Similar topic explored in videos from a friend of mine I call the "Adventure Game sommelier," because he's played so many of them and can recommend you one for precisely your needs. The first
Sierra's Thexder haunted me for years, because I couldn't understand the tinny Japanese at the start of it at all or even tell what language that was, but I remembered the sound from playing it on an Apple ][ GS as a kid despite that.
And tell me if you can hear "Siera ga ookuri suru Thexder" (Thexder presented by Sierra) there. Even now, at most I can make out Sierra and a distorted bit of Thexder, even knowing how Thexder is rendered into katakana.
I mean its a bad example, but not the only example of obtuse puzzles in games preventing forward progress in game. Dead ends and not being able to finish if messed up a previous steps were real problems. This was a bigger issue when the internet wasn't available to help out. I like adventure games, but even still they can be difficult and frustrating (although maybe I'm not great at them)
Puzzle Dependency charts in game design help this (from Ron Gilbert/ Monkey Island etc...).
I remember playing Space Quest IV and we got to a part where we were completely blocked. We got parents permission to call Sierra's 1-900 hint line (who knows how much that cost) to find out that the game won't process until you stand on a certain pixel in the back of the arcade. There was no reason to go there, so while we had walked around the arcade many times apparently we never stepped on that precise pixel.
I was stuck on that puzzle for years, let a friend borrow it, and he confidently announces the solution a couple days later. He swore he had uncovered it through trial and error, but I didn’t believe him. Still don’t. You weren’t running a BBS in the 90s, were you?
Back then as a kid, I made dozens of attempts at SQ5, the best I managed before giving up was dying in some ventilation shaft towards finale. This was my first point and click adventure, but hostile game design decisions really put me off other Sierra games, the only one I finished was SQ1 VGA. Arbitrary actions you have to take with consequences hours later are such BS.
> 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.
>Did you read all of that? If not, good for you! Dumb as your television enjoying ass probably is, you're smarter than the genius adventure gamers who, in a truly inappropriate display of autism-level concentration, willingly played the birdbrained events described in that passage.
I laughed a bit too hard at this. Pure "follow my train of thought" puzzles aren't the most fun, and I think they fit best in the larger context of something like Uncharted. Just give me a skip button.
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.
Jimmy Maher has that rare mix of deep research and genuinely engaging storytelling. He somehow makes technical or historical rabbit holes feel like page-turners
> 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.
And from Steven Levy's Hackers, she was one of the women in the hot tub for the cover and ad for the game Softporn Adventure, published by the company that was soon renamed to Sierra On-line.
I always found those photos deeply unsettling. None of the women look particularly happy about being there. “If I don’t do this, Timmy doesn’t get that operation” vibes. The photo in the advertisement was bad enough, the outtakes are worse.
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".
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?
On the other hand, an audit that makes your customer look good to their customers is great for repeat business. The trick is checking for things that people actually care about, rather than box-checking activities.
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.
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?
> I remeber a space quest scene where a room full of computers was a joke on sierra offices.
The pirates of pestulon base in space quest 3 I think. It was pretty funny. Making fun of the cubicle office which was pretty much Avant la lettre back then (i know in Europe we only really got those in the late 90s). In 2000 I still had my own office as a trainee
With a boss that goes around whipping the developers as well. As a kid this was forever etched into my mind as what a game software company looks like.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Same memories for me, but with King’s quest 3. I still have the tiny English-french dictionary I wrecked by opening it and translating every and each word of each sentence, for that [6 months] adventure. To get rid of the wizard, become a bird, kill that nasty spider, go into bear’s house, etc, etc…
The guys who created Space Quest kickstarted another sci-fi comedy adventure game... 13 years ago. It went (and is still going) poorly, and Kotaku just posted about the ordeal today:
I’ve been waiting 13 years and just received a Steam early access code a few days ago. Someone did some regression analysis a while back based on average kickstarter demographics and estimated that 25% of the people who kickstarted the project are already dead. 13 years feels like a lifetime ago. I’m grateful they kept chipping away at the game instead of walking away, but it has been disappointing.
To be honest I'm not sure I want to relive that era; my memories of it are some of the fondest, but I don't think I'd like to play these games nowadays (it's been a while since I replayed them using DOSBox or ScummVM!).
To my knowledge there was a long lockout period in CUC Sierra acquisition. When Sierra employees were finally able to sell their CUC stock, it had already tanked as the massive fraud was exposed.
Business was good in those days if you had an audience and could distribute your game to your customers more or less direct. Retail was very expensive, but if you were selling shareware your distribution costs were really low and you weren't giving anybody 30-50% of your take. Titles may not have sold i.e. 10 million copies back then, but you could make good money off a single game, and it was cheaper & faster to develop a game. The 'if's I just listed are pretty significant, of course.
For one example, Ultima 1 was developed by a couple people, sold for ~$40 USD, and eventually sold over 1.5m copies according to https://www.newspapers.com/article/austin-american-statesman... and other sources. So that alone probably made everyone involved in the game's development millionaires, even if the publisher took a huge cut.
If you're feeling dejavu reading this article like I was, you might have read this previous piece on Vice [0] four years ago which also drew on Ken William's book, including many of the same quotes. It was discussed here as well [1].
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.
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, Pokémon, 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.
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.
Fair enough, though I’d argue that it’s difficult to get much closer to the real thing without signing a contract. As the old lie goes, “Dulce et decorum est, Pro Controller mori.”
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.
That’s awesome! I have been playing off and on since 2009!
If you haven’t heard of it, check out The November NetHack Tournament [1]. I played it for the first time in November of last year and almost got a Wizard win (ran out of time) after getting so close with a Monk (got killed by Rodney’s touch of death after he stole my only source of magic resistance).
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
I assure you that there is a niche market of folks who absolutely love the latter. My father was in the military logistics group.
It's not really about the content - it's a McLuhanesque phenomenon of "the medium is the message". When CD-ROM became affordable for consumers, investment into content that demonstrated the power of CD flooded in.
A few years later, the investment cycle moved on towards 3D and online. Different medium, different message. That really is all that is needed to explain the trends. Galaga remains fun and playable, but nobody is marketing Galaga as the next big thing, so it isn't making sales charts.
That must have been why PacMan was such a dismal failure. How realistic is to play a giant yellow mouth chomping on dots in a maze while being chased by ghosts
I'm sorry to disagree but I want to play games that engage my flow state: Fast, skill-based, noisy, full of acceleration and explosions. Realism has nothing to do with it.
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.
The part that really got me was him packing up and leaving with no fanfare, no goodbye, nothing. Like, this guy built Sierra from nothing. And it ends with him slipping out the back door.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hmm yes but telltale almost went out of business. And since their revival their games have been more actioney. I don't think their games were truly inventive either. Their monkey island episodes were ok but nothing as characteristic as the real ones.
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?
Before Sierra's end, they had already been crushes, sales wise, by Lucasarts, which had far better game design principles. No dead man walking situations, or random deaths.
Still, the genre isn't dead today, but modern adventure games owe far more to Lucasarts than to Sierra. Even when the graphics are Sierra-like, like in The Crimson Diamond, we can see how far we've gone from the different Quest series
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...?
This has been a big LLM side-scene almost since they arrived. There are models optimised for D&D-style game play.
It's not my personal interest, so I'm not sure how good they are at creating believable puzzles. But they're certainly an obvious thing on the LLM scene.
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
Similar topic explored in videos from a friend of mine I call the "Adventure Game sommelier," because he's played so many of them and can recommend you one for precisely your needs. The first
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOPiSYUSrQ0
and the second, which is one of my favorite videos of all time (if you only watch one, I'd pick this one)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMVl5U3SlS0
I think he mentions Old Man Murray's piece in the second!
Sierra's Thexder haunted me for years, because I couldn't understand the tinny Japanese at the start of it at all or even tell what language that was, but I remembered the sound from playing it on an Apple ][ GS as a kid despite that.
Just watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si_iveNrUPo
And tell me if you can hear "Siera ga ookuri suru Thexder" (Thexder presented by Sierra) there. Even now, at most I can make out Sierra and a distorted bit of Thexder, even knowing how Thexder is rendered into katakana.
Important context that's come to light since then
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_hair_mustache_puzzle
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".
I mean its a bad example, but not the only example of obtuse puzzles in games preventing forward progress in game. Dead ends and not being able to finish if messed up a previous steps were real problems. This was a bigger issue when the internet wasn't available to help out. I like adventure games, but even still they can be difficult and frustrating (although maybe I'm not great at them)
Puzzle Dependency charts in game design help this (from Ron Gilbert/ Monkey Island etc...).
https://grumpygamer.com/puzzle_dependency_charts/
I remember playing Space Quest IV and we got to a part where we were completely blocked. We got parents permission to call Sierra's 1-900 hint line (who knows how much that cost) to find out that the game won't process until you stand on a certain pixel in the back of the arcade. There was no reason to go there, so while we had walked around the arcade many times apparently we never stepped on that precise pixel.
I was stuck on that puzzle for years, let a friend borrow it, and he confidently announces the solution a couple days later. He swore he had uncovered it through trial and error, but I didn’t believe him. Still don’t. You weren’t running a BBS in the 90s, were you?
Back then as a kid, I made dozens of attempts at SQ5, the best I managed before giving up was dying in some ventilation shaft towards finale. This was my first point and click adventure, but hostile game design decisions really put me off other Sierra games, the only one I finished was SQ1 VGA. Arbitrary actions you have to take with consequences hours later are such BS.
It used to be pretty common to buy strategy books for the really tough games!
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.
>Did you read all of that? If not, good for you! Dumb as your television enjoying ass probably is, you're smarter than the genius adventure gamers who, in a truly inappropriate display of autism-level concentration, willingly played the birdbrained events described in that passage.
I laughed a bit too hard at this. Pure "follow my train of thought" puzzles aren't the most fun, and I think they fit best in the larger context of something like Uncharted. Just give me a skip button.
God that is great
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/
Jimmy Maher has that rare mix of deep research and genuinely engaging storytelling. He somehow makes technical or historical rabbit holes feel like page-turners
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.
> 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.
She also built most of the intellectual property.
And from Steven Levy's Hackers, she was one of the women in the hot tub for the cover and ad for the game Softporn Adventure, published by the company that was soon renamed to Sierra On-line.
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softporn_Adventure
Interesting to read the link to the Leisure Suit Larry game.
There are a couple more photos from that photoset https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/12/the-o...
I always found those photos deeply unsettling. None of the women look particularly happy about being there. “If I don’t do this, Timmy doesn’t get that operation” vibes. The photo in the advertisement was bad enough, the outtakes are worse.
Yeah, that exchange says so much in just a few lines.
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".
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.
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.
In this case I would suggest that is Credit Suisse that is the problem - UBS were forced to take it over when problems were found.
Credit Suisse no longer exists. Whatever problems Credit Suisse had, UBS now has.
An audit that makes your customer look bad isn't good for repeat business.
On the other hand, an audit that makes your customer look good to their customers is great for repeat business. The trick is checking for things that people actually care about, rather than box-checking activities.
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.
So true. Money has this weird way of making people seem smarter or more trustworthy than they actually are, especially if they talk the part
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?
Browse the blog archives, Mr. Maher has written repeatedly about Sierra and their games: https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/
Edit: common homophone issue
> I remeber a space quest scene where a room full of computers was a joke on sierra offices.
The pirates of pestulon base in space quest 3 I think. It was pretty funny. Making fun of the cubicle office which was pretty much Avant la lettre back then (i know in Europe we only really got those in the late 90s). In 2000 I still had my own office as a trainee
There's some of that in Steven Levy's book Hackers, which has a section on the 80s called "Game Hackers: The Sierras."
Sierra games had this uniquely goofy, irreverent tone that felt super personal, like the devs were sneaking in jokes while no one was looking
With a boss that goes around whipping the developers as well. As a kid this was forever etched into my mind as what a game software company looks like.
It wasnt that much off, right?
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
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 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.
A love letter to New Orleans.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Same memories for me, but with King’s quest 3. I still have the tiny English-french dictionary I wrecked by opening it and translating every and each word of each sentence, for that [6 months] adventure. To get rid of the wizard, become a bird, kill that nasty spider, go into bear’s house, etc, etc…
The guys who created Space Quest kickstarted another sci-fi comedy adventure game... 13 years ago. It went (and is still going) poorly, and Kotaku just posted about the ordeal today:
https://kotaku.com/spaceventure-space-quest-kickstarter-stea...
I backed the project, but at one of the lowest levels, so I'm not really mad. It's just kind of sad.
I’ve been waiting 13 years and just received a Steam early access code a few days ago. Someone did some regression analysis a while back based on average kickstarter demographics and estimated that 25% of the people who kickstarted the project are already dead. 13 years feels like a lifetime ago. I’m grateful they kept chipping away at the game instead of walking away, but it has been disappointing.
The Two Guys From Andromeda? Wow.
To be honest I'm not sure I want to relive that era; my memories of it are some of the fondest, but I don't think I'd like to play these games nowadays (it's been a while since I replayed them using DOSBox or ScummVM!).
That and Larry 1 were my first two PC games. I had to play them using a Spanish/English dictionary. I was 10 years old.
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-...
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.
I wonder how the early employees did in the deal. Did they cash-out as well?
To my knowledge there was a long lockout period in CUC Sierra acquisition. When Sierra employees were finally able to sell their CUC stock, it had already tanked as the massive fraud was exposed.
(Spoiler for Part II of this article, I guess!)
This is interesting was there already enough money in videogames to make people multi miljonairs in those days?
Business was good in those days if you had an audience and could distribute your game to your customers more or less direct. Retail was very expensive, but if you were selling shareware your distribution costs were really low and you weren't giving anybody 30-50% of your take. Titles may not have sold i.e. 10 million copies back then, but you could make good money off a single game, and it was cheaper & faster to develop a game. The 'if's I just listed are pretty significant, of course.
For one example, Ultima 1 was developed by a couple people, sold for ~$40 USD, and eventually sold over 1.5m copies according to https://www.newspapers.com/article/austin-american-statesman... and other sources. So that alone probably made everyone involved in the game's development millionaires, even if the publisher took a huge cut.
If you're feeling dejavu reading this article like I was, you might have read this previous piece on Vice [0] four years ago which also drew on Ken William's book, including many of the same quotes. It was discussed here as well [1].
0: https://www.vice.com/en/article/inside-story-sierra-online-d...
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24941667
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.
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, Pokémon, 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.
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.
Fair enough, though I’d argue that it’s difficult to get much closer to the real thing without signing a contract. As the old lie goes, “Dulce et decorum est, Pro Controller mori.”
> 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.
If I could strafe jump as well in person as Quake, well, everyone would know
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.
Always thrilled to see another nethack player in the wild!
Been playing on and off for 20 years and have only managed a single ascension in that time!
That’s awesome! I have been playing off and on since 2009!
If you haven’t heard of it, check out The November NetHack Tournament [1]. I played it for the first time in November of last year and almost got a Wizard win (ran out of time) after getting so close with a Monk (got killed by Rodney’s touch of death after he stole my only source of magic resistance).
I’m looking forward to playing again this year!
[1] https://tnnt.org/
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
I assure you that there is a niche market of folks who absolutely love the latter. My father was in the military logistics group.
People want both of those things, possibly different people.
It's not really about the content - it's a McLuhanesque phenomenon of "the medium is the message". When CD-ROM became affordable for consumers, investment into content that demonstrated the power of CD flooded in.
A few years later, the investment cycle moved on towards 3D and online. Different medium, different message. That really is all that is needed to explain the trends. Galaga remains fun and playable, but nobody is marketing Galaga as the next big thing, so it isn't making sales charts.
People say they want realism in games. They don't. That's just a thing people have learned to say.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuTkgi7scKo
That must have been why PacMan was such a dismal failure. How realistic is to play a giant yellow mouth chomping on dots in a maze while being chased by ghosts
> People want these simulations to be as realistic as possible.
Isn't this what is leading AAA game studios to financial ruin these days? Incrementally improved realism has become unaffordable.
I'm sorry to disagree but I want to play games that engage my flow state: Fast, skill-based, noisy, full of acceleration and explosions. Realism has nothing to do with it.
Ah, so that's why Minecraft got so incredibly popular, because realism. /s
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.
Who else grew up playing 3-D Ultra Lionel Train Town Deluxe?
Still works on windows, still fun.
The part that really got me was him packing up and leaving with no fanfare, no goodbye, nothing. Like, this guy built Sierra from nothing. And it ends with him slipping out the back door.
With the IP now owned my Microsoft, I have some hope that Phil Spencer will revive and modernise Sierra.
Am I dreaming?
I only know Sierra because they published Half-life. P&C adventure games were already dying in 1998.
You are not my son.
“KEN SENT ME”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is Tekken erasure.
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.
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.
Hmm yes but telltale almost went out of business. And since their revival their games have been more actioney. I don't think their games were truly inventive either. Their monkey island episodes were ok but nothing as characteristic as the real ones.
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?
Before Sierra's end, they had already been crushes, sales wise, by Lucasarts, which had far better game design principles. No dead man walking situations, or random deaths.
Still, the genre isn't dead today, but modern adventure games owe far more to Lucasarts than to Sierra. Even when the graphics are Sierra-like, like in The Crimson Diamond, we can see how far we've gone from the different Quest series
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...?
This has been a big LLM side-scene almost since they arrived. There are models optimised for D&D-style game play.
It's not my personal interest, so I'm not sure how good they are at creating believable puzzles. But they're certainly an obvious thing on the LLM scene.