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The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisition
- vunderba 2y agoSierra was responsible for creating two of my favorite games of all time - King's Quest VI (designed by Roberta Williams / Jane Jensen) and Conquests of the Longbow (designed by Christy Marx). It's such a contrast then to read (what I find profoundly distasteful) quotes like this from the other side of the company. Ken Williams: "I read books about business executives who owned yachts and jets, and who hung out with beautiful models in fancy mansions. I knew that was my future and I couldn’t wait to claim it.". It's a tragedy Ken Williams managed to overrule nearly everyone familiar with Sierra (including his wife) opposed to the acquisition by CUC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUC_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUC_International
- snoman 2y agoThe Colonel’s Bequest (also by Roberta Williams) still holds a special place in my heart. I can’t play a game like Luigi’s Mansion without feeling like that was one of the inspirations.
- selimthegrim 2y agoA love letter to New Orleans.
- hinkley 2y agoI hope Larian gets into making sequels or remakes of all those 90’s games that people loved. Baldur’s Gate is a game my brain tries to place in the late 90’s along with the later Warcraft games but in fact it’s 00’s. Seeing them walk gaming history backward would be a treat. Before BG3 came out I started to try to finish BG which I played but got stuck a third of the way through. I made it at least halfway, but then the betas were coming out so I just watched other people play through on YouTube. Which I suspect many people did if they even bothered exerting themselves that much. What other games have good playthroughs?
- rfurmani 2y agoCompletely agree on both counts! I loved those two games and felt Conquests of the Longbow didn't get the recognition it deserves. On the second point, when I read his book (https://kensbook.com/ https://kensbook.com/) I was disappointed to not hear about the magic of the games themselves and the creative process behind them. It became clear that his primary goal was to grow a business, he thought being a game distributor was more exciting, but then was disrupted by Steam, shareware, and online distribution.
- the_af 2y agoIt was Space Quest for me. Oh, I played many of the others, but SQ -- specifically II -- was what made me fall in love with adventure games, warts and all. I learned English (well, besides taking actual English classes anyway) by typing words in its text interface.
- SamBam 2y agoSo much humor in the Space Quest series. I loved them. I should work out how to get them running from GOG for my kids.
- pavlov 2y agoI also learned English mostly by Space Quest. I remember being nine years old, sitting in front of SQ1 with my best friend, and trying to survive the escape pod early in the game. How do you avoid dying when it crashes on an alien world? Our only hope was my neighbor who was a few years older and seemingly infinitely wise. I called him up, and patiently he spelled out the magic words to type before launching the escape pod: “FASTEN SEAT BELT” What do those words mean? We had no idea, but we lived on to explore another world. A few years later I could read and write English just fine, but had no idea how anything was pronounced. Sierra English was a real thing among my generation.
- lolive 2y agoSame memories for me, but with King’s quest 3. I still have the tiny English-french dictionary I wrecked by opening it and translating every and each word of each sentence, for that [6 months] adventure. To get rid of the wizard, become a bird, kill that nasty spider, go into bear’s house, etc, etc…
- rfarley04 2y agoYea, same for me. This article sent me down a rabbit hole of playing a few of 'em online: https://playclassic.games/games/point-n-click-adventure-dos-games-online/play-space-quest-v-next-mutation-online/play/ https://playclassic.games/games/point-n-click-adventure-dos-...
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- 999900000999 2y agoHow tragic to be widely successful, cruise the world and still have the drive to work on passion projects. They just released Colossal Cave a few years ago. Nothing good lasts forever, that's just how it is.
- mzs 2y agoI wonder how the early employees did in the deal. Did they cash-out as well?
- pavlov 2y agoTo my knowledge there was a long lockout period in CUC Sierra acquisition. When Sierra employees were finally able to sell their CUC stock, it had already tanked as the massive fraud was exposed. (Spoiler for Part II of this article, I guess!)
- Yeul 2y agoThis is interesting was there already enough money in videogames to make people multi miljonairs in those days?
- kevingadd 2y agoBusiness was good in those days if you had an audience and could distribute your game to your customers more or less direct. Retail was very expensive, but if you were selling shareware your distribution costs were really low and you weren't giving anybody 30-50% of your take. Titles may not have sold i.e. 10 million copies back then, but you could make good money off a single game, and it was cheaper & faster to develop a game. The 'if's I just listed are pretty significant, of course. For one example, Ultima 1 was developed by a couple people, sold for ~$40 USD, and eventually sold over 1.5m copies according to https://www.newspapers.com/article/austin-american-statesman/90148089/ https://www.newspapers.com/article/austin-american-statesman... and other sources. So that alone probably made everyone involved in the game's development millionaires, even if the publisher took a huge cut.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago> Forbes first became associated with Sierra in 1991, when he agreed to join the company’s board. Ken Williams, Sierra’s co-founder and CEO, considered this a major coup... And then: > “Have you and Ken ever thought about selling Sierra?” <Forbes> asked her out of the blue one day in the lobby of the Paris hotel. > “No,” Roberta answered shortly. “We’re not interested.” > “But if you ever were, what sort of price would you be looking at?” > “A lot,” Roberta replied, then walked away as quickly as decorum allowed. Pretty clear which of the two was the better business person.
- influx 2y agoShe also built most of the intellectual property.
- canucker2016 2y agoAnd from Steven Levy's Hackers, she was one of the women in the hot tub for the cover and ad for the game Softporn Adventure, published by the company that was soon renamed to Sierra On-line. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softporn_Adventure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softporn_Adventure Interesting to read the link to the Leisure Suit Larry game.
- alexey-salmin 2y agoThere are a couple more photos from that photoset https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/12/the-odd-history-of-the-first-erotic-computer-game/383114/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/12/the-o...
- wileydragonfly 2y agoI always found those photos deeply unsettling. None of the women look particularly happy about being there. “If I don’t do this, Timmy doesn’t get that operation” vibes. The photo in the advertisement was bad enough, the outtakes are worse.
- tmsbrg 2y agoJimmy Maher is really a great history writer. The way he writes is very compelling. He made a whole history of windows which I somehow read through completely[0]. I can also recommend his other site, Analog Antiquarian[1] where he writes more about the larger history. His Magellan series that's going on now is really amazing, makes you feel like you're really experiencing the epic voyage through South America and South East Asia. [0] https://www.filfre.net/2018/06/doing-windows-part-1-ms-dos-and-its-discontents/ https://www.filfre.net/2018/06/doing-windows-part-1-ms-dos-a... [1] https://analog-antiquarian.net/ https://analog-antiquarian.net/
- themadturk 2y agoHe really is great, I'm glad to see him writing "analog" history as well as digital. Excellent work for a guys who's essentially a hobbiest.
- BrtByte 2y agoJimmy Maher has that rare mix of deep research and genuinely engaging storytelling. He somehow makes technical or historical rabbit holes feel like page-turners
- JKCalhoun 2y agoI read Ken Williams' book and found it meh. I'm fascinated by that era (after having read Steven Levi's account in his own book, "Hackers") but Ken didn't strike me as a particularly compelling narrator/person. I came away kind of sickened by the "corporatization" of art (and I think game development is a kind of art when it's at its best). Budgets, deadlines... Gross. Wild window in time though that was.
- sys32768 2y agoOld Man Murray wrote a great peace in 2000 about who killed adventure games, the answer to which I won't spoil since it's an easy read: https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html
- tvickery 2y agoGod that is great
- KerrAvon 2y agoImportant context that's come to light since then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_hair_mustache_puzzle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_hair_mustache_puzzle
- drooopy 2y agoCrazy to think that the same game contains both the worst puzzle ever conceived (cat hair) and arguably one of the finest, "Le Serpent Rouge".
- andrewflnr 2y agoHighlights: > It was created by the game's producer, Steven Hill, after a puzzle designed by the game's lead designer, Jane Jensen, was cut due to budgetary reasons. > It came as a result of a puzzle created by the game's designer, Jane Jensen, needing to be removed due to budget concerns. What an incredibly classic, braindead tragedy.
- acomjean 2y agoI mean its a bad example, but not the only example of obtuse puzzles in games preventing forward progress in game. Dead ends and not being able to finish if messed up a previous steps were real problems. This was a bigger issue when the internet wasn't available to help out. I like adventure games, but even still they can be difficult and frustrating (although maybe I'm not great at them) Puzzle Dependency charts in game design help this (from Ron Gilbert/ Monkey Island etc...). https://grumpygamer.com/puzzle_dependency_charts/ https://grumpygamer.com/puzzle_dependency_charts/
- HellDunkel 2y agoThe business side of things with sierra is certainly spectacular. But the story of the characters making the games would be so much more interesting. Where did the humor come from? What was office live? How come the games were both topsellers and also extremly silly? I remeber a space quest scene where a room full of computers was a joke on sierra offices. How did that make it into the final product?
- kencausey 2y agoBrowse the blog archives, Mr. Maher has written repeatedly about Sierra and their games: https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/ https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/ Edit: common homophone issue
- aaronbaugher 2y agoThere's some of that in Steven Levy's book Hackers, which has a section on the 80s called "Game Hackers: The Sierras."
- bemmu 2y agoWith a boss that goes around whipping the developers as well. As a kid this was forever etched into my mind as what a game software company looks like.
- HellDunkel 2y agoIt wasnt that much off, right?
- wkat4242 2y ago> I remeber a space quest scene where a room full of computers was a joke on sierra offices. The pirates of pestulon base in space quest 3 I think. It was pretty funny. Making fun of the cubicle office which was pretty much Avant la lettre back then (i know in Europe we only really got those in the late 90s). In 2000 I still had my own office as a trainee
- BrtByte 2y agoSierra games had this uniquely goofy, irreverent tone that felt super personal, like the devs were sneaking in jokes while no one was looking
- havblue 2y agoAren't we primarily talking about adventure games here? That is, games that nobody played after the nineties?If they weren't acquired they certainly would have modernized, of course. I can't help but think they were in deep trouble even without the failed merger.
- SamBam 2y agoYour argument seems like it might confuse cause and effect. Would adventure games have gone away anyway because no one played them after the 90s, or did no one play them after the 90s because their biggest creator, Sierra, got pushed out, as described in the article, so no one was making them?
- hibikir 2y agoBefore Sierra's end, they had already been crushes, sales wise, by Lucasarts, which had far better game design principles. No dead man walking situations, or random deaths. Still, the genre isn't dead today, but modern adventure games owe far more to Lucasarts than to Sierra. Even when the graphics are Sierra-like, like in The Crimson Diamond, we can see how far we've gone from the different Quest series
- AdmiralAsshat 2y agoIt's pretty easy to say "Oh yes, genre _____ died, therefore it was doomed to die" rather than evaluating whether it died because it failed to meaningfully evolve. I remember in the early aughts people deemed the beat-em-up genre "dead" because there were a high-profile string of early attempts that failed to successfully translate the game experience from 2D to 3D. Fighting Force and The Bouncer were two big examples I can think of that failed miserably. Sword of the Berserk was another attempt, which had some nice production values but pretty forgettable gameplay. So the beat-em-up genre was likely to fade from existence...until Devil May Cry came along and arguably revitalized the genre (or turned it into the "3D hack-and-slash" genre, depending on you who ask). It showed the industry how to do the gameplay properly in 3D, and now the genre is as popular as ever. All of which is to say...there's no reason why the Adventure genre could not have persisted into the modern day, had the right game/developer come along.
- alexey-salmin 2y agoIt's important to remember that the deal was audited by Ernst&Young and they didn't notice the hundreds of millions missing from the balance sheet. EY later settled in court at 300 million but never admitted any wrongdoing. So much for the reputation of the "big four" which at the time was still known as "big five".
- Scubabear68 2y agoAfter having read a number of school board “audits”, and read about Enron etc, and looked beyond that to other instances, it’s clear that audits are generally worthless as a rule. The auditors are shown what they are shown and not allowed to color outside the lines. Find a discrepancy and every damn time the auditors will say “oh, that information was not provided to us”. It’s like if you hired a judge for your own prosecution. What judge is going to find you guilty? See also ratings agencies in 2008.
- MegaButts 2y agoJust as a counterexample (not saying this disproves the trend), UBS auditor recently said there is something wrong at the bank. https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/ubss-auditor-issues-warning-over-banks-financial-reporting-controls-2024-2025-03-17/ https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/ubss-auditor-issues... I think this says more about how worrisome UBS is than how unreliable auditing is.
- TheBlight 2y agoPeople don't strictly want to play games as much as they want to experience alternate realities. That's why Doom/Quake resonated. People want these simulations to be as realistic as possible.
- throwup238 2y ago> People want these simulations to be as realistic as possible. What do you mean by that? Do you mean in the context of that era? IME people what games to be fun because every single genre has a multitude of conceits to make the game playable and technologically feasible. The ones that eschew (most of) those conceits like ARMA and flight simulators are very niche or like Dwarf Fortress and Factorio, complexity is the point (which requires its own conceits to be feasible). People want to ride into battle and swing swords and conquer civilizations, not manage the intricacies of military campaign logistics and foraging operations and tax collection.
- geraldwhen 2y agoPeople want both of those things, possibly different people.
- mathgeek 2y ago> People want to ride into battle and swing swords and conquer civilizations, not manage the intricacies of military campaign logistics and foraging operations and tax collection. I assure you that there is a niche market of folks who absolutely love the latter. My father was in the military logistics group.
- tekla 2y agoYou clearly have never played Hearts of Iron. Basically Factorio for history buffs.
- zoky 2y agoThat’s a pretty broad statement to make given that of the seven bestselling video game franchises of all time (Mario, Tetris, Call of Duty, Pokémon, GTA, Minecraft, and FIFA) only one (Call of Duty) is a realistic simulation, one (GTA) could be best described as a totally unrealistic simulation, one (FIFA) is a simulation of an actual game, and the rest are a mix of abstract fantasy and/or pure puzzles.
- grokys 2y agoA lesson for the ages: that cultured (or not) rich person over there isn't any more intelligent or prescient than your neighbour or colleague, and most certainly no more than your partner. They just have more money.
- BrtByte 2y agoSo true. Money has this weird way of making people seem smarter or more trustworthy than they actually are, especially if they talk the part
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- n8cpdx 2y agoWho else grew up playing 3-D Ultra Lionel Train Town Deluxe? Still works on windows, still fun.
- guidedlight 2y agoWith the IP now owned my Microsoft, I have some hope that Phil Spencer will revive and modernise Sierra. Am I dreaming?
- mepian 2y agoAt this point Microsoft owns too many IPs waiting to be revived, I suspect anything from Sierra is far from the top of the list.
- Yeul 2y agoI only know Sierra because they published Half-life. P&C adventure games were already dying in 1998.
- pvo50555 2y agoYou are not my son.
- pimlottc 2y agoIf you're feeling dejavu reading this article like I was, you might have read this previous piece on Vice [0] four years ago which also drew on Ken William's book, including many of the same quotes. It was discussed here as well [1]. 0: https://www.vice.com/en/article/inside-story-sierra-online-death-cuc-cendant-fraud/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/inside-story-sierra-online-d... 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24941667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24941667
- BrtByte 2y agoThe part that really got me was him packing up and leaving with no fanfare, no goodbye, nothing. Like, this guy built Sierra from nothing. And it ends with him slipping out the back door.
- ErneX 2y ago“KEN SENT ME”
- avsteele 2y agoKen's book is good BTW. I recommend it if you are interested in this subject.