[HN Gopher] Sierra was captured, then killed, by an accounting f...
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Sierra was captured, then killed, by an accounting fraud (2020)
Author : bentcorner
Score : 173 points
Date : 2024-05-17 23:25 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| klyrs wrote:
| A harrowing read, but [2020]
| mistrial9 wrote:
| wasn'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 wrote:
| It'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=sfl...
|
| Not sure about any summer camp stuff. Was that a lesser known
| part of their business? Or a different company?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Care to share the doc? I've never heard this before.
| Natsu wrote:
| They also published some weird old games like Thexder:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0N9bSR-zJs
| swozey wrote:
| They also have one of the first MMORPGs that hardly anyone
| knows about, and it's still around. The Realm
| (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.
| 4RealFreedom wrote:
| Thexder was great!
| mlyle wrote:
| > It's about Sierra Entertainment (later Sierra On-Line)
|
| Other way around: On-Line Systems -> Sierra Online -> Sierra
| Entertainment.
| solardev wrote:
| TLDR they were acquired in stock by a shady company that made up
| its accounting.
|
| It's a reaaaaaally long article.
| ab5tract wrote:
| You mean, it's journalism?
| solardev wrote:
| Sure, 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.
| swozey wrote:
| Believe 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Putting 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.
| auggierose wrote:
| Appreciate the summary! What a mistake to make.
| solardev wrote:
| Hmm, weird. I actually posted this a few days ago, but the
| article was under a different title then. It looks to me like
| maybe Vice was A/B testing titles, it somehow got a second
| chance on HN, but with the existing comments merged in and
| their timestamps changed too...?!
|
| It's a lot clearer with the new title but it sure makes for
| some confusing threads.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| For those of us who were fans of Sierra it was about the right
| length.
| zoky wrote:
| Except I died three-quarters of the way through reading it
| and had forgotten to save, so I had to start again at the
| beginning.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Don't sell, don't put untrustworthy people in key positions and
| remember machine learning 1st rule - NO FREE LUNCH anyone who
| says otherwise is a disaster waiting to happen.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| ^2020
|
| An either thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24941667
| theolivenbaum wrote:
| Interesting article buried in the comments there about the
| fraud https://www.econcrises.org/2016/11/29/cendant-
| corporation/
| doubloon wrote:
| if 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 wrote:
| Vampire romance?
| nineteen999 wrote:
| He obviously meant the Italian Mafia.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| generally it has to be public knowledge which prisons people
| are in, because the alternative would be really bad (people
| "disappear").
| zoky wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| I'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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think the crimes are categorically different, and you can't
| compare them in that manner.
|
| There is no singular "the value of life". There are numbers
| which some people use in very specific circumstances. Prices
| for life are subjective. I would say mine is priceless, and
| might say yours is much cheaper.
|
| When you take someones life, they don't have a chance to put
| a price to it.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| Do any of those reasons weigh against measuring the
| seriousness of financial crimes in terms of actuarial
| lives? No problem with the objection that lives are
| priceless, but couldn't the inverse still be a useful lens?
| yard2010 wrote:
| I would argue no money could buy life.
|
| If you lose your money you are still alive. If you lose your
| life, you lose the money too.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| Yes and stealing billions from hundreds if people who lose
| a home/ability to educate isn't the same as stealing
| someone's life.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| What would be the point. More time in jail doesn't fix
| anything.
|
| Sentencing guidelines actually are based on the amount. I just
| don't think it is linear.
|
| Last, in reality, it isn't just about the number, but the harm
| done. Stealing a penny from 300 million people is very
| different than stealing 3 million from one person in terms of
| impact.
| banish-m4 wrote:
| As 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 wrote:
| Well 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.
| wsc981 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| God, I miss Sierra games. Such a big part of my growing up.
| doctorraags wrote:
| I literally thought this exact sentence when I saw this
| article.
| laurencei wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| For 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.
| pasttense01 wrote:
| @dang, this was published in 2020.
| metadat wrote:
| Contrary 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.
| sgt wrote:
| That should be a feature request. Every time someone mentions
| @dang, his pager will go off and his belt will vibrate.
| yard2010 wrote:
| @dang is this correct?
| vel0city wrote:
| It's always incredible how these massive frauds seem to have E&Y
| looking over their books. How does anyone trust anything they put
| out?
| ralph84 wrote:
| Mutual 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 wrote:
| the 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.
| astrange wrote:
| BlackRock 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.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Did E&Y not face any consequences here and why not anyway?
| jojobas wrote:
| Apparently two EY partners did suffer some repercussions. Not
| Arthur Andersen scale, but CUC wasn't Enron scale either.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Partnerships 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 wrote:
| They're either very stupid or complicit. Neither should
| surprise anyone.
| fareesh wrote:
| Microsoft 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Hero 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 wrote:
| Oh, 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.
| somerandomqaguy wrote:
| Ready or Not is effectively the spiritual successor of SWAT 4.
| I haven't played it since release but it's got the right vibe.
| droptablemain wrote:
| Arcanum :)
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| The first game I rage quit and then went looking for an
| overwrite tool to ensure that every last bit of it was gone
| off my hdd. I loved the premise - steampunk and magic! - but
| got stuck and web said I needed some random thing that I had
| discarded many game hours ago. Inventory management can make
| or break a game really.
|
| That overwrite tool was handy later when my first
| C&C:Generals LAN game had my Supertank sniped and stolen.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Your comment makes Steam's cloud-storage team very nervous.
| card_zero wrote:
| I love it, but mainly for its atmosphere and roleplay,
| because the magic/tech choice every time you level up is a
| nonsense. The two sides do equivalent things, and stack
| together but degrade each other if mixed, so strategically
| you just have to pick one side or the other and stick to it.
| Also there's weird bits involving a graveyard full of
| zombies, or roaming the wilderness having random encounters,
| which basically beg you to grind for XP as much as you like:
| and a pet dog who can gain his own XP and rapidly becomes
| overpowered, getting all the first kills. Lovely game,
| terrible gameplay.
| caf wrote:
| No love for Conquests Of The Longbow?
| sersi wrote:
| Conquest of the Longbow is a masterpiece. As a kid, I loved
| the fact that a lot of puzzles had multiple solutions. It was
| definitely not an easy adventure game though, I remember
| being stuck on some of the puzzles using gems and trees.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Microsoft owns the IP today. Would be nice to see them do
| something good with it._
|
| Microsoft... do something good?
|
| Have you tried using Microsoft products?
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Daily driving Windows for as long as I can remember, using
| Office for both personal and professional paperwork.
|
| They have given me far more than I ever paid them and will
| continue to do so.
|
| Also: Age of Empires II. Best RTS ever; change my mind.
| card_zero wrote:
| I tried Empire Earth (from 2001) and was impressed by its
| depth vs AoE. I've been thinking about installing it on
| Windows 11. But this is somewhat beside the point, I'm sure
| both would run on Wine. I guess AoE II was published by
| Microsoft, but it was made by Ensemble Studios before MS
| bought them. And Office can do one.
| dayjaby wrote:
| EE has depth? Then why is AoE2 played competitevly and
| noone plays EE?
|
| AoE2 has a lot of micro depth: - quick walling to trap
| enemy units in or out - each arrow is a projectile that
| you can dodge - ballistics helps to hit moving targets,
| still can be dodged by good players
|
| The list goes on. Watch any modern caster for this game
| (MembTV or T90). There is a lot to enjoy.
|
| What I dislike about Microsoft+AoE is the fact that they
| publish DLCs with less and less content for huge prices.
| And AoE mobile is obviously a joke.
| guappa wrote:
| > still can be dodged by good players
|
| You are presuming that units would do as they are told,
| in a timely manner. Which they do not.
| izacus wrote:
| Also Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 single handedly
| revived the genre.
| musha68k wrote:
| Probably will be the opposite. They are currently doubling down
| on Call of Duty above anything else.
|
| The about to be closed Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks were
| institutions in gaming similar to Sierra. Their franchises
| probably relegated to the same place in essence.
| astrange wrote:
| Tango's most well known developers (Ikumi Nakamura and Shinji
| Mikami) left after Ghostwire and Hi-Fi Rush were completed
| respectively, so I don't know if it would've been that
| successful afterward.
|
| Although they weren't closed for a good reason, just because
| the Xbox executives decided to spend the entire company's
| budget buying Blizzard and now finance is making them
| actually pay for that.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Microsoft owns the IP today.
|
| All of it? I thought the EarthSiege / Metaltech / Tribes
| Universe ended up with Hi-Rez Studios, but none of that is even
| on their website any more.
| dceddia wrote:
| Lots 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/
| pauljara wrote:
| You'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_tr...
| pico303 wrote:
| Holy 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 wrote:
| I agree. The text jumping around and making me lose my place
| every 60 seconds just might motivate me to install an ad
| blocker.
| wvenable wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| Are 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 wrote:
| Interesting story told poorly in an atrocious UI.
| metabagel wrote:
| Firefox Reader View handles this OK. It's the sheet of paper
| icon to the right of the URL.
| yard2010 wrote:
| If you want you can use Vivaldi browser on mobile as it has a
| built in ad blocker.
| swozey wrote:
| And 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 wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| A 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| A remake came out not long ago:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaoh:_A_New_Era
| kingforaday wrote:
| Shadow of Yserbius anyone?
| eszed wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| No. 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 wrote:
| >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.
| earnesti wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I think a simple way to avoid this is to ask for a all-cash
| offer. Naturally it will be either non-existant or much
| smaller value. If the offer is still good, it is not a
| problem to accept it.
|
| The problem here was that the sellers were accepting stock as
| a payment, which was garbage.
| hitekker wrote:
| You're taking the right angle with greed (1 Timothy 6:9-11).
| But I think it goes beyond that:
|
| > Williams wasn't a game designer, but a visionary who saw the
| company always moving forward, leading the market with other
| genres, other software, online worlds connecting every kind of
| person. That Sierra is instead remembered, basically entirely,
| for these 2D adventure games from the eighties and nineties is,
| he says, because the company was killed.
|
| With respect to Ken, I think his ambition outstripped his
| ability. He prided his company on being something it wasn't,
| and himself being something he wasn't either. Sierra had to be
| something big, he had to be something big; his favored
| fraudster knew exactly how to exploit that self-illusion. In
| reality, Ken's own wife hints that Ken was struggling as CEO
| even before selling, e.g. failing to see through people, over-
| relying on lieutenants when making decisions, etc.
|
| For all the talk of murdering Sierra, I find it interesting Ken
| doesn't name the culprit. Not the fraudster or his cronies. I
| think that's because Ken is the one who let them in his house.
| mattbee wrote:
| Maybe you've also read his self-published autobiography, but
| his character flaws are front and centre. He's explicit about
| his vanity and overconfidence, painfully honest about
| personal snubs from Gates etc. He comes across as a permanent
| outsider, just one of those people who never acts on any
| feedback. So I think he knows.
|
| If you loved the company, it's a very interesting book.
| rasz wrote:
| Everyone but Ken, yes. Sierra could have been Cyan
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40404054 Two successful
| games 25 years ago and they are still around.
|
| Ken ambitions killed Sierra, Ken wanted that G5. This
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr9_GfeoCjk [Tropic Thunder Tom
| Cruise Dancing to Flo Rida Low] is an accurate reenactment of
| how Walter Forbes lured Ken Williams into selling
| pavlov wrote:
| Sierra was never a single studio, they were always a
| publisher too. That's a big difference from Cyan.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| It's hard to turn down the prospect of making your and all your
| employees/shareholders investments pay off. In fact, many of
| them would probably angry if they heard you did that. The
| potential for an exit is one reason they worked for you and not
| bigco who pays more. And you didn't get whatever success you
| had by ignoring opportunities that presented themselves.
| repomies69 wrote:
| He should just have asked for all-cash transaction. I think
| it is fair. If they don't want to sell the company stock and
| buy the company with cash, or at least make an offer, then
| there is likelihood that there is some kind of fraud going
| on.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| Easy to say in hindsight, but using stock to pay for a
| merger is common. Most companies are not carrying a big
| chunk of their value in cash (it's not capital-efficient).
| Therefore buying anything sizable for cash will require the
| combined company to take on debt. So a stock-for-stock
| merger can result in a combined company that has a safer
| balance sheet. If the acquiree believes the merger is a
| good idea, they might consider owning stock in the merged
| entity to be a good thing. If nobody is offering them a
| competitive offer in cash, they don't have much leverage to
| ask for it anyway. Even if you value the stock offer with
| some discount for risk, it can still be attractive.
| zamfi wrote:
| This wasn't an "exit" though -- the company was already
| public, and had been for 7 years!
|
| It was "just" an offer with a large premium over the current
| stock price.
| daemin wrote:
| I would say that if you ever take your company public that you
| don't own it anymore, it is now owned by the whims of the
| marketplace as a whole.
| rob74 wrote:
| Or, to combine your and the OPs points: if you take your
| company public, you will have to live by the rules of "the
| love of money". It's also the love of money that ultimately
| led to Sierra (the more creative company) being killed in
| favor of Davidson/Blizzard (the more business-savvy company)
| while they were owned by CUC and then Vivendi.
| asimpletune wrote:
| Sometimes half is worth more than the whole
| ptman wrote:
| https://kensbook.com/
| gumby wrote:
| Similar fraud story with Dragon:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking
| surfingdino wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Refusing 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.
| sgt wrote:
| Printed book:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/1716727367
|
| 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-t...
| (hardcover)
| nytesky wrote:
| What did she mean RPG vs Adventure games?
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