Sierra Al Lowe talks about how Sierra Online collapsed

[oasis789]

.

 

[Darth Roxor]

That article. Jesus Christ

 

[ghostdog]

Damn, that's one great interview.

 

[Aenra]

oasis789
Thanks for linking, had no idea..
sad to read

They were the one and only company whose games i always bought without questioning. New one out? D1P as Morgoth would say, just like that..
Fucked up yuppie high stakes games. You should not need lawyers at your beck and call when your job is to make adventure games for crying out loud

 

[FeelTheRads]

That fucking Paul guy. Jeez. I thought it was over the top when he was accused of sabotaging other kickstarters or hey, of being a pedo. But now? It seems quite reasonable.

 

[MRY]

Wow, amazing interview -- I was never a Larry fan, but Al Lowe comes across as a thoughtful, articulate polymath in this article.

I wasn't as severe as Roberta. Roberta just took a private vow to never again speak about her past or about her history or about her games and output and place in the business.

felipepepe: See! It was her own fault!

But what they didn't do is grab the stories. We told stories.

The notion that post-1980s games have less focus on (or even less quality in) story-telling that Sierra games seems incorrect to me.

 

[tuluse]

The notion that post-1980s games have less focus on (or even less quality in) story-telling that Sierra games seems incorrect to me.

Yeah I think he's pretty wrong about a decreased emphasis on story, but he even says he doesn't play games anymore, so maybe that was the impression he got in the years when he stopped playing (late 90s early 00s?).

He is right though that comedies are a far smaller amount of the overall market. Everyone wants to be SERIOUS and GRIM these days.

 

[MRY]

He doesn't say quite when he quit, but I can't think of any era of games where story-telling declined. Reactivity in story-telling may have declined, but basically there has been (as best I can tell) an unbroken trend toward more story and (generally) better writing. Adventure-game-style, characer-centric story-telling colonized RPGs, platformers, strategy games, and FPSs, and that was happening even when he was playing games.

The only potential period of decline would be the Infocom era to the post-Infocom era: for a little while, text-heavy games, many of which also had significant stories, occupied a large market share, which they then lost to consoles, early graphic adventures which tended to have weaker and less story-telling, etc. But once graphical games became the norm, yeah, it seems like the pressure has always been in the pro-narrative direction (some might think to the detriment of games).

 

[felipepepe]

I wasn't as severe as Roberta. Roberta just took a private vow to never again speak about her past or about her history or about her games and output and place in the business.

felipepepe: See! It was her own fault!

So if the person is not constantly promoting their own history it will fade away, no matter how important?

That's what I hate, you have people like Brenda Romero being treated like royalty just because she's always around... she's credited as play-testing & writing the manuals for the Wizardry games, never had a leading position in Sir-Tech, but since she has a big mouth and journos can't fact check anything, she's now "the Wizardry developer" - fuck Andrew Greenberg, Robert Woodhead and D.W. Bradley, they don't go to cons and trade pleasantries.

 

[Aenra]

he was being ironic, but i guess you got that

and i beg to differ, we have -not- forgotten her, sorry. And i can assure you it is a rather large 'we'. Google algorythms did and continue to do the rest, ensuring the minimum of an interest is bound to bring her name up (for the younger ones)

edit: besides, i see RnR classic songs with barely 12k views on youtube. Would you honestly say that this is the sum total of people aware and in love with said songs? Most absolutely not

 

[MRY]

Aenra: Only sort of. He and I had an exchange in another thread about whether it was appropriate that no one had written anything significant about her for several years, and I was teasing based off of that.

felipepepe: Well, that's the way the world is. If you take a vow of refusing to talk to people about your work, then you as a person will fade into the background even when your work remains prominent. I assume the Romero thing is based on (1) the factors you mention; (2) a desire to promote a woman's accomplishments in a male-dominated field (I leave for others to debate the merits of this approach, but I'm not wholly unsympathetic to it); and (3) the fact she shares a surname with one of the all-time famous game developers. Factor 3 may seem absurd, but I really do believe it matters a lot, and I think it's also part of why Dave Gilbert has been so successful ("Dave Gilbert, he made Monkey Island, right?" "No, that was Dave Grossman." "No, I'm positive his last name was Gilbert." "Oh, maybe you're right."). Obviously it's not a sufficient condition or a necessary one, but it certainly doesn't hurt!

 

[mondblut]

But back in the '80s or early '90s, if you said you wanted to do a role-playing game, people woulda thought you were crazy. Nobody bought those. They were verboten. It was dead. It was gone.

WUT?

He should lay off candy crush.

 

[Aenra]

MRY i know, have read the thread! But thanks for being kind enough to give a pointer
edit: You pretty much said it all while i was typing:

there are always those that seek the limelight and deserve it. That seek it while they do not. That never sought it despite deserving it, or never sought it and well for them since they never earned it.
just as always, there have been people that needed to be 'told' what to admire or enjoy, and people that never cared and searched on their own.
your conventions and self-branding in fucking Tweeter/FB is just today's way of seeking said limelight. Two hundred years ago she'd have banged someone, made a scandal, married another and hanged out at court. Same thing. Who gives a fuck.

viewing one category or another as fair or unfair is noble, but rather superfluous if not egotistic. In that white-knightish "i am here for YOU, as you cannot" kind of way
she chose to, and good for her, although obviously ok, sad to know what triggered it. That's it though;
it was her choice. You search, you shall always find. And i am sure she knows how much we all appreciate her. No dress-code convention can deliver that particular feeling

 

[taxalot]

But back in the '80s or early '90s, if you said you wanted to do a role-playing game, people woulda thought you were crazy. Nobody bought those. They were verboten. It was dead. It was gone.

WUT?

He should lay off candy crush.

Absolutely. Farm heroes Saga is where it's at.

 

[MRY]

Aenra: Oh, given when you joined the Codex, I wasn't sure if you'd seen it.

 

[Taluntain]

Good interview, but JFC is the art of editing dead and buried or something?

 

[Infinitron]

The notion that post-1980s games have less focus on (or even less quality in) story-telling that Sierra games seems incorrect to me.

Seems like he's just conflating "story" and "puzzles". I've noticed that these old fogies tend to do that; take one thing that they like, and another thing that they like that's maybe vaguely correlated with it, and sort of combine them in their head. Like Warren Spector saying Bioware games have good "emergent gameplay" because he likes their stories.

 

[MRY]

Interesting. I wonder if it's also a species of euphemistic trading up: it's classier to like "stories" than puzzles, and perhaps classier to like "emergent gameplay" than to like romanceable NPCs, so you use the better term unknowingly. That said, it's hard to see how you could confuse stories and puzzles.

 

[Infinitron]

Interesting. I wonder if it's also a species of euphemistic trading up: it's classier to like "stories" than puzzles, and perhaps classier to like "emergent gameplay" than to like romanceable NPCs, so you use the better term unknowingly. That said, it's hard to see how you could confuse stories and puzzles.

I guess it's a "feels" thing. An adventure game is a non-violent experience. You wander around peacefully, solving puzzles and absorbing story bits, and those things kind of synergize, I guess? Whereas, in an action game, one might think the player is too busy getting a twitchy adrenaline rush to care about story.

Certainly, all these Sierra guys were badly traumatized by the rise of first person shooters in the 90s, and I can see them being too overwhelmed by it all to notice the emphasis on narrative in Bioshock or whatever.

 

[Telengard]

Possibly. But he might also simply not be being careful with details. When he said "story", he may have meant "rip-roaring yarn". And when he accused modern games of not having story, he may have meant, "They make stories that are simply vehicles for the action, and thus have no real substance beyond the ephemera of the graphics they are tied to." Or in other words, modern game narratives suck.

And they suck most of all because, even if they may at times be entertaining, they lack the elements that make something a good story, rather than just entertainment. Much like the summer blockbuster movie. Or the Bioshock plot.

But those examples may have been redundant.

 

[Morkar Left]

Interesting. I wonder if it's also a species of euphemistic trading up: it's classier to like "stories" than puzzles, and perhaps classier to like "emergent gameplay" than to like romanceable NPCs, so you use the better term unknowingly. That said, it's hard to see how you could confuse stories and puzzles.

I guess it's a "feels" thing. An adventure game is a non-violent experience. You wander around peacefully, solving puzzles and absorbing story bits, and those things kind of synergize, I guess? Whereas, in an action game, one might think the player is too busy getting a twitchy adrenaline rush to care about story.

Certainly, all these Sierra guys were badly traumatized by the rise of first person shooters in the 90s, and I can see them being too overwhelmed by it all to notice the emphasis on narrative in Bioshock or whatever.

The timeperiod he made his games were in the 80's and there was no storytelling in other genres besides some basic setups (Kill some evil guy, rescue the princess, shoot all aliens). Adventure games were practically synonymous with story based games (and riddles) and I guess the main reason people enjoyed playing them.
Even more, adventure games provided stories and humour you could barely find somewhere else for the common population (mostly normal TV watchers back in the day).

 

[tuluse]

I just skimmed it again and while he says he wanted enhanced story telling I actually think he's talking about what drives the game. In a graphical adventure, the designers would come up with a story or theme or maybe just a setting and then design the puzzles around that. He's contrasting that with games where it's designed around something cool to do, and the story is added on top of that.

 

[jfrisby]

Al had pretty big Disney/story aspirations for a Torin's Passage series (http://www.allowe.com/gamedesign/Torin Design.pdf), and FP wasn't really a hit either. Both probably caught in the declining market share of 'story-driven' stuff.

 

[toro]

Pretty good interview.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

AWESOME interview. I fear that by the time most people 'get' what Al Lowe is on about, he'll be long gone. Most of us as well, sadly.