Sierra Online history

King of Posters
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I wanted to link this fantastic article on Sierra and the 80s PC game market: http://www.filfre.net/2016/08/sierra-gets-creative/ . Worth reading even if you have no interest in adventure games.

When talking about Sierra nowadays it’s easy to focus on how bad most of their games were (and this article does do some of that), but this has so many other interesting angles. Did you know that Ken Williams was inspired by the PC-98? That one-quarter of Sierra’s playerbase was female? That Sierra helped create the market for PC sound cards?

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Previous articles in the series:

http://www.filfre.net/2013/07/the-unmaking-and-remaking-of-sierra-on-line/

http://www.filfre.net/2015/08/splendid-isolation-sierra-at-mid-decade/

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Anyone whose blanket opinion on Sierra is They Made Bad Games is a tool.

Sierra published Half-Life!

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Don’t know if that example is a joke, since, you know, publishing and development are very different things, but yeah. It’s dangerously reductive to say that they made bad games. It would be more helpful to say that the logic behind their games was often baffling, if it existed at all. Putting a judgment on that isn’t going to bring you very far, especially when you consider how phenomenally successful Sierra was at its peak. It was the great equalizer, opening up PCs and videogames in general to a mass audience who otherwise might have had no in-road. Men, women, adults, children, techies, luddites – all had a more or less equal chance of making sense of these things, given enough persistence. If anything, the games skewed toward the more literate and intuitive players – which, yes, would tend to give women an advantage. For that matter, the public face of the company and therefore for years probably the most visible American game designer to a whole generation, was a woman.

Sierra was an important company that made important games. That the games are designed contrary to current norms and notions of best practices shouldn’t undermine their value. Not in and of itself, at least.

Leisure Suit Larry can go up on the cross, I guess. The games aren’t even joyous or witty, like Leather Godesses of Phobos. There are arguments to make about the self-effacing commentary, but when you break it down the games are just ugly.

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Leisure Suit Larry is such a weird outlier. It’s lewd where the others are wholesome, urban/coastal where the others are rural/heartland, exclusionary where the others are inclusive (I’m thinking of the boomer trivia quiz you have to complete to start the first game). It’s like if Disney also happened to publish… I dunno, Howard The Duck. Game design wise though, it’s very similar to the rest of Sierra’s output, e.g. LSL1 shared the intended-save-scumming casino minigame with Space Quest 1.

The Quest for Glory series I’ve always felt were Sierra’s best adventure games, because they draw from a tradition of actual games (tabletop RPGs), instead of their inbred inhouse traditions that were never founded on solid ground. Aside from the FF2-style skill training, action-battle minigames, and open worlds, they’re also a real outlier in that most of the puzzles have multiple, commonsense solutions, and in the first game, the truly obscure puzzles are thoughtfully relegated to requirements for the “better endings”. If I recall correctly, I managed to complete all of the Quest for Glory games I played (1, 3, 4) without reference to a guide, as a kid.

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Leisure Suit Larry definitely shows that it originated as a remake of one of Roberta Williams’ earlier titles when her sensibility was a bit more sadistic (not that her design sensibility was ever NOT gleefully sadistic). It’s kind of telling how LSL1 was all night time with a singular goal in a world that actively wished Larry harm, while the sequels where Al was given more control felt more like 80s teen comedy.

I still think the ending sequence of LSL2 where the main villain gets croaked was one of the most hilarious graphic adventure scenes.

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Another way to think about the “badness” of Sierra games is, is there anywhere that style of design resonated with the rest of the game, to feel organic rather than arbitrary? Space Quest II comes to mind as an answer, since just past the patina of comedy it’s lonely and terrifying sci-fi horror. (To some degree, all the others are as well, but I think II is the scariest – it even has the ending of Alien.) It was so scary and inexplicable, that the schoolyard friend I pirated the game from swore up and down that once when a SimAnt disk was in the other drive while playing it, giant ants came down from the trees to eat Wilco.

Come to think of it, the structure of Another World is in cruder form in Space Quest II, not to mention many of the setpieces are very similar. There’s at least a common influence both those games are inspired from… but no, I want to go out on a limb and claim Chahi must’ve been strongly and directly inspired by it, right, even if he never said so?

(I was also going to add that the impossible puzzles in Gobliiins resonate with its absurdist sensibility, but it looks like that was only published by Sierra, anyway.)

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I think they had more female designers than male, at least just about all their heavy hitters were anyway. roberta williams, jane jensen, lori cole, and of course christy marx, creator of my favorite game of all time conquest of the longbow, also jem and the holograms. longbow is one of the best looking games of all time to me and must of been where the concept for outlaw values was first branded on my brain. one of the first things you do being killing a cop in the street for terrorizing a civilian must of made an impression on my six year old self.

quest for glory is also one of my favorite series. I went into month long depression after I read lori cole said how she felt constrained by the sci engine back then for the series. that’s the whole appeal to me, trying to jam a rpg type thing into this adventure game engine. it ends up feeling not like anything else. it’s like how driving in gta is more appealing than driving in actual driving games where everything is designed just for driving on a track and nothing else. you can click on a door and you get a list of whether you want to knock on the door, break down the door, pick the lock on the door, cast a spell on the door, etc. I like how you import your character from game to game and your in a different setting and culture each time. I’ve been cursed ever since to wanting every other game I’ve played since to be more like a quest for glory game.

police quest was also neat for being a police simulator in an adventure game engine. they’re kind of miserable to play though, especially cause of the driving parts. but it’s great back then somebody like ken williams would just tell some cop guy, why not try and make a videogame.

gabriel knight 2 is sierra’s full throttle, the perfect adventure game, except for the cuckoo clock puzzle.

king’s quests have some boneheaded puzzles and design, especially the early ones, but the later ones I don’t think are anymore illogical than some of the fairytales the games draw from. but I got no way of looking at these things objectively at this point or figuring how someone raised on modern games might be able to go about playing them.

I love the sciv engine, with the status line and the little icons, and how each game the icons are done in a different art style to fit that game. for me not much beats those 256 color sciv sierra games for looks. at least the fantasy pixelated painting looking ones, the police quest stuff that’s pixelated versions of photos of 90s places and fashion I’m not so big on.

reading sierra’s old interaction magazine is depressing. ken williams talks about how he’s not a fan of how you have to constantly upgrade pc’s, he’d love to keep selling old games or still make games for older hardware but stores won’t stock them. if only some sort of… digital distribution type deal existed. he talks about getting excited for the possibilities for multiplayer, figuring out how multiplayer adventure games could work. talks about edutainment titles when those still existed, how games could someday be like interactive worlds for history classes or whatnot.

sierra also published the game arts games zeliard and sorcerian. I think zeliard might have been the first game I ever played, and I never beat it until the year I graduated highschool. that last dungeon has invisible walls and air currents and shit. couldn’t believe later on your not actually supposed to go through the game without maps cause it comes with them in an actual boxed copy (I was born unto copyright infringement from day one, couldn’t have afforded all this shit any other way).

as much as I obsessively digitally horde everything and love sierra I never gave a shit about leisure suit larry though.

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Conquest of the Longbow I found really hard to swallow after playing Quest for Glory first. It seems to tease that it will have the exact same structure, but it’s actually linear to the max. I kept trying to walk away and escape the plot, only to be arbitrarily murdered for my efforts. The linearity doesn’t fit the outlaw concept, either. All its setpieces are dramatic and engaging though (which I guess is what that buys you).

Likewise with the first Police Quest, it’s like an open world city but there is always exactly one thing you can do. I got stuck forever standing next to the drunk driver in mid-arrest because I didn’t think to type “read rights”. In the world of Police Quest, proper police procedure is a law of physics unto itself.

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I usually don’t try to escape the plot in games, especially 90s adventure games. I don’t see why a game about an outlaw can’t be linear though. but if there has to be some reason, he’s a hunted fugitive, his movements are restricted. the sheriff’s men ramping up their patrols and scouring the forest more is a part of the story, and it does finally end with your unavoidable capture. but instead of qfg: sherwood edition, I always saw it as just a videogame version of a collection of robin hood stories. like how they tried to feed a roleplaying game into the sciv machine for qfg here they tried sticking in howard pyle’s robin hood book. except there’s a little more of an overarching story tying it all together instead of just unrelated episodes. You usually do have a few options for how to approach the individual scenarios. and then every day ends with hanging out with the crew:

beautiful

howard pyle specifically wrote this for you broco, for trying to the walk away from your duties in sherwood:

just remembered another of my favorite thing of sierra games, the bird chirping noises while your out walking around in the greenery.

police quest is really restrictive and punishing though. I think you were literally supposed to play those with the manual in one hand. and it’s even more absurd because we now know in real life you can approach police work more like doom than anything in police quest

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Man I never realized Police Quest was responsible for everyone being wrong about police procedure.

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I have fond memories of when I was a young child, when my parents would take us to visit my dad’s Air Force buddy and I would get to play on the computer the whole time, usually playing King’s Quest V or Police Quest. I never got far in either, but they gave me an impression of a vast world with near endless possibilities thanks to the text parsers and point and click interface. I particularly enjoyed being lewd in Police quest and getting appropriate responses. I also actually liked Cedric the owl, but that was likely due to it being the text only version.

I think I remember in Police Quest I managed to load a save file that had reached the end of the game, and since I had never encountered a save system before, I was incredibly confused as I saw the player character being kissed by some blonde woman in a parade and I couldn’t control anything. I thought I must have broken it or triggered some kind of magical wizardry.

I tried playing Leisure Suit Larry once, but it had one of those copyright protection things at the start where you had to enter the phone number of the woman displayed, and they all looked the same except for the colours. My dad’s friend only had a grainy black and white print out of the phone numbers and women, but I guess I shouldn’t have been playing that game at that age anyway

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Yeah, in retrospect it is a little weird the extent to which Sierra over-egged that one game engine and one model of design. By the same token, though, it’s fascinating how much different designers pushed the boundaries of what the engine was built to handle. The thread has covered much of that, but yeah, Quest for Glory is a prime example and almost certainly the best thing Sierra ever did. It’s sort of like those late-era console games that bend the underlying hardware to do things it was never meant to do, and wind up in wild and fascinating places as a result.

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Musing on a couple of things here.

Thing one: Big PC Developers. Twenty-five, thirty years ago the PC scene was dominated by big publishers with their own big in-house development teams. Sierra, Origin. EA, for its part, which I’ll muse about more in #2. Today nearly all of those monolithic voices are gone. Either they just don’t exist, or they were bought out and their names have become no more than brands, or they’ve turned into some kind of horrible IP portfolio holding company that serves to milk both brands and employees until they are dry of all practical use, then discarding them.

Thing two: Authors. This used to be the big, big thing in PC design, and American game software in general. Activision and EA both started as sort of author showcases. Games were released like LPs, with the names and faces of the key designers as important as the games’ premises. Sierra played into this, certainly. Out of it we get names like Sid Meier and Will Wright, Peter Molyneux and Richard Garriott – all of these name-value super-designers.

There really used to be this representation of PC games in particular as a creative enterprise, pursued by adults from a wide range of backgrounds with individual things to say. And the biggest companies out there tended to bend over backwards to encourage this perspective. I’m not saying the developers weren’t worked to death, or that the companies always made the wisest financial decisions, or were even particularly progressive all the time. It’s just that the whole infrastructure was so different back then, and I can’t help but feel like something has been lost in the race of technology and wholesale shift to commercial exploitation.

This was not an era of techbros.

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In-house versus external developers:
I think the industry has gone through a few cycles where small companies spring up, are published by big studios, then as budgets and risk grows, get absorbed by publishers who can take on that risk. Stagnation sets in amongst the absorbed studios and new technology drives small studios to appear again. It got notably real in the '00s but digital distribution, mobile, and free to play have been economic wildfires destructive enough that we’re in a good period now.

Designer as star:
I think this went away as games started to be made by bigger and bigger studios; and that’s fine, it’s pretty unethical to assign ‘star’ status to a part of a very large team. But as the situation has changed and we have indies we see the personality-attached games coming again; at a small scale, it’s easier to remember a personal narrative to a game history, while at a company level, it’s easier to remember the studio history than the people.

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I never played any of these things with voice and have no clue why a lot of fanmade sierra style adventure games take such pride in also having terrible voice acting