

Sierra On-line founder Ken Williams on Adventure gaming in the 80s - peterkelly
http://guysfromandromeda.com/ken-williams-joins-chris-pope-live-interview-6812/

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mickeyp
Sierra ushered in an era of Adventure games, but it took the upstart company
games company LucasArts to perfect the formula and eliminate the tedium of
being stuck in the latter parts of the game, having failed to pick up the
right item or trigger the right sequence, way back in the beginning. Not to
mention the frustration many a gamer felt when the protagonist got killed off
for seemingly stupid reasons.

~~~
sanswork
Funny as it sounds my least favourite experience in gaming was playing the
original police quest on my uncles IBM PC(think it was like the model 2 maybe?
Circa mid-late 80s) and having the driving portions be impossible due to the
car racing around and not having any diagonal steering(20+ turns to get into a
parking spot!). It wasn't until many years later when I purchased a rerelease
that I was able to fully enjoy the depth of those early games.

~~~
mickeyp
I remember that. You had to set the game speed to a crawl; good luck going up
the on-ramps for the motorway as well.

Oh, and if you did not "walk around" the car and thus 'inspect it', your game
would end as your car "would break down." Yikes. I also remember that you had
to stop a drunk driver and if you didn't write -- and I remember this even to
this day -- "issue field sobriety test", exactly, you could never continue
with the game.

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peterkelly
What I think is so great about the way Ken ran the company was that he was
genuinely committed to giving game designers a great deal of creative freedom,
and was willing to take risks on new ideas - something you don't see a lot of
in today's large game companies.

Within the realm of adventure games, Sierra came out with an incredibly wide
range of material. Their games were a big part of what got me into computers
in the first place.

~~~
Happer
Their games also got me into computers. But they also encouraged me as a 10
year old to learn and understand English. I remember playing with 2 different
dictionaries, looking up every word I didn't understand. Thanks Ken & Roberta!

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DisconnectD
Its so freaking awesome for Ken and Roberta Williams to take such a personal
interest in the Two Guys Kickstarter. It makes me wish SIERRA didn't get
destroyed and sold off for spare parts.

Still, as long as we get the Two Guys back I'M SOLD!

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mkramlich
Ken, Roberta and Sierra are one of the biggest reasons I'm a programmer today.
Played their games as a kid, some of my own first programming was making
games, and I dreamed of running my own computer game company as an adult. The
Sierra story as told in Levy's Hackers, in particular was a big inspiration to
me as well.

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wozname
He is one of the Hackers in Steven Levy's Book pubished in 1984:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution)

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thevader
So damn cool! Just take my money already - back www.tgakick.com

