
Sierra Gets Creative - ColinCochrane
http://www.filfre.net/2016/08/sierra-gets-creative/
======
shmerl
_> One could wish that Roberta’s ambivalence about killing her new female
heroine at every possible juncture had led her to consider the wisdom of
indulging in all that indiscriminate player-killing at all_

It's interesting, how in comparison in Loom[1], there are practically no such
deaths at all. The most that can happen - you'll get stuck with progress and
will have to return to previous areas to finish what you missed. King's Quests
on the other hand are infamous for brutal deaths caused by all kind of
mistakes, like failing to feed hungry chicken in time.

[1].
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loom_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loom_\(video_game\))

~~~
danso
That's the case with virtually every Lucasfilm game I've ever played,
including Indiana Jones: Fate of Atlantis, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango. I
believe you can die in the climaxes of those games, otherwise you just get
knocked unconscious at worst.

That feature was a nice reprieve after playing the Sierra-designed games.
Though sometimes the abrupt endings in the Sierra games had their point; for
example, forgetting to secure your weapon before taking an inmate into jail
would result in a game-over scene in Police Quest 1. Not sure how that could
be resolved the LucasFilm way.

~~~
gnarbarian
Han would solve it by shooting the inmate first.

~~~
nolok
Not in the HD re-release he wouldn't

------
danso
> _Roberta Williams, an example of that rare species of adventure-game
> designers who don’t actually play adventure games, likely had little idea
> just how torturous an experience her games actually were. Taken as a whole,
> Roberta’s consistent failings as a designer seemingly must stem from that
> inability to place herself in her player’s shoes, and from her own seeming
> disinterest in improving upon her previous works in any terms but those of
> their surface bells and whistles. That said, however, King’s Quest IV‘s
> unusually extreme failings, even in terms of a Roberta Williams design,
> quite obviously stemmed from the frenzied circumstances of its creation as
> well._

Wow, I had no idea that KQ4 was so controversial. I remember it fondly, though
now that I think about it, I remember it fondly for its graphics and setting.
I don't remember actually ever finishing it. All the KQ games do seem poorly
designed in retrospect but I do remember chugging through the first few of
them through trial and error. I've wondered if that perseverance is something
that is part of the stupid bullheadedness of youth (or the weakness of age),
or if at the time, we just accepted that games were supposed to be unfair and
cruel.

~~~
Reedx
Same here! I absolutely loved the King's Quest and Space Quest games (and
really most of Sierra's adventure games) and have very fond memories of them.
Definitely a big part of it was due to the settings, characters and stories.
And the interaction and exploration of those worlds... on a computer. Which I
was just naturally fascinated by. I was also fascinated by Ken and Roberta's
story about creating games from their kitchen table. That seemed magical to
me. I poured over every page of their pamphlets and magazine (Interaction).

I know that if those games were released today there's no way I would play
them for long and I'd recognize them as poorly designed. But when I was a kid
every new game was a big deal and so I pushed through the puzzles (I felt
certain ones were ridiculous, but generally just accepted them as what
adventure game puzzles were). Sometimes I'd get stuck and come back months
later. Ultimately I beat most of the King's Quest and Space Quest games, even
years later.

It's hard to imagine that today with the unlimited buffet of cheap or free
games. The constraint used to be money, now it's time. Even for kids.

~~~
djsumdog
That entire genre had a lot of issues. People like to talk about the Gabriel
Knight 3 / cat hair moustache as being the pivotal moment for the death of
adventure games, but really it was all along in the design.

Puzzles were difficult, natural language processing is a hard problems, and
commands/grammers could get weird/complex. The icon based point-n-click
cleared this up a little, but Sierra had a business model build around needing
to order hint books (or play with large groups of people).

No one wants hint books, because once you use one hint, you tend to just keep
using them. With the Internet and things like UHS for adventure games, this
model kinda hit a wall.

Telltale, Double Fine, et. al. brought this gene back by treating it more as
an interactive story. The puzzles were less crazy and you could get through
them without a hint guide.

Broken Age is a stealer example of both versions of this genre. Part I is more
like Telltale, except with better puzzles. It's easy to get through, but still
challenging. Part 2 goes back to the Sierra model though, with puzzles that
make little sense and are insolvable for most casual and moderate gamers
without a hint guide.

~~~
Eric_WVGG
"cat hair mustache" that bit is a classic.
[http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html](http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html)

------
mschuster91
Ah, hearing the name "Sierra On-Line" brings back some memories. Caesar, Earth
Siege... Does anyone here happen to know where their licensing
portfolio/copyrights/code have ended up?

~~~
nolok
Vivendi Games (owned by Vivendi Universal, the huge french conglomerate)
bought them (they also owned Blizzard, amongst others), then VG merged with
Activision and were in majority control, then Vivendi (parent company) decided
they wanted out of the gaming business to focus on other ares (one being
telecoms) and sold their shares to Activision, making a nice profit.

In what is one of the most Vivendi "we don't know what we want to do" event,
just a couple years later they then decided they wanted to sell their main
french telecom company (SFR) and at the same time bought Gameloft and
agressively bought Ubisoft shares (the two biggest french video games
companies).

~~~
mschuster91
So right now Activision should be the rightsholder?

Too bad. I highly doubt Activision will ever release them. I tried to contact
a bunch of companies via email, regarding the source code for EarthSiege 2,
but never got a reply :(

If anyone knows anyone who worked on ES2 and might shed a light on some weird
things I encountered during reverse engineering, please contact me!

------
eriknstr
I found a video with a full play-through of King's Quest IV without
commentary. The video is almost an hour long.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCqDIRMRTTY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCqDIRMRTTY)

Interesting to watch, but I can certainly see what they meant when they said
that the game was fundamentally broken, that it requires you to perform a
bunch of actions which you must wander around trying to figure out pretty much
without any help at all.

As a play-through video, I enjoyed it. As I game, I would have become very
frustrated, I would not have enjoyed it and I would have given up within short
time.

The story as a whole combines a lot of folk tales and IMO does so to pretty
good success. I also think that there are some elements from the game which
would be worth basing another game on for something like a gamejam entry. For
example, the scarab that scares away the zombies and the mummy, that could be
reused in such a game. Just, the scarab would not be so hard to come by.

~~~
aesthetics1
Did anyone play this game when it was out (not the recent reworked versions)?
GameFAQs did not exist, nor did reddit, forums, or other places to discuss
strategy and tactics for these sorts of games. There was however a hotline on
the back of the instruction manual that you could call for hints - for a low
low fee of course.

I remember thinking that the game designers were probably asked to make some
of the puzzles frustratingly difficult so that a post-sale revenue stream
could be realized.

I also remember playing through these games without the help of the tip
hotline. Sharing ideas and discussing strategies with my family. It made for a
very fun experience and a very rewarding feeling when you finally figured
something out.

It also made for a very frustrating experience when you did something wrong or
missed something along the way and had to go back to a very early save point
to fix your mistake. I guess you could say that this was poor design but I
still have very fond memories of the series.

------
stuart78
Great post, I love the "basic" challenges of development back in the early
days. Dealing with Sound, in this article, jumped out at me. We take so much
for granted about how our computers work today.

~~~
blakeyrat
The article doesn't dwell on it much but those "primitive" 8-bit Commodore 64
machines had the legendary SID sound chip inside of them that put most early
PC-compatible sound chips to shame. (As did the Amiga and Macintosh, the
Macintosh famously shipping with a digitized speech synthesizer back in 1984.)

Of course for most of that era, the PC was "controlled" by IBM who had zero
respect for video games.

------
justinlardinois
Worth noting that a bunch of Sierra games are in this week's Humble Bundle,
including all of the King's Quest games at the higher tiers.

[https://www.humblebundle.com/sierra-
bundle](https://www.humblebundle.com/sierra-bundle)

------
danso
h/t r/themakingofgames

A NBC News piece about Sierra Online in 1983; brought back lots of great
memories, and feels like the 80's version of the feature piece on a startup
unicorn:
[http://www.nbcuniversalarchives.com/nbcuni/clip/51A17175_s01...](http://www.nbcuniversalarchives.com/nbcuni/clip/51A17175_s01.do?assetId=clip_35754451)

------
roschdal
You might enjoy Ken Williams yatch blog:
[http://www.kensblog.com](http://www.kensblog.com)

