Not to mention, those are fun games with interesting and novel game mechanics. My memories of Sierra games more or less involve cheating because many of the puz

Not to mention, those are fun games with interesting and novel game mechanics. My memories of Sierra games more or less involve cheating because many of the puzzles were arbitrary. Oh, you gave the chicken leg to the yeti instead of the eagle? Now find a save game from 5 hours before! There's a reason Sierra failed - player punishing adventure games fell out of fashion. I play more than a few adventure and point and click games on Steam and rarely are the puzzles Sierra-like frustrating. That formula just doesn't work and only worked because of the lack of competition in the 80s. The early 1990s brought us stuff like Doom, Civilization, Myst, etc and killed the adventure game market. Heck, The Longest Journey and its sequels, pretty much brought back the Sierra-style game and sold a lot of copies. Compare it to what Sierra was doing. TLJ is pretty much fine art compared to the schlock-fest and hammy writing of the Sierra crew. > I realized, anyway, by the mid-'90s that people weren't looking for deeper games with deeper puzzles and thought-provoking concepts and all these things we were hoping for. Talk about paying yourself a compliment! Are we really saying Half-Life's or Chrono-Trigger's storytelling is more shallow than the milquetoast stories of the Sierra universe? Come on. There's also an argument here that games shouldn't be "do some work to get to the next part of the story" visual novels. There's balance between story and game. Some lean more one way than another. There's nothing wrong with either approach. I think modern gamers lean towards a more cinematic story-telling experience, which is a questionable fad. If anything, games are too story-based right now. That said, I feel a little sorry for Al. He and his people were on top of the gaming world in the 1980s and are now deep into irrelevancy. The sad part is, if he took on a more mature attitude like, "Hey, we had a lot of fun, but the industry changed quickly and we didn't, and we got squashed," a bit like Nolan Bushnell did about Atari, I'd have some respect for him. But playing the endless blame game (gamers suck, management sucks, but the creatives are oh-so perfect) just makes him look a primadonna.