7 ms·

Sierra Gets Creative

139 points by ColinCochrane 10y ago

danso 10y ago
> Roberta Williams, an example of that rare species of adventure-game designers who don’t actually play adventure games, likely had little idea just how torturous an experience her games actually were. Taken as a whole, Roberta’s consistent failings as a designer seemingly must stem from that inability to place herself in her player’s shoes, and from her own seeming disinterest in improving upon her previous works in any terms but those of their surface bells and whistles. That said, however, King’s Quest IV‘s unusually extreme failings, even in terms of a Roberta Williams design, quite obviously stemmed from the frenzied circumstances of its creation as well. Wow, I had no idea that KQ4 was so controversial. I remember it fondly, though now that I think about it, I remember it fondly for its graphics and setting. I don't remember actually ever finishing it. All the KQ games do seem poorly designed in retrospect but I do remember chugging through the first few of them through trial and error. I've wondered if that perseverance is something that is part of the stupid bullheadedness of youth (or the weakness of age), or if at the time, we just accepted that games were supposed to be unfair and cruel.
- Reedx 10y ago
  Same here! I absolutely loved the King's Quest and Space Quest games (and really most of Sierra's adventure games) and have very fond memories of them. Definitely a big part of it was due to the settings, characters and stories. And the interaction and exploration of those worlds... on a computer. Which I was just naturally fascinated by. I was also fascinated by Ken and Roberta's story about creating games from their kitchen table. That seemed magical to me. I poured over every page of their pamphlets and magazine (Interaction). I know that if those games were released today there's no way I would play them for long and I'd recognize them as poorly designed. But when I was a kid every new game was a big deal and so I pushed through the puzzles (I felt certain ones were ridiculous, but generally just accepted them as what adventure game puzzles were). Sometimes I'd get stuck and come back months later. Ultimately I beat most of the King's Quest and Space Quest games, even years later. It's hard to imagine that today with the unlimited buffet of cheap or free games. The constraint used to be money, now it's time. Even for kids.
  - benologist 10y ago
    King's Quest 8 just came out recently ... they've kept with the times: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/kings-quest-the-complete-collection https://www.humblebundle.com/store/kings-quest-the-complete-...
    - jaredsohn 10y ago
      I think it is just "King's Quest". But if it was numbered it would be the ninth one. (Mask of Eternity would be the eighth.)
      - flukus 10y ago
        We don't talk about that one...
  - djsumdog 10y ago
    That entire genre had a lot of issues. People like to talk about the Gabriel Knight 3 / cat hair moustache as being the pivotal moment for the death of adventure games, but really it was all along in the design. Puzzles were difficult, natural language processing is a hard problems, and commands/grammers could get weird/complex. The icon based point-n-click cleared this up a little, but Sierra had a business model build around needing to order hint books (or play with large groups of people). No one wants hint books, because once you use one hint, you tend to just keep using them. With the Internet and things like UHS for adventure games, this model kinda hit a wall. Telltale, Double Fine, et. al. brought this gene back by treating it more as an interactive story. The puzzles were less crazy and you could get through them without a hint guide. Broken Age is a stealer example of both versions of this genre. Part I is more like Telltale, except with better puzzles. It's easy to get through, but still challenging. Part 2 goes back to the Sierra model though, with puzzles that make little sense and are insolvable for most casual and moderate gamers without a hint guide.
    - Eric_WVGG 10y ago
      "cat hair mustache" that bit is a classic. http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  > All the KQ games do seem poorly designed in retrospect but I do remember chugging through the first few of them through trial and error. I've wondered if that perseverance is something that is part of the stupid bullheadedness of youth (or the weakness of age), or if at the time, we just accepted that games were supposed to be unfair and cruel. A) We've come a looong way in terms of game abilities, and design. Designers were learning a lot back then. B) Games were expensive. I couldn't just go buy another game for ~$20 if I didn't like the one I had, so I stuck with it. C) Games were logistically harder to come buy. I had to go to a store, then pick up a new one. Now I just download a new one without ever putting on pants.
  - derefr 10y ago
    A lot of it wasn't so much design inexperience as an intentional difference in design-style due to those factors B and C. Where today we speak of "replay value", of games that you finish and then want to play again, no such concept existed back then. Instead, it was assumed that a game that was "beaten" (let alone "mastered") would be put away, and so a game should resist being beaten for as long as possible to make it "more worth the money." This was partially the quarter-eating arcade-game philosophy leaking into home-console gaming, and partially the knowledge that parents want the $50 they spend on a distraction for their kids to stretch as long as possible. In the 80s, since games were size-limited (small tapes/cartridges and low memory headroom), this translated to games that were preternaturally challenging to stretch out their play-time. This is the classic "Nintendo Hard" game-design philosophy; but it's also responsible for grind-fest RPGs (another way of taking a small amount of content and padding it out.) In the 90s, with lower size-limits, we instead saw the temporary emergence and flourishing of the really long game—everything was advertised by talking about how expansive the world was, and how many hours of content there were to get through. We still look back on this era as being responsible for the creation of many classic action-adventure and adventure-RPG games for this reason. All this stopped when we hit the 3D era and art-asset production became the overriding cost of producing a game. Games weren't limited in "content" in the scenario/script sense, but they were limited in "content" in the unique-things-to-see sense. There was a temporary burst of interest in exploiting this divide directly (some early PSX games fiddled with procedural generation to overcome the problem), but this was limited to a few minor studios; the majority instead moved their games toward being increasingly high-production-value cinematic affairs. With a fixed amount of stuff to see, getting the player to care about looking at it all more than once became the overriding concern; thus, replayability rather than difficulty became the goal. (Replay-value was always part of the design philosophy of some studios, but now it became part of the basic culture of the industry.) This is when you start to see things like "missions" and "achievements" emerge, that give you many things to do within the same few set-piece areas.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  I think the canonical example of bad adventure game design is a "puzzle" in the Gabriel Knight series to construct a false mustache to disguise yourself as Lt. Mosely, who does not have a mustache, to commit credit card fraud. It involves maple syrup and a cat. I remember brute-forcing through it by clicking everything and trying to combine everything with everything else, because online FAQs were not yet commonly available to me at the time. I liked the story enough to plow through the cloudcuckoolander puzzle logic. After the Sierra games, the last example I can recall of WTF game puzzles was being required to incinerate a bizarrely out-of-place brassiere to get the underwire in Return to Zork. It would appear that either game designers have learned to behave themselves, or that I have stopped playing games that don't make any danged sense.
- Jeema101 10y ago
  I remember as kid just being in awe of the game mechanics and the graphics in those Sierra games. It was fun just to explore and type stuff in and see what was possible, even if you had no hope of ever finishing the game.
stuart78 10y ago
Great post, I love the "basic" challenges of development back in the early days. Dealing with Sound, in this article, jumped out at me. We take so much for granted about how our computers work today.
- blakeyrat 10y ago
  The article doesn't dwell on it much but those "primitive" 8-bit Commodore 64 machines had the legendary SID sound chip inside of them that put most early PC-compatible sound chips to shame. (As did the Amiga and Macintosh, the Macintosh famously shipping with a digitized speech synthesizer back in 1984.) Of course for most of that era, the PC was "controlled" by IBM who had zero respect for video games.
shmerl 10y ago
> One could wish that Roberta’s ambivalence about killing her new female heroine at every possible juncture had led her to consider the wisdom of indulging in all that indiscriminate player-killing at all It's interesting, how in comparison in Loom[1], there are practically no such deaths at all. The most that can happen - you'll get stuck with progress and will have to return to previous areas to finish what you missed. King's Quests on the other hand are infamous for brutal deaths caused by all kind of mistakes, like failing to feed hungry chicken in time. [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loom_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loom_(video_game)
- danso 10y ago
  That's the case with virtually every Lucasfilm game I've ever played, including Indiana Jones: Fate of Atlantis, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango. I believe you can die in the climaxes of those games, otherwise you just get knocked unconscious at worst. That feature was a nice reprieve after playing the Sierra-designed games. Though sometimes the abrupt endings in the Sierra games had their point; for example, forgetting to secure your weapon before taking an inmate into jail would result in a game-over scene in Police Quest 1. Not sure how that could be resolved the LucasFilm way.
  - frandroid 10y ago
    In a LucasFilm game, the inmate would escape and return to where they were hanging out before, and you would have to apprehend them again, as many times as it takes before you remember to secure your weapon before taking the inmate into jail.
  - gnarbarian 10y ago
    Han would solve it by shooting the inmate first.
    - nolok 10y ago
      Not in the HD re-release he wouldn't
  - 10y ago
mschuster91 10y ago
Ah, hearing the name "Sierra On-Line" brings back some memories. Caesar, Earth Siege... Does anyone here happen to know where their licensing portfolio/copyrights/code have ended up?
- Reedx 10y ago
  Activision bought Sierra a couple years ago. They revived the brand with a number of new titles and a new King's Quest, but it's been pretty underwhelming so far. :/
  - logfromblammo 10y ago
    Much like Zork. Zork: Grand Inquisitor (1997) was true to its legacy, but Return to Zork (1993) was lackluster, and Zork: Nemesis (1996) could hardly be called a Zork game at all. After Zork: Grand Inquisitor, I really thought that Activision finally had a handle on the brand they bought, but then they just... stopped. Until 2009, when they licensed the IP to Jolt Online to make a crap browser game. So I wouldn't expect much from Activision with the Sierra IP.
    - djsumdog 10y ago
      I liked Return to Zork. I thought it was a really well put together game. Nemesis I never got through the first part, but this makes me want to go back and play it as well as Grand Inquisitor.
- douche 10y ago
  You can find a bunch of the stuff that was actually developed by Impressions Games (Caesar/Pharoah/Zeus, Lords of the Realm) on GOG. I'm still waiting for a rerelease of Civil War Generals, though... I keep a Windows 98 VM around to play that once in a while...
- nolok 10y ago
  Vivendi Games (owned by Vivendi Universal, the huge french conglomerate) bought them (they also owned Blizzard, amongst others), then VG merged with Activision and were in majority control, then Vivendi (parent company) decided they wanted out of the gaming business to focus on other ares (one being telecoms) and sold their shares to Activision, making a nice profit. In what is one of the most Vivendi "we don't know what we want to do" event, just a couple years later they then decided they wanted to sell their main french telecom company (SFR) and at the same time bought Gameloft and agressively bought Ubisoft shares (the two biggest french video games companies).
roschdal 10y ago
You might enjoy Ken Williams yatch blog: http://www.kensblog.com http://www.kensblog.com
danso 10y ago
h/t r/themakingofgames A NBC News piece about Sierra Online in 1983; brought back lots of great memories, and feels like the 80's version of the feature piece on a startup unicorn: http://www.nbcuniversalarchives.com/nbcuni/clip/51A17175_s01.do?assetId=clip_35754451 http://www.nbcuniversalarchives.com/nbcuni/clip/51A17175_s01...
eriknstr 10y ago
I found a video with a full play-through of King's Quest IV without commentary. The video is almost an hour long. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCqDIRMRTTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCqDIRMRTTY Interesting to watch, but I can certainly see what they meant when they said that the game was fundamentally broken, that it requires you to perform a bunch of actions which you must wander around trying to figure out pretty much without any help at all. As a play-through video, I enjoyed it. As I game, I would have become very frustrated, I would not have enjoyed it and I would have given up within short time. The story as a whole combines a lot of folk tales and IMO does so to pretty good success. I also think that there are some elements from the game which would be worth basing another game on for something like a gamejam entry. For example, the scarab that scares away the zombies and the mummy, that could be reused in such a game. Just, the scarab would not be so hard to come by.
- aesthetics1 10y ago
  Did anyone play this game when it was out (not the recent reworked versions)? GameFAQs did not exist, nor did reddit, forums, or other places to discuss strategy and tactics for these sorts of games. There was however a hotline on the back of the instruction manual that you could call for hints - for a low low fee of course. I remember thinking that the game designers were probably asked to make some of the puzzles frustratingly difficult so that a post-sale revenue stream could be realized. I also remember playing through these games without the help of the tip hotline. Sharing ideas and discussing strategies with my family. It made for a very fun experience and a very rewarding feeling when you finally figured something out. It also made for a very frustrating experience when you did something wrong or missed something along the way and had to go back to a very early save point to fix your mistake. I guess you could say that this was poor design but I still have very fond memories of the series.
justinlardinois 10y ago
Worth noting that a bunch of Sierra games are in this week's Humble Bundle, including all of the King's Quest games at the higher tiers. https://www.humblebundle.com/sierra-bundle https://www.humblebundle.com/sierra-bundle

139 points by ColinCochrane 10y ago

danso 10y ago

> Roberta Williams, an example of that rare species of adventure-game designers who don’t actually play adventure games, likely had little idea just how torturous an experience her games actually were. Taken as a whole, Roberta’s consistent failings as a designer seemingly must stem from that inability to place herself in her player’s shoes, and from her own seeming disinterest in improving upon her previous works in any terms but those of their surface bells and whistles. That said, however, King’s Quest IV‘s unusually extreme failings, even in terms of a Roberta Williams design, quite obviously stemmed from the frenzied circumstances of its creation as well. Wow, I had no idea that KQ4 was so controversial. I remember it fondly, though now that I think about it, I remember it fondly for its graphics and setting. I don't remember actually ever finishing it. All the KQ games do seem poorly designed in retrospect but I do remember chugging through the first few of them through trial and error. I've wondered if that perseverance is something that is part of the stupid bullheadedness of youth (or the weakness of age), or if at the time, we just accepted that games were supposed to be unfair and cruel.

Reedx 10y ago
Same here! I absolutely loved the King's Quest and Space Quest games (and really most of Sierra's adventure games) and have very fond memories of them. Definitely a big part of it was due to the settings, characters and stories. And the interaction and exploration of those worlds... on a computer. Which I was just naturally fascinated by. I was also fascinated by Ken and Roberta's story about creating games from their kitchen table. That seemed magical to me. I poured over every page of their pamphlets and magazine (Interaction). I know that if those games were released today there's no way I would play them for long and I'd recognize them as poorly designed. But when I was a kid every new game was a big deal and so I pushed through the puzzles (I felt certain ones were ridiculous, but generally just accepted them as what adventure game puzzles were). Sometimes I'd get stuck and come back months later. Ultimately I beat most of the King's Quest and Space Quest games, even years later. It's hard to imagine that today with the unlimited buffet of cheap or free games. The constraint used to be money, now it's time. Even for kids.
- benologist 10y ago
  King's Quest 8 just came out recently ... they've kept with the times: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/kings-quest-the-complete-collection https://www.humblebundle.com/store/kings-quest-the-complete-...
  - jaredsohn 10y ago
    I think it is just "King's Quest". But if it was numbered it would be the ninth one. (Mask of Eternity would be the eighth.)
    - flukus 10y ago
      We don't talk about that one...
- djsumdog 10y ago
  That entire genre had a lot of issues. People like to talk about the Gabriel Knight 3 / cat hair moustache as being the pivotal moment for the death of adventure games, but really it was all along in the design. Puzzles were difficult, natural language processing is a hard problems, and commands/grammers could get weird/complex. The icon based point-n-click cleared this up a little, but Sierra had a business model build around needing to order hint books (or play with large groups of people). No one wants hint books, because once you use one hint, you tend to just keep using them. With the Internet and things like UHS for adventure games, this model kinda hit a wall. Telltale, Double Fine, et. al. brought this gene back by treating it more as an interactive story. The puzzles were less crazy and you could get through them without a hint guide. Broken Age is a stealer example of both versions of this genre. Part I is more like Telltale, except with better puzzles. It's easy to get through, but still challenging. Part 2 goes back to the Sierra model though, with puzzles that make little sense and are insolvable for most casual and moderate gamers without a hint guide.
  - Eric_WVGG 10y ago
    "cat hair mustache" that bit is a classic. http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html
CaptSpify 10y ago
> All the KQ games do seem poorly designed in retrospect but I do remember chugging through the first few of them through trial and error. I've wondered if that perseverance is something that is part of the stupid bullheadedness of youth (or the weakness of age), or if at the time, we just accepted that games were supposed to be unfair and cruel. A) We've come a looong way in terms of game abilities, and design. Designers were learning a lot back then. B) Games were expensive. I couldn't just go buy another game for ~$20 if I didn't like the one I had, so I stuck with it. C) Games were logistically harder to come buy. I had to go to a store, then pick up a new one. Now I just download a new one without ever putting on pants.
- derefr 10y ago
  A lot of it wasn't so much design inexperience as an intentional difference in design-style due to those factors B and C. Where today we speak of "replay value", of games that you finish and then want to play again, no such concept existed back then. Instead, it was assumed that a game that was "beaten" (let alone "mastered") would be put away, and so a game should resist being beaten for as long as possible to make it "more worth the money." This was partially the quarter-eating arcade-game philosophy leaking into home-console gaming, and partially the knowledge that parents want the $50 they spend on a distraction for their kids to stretch as long as possible. In the 80s, since games were size-limited (small tapes/cartridges and low memory headroom), this translated to games that were preternaturally challenging to stretch out their play-time. This is the classic "Nintendo Hard" game-design philosophy; but it's also responsible for grind-fest RPGs (another way of taking a small amount of content and padding it out.) In the 90s, with lower size-limits, we instead saw the temporary emergence and flourishing of the really long game—everything was advertised by talking about how expansive the world was, and how many hours of content there were to get through. We still look back on this era as being responsible for the creation of many classic action-adventure and adventure-RPG games for this reason. All this stopped when we hit the 3D era and art-asset production became the overriding cost of producing a game. Games weren't limited in "content" in the scenario/script sense, but they were limited in "content" in the unique-things-to-see sense. There was a temporary burst of interest in exploiting this divide directly (some early PSX games fiddled with procedural generation to overcome the problem), but this was limited to a few minor studios; the majority instead moved their games toward being increasingly high-production-value cinematic affairs. With a fixed amount of stuff to see, getting the player to care about looking at it all more than once became the overriding concern; thus, replayability rather than difficulty became the goal. (Replay-value was always part of the design philosophy of some studios, but now it became part of the basic culture of the industry.) This is when you start to see things like "missions" and "achievements" emerge, that give you many things to do within the same few set-piece areas.
logfromblammo 10y ago
I think the canonical example of bad adventure game design is a "puzzle" in the Gabriel Knight series to construct a false mustache to disguise yourself as Lt. Mosely, who does not have a mustache, to commit credit card fraud. It involves maple syrup and a cat. I remember brute-forcing through it by clicking everything and trying to combine everything with everything else, because online FAQs were not yet commonly available to me at the time. I liked the story enough to plow through the cloudcuckoolander puzzle logic. After the Sierra games, the last example I can recall of WTF game puzzles was being required to incinerate a bizarrely out-of-place brassiere to get the underwire in Return to Zork. It would appear that either game designers have learned to behave themselves, or that I have stopped playing games that don't make any danged sense.
Jeema101 10y ago
I remember as kid just being in awe of the game mechanics and the graphics in those Sierra games. It was fun just to explore and type stuff in and see what was possible, even if you had no hope of ever finishing the game.

stuart78 10y ago

Great post, I love the "basic" challenges of development back in the early days. Dealing with Sound, in this article, jumped out at me. We take so much for granted about how our computers work today.

blakeyrat 10y ago
The article doesn't dwell on it much but those "primitive" 8-bit Commodore 64 machines had the legendary SID sound chip inside of them that put most early PC-compatible sound chips to shame. (As did the Amiga and Macintosh, the Macintosh famously shipping with a digitized speech synthesizer back in 1984.) Of course for most of that era, the PC was "controlled" by IBM who had zero respect for video games.

shmerl 10y ago

> One could wish that Roberta’s ambivalence about killing her new female heroine at every possible juncture had led her to consider the wisdom of indulging in all that indiscriminate player-killing at all It's interesting, how in comparison in Loom[1], there are practically no such deaths at all. The most that can happen - you'll get stuck with progress and will have to return to previous areas to finish what you missed. King's Quests on the other hand are infamous for brutal deaths caused by all kind of mistakes, like failing to feed hungry chicken in time. [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loom_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loom_(video_game)

danso 10y ago
That's the case with virtually every Lucasfilm game I've ever played, including Indiana Jones: Fate of Atlantis, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango. I believe you can die in the climaxes of those games, otherwise you just get knocked unconscious at worst. That feature was a nice reprieve after playing the Sierra-designed games. Though sometimes the abrupt endings in the Sierra games had their point; for example, forgetting to secure your weapon before taking an inmate into jail would result in a game-over scene in Police Quest 1. Not sure how that could be resolved the LucasFilm way.
- frandroid 10y ago
  In a LucasFilm game, the inmate would escape and return to where they were hanging out before, and you would have to apprehend them again, as many times as it takes before you remember to secure your weapon before taking the inmate into jail.
- gnarbarian 10y ago
  Han would solve it by shooting the inmate first.
  - nolok 10y ago
    Not in the HD re-release he wouldn't
- 10y ago

mschuster91 10y ago

Ah, hearing the name "Sierra On-Line" brings back some memories. Caesar, Earth Siege... Does anyone here happen to know where their licensing portfolio/copyrights/code have ended up?

Reedx 10y ago
Activision bought Sierra a couple years ago. They revived the brand with a number of new titles and a new King's Quest, but it's been pretty underwhelming so far. :/
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  Much like Zork. Zork: Grand Inquisitor (1997) was true to its legacy, but Return to Zork (1993) was lackluster, and Zork: Nemesis (1996) could hardly be called a Zork game at all. After Zork: Grand Inquisitor, I really thought that Activision finally had a handle on the brand they bought, but then they just... stopped. Until 2009, when they licensed the IP to Jolt Online to make a crap browser game. So I wouldn't expect much from Activision with the Sierra IP.
  - djsumdog 10y ago
    I liked Return to Zork. I thought it was a really well put together game. Nemesis I never got through the first part, but this makes me want to go back and play it as well as Grand Inquisitor.
douche 10y ago
You can find a bunch of the stuff that was actually developed by Impressions Games (Caesar/Pharoah/Zeus, Lords of the Realm) on GOG. I'm still waiting for a rerelease of Civil War Generals, though... I keep a Windows 98 VM around to play that once in a while...
nolok 10y ago
Vivendi Games (owned by Vivendi Universal, the huge french conglomerate) bought them (they also owned Blizzard, amongst others), then VG merged with Activision and were in majority control, then Vivendi (parent company) decided they wanted out of the gaming business to focus on other ares (one being telecoms) and sold their shares to Activision, making a nice profit. In what is one of the most Vivendi "we don't know what we want to do" event, just a couple years later they then decided they wanted to sell their main french telecom company (SFR) and at the same time bought Gameloft and agressively bought Ubisoft shares (the two biggest french video games companies).

roschdal 10y ago

You might enjoy Ken Williams yatch blog: http://www.kensblog.com http://www.kensblog.com

danso 10y ago

h/t r/themakingofgames A NBC News piece about Sierra Online in 1983; brought back lots of great memories, and feels like the 80's version of the feature piece on a startup unicorn: http://www.nbcuniversalarchives.com/nbcuni/clip/51A17175_s01.do?assetId=clip_35754451 http://www.nbcuniversalarchives.com/nbcuni/clip/51A17175_s01...

eriknstr 10y ago

I found a video with a full play-through of King's Quest IV without commentary. The video is almost an hour long. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCqDIRMRTTY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCqDIRMRTTY Interesting to watch, but I can certainly see what they meant when they said that the game was fundamentally broken, that it requires you to perform a bunch of actions which you must wander around trying to figure out pretty much without any help at all. As a play-through video, I enjoyed it. As I game, I would have become very frustrated, I would not have enjoyed it and I would have given up within short time. The story as a whole combines a lot of folk tales and IMO does so to pretty good success. I also think that there are some elements from the game which would be worth basing another game on for something like a gamejam entry. For example, the scarab that scares away the zombies and the mummy, that could be reused in such a game. Just, the scarab would not be so hard to come by.

aesthetics1 10y ago
Did anyone play this game when it was out (not the recent reworked versions)? GameFAQs did not exist, nor did reddit, forums, or other places to discuss strategy and tactics for these sorts of games. There was however a hotline on the back of the instruction manual that you could call for hints - for a low low fee of course. I remember thinking that the game designers were probably asked to make some of the puzzles frustratingly difficult so that a post-sale revenue stream could be realized. I also remember playing through these games without the help of the tip hotline. Sharing ideas and discussing strategies with my family. It made for a very fun experience and a very rewarding feeling when you finally figured something out. It also made for a very frustrating experience when you did something wrong or missed something along the way and had to go back to a very early save point to fix your mistake. I guess you could say that this was poor design but I still have very fond memories of the series.

justinlardinois 10y ago

Worth noting that a bunch of Sierra games are in this week's Humble Bundle, including all of the King's Quest games at the higher tiers. https://www.humblebundle.com/sierra-bundle https://www.humblebundle.com/sierra-bundle