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Sierra was captured, then killed, by an accounting fraud (2020)
- vel0city 2y agoIt's always incredible how these massive frauds seem to have E&Y looking over their books. How does anyone trust anything they put out?
- jojobas 2y agoApparently two EY partners did suffer some repercussions. Not Arthur Andersen scale, but CUC wasn't Enron scale either.
- jrochkind1 2y agoDid E&Y not face any consequences here and why not anyway?
- ralph84 2y agoMutual funds and 401k’s have almost completely divorced shareholders from the companies they own. Most of the supposed checks and balances of public companies are merely performative at this point.
- wdh505 2y agothe big thing that changed from Enron is Sarbanes Oxley act which requires that controls (processes) be understood and tested. This is a pretty big deal to all the auditor's "assurance" that they gain in an audit. It is much more than "performative" and it influences every number and disclosure on the financial statements.
- GartzenDeHaes 2y agoSOX was implemented with COBIT 4, Control Objectives for IT. This introduced a lot of process and cost overhead, so COBIT 5 removed the control objectives -- it's just a list of IT topics. So now, corporations can now comply with SOX by doing nothing.
- astrange 2y agoBlackRock and Vanguard do try to influence the companies whose shares they manage - that is "ESG" - but people don't really like it when they do it.
- monero-xmr 2y agoPartnerships are run more like guilds than public companies. Many years ago my friend was offered partnership track to a medium-sized accounting firm. It was something like a $1.5 million up front payment to join, but they had partner banks who would give you the loan with a long (30 year?) payoff like a mortgage, so every time a new partner was added it diluted the profits, but all of the existing partners got an immediate payoff. And there are tiers of partners, so a junior partner gets way less profits, like a pyramid (isn't everything like this?). I assume VCs, law firms, and similar partnerships operate the same. So arresting the partners involved in this makes sense, as it is more like a group of individual rainmakers working under one brand rather than a traditional company. And my friend didn't join, instead he switched to small firm where their employees were like strike-force mercenaries. He had a specialised skillset and was willing to move anywhere for a year at a time. Wound up going from ~$150k in 2008 money to over $400k with the insane travel sacrifice schedule, overtime, etc. He is still there but manages the young people doing that while working from home, and makes good money still. I own a highly profitable small-ish business where I want longterm employees, but my incentive is staggering payments so your profits balloon after staying 5 years, but then you have to wait 7 more years to get all of your profits, so each year you get another 7 year profit vesting. So the handcuffs are very reinforced to prevent people leaving. Some people still leave though, but very small turnover at the VP / senior leadership level.
- tjpnz 2y agoThey're either very stupid or complicit. Neither should surprise anyone.
- klyrs 2y agoA harrowing read, but [2020]
- mistrial9 2y agowasn't this the company that famously started life by offering summer adventure game camps, but actually the helpless nerds were not allowed to leave and encouraged/seduced/coerced to write code 24x7 ? iir several participants years later had some trauma resurface about all that.. despite all that 'productivity'
- solardev 2y agoIt's about Sierra Entertainment (later Sierra On-Line), publisher of games like Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest, and the original Half-Life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Entertainment?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Entertainment?wprov=sfl... Not sure about any summer camp stuff. Was that a lesser known part of their business? Or a different company?
- paulryanrogers 2y agoI heard about the 'camp' on a YT documentary, though it came across as positive in that telling. Now I'm curious to hear more from first sources!
- owlninja 2y agoCare to share the doc? I've never heard this before.
- Natsu 2y agoThey also published some weird old games like Thexder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0N9bSR-zJs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0N9bSR-zJs
- swozey 2y agoThey also have one of the first MMORPGs that hardly anyone knows about, and it's still around. The Realm (https://www.realmserver.com/ https://www.realmserver.com/) I know this came after Meridian 59 and Everquest but I think it was before Ultima Online. Spent my elementary days playing it. I bet a lot of the players have passed on by now. I was (rule-breakingly) about 30+ years younger than everyone. edit: Oh, 1996. I guess it was right when UOs alpha/beta came out. Wild. That definitely ate its lunch. IIRC The Realm was a one time purchase whereas I needed my dads cc for UO... so that was limiting.
- solardev 2y agoTLDR they were acquired in stock by a shady company that made up its accounting. It's a reaaaaaally long article.
- ab5tract 2y agoYou mean, it’s journalism?
- solardev 2y agoSure, it's journalism, but just REALLY long. I read the first few sections, had no idea what the story was about, and had to ask the AI to summarize it. Then manually skimmed for the relevant sections. A lot of journalism is written inverted pyramid style with the most important facts at the top. This piece was more like a long form investigative piece, which is fine, but without a very engaging hook at the start. It was a lot of fluff and exposition... I think I prefer bullet points for something like this, but to each their own.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- swozey 2y agoBelieve me I almost bowed out many times. It was a lot of unnecessary fluff and not exactly how I wanted to spend the last hour of my night before bed.
- kevbin 2y agoThe article is boring and repetitious. I love a well-written long read. This isn’t. Bad writing? Maybe the article was edited or processed to show more ads?
- projektfu 2y agoPutting the important part of the story after a wall of text is called burying the lede. I think it's possible to write an engaging long-form article without a thousand words before presenting a thesis, but that's not the fashion.
- paulryanrogers 2y ago^2020 An either thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24941667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24941667
- theolivenbaum 2y agoInteresting article buried in the comments there about the fraud https://www.econcrises.org/2016/11/29/cendant-corporation/ https://www.econcrises.org/2016/11/29/cendant-corporation/
- doubloon 2y agoif only there was a genre of fiction that would warn people about things that are too good to be true from well dressed visitors.
- solardev 2y agoVampire romance?
- nineteen999 2y agoHe obviously meant the Italian Mafia.
- RecycledEle 2y ago> On July 20, 2018, Walter Forbes was released from the Federal Correctional Institute, Otisville in New York, a medium-security prison later to be occupied by Michael Cohen, the Situation, and Fyre Festival’s Billy McFarland. Forbes was convicted in 2007—after two mistrials—on one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and two counts of making false statements, and sentenced to 151 months in prison and to make restitution in the order of $3.28 billion. The house he’d transferred to his wife was returned to him, by court order, to be divvied up between the government and Cendant. > Kirk Shelton was sentenced to 10 years and the same amount in restitution. How can someone destroy a company like Sierra Online that touched millions of lives and ever get out of prison? A better system would be to standardize a number of dollars of fraud is equal to a day is jail, and then just do the math to determine the jail time.
- adolph 2y ago> Walter Forbes was released from the Federal Correctional Institute, Otisville in New York, a medium-security prison later to be occupied by Michael Cohen, the Situation, and Fyre Festival’s Billy McFarland I’m surprised that the BoP is so relaxed about prisoner privacy, also that there hasn’t been a reality TV show in this prison.
- currymj 2y agogenerally it has to be public knowledge which prisons people are in, because the alternative would be really bad (people “disappear”).
- zoky 2y ago> I’m surprised that the BoP is so relaxed about prisoner privacy There’s no such thing, at least not in terms of who is in what prison. Courts determine prison sentences, and since court records are public, prison records are public. If you know the name of an inmate you can find out what their sentence is, where they are incarcerated, expected release date, etc.
- zmgsabst 2y agoI’m a big proponent we should apply the value of a life — about $10M. Financial crimes should be scaled so the penalties for doing $10M in damage are equivalent to 1 dead person. Do a billion in damage? You’re going away forever, the same as someone who sets off a bomb killing a hundred people. I think we’d solve a lot of our problems if we accepted money as life-equivalent in both directions, ie, not only as a value when a wrongful death occurs.
- banish-m4 2y agoAs a case study: - Don't let untrustworthy people in positions of confidence without controls and oversight - Don't sell to untrustworthy parties - Don't go public - Don't take counsel of MBAs out to make a buck - Listen - Be cautious It's incredibly hard to have the timing, build the team, and reach such a magic state of success. Guard it well and don't sell out so easily.
- tbrownaw 2y agoWell yes "don't trust people who can't be trusted" does sound like a good idea, but it appears to be a bit tricky to actually implement.
- schmidtleonard 2y agoJust buy low and sell high, it's easy!
- wsc981 2y agoThe thing is, greed can be a very big motivator to make bad decisions. I've come to believe that it's very hard for people to not listen to the voice of greed in their mind. I also believe that as people become more wealthy, they tend to become more greedy. It's a fight against human nature and I don't think many people are well enough in control of themselves in this regard. Maybe someone like Keanu Reaves (from what I've read), but people like him are very few I think ...
- baidifnaoxi 2y agoGod, I miss Sierra games. Such a big part of my growing up.
- doctorraags 2y agoI literally thought this exact sentence when I saw this article.
- laurencei 2y agoI'm trying to find games for my kids that would have the same influence. Fortnite etc is all so popular - but I feel that Police Quest, Hero Quest etc are a big part of my logical reasoning skills I have today...
- alexey-salmin 2y agoI found a few good Android games for my kids (god it's hard to get through all the ad-ridden garbage) * Monument Valley * I Love Hue * Battle of Polytopia * Grand Mountain Adventure * Tiny Bubbles * Kingdom Rush * Planes Control * Human Resource Machine No quests however, so I would also welcome suggestions here
- Loughla 2y agoFor real, kids games are absolute garbage. I would pay for a curated list of games that are engaging, require some amount of thought, but that are not massively stuffed with ads.
- HellDunkel 2y agoBig sierra fan her. For almost 20 years i was absent from video games until i became a father an play zelda - breath of the wild. It felt as great as kings quest 1.
- pasttense01 2y ago@dang, this was published in 2020.
- metadat 2y agoContrary to what you may have unwittingly assumed, @mentioning Dang doesn't summon him. Send an email to hn@ycombinator.com if you want something corrected.
- fareesh 2y agoMicrosoft owns the IP today. Would be nice to see them do something good with it. Space Quest, Police Quest, King's Quest, Quest for Glory, LSL, Gabriel Knight are all so good.
- sersi 2y agoThe King's Quest game from 2015 started out excellent with some great puzzles and felt like a modern King's Quest. Unfortunately the later chapters were much lighter in terms of puzzles. For Quest of Glory, I'd recommend Hero U: Rogue to Redemption from the Coles, it has a similar feeling and is a load of fun. For me it's the best quest for glory clone since (better than Mage Initiation and Heroine's Quest). There's been other games by Sierra alumni but they just don't have the same level of polish.
- jonwest 2y agoHero U was so close but ultimately such a grindfest that I ended up souring on it a bit but it was still the closest a game has come I think.
- sersi 2y agoOh, I actually thought it was less of a grindfest than Heroine's quest and mage initiation or at least I really don't remember grinding much.
- bnralt 2y agoQuest for Infamy is another a Quest for Glory-style game that’s been very well received (and seems to have been a labor of love for the developers).
- sersi 2y agoOh yes, they've also done another game that's very much in the spirit of the old King's Quest. Order of the Thorne. The lead developer has chronic health problems unfortunately so that slows development by a lot. He has a patreon account to sponsor his development.
- dceddia 2y agoLots of feelings seeing Sierra come up again. Lots of good memories playing Sierra games as a kid. The story feels like it bears some similarity to the Dark Quiet Death episode from Mythic Quest. The video game industry, the husband-and-wife team, the rollercoaster of success and failure. Maybe just a coincidence. If you haven't seen it, it's a very good (and very sad) stand-alone episode. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10084334/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10084334/
- pauljara 2y agoYou're right, it wasn't just a coincidence: "Doc and Beans are inspired by Ken and Roberta Williams, a real-life couple who founded Sierra Entertainment, a video game company known for the King's Quest series that eventually sold to Activision." https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10084334/trivia/?ref_=tt_trv_trv https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10084334/trivia/?ref_=tt_trv_tr...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kelnos 2y agoWow, yeah, back when I first saw that episode, it definitely evoked memories of Sierra for me. As the sibling points out, the IMDB page's trivia says that was intentional. I had no idea...
- pico303 2y agoHoly cow. Trying to read an article on Vice is atrocious. I’m ok with you needing to publish ads, but when it makes the site bounce around like dog chasing squirrels, I give up.
- mdavidn 2y agoI agree. The text jumping around and making me lose my place every 60 seconds just might motivate me to install an ad blocker.
- wvenable 2y agoYou browse the web without an adblocker? How? On that first fresh OS install, it's always amazing how the web looks, in general, without ad blocking. And I even still see some ads!
- nytesky 2y agoAre you reading on a computer? I was on Firefox Focus on iPhone and it still had tons of ads mangling the page. In the end I printed it to PDF and read that.
- kevbin 2y agoInteresting story told poorly in an atrocious UI.
- metabagel 2y agoFirefox Reader View handles this OK. It’s the sheet of paper icon to the right of the URL.
- yard2010 2y agoIf you want you can use Vivaldi browser on mobile as it has a built in ad blocker.
- kelnos 2y agoI still don't understand how anyone uses the web without an ad blocker.
- swozey 2y agoAnd of course the working people get screwed and bankrupted. > Stock options had long been a major part of the Sierra compensation package, so most employees and former employees were affected by the overnight collapse in Cendant’s share price, and its continued fall. “I had a fair amount of my net worth at the time tied up in that stock,” says Mike Brochu. “Holy crap, it just plummeted to nothing.” Leslie Balfour, a writer and producer at Sierra until late 1997 saw her stock fall from $100,000 to $20,000. Al Lowe says he and his wife lost “the equivalent of a really nice home.” ... > Less fortunate were the Sierra employees who’d borrowed on their stock options to buy houses, whose banks called in their loans when the stock fell and had to declare bankruptcy. “One of my employees,” Bowerman says, “went from being on paper a millionaire to being hundreds of thousands in debt with no way of payment. There were just dozens of horror stories like that.” > “To this day,” he writes, “I am only 99% convinced that Walter was a crook. It remains unimaginable to me.”
- yard2010 2y agoWhat he says in the end just shows what kind of person he is. Values are much more important than bank notes anyway, and he knows it.
- swozey 2y agoA CEO being a people pleaser is probably (verifiably here) a terrible mixture. He basically threw them out to the wolves. There's a quote in there where one of his employees likens him to Donald Trump. Found that interesting.
- jongjong 2y agoI remember playing "Pharaoh" and also "Zeus: Master of Olympus". I really enjoyed those games. In Pharaoh, you would manage the economy of an ancient Egyptian city and could build monuments and pyramids.
- teruakohatu 2y agoA remake came out not long ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaoh:_A_New_Era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaoh:_A_New_Era
- kingforaday 2y agoShadow of Yserbius anyone?
- eszed 2y ago> It would never have been enough, not for Williams nor the board, for Sierra to have levelled out as, say, a boutique producer of high-quality adventure games. Why not?!? It seems like everyone in this story - Roberta, people who love games, (most especially) the employees who lost their savings, and even Ken - would be happier today if they had continued earning an honest profit doing what they did best. The scramble for more, more, MORE undid them all. There's wisdom in the proverb "the love of money is the root of all evil". This story is a cautionary tale.
- bsder 2y agoNo. An unprecedent fraud undid them all. And nobody saw it coming. It took two insiders to roll over before anything came to light (ref: Cendant). As many people point out, the CEO has some level of fiduciary duty to investors. If you refuse an offer with a 40% or so premium, you are going to be facing down lawsuits. Finally, while Roberta was enjoying her position, Ken really wanted to quit all of the CEO crap. Finding a CEO to hand things over to is just as fraught as a buyout and probably more likely to bump into bad actors than a buyout. Put it all together and there really was no good reason to refuse the buyout. If the purchasing company hadn't been a fraud, we'd be lauding the decision to sell instead of castigating it.
- rasz 2y ago>If you refuse an offer with a 40% or so premium, you are going to be facing down lawsuits. not if the offer is all garbage stock > Ken really wanted to quit all of the CEO crap. Article contradicts that spending a lot of paragraphs on Ken fighting for position in new company. >there really was no good reason to refuse the buyout Nobody looked for one, nobody wanted to find one due to greed. Otherwise they would be balls deep in CUCks books.
- x0x0 2y agore: Ken and the ceo -- Ken is desperate for people not to understand Ken is an idiot. The article even points out everyone at Sierra told him not to do it.
- ptman 2y agohttps://kensbook.com/ https://kensbook.com/
- gumby 2y agoSimilar fraud story with Dragon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking
- SilasX 2y agoSurprised I had to scroll down this far and not see it mentioned in any of the other threads. It was likewise a case of a company being bought out in an all stock offer where the stock turned out to be worthless because of an accounting scandal. And the IB that handled it for Dragon (Goldman) disavowed responsibility for advising they take the stock deal and fought Baker in court for years.
- surfingdino 2y ago> Stock options had long been a major part of the Sierra compensation package, so most employees and former employees were affected by the overnight collapse in Cendant’s share price, and its continued fall. Stories like this one and my own experience are the reason why I refuse to accept contracts where stock options are part of compensation package. The agents/hiring managers are quite surprised when I tell them that stock options are just a way to make people work harder for less money. It is a sweet deal for the company and a crap deal for the employee.
- zamfi 2y agoThe company was already public, though. It's not the contracts that were the problem -- it was the fact that in those days it was uncommon for rank-and-file employees to really diversify. We've mostly learned that lesson now.
- dtech 2y agoRefusing seems like a weird thing, why not value them at $0 (i.e. pretend they aren't part of the comp). That's wise for anything not already public anyway.
- JohnFen 2y ago> Stories like this one and my own experience are the reason why I refuse to accept contracts where stock options are part of compensation package. I agree, except I don't refuse them. I just consider them to be without value when I'm totaling up the compensation offer. If the job isn't worth it without the stock/options, it's not worth it with them.
- sgt 2y agoPrinted book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1716727367 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1716727367 https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ken-williams/not-all-fairy-tales-have-happy-endings/paperback/product-5jgwme.html https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ken-williams/not-all-fairy-t... https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ken-williams/not-all-fairy-tales-have-happy-endings-deluxe-edition/hardcover/product-4jz4qd.html https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ken-williams/not-all-fairy-t... (hardcover)
- nytesky 2y agoWhat did she mean RPG vs Adventure games?
- chrisco255 2y agoRPGs tend to be focused on leveling and battle systems (think Diablo, Final Fantasy). Adventure games like King's Quest rarely involved conflict and focused more on exploration and puzzle solving. King's Quest 8: Mask of Eternity, was the first 3D entry in the series but also departed substantially from the pure exploration and story-driven elements of the earlier entries. It was a very disappointing game for me, as a long time fan of King's Quest. It wasn't even a well-done RPG.
- JustSomeRando4 2y ago[dead]
- JustSomeRando4 2y ago[dead]
- ErneX 2y ago“Ken sent me”
- stripline 2y agoThis story reminds me of how the original owners of the Highland Mint (they make the coin for the Super Bowl coin toss) were swindled out of their company. https://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v19n06a31.html https://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v19n06a31.html
- praptak 2y agoGreat products loved by customers don't seem to be what the free market rewards. It's almost looks like customer passion is an inefficiency which the market tends to eliminate and not as an accident but rather as a general rule. Customers love your product? Great, here's a very attractive offer, we buy the company and make it "efficient" which somehow tends to make the product shitty and the customers unhappy.
- coldpie 2y agoI think one way to phrase this in a way that reflects how the market works is that sellers often very much under-value the worth of the brand itself, and buyers know this. If you can buy a brand for X and exploit the customers who trust that brand for 2*X, then it's worth it even if it destroys the brand that was truly worth 10*X in the process. The trouble comes when X is large enough to buy (almost) literally anyone out -- "F-You Money" -- and the seller don't care what the true value of the brand is because it's yacht time, baby. And the employees & customers get screwed. If this is a problem we want to solve, the answer IMO is stuff like employee-ownership & unions.
- dbspin 2y ago[flagged]
- jszymborski 2y agoI'm happy to hear this sentiment echoed here. My mind has been on this quite a bit lately.
- throw10920 2y ago> It's too abstracted from externalities - from slash and burn asset sweating, to environmental damage to abusive employment practices offshored or put at arms length through contractors None of this is intrinsic to corporations, and all of it can be legislated away without changing what it means to be a "corporation". This is just thinly-veiled advocacy for communism.
- JohnFen 2y agoI always assumed that Sierra died the same way the majority of great game companies die: simply by being acquired. It's interesting to hear that there was more to the story here. Very sad.
- bane 2y agoThe old Sierra was such an amazing part of early computer gaming, mainly because nobody knew what genres the industry would eventually end up in. Imagine a single company today that makes games in the following genres: * Police Investigations * High Fantasy * Fairy Tale Fantasy * Sci-Fi Comedy * Adult Comedy * Arcade Games * Educational Games * Card and Casino Games * and then had a subsidiary pretty much devoted to 3d Simulation and Action games. and did all of those, including multiple sequels, in the space of less than 15 years. The lack of rules also bit Sierra later on as players encountered more games from other creators and we slowly realized how unplayable many of the Sierra games actually were. But for the period where they dominated, they were kind of a wonderland. Memory: I basically learned how to type playing Police Quest and Space Quest II.
- bentcorner 2y ago> Memory: I basically learned how to type playing Police Quest and Space Quest II. Same here. I recall playing Quest for Glory 2 and becoming very quick at typing "ask about ...". Pausing the game when the user brought up the typing window was such an innovation for me haha
- dagw 2y agoI (and many of my friends) basically learned how to read English playing LSL and the early Quest games. And yes memorising the answers to LSL 1 age verification questions taught us a lot about US culture (we learnt about the secret skip key much later).
- edzillion 2y ago10 year old me: who the hell is Spiro Agnew?!!?
- HellDunkel 2y agoIf you played the old sierra adventures you could literally feel there is something wrong with their corporate culture. And the programmers seemed to have a laugh.