15 ms·

Sierra was captured, then killed, by an accounting fraud

329 points by danso 6y ago

sokoloff 6y ago
I worked for a game studio that was acquired by Sierra in late 1995. Being acquired by Ken and Roberta was surreal; they were two of my idols from childhood gaming and they were every bit as great to work for (via multiple layers of bosses) as you'd hope. They were gamers; they cared about people having fun playing games. They were also hard-nosed about their development teams creating product that would achieve that goal. I remember having to answer to Ken in person in a meeting about what my plan was to get my title shipped. He was firm and fair, but he didn't like my hand-waving at the schedule and task-breakdown. (He'd come to visit our studio in general, not to ream me out about shipping late, but he was spot on that I'd not been diligent enough in my prep and planning. We didn’t call it that, but my burndown chart was not tilted downward.) Every step along the rest of the journey with Sierra was a nightmare for employees. CUC, Cendant, Vivendi, and maybe there was another link in the chain, but I got fed up and quit in spring of 1997. We had incredibly talented and passionate artists (2D and 3D) and along the way a lot of that got shipped out of country to artists who seem to have never seen an American auto race. Several employees sued over shenanigans with our stock options treatment; I didn't join in (though perhaps I should have as I think we were getting screwed). IMO, the acquirers just sucked all the fun out of the room and a lot of talented devs and producers left. If you're not having fun working in computer gaming, you might as well go not have fun someplace that pays well. Ken and Roberta are two of the good ones in my book. 0 - Papyrus Design [IndyCar and NASCAR Racing]
- danso 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing! I played the Quest games as a kid and only heard in passing about Ken and Roberta and early Sierra (I was young enough to not know how unusual it was for a software company to be started and run by a married couple). In my completely presumptive head canon, Sierra petered out because LucasArts games were so much better, and Ken & Roberta sold out and moved into early retirement. I hadn't known Roberta was fighting to the very end for her vision on King's Quest VIII. (Speaking of LucasArts: peeking at KQ8's Wikipedia entry, I see Roberta made the astonishing claim that KQ8 sold twice as well as Grim Fandango: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Quest:_Mask_of_Eternity#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Quest:_Mask_of_Eterni...)
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    That actually was briefly true as I recall. It was an early sign of the problems of "preorder culture" in games (a lesson we're still relearning/refighting time-and-again today): KQ8 was a preorder darling with a ton of hype and anticipation. Grim Fandango was a sleeper that "no one" thought to preorder and the preorder shops (for their reasons) weren't pushing. Grim Fandango was considered a "flop" for a bunch of years, though obviously it's done far better in the long tail of post-preorder sales than KQ8.
    - 737maxtw 6y ago
      I think with Sierra you are right but it was a slower build up imo. I remember KQ6 being a big bit of pomp and circumstance with its production values etc, more promotion than you would see for a computer game at the time. And then KQ7 happened. A victim of a bit of overhypeing and a LOT of WinG pain. Could never get it running on a pc our family owned, even proper pentiums.
  - ahartmetz 6y ago
    Yes, there were at least two genres where LucasArts seemed to make games that were strictly better than Sierra's: adventures and (arcade-ish) flight simulators. Not only better, but the best. For flying games, Origin was a contender, but despite all the advanced graphics and FMV, flying and shooting in Wing Commander was not as fun as in X-Wing and TIE Fighter.
    - mrguyorama 6y ago
      I played only Wing Commander: Prophecy (one of the last ones) and I found it way better than the older star wars games, probably just a normal passage of time thing honestly. If you love those kinds of games and are missing them, check out Freespace, which you can get cheap on GOG, and the Knossos launcher, which allows you to download mods like the open source re-implementation of the game engine which vastly improves things, and some fan made campaigns/overhauls including a great Wing Commander style one. Alternatively, EA (the owners of Origin's intellectual property) recently released StarWars Squadrons, which has a short campaign that certainly scratches that old itch. However I don't know how I feel about the multiplayer.
- magicalhippo 6y ago
  > NASCAR Racing Oh man I spent so many hours on that. Thanks for the good memories!
  - rashkov 6y ago
    Oh wow, I totally forgot about that game. I was not very good at it, but eventually I figured out that I could drive the car in reverse and because there was no hitbox on the bumper, the racetrack's wall just kind of guided me along while I accelerated to maximum speed. Fun memory
    - myself248 6y ago
      Haha, yes, backwards was the best way to play Nascar! I remember being absolutely blown away that the game kept track of tire rubber on the track, and you could see your own spinouts and stuff on the next lap.
  - holoduke 6y ago
    The former NASCAR engine still exists in a new simulator called iracing. You can still notice the same graphics style. Lots of famous real race drivers using it.
- bsenftner 6y ago
  I worked for several game publishers as a developer, and would be called in to firefight games at other developers in danger of not shipping or shipping past a critical deadline. The Sierra productions were typically nightmares, at least the ones that needed publisher bailouts. I never interacted with Ren or Roberta beyond introduction, as firefighting a failing production tends to be upper management scarce.
- CMay 6y ago
  Never had more than a passing interest in IndyCar or NASCAR races, but I remember enjoying both of those on a 486 DX with the turbo button on the case when I was a kid. Links: The Challenge of Golf was another one. Daytona USA was released around the same time... and had a karaoke mode so you could sing along to the soundtrack while racing. That was Papyrus' true downfall, they never identified karaoke as a critical feature in any of their games. :)
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    Ironically, Daytona was actually one of our downfalls or at least a thorn in our side. Sega had the license to the Daytona name and usage for electronic games and that’s one of the most well-known tracks and events. We had every other Cup and Indy circuit, but couldn’t get Daytona. (For our in-house racing series, we had a “Florida” circuit that was the first and middle race in the schedule. For some reason, it was surprisingly close to Daytona International Speedway in design.) We’d have probably sold more boxes and surely would have gotten more online subs if we’d been able to offer Daytona. (Some of the Papyrus crew went on to form iRacing and they’ve got a great product over there; still no karaoke though...)
    - CMay 6y ago
      I guess that doesn't surprise me too much for a sim, though the future of racing games may be the other way around. Some of the most loved tracks in racing games are fantasy ones where you have full control to iterate on the experience and scenery. Would be nice to see next-gen racers returning to that in a big way and eventually have people wanting to license the tracks for real-world construction after they've been battle tested by millions of virtual drivers.
  - animal531 6y ago
    I'm a foreigner, we don't have either. But Indy 500 was groundbreaking at the time, and then came IndyCar. The graphics and all around racing was really great.
- burnte 6y ago
  I have a very vivid memory of Papyrus' NASCAR game in the late 90s. I was in the sales and service industry, I was realy just a couple years into it, still 17, and had sold a beefy system for gaming to a guy who was a NASCAR fan. The day I was supposed to deliver it I dislocated my kneecap. I cslled him, let him know, and came home from the ER with him in my driveway waiting for me. When I got out of the car in the leg brace, he said "Oh thank god your'e hurt! I thought you were trying to rip me off!" I will always remember that game for reasons unrelated to gaming. :D
- breakingcups 6y ago
  Totally off-topic, but did you work on Road Rash at all?
smitty1e 6y ago
Sierra On-Line's initials, SOL, proved prophetic.
tartoran 6y ago
I wasn't much of a gamer but oh boy, did I love all the quest games, they totally appealed to my tastes. I loved the 2D-ness of the games, the attention to details, the scripts, the colors, the music. You could tell there was a talented team behind those games. Games have now gotten so complex graphics-wise but it seems to me that they lost something it's very hard to pinpoint, maybe the limitations of that age was what made the games more creative? Or maybe it's pure subjectivity on my part.
- jasonv 6y ago
  I'm not a gamer, either, but I might say that Space Quest was my one dip into games, and I played that a lot. That was a long time ago.
- sidlls 6y ago
  Games are richer in terms of both content (“things to do”) and visual imagery, but the stories and gameplay are much more uniform now than 20 years ago (which is long after my childhood video game playing period ended). There is some subjectivity here of course, but I occasionally replay games from when I was in college or even elementary school (hello Apple II, Atari and Nintendo). The graphics and limitations are clear, but within those constraints it’s hard to say games have improved that much. For all the advances in the tech we’ve had I don’t believe we’ve seen equivalent gains in actual gaming experience.
  - polytely 6y ago
    See IggleSniggle's comment above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24944816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24944816 I would recommend Outer Wilds (2019) for a game that displays a real advance in gameplay mechanics. There is alot of exciting stuff happening in the indie game scene.
    - sidlls 6y ago
      Game mechanics is definitely one area that seems to have been lacking. Aside from that, there's a certain homogeneity to games these days. I think that's attributable to the fact that there are more of them and that to reach a broader audience there has to be some generalization that occurs.
electrondood 6y ago
It's fascinating to me that a company that became such a huge impact in the computer gaming industry started in, and kept a dev office in Oakhurst.
stephankoelle 6y ago
By accident I bought: Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conquests_of_the_Longbow:_The_Legend_of_Robin_Hood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conquests_of_the_Longbow:_The_... ] Didn't know what "an adventure game" is, at that time. So many good memories. What a great game.
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  My perception has always been that that game was under-appreciated. Nice to run into a fellow appreciator. I think it's also the only DRM[0] I've ever encountered that was a genuine pleasure to use (not that it would work today). [0] - Conquests of the Longbow required you to use the book that came with it to look up lore like coats of arms, to identify plants by their leaves, find out about superstitions around gemstones, etc in order to solve the puzzles in the game. At the time, people generally pirated by passing around floppy disks, none of the kids pirating had access to xerox machines, and the information in the manual was obscure, so you really kinda needed to have the manual. But if you did have it, it almost felt like a natural part of the game, and the information was fun to learn. Of course, now you can easily find it online: http://www.sierrahelp.com/Documents/Manuals/Conquests_of_the_Longbow_-_Manual.pdf http://www.sierrahelp.com/Documents/Manuals/Conquests_of_the...
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    I definitely encountered other games for which you had to look up stuff in the manual, and maybe it wasn't done as well because I always hated it.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      I think in King's Quest it was looking up some specific code word in a random grid or something, before it would let you launch a boat?
      - npongratz 6y ago
        King's Quest 5's copy protection (floppy version only) was enforced with a requirement to use a magic wand to cast a "spell" at various points in the game, where the "spell" is a series of letters that the player matches to symbols in the printed manual. Launching the boat was one of the points in the game where this was required. https://kingsquest.fandom.com/wiki/Crispin%27s_wand#Behind_the_scenes https://kingsquest.fandom.com/wiki/Crispin%27s_wand#Behind_t...
yters 6y ago
I wonder how much of Sierra's demise was due to CUC vs. just the change in gaming landscape. Compared to the early 90's adventure gaming is non-existent minus nostalgic kickstarters. Sierra may still be alive today, but it may be on the same shelf as Nancy Drew mysteries.
- gryson 6y ago
  By the mid- to late-1990s, Sierra's publishing output was far more diversified than just adventure games. They owned a large number of subsidiary development companies (such as Dynamix, Impression, and Papyrus) that were creating games in a wide range of genres. They also published a little-known game called Half-Life in 1998...
  - yters 6y ago
    Great point. I forgot HL was originally Sierra. It seems they were able to adapt to the new market, so CUC can probably be blamed for their demise.
  - microtherion 6y ago
    If not for the events in the article, we might have ended up with Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Portals.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    Half-Life came out just about when I started gaming, and was when I first really picked up on Sierra’s existence. Then right after, they were just gone. No more new games with the Sierra logo (that I saw anyway)
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  The cause and effect is really tough to straighten out. There's certainly an argument to be made that Sierra's demise was the final nail in adventure gaming and the genre might still be alive if Sierra themselves had survived (and/or if Roberta Williams was left with the budgets to keep making them). Sierra helped push the budgets of adventure games to the point where no one could compete with them (except maybe LucasArts, and LucasArts didn't seem interested in competing to the same costs) and then after setting that unreasonable market perspective of what a AAA adventure game "should" be, they died. Even today most of the controversy with the "nostalgic kickstarters" is that a Kickstarter can't approximate (adjusting for inflation) even a tenth of Sierra's final few adventure game budgets (much less a quarter to a half of LucasArts' last few).
jessaustin 6y ago
E&Y strike again! Any record that includes both CUC and WeWork betrays a deep rot. The Big 5 became the Big 4, not too long after the events of TFA. Why shouldn't E&Y be killed by the courts? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24802741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24802741
- georgiecasey 6y ago
  Usually after Googling with the letters and some context I can figure out most acronyms but I've failed on this one. What's TFA?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Doctor_Fegg 6y ago
    The F——ing Article. Slashdot-speak for the article being discussed here.
  - sparky_z 6y ago
    "The fucking article". As in, "RTFA".
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      Also sometimes "The Fine Article".
      - effingwewt 6y ago
        I think good manners version is 'The Featured Article'
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    HN search is often helpful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=tfa&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
LawnGnome 6y ago
The /r/Games thread on this is interesting, as Ken himself is commenting on it: https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/jkbg4g/how_sierra_was_captured_then_killed_by_a_massive/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/jkbg4g/how_sierra_wa...
- gryson 6y ago
  Ken Williams' initial comment there: "It does seem obvious that I was fooled by Walter Forbes, but so were most people. He was the Jeff Bezos of his time. He had a big-four accounting firm who signed off on their financials every 90 days. Henry Silverman (Avis, Howard Johnson's, and many other companies) believed in him, as did everyone. He had been on Sierra's board for five years. I thought I knew him well. I also thought we had structured the deal such that the software business couldn't be screwed up. And, I had so much faith that Sierra's market dominance was so strong that no one could ever screw it up. As you might imagine, I've looked back on the crash many times, and still believe I made the right move based on what I knew at the time. The problem was that I was dealing with snakes and didn't know it. MANY people lost their jobs and had their net worth wiped out. It was indeed a sad event, but I wasn't the only person fooled by CUC. Tens of thousands of people directly or indirectly were hurt by the financial scandal." There are others, too, that are worth reading for the interested.
  - robertlagrant 6y ago
    I'm amazed people still trust audits.
    - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
      Funny you say this, my reaction upon reading it was “why wouldn’t they?” and reflecting on how I would absolutely trust an audit from a reputable company. I know very little about accounting and company financials, but I work in security, and quickly remembered how much time I spend trying to convey to people that 3rd party compliance audits are not even worth the paper they’re written on, yet people still have confidence in them. Kind of a Gell-Mann amnesia effect I suppose.
Joeri 6y ago
Here’s something I don’t understand: Sierra was a money-printing machine, earning easy profits and on a natural growth path. With a trajectory like that, why go public, why sell the business at all? There was nothing to gain really, whatever growth they would have gotten from going public and from the CUC deal (even if it had been on the up and up) they would have seen naturally. Gaming is not a winner takes all market, they had no need to grow more quickly.
- drewwwwww 6y ago
  this subject is covered at length in the article.
- projektfu 6y ago
  TL;DR Ken Williams had had a bad experience early on where the company was nearly bankrupt from a bad move, and he thought selling to a conglomerate would bulletproof the company, and was something of a duty to his shareholders. If the article is to be believed, they did so without being permitted to do due diligence on their buyer.
SamBam 6y ago
As someone who adored the old Sierra games as a kid (the _Quest ones, mostly), as well as LucasArts ones (Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones), can anyone recommend great modern games in the same vein? And maybe iOS ones? I'd love games of those style and quality to be my 7-year-old's daughter's first experience with video games.
- Eric_WVGG 6y ago
  why not go with the classics? Tim Schaeffer somehow got the rights to his classics back from Lucasarts/Disney and has published remakes of Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango and even Full Throttle, and he has a new one that is very age-appropriate for your daughter called Broken Age. All the Monkey Island games are available in one for or another, and Ron Gilbert has a new-ish one called Thimbleweed Park. There's also an "episodic adaptation" of King's Quest from 2015 that was surprisingly well-received. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Quest_(2015_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Quest_(2015_video_gam...
- blevs 6y ago
  The 2015 King's Quest is quite enjoyable. It's a great deal less obtuse than the adventure games of old, which is probably a good thing.
- BorisTheBrave 6y ago
  I liked the Deponia series, which has a similar look and comedy tone to Monkey Island 3. However, I wouldn't recommend it for a 7yo. The puzzles are a bit tough, and the protagonist is a complete asshole (for comic effect, of course).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- lkramer 6y ago
  The Blackwell games hit the right nerve for me: https://www.gog.com/game/blackwell_bundle https://www.gog.com/game/blackwell_bundle
- StillBored 6y ago
mseepgood 6y ago
Why was Sierra called "On-Line" if none of their games were online games?
- jccooper 6y ago
  It started as a business software play called "On-line Systems". It seems doubtful that Ken Williams was considering actual networked software on Apple II at the time (though the machine could do it) but probably it sounded advanced and cool. In 1979 "on-line" would have been recognizably computery, but not mean much else to most people, who would never have seen a computer network. Says Jimmy Maher, who should know, On-Line Systems was "a name fairly typical of the vaguely futuristic, vaguely compound, but essentially meaningless names (Microsoft, anyone?) that were so common in the era." https://www.filfre.net/2011/10/ken-and-roberta/ https://www.filfre.net/2011/10/ken-and-roberta/
- jessaustin 6y ago
  "Online" used to mean "not batch-processed". Most of their games reacted immediately to player input, so in that sense they weren't batch programs. This plausible explanation might not have anything to do with the actual reason for the name...
  - cperciva 6y ago
    "Online" used to mean "not batch-processed". Computer scientists still refer to "online algorithms" as meaning "algorithms which process each input as it comes in". The obvious algorithm for "find the minimum element" is online for example, since you can stop at any point and say what the smallest you've seen so far is; however finding the median takes more work (you need to maintain two heaps, vs. simply collecting all the data and sorting it at the end).
Shivetya 6y ago
If you want to read up on Cendant and the fraud that was this [0] is a good story on the subject. This covers CUC and HFS (Hospitality Franchise Services) and shows how that merge uncovered the dirty accounting at CUC [0]https://www.econcrises.org/2016/11/29/cendant-corporation/ https://www.econcrises.org/2016/11/29/cendant-corporation/
bastardoperator 6y ago
I still think Sierra created some of the best games that have ever been made. If I saw a Sierra logo on a game as a kid, I knew I wanted it and I knew it would be quality. Lots of interactions, puzzles, and outcomes especially compared to what I was playing on console. I still think about how I could have plotted my course on Codename Iceman more accurately. I miss these games, I miss the style, I miss the casual aspect of not being a button mashing or accuracy god which I am no longer.
the__alchemist 6y ago
Is it normal to be acquired using stock? From a naive perspective, it seems like a conflation of 1: Getting paid, and 2: Gambling on a stock. Was there part of the agreement that stated the Williams' couldn't immediately liquidate upon deal completion?
- kelnos 6y ago
  It's not unusual. Some acquisitions are all cash, some all stock, and some a mix.
- krallja 6y ago
  There is usually a blackout period after acquisitions to prevent the new hires from quitting immediately.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  I think the opposite is more unusual. If you get aquired by Facebook you generally switch your own stock for FB’s one, at least in most of the deals I’ve heard of. Much better for the company to keep their cash free.
TT3351 6y ago
"Had they done so, they’d have found only confirmation that CUC was a healthy, hungry start-up well-liked by Wall Street. While CUC wouldn’t let Sierra see its internal financial data, it did have assurances from the Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young that the books were not just in order but reflected a company so fabulously wealthy that it could pay for Sierra not with cash, but pieces of itself." 2 weeks ago on WSJ & HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24802741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24802741 "Firms That Imploded Have Something in Common: Ernst and Young Audited Them"
projektfu 6y ago
A very interesting article, indeed, but wow was it edited by a human? Parts of it seemed located in the wrong section, and there were lots of howlers like a photo caption "Robert and Ken Williams".
raptor99 6y ago
If you'd like some further/alternate reading on parts of this story, a guy has recently released part 1 of his story of Richard Garriott, Origin, and his Ultima series. The name of the book is Through the Moongate.
ndesaulniers 6y ago
One of my favorite youtube channels, Metal Jesus Rocks, had an interesting episode or two about his time at Sierra and the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmNCFtAlYN0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmNCFtAlYN0, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hyAYjM8Ssg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hyAYjM8Ssg, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkQgL9s42WY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkQgL9s42WY I have fond memories as a little kid playing Sierra games, so all that was news to me what happened to Sierra and where did they go.
autarch 6y ago
This is a great article, except for the parts where it intimates that Sierra games were good. While their games _were_ beautiful technological marvels, the design of most of the games (especially Roberta's) was just so incredibly bad. The games are some of the worst I've ever played in terms of actual gameplay. Jimmy Maher at The Digital Antiquarian (https://www.filfre.net/ https://www.filfre.net/) has written a fair bit about their games and the design issues with them, as well as their place in gaming history.
- nicolas_t 6y ago
  While I like Jimmy Maher's writing, I would say that he's rather biased in the way he describes those games and it's a matter of opinion. And there are a lot of great games from Sierra: Conquest of the longbow, the ecoquest serie (aimed at a younger public), Quest of Glory, Leisure Suit Larry (but then I played that as a teenager) and yes I'd say King's Quest 6 & 4.
  - autarch 6y ago
    I wouldn't call him "biased". He has a strong opinion, but it's not based on nothing nor is it a product of some sort of ulterior motive. He has a strong opinion about these games that I agree with. I had a C64 growing up so I didn't really play any of the Sierra games til I had a PC in college, and I remember feeling really confused about why people liked them so much. They felt unplayable and frustrating to me.
- TwoBit 6y ago
  The massive popularity of many of those games proves you wrong by example.
  - autarch 6y ago
    So popularity = good design? That's a weird assertion. Like I said, they were technological marvels, and I think people bought them because of that. I do wonder how many people who purchased them actually finished them.
bane 6y ago
In case anybody is interested, Ken Williams has just published a book. https://kensbook.com/ https://kensbook.com/
- jtsiskin 6y ago
  That’s the first line of the article :)
amw 6y ago
I can't help but read this article dwell on how everyone but Ken stated their misgivings about the deal. If ownership and decision-making of the company were more equitable, then this specific decision would have gone the opposite way, and thousands of people might have had chance at a better outcome from deciding to work for them.

329 points by danso 6y ago

I worked for a game studio that was acquired by Sierra in late 1995. Being acquired by Ken and Roberta was surreal; they were two of my idols from childhood gaming and they were every bit as great to work for (via multiple layers of bosses) as you'd hope. They were gamers; they cared about people having fun playing games. They were also hard-nosed about their development teams creating product that would achieve that goal. I remember having to answer to Ken in person in a meeting about what my plan was to get my title shipped. He was firm and fair, but he didn't like my hand-waving at the schedule and task-breakdown. (He'd come to visit our studio in general, not to ream me out about shipping late, but he was spot on that I'd not been diligent enough in my prep and planning. We didn’t call it that, but my burndown chart was not tilted downward.) Every step along the rest of the journey with Sierra was a nightmare for employees. CUC, Cendant, Vivendi, and maybe there was another link in the chain, but I got fed up and quit in spring of 1997. We had incredibly talented and passionate artists (2D and 3D) and along the way a lot of that got shipped out of country to artists who seem to have never seen an American auto race. Several employees sued over shenanigans with our stock options treatment; I didn't join in (though perhaps I should have as I think we were getting screwed). IMO, the acquirers just sucked all the fun out of the room and a lot of talented devs and producers left. If you're not having fun working in computer gaming, you might as well go not have fun someplace that pays well. Ken and Roberta are two of the good ones in my book. 0 - Papyrus Design [IndyCar and NASCAR Racing]

danso 6y ago
Thanks for sharing! I played the Quest games as a kid and only heard in passing about Ken and Roberta and early Sierra (I was young enough to not know how unusual it was for a software company to be started and run by a married couple). In my completely presumptive head canon, Sierra petered out because LucasArts games were so much better, and Ken & Roberta sold out and moved into early retirement. I hadn't known Roberta was fighting to the very end for her vision on King's Quest VIII. (Speaking of LucasArts: peeking at KQ8's Wikipedia entry, I see Roberta made the astonishing claim that KQ8 sold twice as well as Grim Fandango: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Quest:_Mask_of_Eternity#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Quest:_Mask_of_Eterni...)
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  That actually was briefly true as I recall. It was an early sign of the problems of "preorder culture" in games (a lesson we're still relearning/refighting time-and-again today): KQ8 was a preorder darling with a ton of hype and anticipation. Grim Fandango was a sleeper that "no one" thought to preorder and the preorder shops (for their reasons) weren't pushing. Grim Fandango was considered a "flop" for a bunch of years, though obviously it's done far better in the long tail of post-preorder sales than KQ8.
  - 737maxtw 6y ago
    I think with Sierra you are right but it was a slower build up imo. I remember KQ6 being a big bit of pomp and circumstance with its production values etc, more promotion than you would see for a computer game at the time. And then KQ7 happened. A victim of a bit of overhypeing and a LOT of WinG pain. Could never get it running on a pc our family owned, even proper pentiums.
- ahartmetz 6y ago
  Yes, there were at least two genres where LucasArts seemed to make games that were strictly better than Sierra's: adventures and (arcade-ish) flight simulators. Not only better, but the best. For flying games, Origin was a contender, but despite all the advanced graphics and FMV, flying and shooting in Wing Commander was not as fun as in X-Wing and TIE Fighter.
  - mrguyorama 6y ago
    I played only Wing Commander: Prophecy (one of the last ones) and I found it way better than the older star wars games, probably just a normal passage of time thing honestly. If you love those kinds of games and are missing them, check out Freespace, which you can get cheap on GOG, and the Knossos launcher, which allows you to download mods like the open source re-implementation of the game engine which vastly improves things, and some fan made campaigns/overhauls including a great Wing Commander style one. Alternatively, EA (the owners of Origin's intellectual property) recently released StarWars Squadrons, which has a short campaign that certainly scratches that old itch. However I don't know how I feel about the multiplayer.
magicalhippo 6y ago
> NASCAR Racing Oh man I spent so many hours on that. Thanks for the good memories!
- rashkov 6y ago
  Oh wow, I totally forgot about that game. I was not very good at it, but eventually I figured out that I could drive the car in reverse and because there was no hitbox on the bumper, the racetrack's wall just kind of guided me along while I accelerated to maximum speed. Fun memory
  - myself248 6y ago
    Haha, yes, backwards was the best way to play Nascar! I remember being absolutely blown away that the game kept track of tire rubber on the track, and you could see your own spinouts and stuff on the next lap.
- holoduke 6y ago
  The former NASCAR engine still exists in a new simulator called iracing. You can still notice the same graphics style. Lots of famous real race drivers using it.
bsenftner 6y ago
I worked for several game publishers as a developer, and would be called in to firefight games at other developers in danger of not shipping or shipping past a critical deadline. The Sierra productions were typically nightmares, at least the ones that needed publisher bailouts. I never interacted with Ren or Roberta beyond introduction, as firefighting a failing production tends to be upper management scarce.
CMay 6y ago
Never had more than a passing interest in IndyCar or NASCAR races, but I remember enjoying both of those on a 486 DX with the turbo button on the case when I was a kid. Links: The Challenge of Golf was another one. Daytona USA was released around the same time... and had a karaoke mode so you could sing along to the soundtrack while racing. That was Papyrus' true downfall, they never identified karaoke as a critical feature in any of their games. :)
- sokoloff 6y ago
  Ironically, Daytona was actually one of our downfalls or at least a thorn in our side. Sega had the license to the Daytona name and usage for electronic games and that’s one of the most well-known tracks and events. We had every other Cup and Indy circuit, but couldn’t get Daytona. (For our in-house racing series, we had a “Florida” circuit that was the first and middle race in the schedule. For some reason, it was surprisingly close to Daytona International Speedway in design.) We’d have probably sold more boxes and surely would have gotten more online subs if we’d been able to offer Daytona. (Some of the Papyrus crew went on to form iRacing and they’ve got a great product over there; still no karaoke though...)
  - CMay 6y ago
    I guess that doesn't surprise me too much for a sim, though the future of racing games may be the other way around. Some of the most loved tracks in racing games are fantasy ones where you have full control to iterate on the experience and scenery. Would be nice to see next-gen racers returning to that in a big way and eventually have people wanting to license the tracks for real-world construction after they've been battle tested by millions of virtual drivers.
- animal531 6y ago
  I'm a foreigner, we don't have either. But Indy 500 was groundbreaking at the time, and then came IndyCar. The graphics and all around racing was really great.
burnte 6y ago
I have a very vivid memory of Papyrus' NASCAR game in the late 90s. I was in the sales and service industry, I was realy just a couple years into it, still 17, and had sold a beefy system for gaming to a guy who was a NASCAR fan. The day I was supposed to deliver it I dislocated my kneecap. I cslled him, let him know, and came home from the ER with him in my driveway waiting for me. When I got out of the car in the leg brace, he said "Oh thank god your'e hurt! I thought you were trying to rip me off!" I will always remember that game for reasons unrelated to gaming. :D
breakingcups 6y ago
Totally off-topic, but did you work on Road Rash at all?

smitty1e 6y ago

Sierra On-Line's initials, SOL, proved prophetic.

tartoran 6y ago

I wasn't much of a gamer but oh boy, did I love all the quest games, they totally appealed to my tastes. I loved the 2D-ness of the games, the attention to details, the scripts, the colors, the music. You could tell there was a talented team behind those games. Games have now gotten so complex graphics-wise but it seems to me that they lost something it's very hard to pinpoint, maybe the limitations of that age was what made the games more creative? Or maybe it's pure subjectivity on my part.

jasonv 6y ago
I'm not a gamer, either, but I might say that Space Quest was my one dip into games, and I played that a lot. That was a long time ago.
sidlls 6y ago
Games are richer in terms of both content (“things to do”) and visual imagery, but the stories and gameplay are much more uniform now than 20 years ago (which is long after my childhood video game playing period ended). There is some subjectivity here of course, but I occasionally replay games from when I was in college or even elementary school (hello Apple II, Atari and Nintendo). The graphics and limitations are clear, but within those constraints it’s hard to say games have improved that much. For all the advances in the tech we’ve had I don’t believe we’ve seen equivalent gains in actual gaming experience.
- polytely 6y ago
  See IggleSniggle's comment above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24944816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24944816 I would recommend Outer Wilds (2019) for a game that displays a real advance in gameplay mechanics. There is alot of exciting stuff happening in the indie game scene.
  - sidlls 6y ago
    Game mechanics is definitely one area that seems to have been lacking. Aside from that, there's a certain homogeneity to games these days. I think that's attributable to the fact that there are more of them and that to reach a broader audience there has to be some generalization that occurs.

electrondood 6y ago

It's fascinating to me that a company that became such a huge impact in the computer gaming industry started in, and kept a dev office in Oakhurst.

stephankoelle 6y ago

By accident I bought: Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conquests_of_the_Longbow:_The_Legend_of_Robin_Hood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conquests_of_the_Longbow:_The_... ] Didn't know what "an adventure game" is, at that time. So many good memories. What a great game.

IggleSniggle 6y ago
My perception has always been that that game was under-appreciated. Nice to run into a fellow appreciator. I think it's also the only DRM[0] I've ever encountered that was a genuine pleasure to use (not that it would work today). [0] - Conquests of the Longbow required you to use the book that came with it to look up lore like coats of arms, to identify plants by their leaves, find out about superstitions around gemstones, etc in order to solve the puzzles in the game. At the time, people generally pirated by passing around floppy disks, none of the kids pirating had access to xerox machines, and the information in the manual was obscure, so you really kinda needed to have the manual. But if you did have it, it almost felt like a natural part of the game, and the information was fun to learn. Of course, now you can easily find it online: http://www.sierrahelp.com/Documents/Manuals/Conquests_of_the_Longbow_-_Manual.pdf http://www.sierrahelp.com/Documents/Manuals/Conquests_of_the...
- jessaustin 6y ago
  I definitely encountered other games for which you had to look up stuff in the manual, and maybe it wasn't done as well because I always hated it.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    I think in King's Quest it was looking up some specific code word in a random grid or something, before it would let you launch a boat?
    - npongratz 6y ago
      King's Quest 5's copy protection (floppy version only) was enforced with a requirement to use a magic wand to cast a "spell" at various points in the game, where the "spell" is a series of letters that the player matches to symbols in the printed manual. Launching the boat was one of the points in the game where this was required. https://kingsquest.fandom.com/wiki/Crispin%27s_wand#Behind_the_scenes https://kingsquest.fandom.com/wiki/Crispin%27s_wand#Behind_t...

yters 6y ago

I wonder how much of Sierra's demise was due to CUC vs. just the change in gaming landscape. Compared to the early 90's adventure gaming is non-existent minus nostalgic kickstarters. Sierra may still be alive today, but it may be on the same shelf as Nancy Drew mysteries.

gryson 6y ago
By the mid- to late-1990s, Sierra's publishing output was far more diversified than just adventure games. They owned a large number of subsidiary development companies (such as Dynamix, Impression, and Papyrus) that were creating games in a wide range of genres. They also published a little-known game called Half-Life in 1998...
- yters 6y ago
  Great point. I forgot HL was originally Sierra. It seems they were able to adapt to the new market, so CUC can probably be blamed for their demise.
- microtherion 6y ago
  If not for the events in the article, we might have ended up with Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Portals.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  Half-Life came out just about when I started gaming, and was when I first really picked up on Sierra’s existence. Then right after, they were just gone. No more new games with the Sierra logo (that I saw anyway)
WorldMaker 6y ago
The cause and effect is really tough to straighten out. There's certainly an argument to be made that Sierra's demise was the final nail in adventure gaming and the genre might still be alive if Sierra themselves had survived (and/or if Roberta Williams was left with the budgets to keep making them). Sierra helped push the budgets of adventure games to the point where no one could compete with them (except maybe LucasArts, and LucasArts didn't seem interested in competing to the same costs) and then after setting that unreasonable market perspective of what a AAA adventure game "should" be, they died. Even today most of the controversy with the "nostalgic kickstarters" is that a Kickstarter can't approximate (adjusting for inflation) even a tenth of Sierra's final few adventure game budgets (much less a quarter to a half of LucasArts' last few).

jessaustin 6y ago

E&Y strike again! Any record that includes both CUC and WeWork betrays a deep rot. The Big 5 became the Big 4, not too long after the events of TFA. Why shouldn't E&Y be killed by the courts? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24802741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24802741

georgiecasey 6y ago
Usually after Googling with the letters and some context I can figure out most acronyms but I've failed on this one. What's TFA?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Doctor_Fegg 6y ago
  The F——ing Article. Slashdot-speak for the article being discussed here.
- sparky_z 6y ago
  "The fucking article". As in, "RTFA".
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    Also sometimes "The Fine Article".
    - effingwewt 6y ago
      I think good manners version is 'The Featured Article'
- jessaustin 6y ago
  HN search is often helpful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=tfa&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

LawnGnome 6y ago

The /r/Games thread on this is interesting, as Ken himself is commenting on it: https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/jkbg4g/how_sierra_was_captured_then_killed_by_a_massive/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/jkbg4g/how_sierra_wa...

gryson 6y ago
Ken Williams' initial comment there: "It does seem obvious that I was fooled by Walter Forbes, but so were most people. He was the Jeff Bezos of his time. He had a big-four accounting firm who signed off on their financials every 90 days. Henry Silverman (Avis, Howard Johnson's, and many other companies) believed in him, as did everyone. He had been on Sierra's board for five years. I thought I knew him well. I also thought we had structured the deal such that the software business couldn't be screwed up. And, I had so much faith that Sierra's market dominance was so strong that no one could ever screw it up. As you might imagine, I've looked back on the crash many times, and still believe I made the right move based on what I knew at the time. The problem was that I was dealing with snakes and didn't know it. MANY people lost their jobs and had their net worth wiped out. It was indeed a sad event, but I wasn't the only person fooled by CUC. Tens of thousands of people directly or indirectly were hurt by the financial scandal." There are others, too, that are worth reading for the interested.
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  I'm amazed people still trust audits.
  - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
    Funny you say this, my reaction upon reading it was “why wouldn’t they?” and reflecting on how I would absolutely trust an audit from a reputable company. I know very little about accounting and company financials, but I work in security, and quickly remembered how much time I spend trying to convey to people that 3rd party compliance audits are not even worth the paper they’re written on, yet people still have confidence in them. Kind of a Gell-Mann amnesia effect I suppose.

Joeri 6y ago

Here’s something I don’t understand: Sierra was a money-printing machine, earning easy profits and on a natural growth path. With a trajectory like that, why go public, why sell the business at all? There was nothing to gain really, whatever growth they would have gotten from going public and from the CUC deal (even if it had been on the up and up) they would have seen naturally. Gaming is not a winner takes all market, they had no need to grow more quickly.

drewwwwww 6y ago
this subject is covered at length in the article.
projektfu 6y ago
TL;DR Ken Williams had had a bad experience early on where the company was nearly bankrupt from a bad move, and he thought selling to a conglomerate would bulletproof the company, and was something of a duty to his shareholders. If the article is to be believed, they did so without being permitted to do due diligence on their buyer.

SamBam 6y ago

As someone who adored the old Sierra games as a kid (the _Quest ones, mostly), as well as LucasArts ones (Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones), can anyone recommend great modern games in the same vein? And maybe iOS ones? I'd love games of those style and quality to be my 7-year-old's daughter's first experience with video games.

Eric_WVGG 6y ago
why not go with the classics? Tim Schaeffer somehow got the rights to his classics back from Lucasarts/Disney and has published remakes of Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango and even Full Throttle, and he has a new one that is very age-appropriate for your daughter called Broken Age. All the Monkey Island games are available in one for or another, and Ron Gilbert has a new-ish one called Thimbleweed Park. There's also an "episodic adaptation" of King's Quest from 2015 that was surprisingly well-received. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Quest_(2015_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Quest_(2015_video_gam...
blevs 6y ago
The 2015 King's Quest is quite enjoyable. It's a great deal less obtuse than the adventure games of old, which is probably a good thing.
BorisTheBrave 6y ago
I liked the Deponia series, which has a similar look and comedy tone to Monkey Island 3. However, I wouldn't recommend it for a 7yo. The puzzles are a bit tough, and the protagonist is a complete asshole (for comic effect, of course).
deleted 6y ago
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lkramer 6y ago
The Blackwell games hit the right nerve for me: https://www.gog.com/game/blackwell_bundle https://www.gog.com/game/blackwell_bundle
StillBored 6y ago

mseepgood 6y ago

Why was Sierra called "On-Line" if none of their games were online games?

jccooper 6y ago
It started as a business software play called "On-line Systems". It seems doubtful that Ken Williams was considering actual networked software on Apple II at the time (though the machine could do it) but probably it sounded advanced and cool. In 1979 "on-line" would have been recognizably computery, but not mean much else to most people, who would never have seen a computer network. Says Jimmy Maher, who should know, On-Line Systems was "a name fairly typical of the vaguely futuristic, vaguely compound, but essentially meaningless names (Microsoft, anyone?) that were so common in the era." https://www.filfre.net/2011/10/ken-and-roberta/ https://www.filfre.net/2011/10/ken-and-roberta/
jessaustin 6y ago
"Online" used to mean "not batch-processed". Most of their games reacted immediately to player input, so in that sense they weren't batch programs. This plausible explanation might not have anything to do with the actual reason for the name...
- cperciva 6y ago
  "Online" used to mean "not batch-processed". Computer scientists still refer to "online algorithms" as meaning "algorithms which process each input as it comes in". The obvious algorithm for "find the minimum element" is online for example, since you can stop at any point and say what the smallest you've seen so far is; however finding the median takes more work (you need to maintain two heaps, vs. simply collecting all the data and sorting it at the end).

Shivetya 6y ago

If you want to read up on Cendant and the fraud that was this [0] is a good story on the subject. This covers CUC and HFS (Hospitality Franchise Services) and shows how that merge uncovered the dirty accounting at CUC [0]https://www.econcrises.org/2016/11/29/cendant-corporation/ https://www.econcrises.org/2016/11/29/cendant-corporation/

bastardoperator 6y ago

I still think Sierra created some of the best games that have ever been made. If I saw a Sierra logo on a game as a kid, I knew I wanted it and I knew it would be quality. Lots of interactions, puzzles, and outcomes especially compared to what I was playing on console. I still think about how I could have plotted my course on Codename Iceman more accurately. I miss these games, I miss the style, I miss the casual aspect of not being a button mashing or accuracy god which I am no longer.

the__alchemist 6y ago

Is it normal to be acquired using stock? From a naive perspective, it seems like a conflation of 1: Getting paid, and 2: Gambling on a stock. Was there part of the agreement that stated the Williams' couldn't immediately liquidate upon deal completion?

kelnos 6y ago
It's not unusual. Some acquisitions are all cash, some all stock, and some a mix.
krallja 6y ago
There is usually a blackout period after acquisitions to prevent the new hires from quitting immediately.
Aeolun 6y ago
I think the opposite is more unusual. If you get aquired by Facebook you generally switch your own stock for FB’s one, at least in most of the deals I’ve heard of. Much better for the company to keep their cash free.

TT3351 6y ago

"Had they done so, they’d have found only confirmation that CUC was a healthy, hungry start-up well-liked by Wall Street. While CUC wouldn’t let Sierra see its internal financial data, it did have assurances from the Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young that the books were not just in order but reflected a company so fabulously wealthy that it could pay for Sierra not with cash, but pieces of itself." 2 weeks ago on WSJ & HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24802741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24802741 "Firms That Imploded Have Something in Common: Ernst and Young Audited Them"

projektfu 6y ago

A very interesting article, indeed, but wow was it edited by a human? Parts of it seemed located in the wrong section, and there were lots of howlers like a photo caption "Robert and Ken Williams".

raptor99 6y ago

If you'd like some further/alternate reading on parts of this story, a guy has recently released part 1 of his story of Richard Garriott, Origin, and his Ultima series. The name of the book is Through the Moongate.

ndesaulniers 6y ago

One of my favorite youtube channels, Metal Jesus Rocks, had an interesting episode or two about his time at Sierra and the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmNCFtAlYN0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmNCFtAlYN0, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hyAYjM8Ssg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hyAYjM8Ssg, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkQgL9s42WY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkQgL9s42WY I have fond memories as a little kid playing Sierra games, so all that was news to me what happened to Sierra and where did they go.

autarch 6y ago

This is a great article, except for the parts where it intimates that Sierra games were good. While their games _were_ beautiful technological marvels, the design of most of the games (especially Roberta's) was just so incredibly bad. The games are some of the worst I've ever played in terms of actual gameplay. Jimmy Maher at The Digital Antiquarian (https://www.filfre.net/ https://www.filfre.net/) has written a fair bit about their games and the design issues with them, as well as their place in gaming history.

nicolas_t 6y ago
While I like Jimmy Maher's writing, I would say that he's rather biased in the way he describes those games and it's a matter of opinion. And there are a lot of great games from Sierra: Conquest of the longbow, the ecoquest serie (aimed at a younger public), Quest of Glory, Leisure Suit Larry (but then I played that as a teenager) and yes I'd say King's Quest 6 & 4.
- autarch 6y ago
  I wouldn't call him "biased". He has a strong opinion, but it's not based on nothing nor is it a product of some sort of ulterior motive. He has a strong opinion about these games that I agree with. I had a C64 growing up so I didn't really play any of the Sierra games til I had a PC in college, and I remember feeling really confused about why people liked them so much. They felt unplayable and frustrating to me.
TwoBit 6y ago
The massive popularity of many of those games proves you wrong by example.
- autarch 6y ago
  So popularity = good design? That's a weird assertion. Like I said, they were technological marvels, and I think people bought them because of that. I do wonder how many people who purchased them actually finished them.

bane 6y ago

In case anybody is interested, Ken Williams has just published a book. https://kensbook.com/ https://kensbook.com/

jtsiskin 6y ago
That’s the first line of the article :)

amw 6y ago

I can't help but read this article dwell on how everyone but Ken stated their misgivings about the deal. If ownership and decision-making of the company were more equitable, then this specific decision would have gone the opposite way, and thousands of people might have had chance at a better outcome from deciding to work for them.