I’ve been thinking about posting in more detail about Sierra after my post about Space Quest 2’s ending was well-received. I searched the archives about Sierra and it seems the last time we had a thread about it was when I started another one in 2016. A lot of interesting points were raised there mostly by other posters and it’s worth rereading if you haven’t.
One thing I’ve been wondering is just why is it that our interests on this forum are so eclectic yet we rarely talk about Sierra which was one of the top-selling PC videogame makers in the 80s and 90s. I’m thinking lately that the reason is primarily generational. They were played mostly by adults who had bought a PC primarily to work from home, or often sneakily on PCs at the office during breaks and evenings. Several of the games have a tongue-in-cheek “boss key” that would fill the screen with fake spreadsheets or graphs that surely never fooled any boss, but was relatable to its players.
Meanwhile we millennials mostly didn’t have access to these games, and if we briefly tried them, the appeal didn’t leap out immediately and we often had a bad experience of immediately getting stuck on an obscure puzzle. Personally though, my parents decided early in life that they would splurge on buying me a PC in order to develop marketable computer skills, whereas they would not buy me any game console so that I wouldn’t waste time nor hog the family TV. So I played a good half of the Sierra game library over my childhood, some pirated some bought.
Anyway, what is the experience Sierra games are trying to create, when you play them from beginning to end over a few days while occasionally referring to a hintbook to get unstuck, as they were intended to be played? Sierra officially had a philosophy of letting a thousand flowers bloom (even as their centralized engines led them to end up with relatively similar experiences anyway). But the basic thing they all have in common is essentially comic-book-like: they want a tell an pulp “adventure” story with a series of artworks of rooms or landscapes.
One my favorite Sierra games for example is Space Quest 2, for its relentlessly lonely and hostile atmosphere that belies the nominal “space comedy” concept. I just went to a Youtube Let’s Play and took a screenshot of every room in Space Quest II. You can get a good half of the game experience by looking at them in sequence like a comic book. See the imgur album: https://imgur.com/a/BqpBzjR . Some highlights:
Some real Out of This World vibes on the planet surface!
For my own part, I too was an upper middle class white kid with free access to a PC, so I could have played Sierra games if I wished, but their lateral thinking combined with fatality (plus some truly boneheaded design decisions) frustrated me and turned me off pretty quick. It’s one thing to get stuck in an adventure game; it’s another thing to die and have to reload. It’s much more demoralizing, especially to a child.
I guess there might me more of a delicious frisson in that kind of thing now that I’m fully grown; maybe I should give some of these a try. Though there is definitely no frisson in losing the whole game because I didn’t click a pixel 10 hours ago.
From a design perspective these games were intended to take 100 hours to complete.
From a business perspective you were supposed to call their 900 hint line. Sierra sent C&D notices to websites that had walkthroughs on them with the claim that they were stealing Sierra’s business.
I missed the heyday of Sierra due to generational reasons but I feel like a lot of games from this era will have aged fairly poorly due to the fundamental design. The quote about Lucasfilm timestamped below kinda speaks to this.
Even at the time I think people realised this sort of design was nonsense. Fortunately these designs were often tied to stories and worlds that were quite expressive so they’re fun to revisit in principle but I don’t have any desire personally to endure it. I wanted to play Loom a while back but it was fairly easy to just watch a playthrough and get about the same amount of enjoyment from it despite it having a neat mechanic.
I think the Sierra games that do still occasionally get discussed are the ones that had any sort of merit at all: Quest for Glory, Conquests of the Longbow in particular get mentioned more often than other Sierra games.
I personally can’t stand Sierra games, they feel primitive even by the standards of the time. Crude two word parsers and horrible deadly puzzles that depend on savescumming to overcome. I think the reason Sierra games don’t bear much discussion is that they were several steps backwards in game design, outside of the aforementioned QFG and Conquests.
I consider Sierra games to be the originator of predatory microtransactions in videogames. They would make intentionally unsolvable puzzles and then encourage players to dial up the helpline to pay a dollar a minute to get clues to make those puzzles solvable.
I will acknowledge, that especially in hindsight, the art direction of early sierra games is very charming.
One of the reasons I’m especially fond of Quest for Glory is that it seemed to offer a cohesive approach to setting and writing. The early King’s Quests were random disconnected assortments of scenes with no rhyme or reason. Quest For Glory introduced a variety of optional routes, relatively unconstrained exploration and mild rpg elements to elevate what was quickly becoming rote and stale in the mainline KQ games. There were no reverse alphabetic ciphers in QFG. There was less instant-death traps. It was a game seemingly designed with people playing it in mind, rather than as entertainment for the programmers.
my earliest videogame experiences were just watching my dad play these and wing commander, growing up, way before I ever tried them myself. I’m surprised I’m not that into watching lp’s now.
I love how the cursor vga sierra games look and sound. and I love how king’s quest’s random fairy tale scenes, and qfg’s rpg and police quest’s cop simulator, and gabriel knight’s goth romance airport mystery novel are all completely different deals forced to fit into the same engine. I love that the status bar is uniquely themed each game. but these games are all memorized in my brain. when I play them now I think would some kid nowadays ever put up with anything like this again? even longbow, which does require a lot of referring to the manual. and what a tragedy that anyone who could of ever been invested enough to make vga remakes of older sierra games is too old for that now.
A lot of what’s good about Sierra games comes down to storytelling and art aesthetic. Conquests of the Longbow has largely standard Sierra design so an argument that it’s especially good would be an argument on that basis.
I have to concede the King’s Quest games do not have much cohesive storytelling, their puzzles are the most unsolvable and their aesthetic is generic fairytale. Unlike many of the other series, I don’t have much to say in its defense. It is Sierra’s second-worst series of the ones I played (the worst is Police Quest).
This thread will probably center around QfG eventually as it’s definitely the best and most interesting Sierra self-developed series, and I have a lot I could say about it myself. Before that though, let me post some screenshots from Manhunter 2: San Francisco. This game has an incomprehensible plot and unplayable action minigames and is set in a depopulated and decaying San Francisco years after alien conquest
