths were definitely a part of their portfolio as well (see Indiana Jones, Sam & Max, The Dig).

In fact, I'm not prepared to say (at all), despite how often you run into people posting this statement, that people hated Sierra games (as much as you describe) because of their design. People might not be happy to learn they locked themselves out of an ending, but I think any adventure gamer from back in the old days has at least fond memories of dying in Space Quest in the most comical and diverse of ways. We used to hunt for death scenes and try to find our way into new ones. It's kinda like that feeling when you try a weird action in a text parser and you realize, with delight, that the creator also thought of it and included a specific response to your action.

I've posted this before. I believe that Sierra (and to a lesser degree LucasArts) fell into a downspiral by pushing more and more technology (eg, 3D, voice acting, FMV) into their games, which both served to elevate game costs and reduce the creative capabilities of their design teams. In Sierra's case, when you look at all (most?) of the successful and established universes, there's a common theme around their demise right after the release of a game which made a technological leap (frequently 3D). Troubled development processes, out-of-control budgets and buggy releases made it so that, no matter how much of the original sparkle was there, the games didn't really sell significantly better and it became unprofitable to keep going down that rabbit hole.

For what it's worth, LucasArts also spent the last few years of their existence in development hell with several cancelled projects and the lackluster release of Escape from Monkey Island (complete with a PS2 release, hello sweet decline).
 
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The only significantly stupid design flaw from Sierra was the presence of walking-dead scenarios. A ton of their games had them, and some of them (GK1, KQVI, Dagger of Amon Ra) were just incredibly obtuse and in no way telegraphed. I remember raging when I first played KQVI and got to the palace only to realize I had lost the game because I failed to befriend Jollo 6 hours earlier.
 

Boleskine

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I've posted this before. I believe that Sierra (and to a lesser degree LucasArts) fell into a downspiral by pushing more and more technology (eg, 3D, voice acting, FMV) into their games, which both served to elevate game costs and reduce the creative capabilities of their design teams. In Sierra's case, when you look at all (most?) of the successful and established universes, there's a common theme around their demise right after the release of a game which made a technological leap (frequently 3D). Troubled development processes, out-of-control budgets and buggy releases made it so that, no matter how much of the original sparkle was there, the games didn't really sell significantly better and it became unprofitable to keep going down that rabbit hole.

I think it's less about Sierra pushing newer technology into games for the sake of it and more about needing to keep pace with the evolution of 3D graphics along with FPS and other faster-paced games. The popularity of games like Doom, Quake, Diablo, and Starcraft made it harder to sell adventure games, which were less exciting by comparison. So, the decision to move most of Sierra's flagship series to 3D was both a logical and necessary one. For numerous reasons it still didn't work out, whether because some games just weren't good, the graphics weren't good, or the offerings from other genres were simply stronger and more attractive to the growing market of PC gamers.

Prior to the explosion of 3D, the CD-ROM of course presented a huge leap over previous limitations and many opportunities - better graphics, voice acting, FMV, etc. Sometimes FMV was gimmicky but Sierra's output there was pretty good (Phantasmagoria 1+2, GK2, Shivers 1+2, Rama, etc.). At the very least Sierra had the money and resources for decent live action production value. While Phantasmagoria 2 might not be a good "game" due to actual game design or a cheesy story the FMV itself was pretty well done aside from some cheesy acting which actually suited the B-movie horror intentions.
 
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Silentstorm

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Honestly, people just seemingly got tired of adventure games, but looking from what people i try to get them into, it's the puzzles and elements like pixel hunting that really grind their gears, and that goes to almost every classic game, that being said, the 90's were a time when graphics and technology advanced at a fast rate and you could make faster or more complex games like nothing, adventure games were just quaint and slow in comparison and they never really found a demographic to target to.

They had the idea that people who usually don't care about games would get into theirs because they revolve around puzzles and actual plots, and ones that are more than fantasy or sci-fi games where you kill tons of enemies...but the way games were advertised were ways that would reach hardcore gamers that at the time would be more excited at games like Quake, Doom, Diablo and so forth.

Sierra and others did try to fight back with 3D graphics, FMV and more, but the crowd they had was only getting smaller and the number of new fans wasn't enough to save them.

Also, walking-dead scenarios are only fine if the game makes it clear you lost or at least doesn't allow you to spend hours playing the game until you find out it is unwinnable, also not a big fan of pixel hunt...but it still feels cool solving puzzles and adventure games when well done are so full of charm that i forgive anything, Sierra was great at making amazingly charming and creative games while pushing tech in good ways...to a point where even if there are some really really dumb puzzles, i still like Space Quest, King's Quest and many other games from them.

In fact, it's hard to find any game these days that approaches the level of charm and wonder that Sierra at it's best provided all the time.
 

hello friend

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I got into adventure games late but if all the puzzles are too simple it's just not fun. The old formula +say, automatic saving before an action that leads to death and no way of completely and unreversably fucking up a playthrough to the point the game can't be finished, although locking out some endings is fine. Some UI improvements where it's needed, better usage of contextual right click without getting rid of verbs. I don't think many changes would be needed to a lot of the classics apart from the need to probably rebuild the game from scratch to implement such changes. Old formula is fine. Sick of seeing new adventure games being released all the time after the genre was "revived" only to be disappointed time and time again because the games were designed without gameplay.
 

Morpheus Kitami

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I think the reason why adventure games stopped getting made by big companies is that they didn't know how to market it properly. During the dark ages of the '00s, where adventure games were supposedly dead, adventure games were still being made, at the same rate. Nancy Drew, The Adventure Company and that guy who made Paradise, they all were making adventure games during that time and seemingly thriving. Its actually during the so-called revival that the number of adventure games starting drying up. Perhaps the casual adventure audience finally got consumed by hidden object games. I don't have any other explanation for why there are twenty Dark Parable games.
 
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I disagree with the above two posts. Adventure games died because the people greenlighting projects wanted to see bigger ROI than they were getting from the genre. As far as I know the last of the big Golden Age adventures (Grim Fandango, GK3, Mask of Eternity if that counts) were all profitable, they just weren't as profitable as the Tomb Raiders, Quakes, or Warcrafts.

Just looking at Sierra alone, their top-selling adventure game of all time was (I believe, feel free to correct me here if anyone has data pointing elsewhere) Phantasmagoria, and it was also one of the most expensive projects they developed in house; they literally installed a Hollywood set in their office complex so they could shoot the FMV. Phantasmagoria sold roughly 1 million copies in lifetime sales by the time Sierra shut down. Compare that with Lords of the Realm 2, a game published but not developed by Sierra the following year. I can't find budget figures for it, but I'm sure it was budgeted significantly lower than Phantasmagoria. It sold roughly 2.5 million copies in lifetime sale before Sierra shut down.

Sierra's adventure games division was also a bit of a loss-leader for pretty much the last 7 years of the 90s. They spent a ton of money on attracting talent and acquiring new technology to try and develop an internal animation studio that could rival Disney... and then they put out a measly three games (KQVII, Torin's Passage, and Love for Sail), none of which were major successes, and one of which (Torin's Passage) was a straight-up flop. Then they invested a shitload of money building a Hollywood live-action studio and then they put out a measly three games (GK2, Phantas, and Phantas 2) all of which were successful commercially, but two of which (the Phantasmagorias) were largely critically derided. Then they decided to switch to early 3d and, well... we all know how that went. They kept chasing technology expecting that it would lead to larger sales numbers, but they weren't realizing that the technology wasn't particularly suited to the genre, and that they had already effectively hit their sales cap for the genre. They failed to acknowledge that their flagship genre in the 80s was not marketable to the majority of the new market brought in by the technical advances of the 90s.
 
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Blackthorne

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Yeah, I can say my experience with making adventure games has been that it costs a lot of make, and you don't bring in enough these days. Part of it is audience waning, and part of it is a large portion of the audience expecting cheap games. I'm just saying, Sierra games sold for around $50 new 30 years ago. $50 is worth around $107 these days too. I don't mind selling games for $5, but If I sold as many copies of QFI at $14.99 as I sold at $5 and under... I'd have made QFI2 like 5 years ago, heh. The mainstream game industry, rightly, is about profit generation - and I get that. Adventure games are niche and not big revenue generators. But financial concerns aside, they are fun to make and design, and I enjoy playing new ones too. I know quite a few people do. I do not think they'll ever be mainstream again - the game mechanics just aren't what the general gaming public is used to now, but I do think there's a nice niche/secondary market for them.
 

Curious_Tongue

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Blackthorne

Are there any changes you think can be made to the classic click and point genre that would make them more appetising to modern audiences? Without dumbing them down obviously.
 

Curious_Tongue

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I wonder about the female audience as well. Can you sell click and points pandering a little bit to the legbeard market as well as the neckbeard one?

The Blackwell Trilogy and Shardlight come to mind. In fact all the popular click and points had elements that females would like.
 

MRY

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I've posted about this before, but a few quick thoughts:

- Up through the mid-to-late 90s, adventure games were (in general) the computer games with the highest production values and strongest narrative. This is often ignored because now the VGA-era art is viewed as retro and inexpensive, rather than very fancy, and every genre has adopted adventure game (and perhaps we might say console RPG) levels of narrative. Playing, say, King's Quest IV today, it doesn't seem like a cinematic blockbuster, but a goofball low-budget title; but at the time, it was the former, not the latter. The heirs to this aspect of adventure games are cinematic shooters, narrative action-adventure games, and streamlined cinematic RPGs.

- These other genres have a significant advantage over adventure games, however, which is that they are capable of delivering current-year cinematic blockbuster audiovisualnarrative experience in a summer tentpole narrative genre. Adventure games by and large can't tell action-movie stories, war stories, fantasy epics, or superhero stories. Action-adventures, cinematic shooter, and streamlined cinematic RPGs can tell those kinds of stories really easily. This makes mass-marketability much easier in those genres than in adventures.

- I would submit that it's no coincidence that the last adventure games to have real mainstream significance were Telltale's adaptations of comic books, action movies, fantasy epics, etc. Those games fit the criterion of the major classics (i.e., cutting edge production values) and managed to tell summer tentpole type stories.

- Looking at Telltale and at the adventure games from the 80s to 90s, it is impossible to know whether people were playing those games because they liked adventure gameplay, or because they yearned for high-production narrative games and were willing to tolerate adventure gameplay. (Myst is probably the most dramatic example of this -- clearly huge numbers of people bought Myst not because they liked Myst-like gameplay, but because it was a tech demo for CD ROM audiovisualnarrative capabilities.)

- If you make a 90s-style adventure game today, you are selling something totally different than the exact same game in the 90s. You are selling something with quite low production values, and you are selling something that actually has less narrative (and less sort of "traditional" narrative) than games with much higher production values. Thus, whereas in the 90s people might settle for adventure gameplay to get something special in terms of production values and narrative, now people are settling for lower production values and lesser narrative in order to get adventure gameplay. This is a totally different proposition.

- Further, most adventure games today have inferior design to the memorable 90s adventure. That is unsurprising because while art, sound, and narrative creation are skills that are fostered at least as much if not more than they were in the 90s, designing adventure games is not. A major adventure game in the 90s would be developed by a professional designer immersed in other professional designers' puzzles and works. These days, it seems like the majority of adventure games are made by first- or second-time amateur designers (like me), working mostly in isolation, and recalling adventures they played many years ago. Thus, you are selling inferior adventure gameplay when that is the factor that is supposed to draw people in, despite inferior production values and narrative.

- Hidden object games have siphoned off some fans of adventure gameplay, namely those who enjoy studying pretty scenes and finding hotspots. Hidden object games centralize this aspect of adventure gameplay in a way that makes it less frustrating. (For instance, the player is generally told what he needs to find, how many objects are left, etc.)

- The result is that the people who are going to buy adventures today are going to be fairly hardcore fans, motivated by a mix of nostalgia, contrarianism, and idiosyncrasy. The market for such people is fairly limited.

- That said, Steam has massively expanded the market. Thus, for instance, Primordia sold many, many more copies than every LucasArts adventure from the Golden Age. Apparently Monkey Island 2 sold 25,000 copies. Primordia has sold ~260,000 copies, so more than 10 times as many. Of course, Monkey Island 2 sold at a much higher price (Primordia has sold on average for less than $3). I expect Strangeland to sell fewer copies (but by all means, wishlist and buy it!!!).

- Even at Primordia's success rate, though, making adventure games professionally is not really an economically reasonable proposition. It works for WEG in large part because Dave doubles as a publisher. The labor:return ratio on developing isn't enough to go from passionate amateur to professional in most cases, but as a publisher, you can increase the value for the developer and skim enough of the profits to support your own development. In essence, WEG is capturing the return on a good chunk of the free labor of amateur developers (while also increasing the return to the developers on the remaining free labor), and that enables WEG to develop games in parallel. I don't think WEG could sustain itself if it operated like Sierra or Lucas (multiple develop teams paid a salary). There was some effort to do that with Francisco (the most prolific WEG publishee), and it didn't pan out.

- Other than making adventure games that are more beautiful, more compelling, etc., I don't think there is any way to expand the market without abandoning inventory-based puzzles. (It's no coincidence that Unavowed, which largely does away with inventory puzzles, is WEG's most successful in-house title.) Whether that is "dumbing down," I don't know. You can have very challenging puzzles that are not inventory based. (I don't think there's an inventory in The Witness, for instance?) But whether it's "dumbing down" or not, it would lose what I consider to be a key aspect of this genre (my love for Loom notwithstanding).

- From interacting with testers on Strangeland, I have become somewhat disheartened about the genre. Despite my love for it, I'm not sure that I could bring myself to make another adventure. There are not that many players left who like traditional P&C puzzles, even among our core fans. Designing those puzzles is a huge effort for me (as is writing the myriad "wrong solution" quips that nudge you in the right direction, the in-game hint system, etc.), and it's not at all clear that the effort is worth it. I probably would rather spend the time crafting RPG-style alternative paths and C&C, where you use recurring systems rather than bespoke puzzles.
 

MRY

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I'm real sorry to hear that. Wormwood studios has been one of the last bastions of proper adventure games in an expanding sea of glorified storybooks.
At some appropriate point post-release, I will talk about the puzzle reaction that really pushed me over the brink of despair. I would rather not spoil it at this point. But the basic gist is that a non-trivial number of testers seem to not be interested in engaging in a thought process like: "What do I need? How could I get what I need? Where should I look for it?" The puzzle to me seems painfully straightforward, but for these testers, the issues what that they are looking for keys without thinking about a particular lock (as it were), and because these particular keys did not stand out in neon, they were overlooked.

At a general level, the issue I have is that traditional adventure games offer a very limited number of paths forward, and it is "expensive" and even wasteful in developer time to offer alternative paths. You either have a key, or you don't; the door is either unlocked, or it isn't. In the typical RPG, you don't have doors per se, it's more like hills. You don't really get stuck, you might just have a harder or easier time getting up the hill depending on the path you take, the skills you have, etc. And you can give all sorts of rewards to the player-character that aren't "keys." In adventure games, you can reward the player with things other than keys (a joke, some lore, a neat animation, whatever), but you can't give anything to the character. It's more limited.

That said, whatever I end up doing down the road, I need to finish FG first, by which point I will probably be as exhausted by RPG design as I am with adventure game design at the moment. :)
 

Morpheus Kitami

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I have to wonder if another contributing factor is the lack of video reviewers/streamers who tackle adventure games. The only people I know of who handle those are heavily mixed towards the genre, or generally outright hostile. Its not the same with other genres, people don't preface FPS or strategy games as a whole as a heavily mixed bag. Whether we like it or not video reviewers tend to have quite an effect on the casual player, and if they're dismissive of the genre then that's going to color most's perception.
 

Maxie

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MRY 's usual strategy of intense self-deprecation stems from the time when as a younger man he attended this one Oriental restaurant where the owner always served him the $3 special claiming it's actually disgusting slop only to turn out rather edible at which offhand commend the asshole Oriental cook stroked his kung fu beard and sent smug little smirks at his clients muttering "no no I assure you it's shit"
 

WallaceChambers

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At some appropriate point post-release, I will talk about the puzzle reaction that really pushed me over the brink of despair. I would rather not spoil it at this point. But the basic gist is that a non-trivial number of testers seem to not be interested in engaging in a thought process like: "What do I need? How could I get what I need? Where should I look for it?" The puzzle to me seems painfully straightforward, but for these testers, the issues what that they are looking for keys without thinking about a particular lock (as it were), and because these particular keys did not stand out in neon, they were overlooked.

This is... weird to me. Would you say the puzzles in Strangeland are significantly more difficult than Primordia?

I've been replaying (third time total, first time since release) Primordia with the Commentary on, and although it's just as great as I remember, I would say the puzzle difficulty is quite easy compared to its contemporaries (Chains of Satinav, Heroine's Quest, QFI, honestly even some of the Blackwell puzzles). To be clear that's not necessarily a bad thing, the puzzles are almost all logical and well designed (only one I really didn't like so far was the one involving cutting off Goliath's finger, and you commented that it was a relic of an earlier build and doesn't fit the game), but it's perplexing to me that anyone who's played other point and clicks would have difficulty with them. I only just reached Metropol, and my memory is that there are a couple tricky puzzles there, but overall the game is less puzzle-heavy from that point on.
 

MRY

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The puzzles are around the same difficulty I think. Perhaps easier (or less finicky).
 

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