[HN Gopher] The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisi...
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The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisition
Author : cybersoyuz
Score : 133 points
Date : 2025-04-04 18:34 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.filfre.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.filfre.net)
| vunderba wrote:
| Sierra 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
| snoman wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| A love letter to New Orleans.
| hinkley wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Completely 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/) 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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| So 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| rfarley04 wrote:
| Yea, 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-...
| 999900000999 wrote:
| How 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 wrote:
| I wonder how the early employees did in the deal. Did they
| cash-out as well?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > 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.
| tmsbrg wrote:
| Jimmy 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-a...
|
| [1] https://analog-antiquarian.net/
| themadturk wrote:
| He 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Old 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
| tvickery wrote:
| God that is great
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Important context that's come to light since then
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_hair_mustache_puzzle
| drooopy wrote:
| Crazy 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 wrote:
| Highlights:
|
| > 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.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Browse the blog archives, Mr. Maher has written repeatedly
| about Sierra and their games: https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/
|
| Edit: common homophone issue
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| There's some of that in Steven Levy's book _Hackers_ , which
| has a section on the 80s called "Game Hackers: The Sierras."
| havblue wrote:
| Aren'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 wrote:
| Your 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?
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| It'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.
| mrob wrote:
| I think adventure games were doomed because their success
| depended on hardware restrictions limiting the competition.
| The main selling point of adventure games was graphical
| spectacle. Adventure games had better graphics than any other
| genre because the lack of action meant they could show the
| most impressive static images. For the bulk of the audience,
| puzzles were secondary to this, serving mostly to ration out
| the graphical spectacle so the players felt they got value
| for money. Look at the success of Myst. I would be very
| surprised if more than 10% of people who bought it completed
| it. Myst simply looked better than any other game and that
| was enough for it to sell. Even King's Quest 1 was considered
| graphically impressive at the time; it was advertised as "3D"
| because the characters could be partly obscured by foreground
| objects and this was an important selling point.
|
| Once you could get the same kind of spectacle in action
| games, and I'd claim Half-Life as the first notable example,
| there was no longer any need for mass-market adventure games.
|
| EDIT: Thinking about it, Metal Gear Solid beat Half-Life to
| market, and that has the same kind of visual spectacle in an
| action game I'm talking about.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Not sure I entirely agree. Myst had mass market appeal
| because it was one of the first crossover/"casual" games
| that didn't require the player to immediately start killing
| things within a few seconds of starting up the game. I
| could let my mother play Myst--I don't think I could let
| her play Half-Life. For one thing, if trying to show her
| Minecraft taught me anything, it's that the paradigm of
| separated Looking vs Moving (i.e. WASD+Mouse) control is
| one too many things to juggle for your average non-gamer.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| This is Tekken erasure.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Not sure I understand your comment. Tekken was a fighting
| game, not a beat-em-up? Unless we're counting Tekken Force
| Mode from Tekken 3.
|
| Fighting games made the 2D->3D jump just fine, although
| they kinda exist in parallel now, since some developers
| really like flexing their sprite chops in 2D fighters.
| havblue wrote:
| Well. Yeah, if they made great decisions like Capcom did, the
| adventure genre may have been more prominent to this day. I
| mean, Capcom even developed the Ace Attorney games which are
| themselves visual novels/adventure games.
|
| If you look back at my post though I acknowledged that they
| would have attempted to modernize had the merger not
| occurred. And I never said they were doomed, I said they were
| in deep trouble regardless. So I'm not sure what people are
| arguing with me about here other than semantics.
| imiric wrote:
| Adventure games didn't go anywhere. They're still popular with
| fans of the genre (Telltale, David Cage, etc.), and adventure
| elements are now part of other genres like Action-Adventure,
| RPGs, etc.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I'm curious if we'll see an adventure game revival.
|
| With modern generative models, LLMs, diffusion and voice, one
| could imagine dynamic adventure games that are not quite the
| same each time, and which could support coop play so you can
| play with your friends.
|
| Maybe not this year but if the models improve like they have
| for another year or two...?
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| After 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 wrote:
| Just 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...
|
| I think this says more about how worrisome UBS is than how
| unreliable auditing is.
| TheBlight wrote:
| People 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 wrote:
| _> 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.
| zoky wrote:
| That's a pretty broad statement to make given that of the seven
| bestselling video game franchises of all time (Mario, Tetris,
| Call of Duty, Pokemon, 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.
| AngryData wrote:
| Im not sure I would even consider CoD realistic either unless
| you back to when it was primarily a single player game. It
| has good graphics that look like reality sure, but the guns
| don't handle anything like real guns would, the people don't
| move or operate like real people, and even the environments
| are cut down to impossibly small engagement areas. I would
| even say GTA is far more realistic than CoD.
| dijksterhuis wrote:
| > That's why Doom/Quake resonated. People want these
| simulations to be as realistic as possible.
|
| Doom/Quake is about as realistic as Escape From Tarkov is easy-
| going, light hearted, non-at-all-sweaty fun.
|
| > People don't strictly want to play games as much as they want
| [an] experience
|
| this would ^ probably be more accurate version of your
| statement. it's not always about realism.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| If I could strafe jump as well in person as Quake, well,
| everyone would know
| titaphraz wrote:
| > People want these simulations to be as realistic as possible
|
| Have you ever played D&D? There is no graphics, it's all in
| your head. I've played _amazing_ adventures many years ago that
| I can still visualize in my head.
| chongli wrote:
| _People don 't strictly want to play games as much as they want
| to experience alternate realities_
|
| That's a very sweeping statement to make about a very large
| number of unrelated people. I happen to be a gamer and your
| statement doesn't describe my wishes or experiences very well
| at all!
|
| I'd much rather play a game of NetHack than some new ultra-
| realistic PS5 game. I'm not the only one who feels this way.
| There a ton of other people like me. People who enjoy retro
| games, puzzle games, point and click adventure games, RPGs,
| strategy games, and countless other games that aren't focused
| on immersive graphics or realistic simulations.
| grokys wrote:
| A 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.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| Who else grew up playing 3-D Ultra Lionel Train Town Deluxe?
|
| Still works on windows, still fun.
| guidedlight wrote:
| With the IP now owned my Microsoft, I have some hope that Phil
| Spencer will revive and modernise Sierra.
|
| Am I dreaming?
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