I worked at Papyrus during the Sierra acquisition; Sierra was a great parent company and Ken a sharp and fair CEO. It all went pear-shaped when Sierra was acquired and then had a series of transactions with financial rather than gaming companies shortly after the end of this story, unfortunately.
> Even the much-vaunted look of King’s Quest VII, although impressive in its individual parts, made for a rather discordant jumble when taken in the aggregate, being the work of so many different teams of animators.
It always really bummed me out that the beautiful oil painting style of KQ 5 and 6 and SQ 4 and 5 got thrown out for the cartoon/primitive CG style of the sequels.
Like compare the atmosphere of the main town in QFG4 to the main town in QFG5:
I concur, the only series I can think of that really nailed that transitional era in a way that still holds up are the PlayStation Final Fantasy games and their use of prerendered backgrounds that clip 3D character models.
I really wish Sierra had taken the same path, hand painted backgrounds with 3D models for Kings Quest would have looked something like Bravely Default does today.
the most bizzare transition IMO was between the most beautiful Monkey Island 3 (comic look!) and Monkey Island 4 (3D - although they did their best to make it charming), granted this was a few years after the SNES/N64 transition but all the more disappointing. Actually, worse than the graphics was the controls.
I’ve seen a few of these kind of articles lately on here, and I really enjoy them. I put a _lot_ of hours into the Quest for Glory franchise as a kid, and always wondered what happened to it. Sierra just seemed to vanish in the mid/late 90s. Very interesting to read about the history now.
Also for anyone wanting to learn the history from the man himself Ken Williams recently wrote a book on Sierra’s rise and fall as one of the industry’s top gaming studios.
Obviously he wasn’t there for the tail end of things during the acquisitions and fraudulent period but what I found most interesting is how Sierra was bootstrapped in the first place.
Ken is a brilliant thinker and had the foresight to build a game engine that Roberta could plug and play her game content in because she admitted to not being a great coder.
Later Ken wanted his next generation games to be built as a virtual machine (The Sierra Creative Interpreter) which meant they only had to make the game once and build the VM for different architectures. Again a brilliant move.
> Later Ken wanted his next generation games to be built as a virtual machine (The Sierra Creative Interpreter) which meant they only had to make the game once and build the VM for different architectures.
Like Infocom did from the beginning with their Z-Machine VM.
I read Ken's (self-published) book and was a bit underwhelmed. Maybe interesting to diehard fans though.
The chapter on Sierra in Steven Levy's "Hackers" was much more engaging (in fact probably made me want to become a published game author).
Ken only mentions the Levy chapter in passing which is too bad — Levy did a fantastic job of painting a picture of the adolescent coding Mecca that Sierra was at that time. All night D&D, 2-liter's of Coke, coding, hot tubs and gaming....
The Quest for Glory series was my favorite as a kid. I'm not sure how many times I beat QFG1. I never did beat 2. But I clearly remember staying home sick one day from school and beating 3 in one sitting. Too bad that was probably the worst of the bunch.
Another favorite of mine was Conquests of Longbow. I think that one was a little more obscure?
I live one town over from Oakhurst part of the year and it's really just astonishing to think of it as any sort of tech hub at all. It's too bad that Sierra took all of that when they failed.
I had to laugh when I saw the Trophy Bass game. My first big program was a fishing game, around 1974. Text only, there were no graphics back then. 20 years too early I guess.
I vividly remember Phantasmagoria. It turned out to be rather boring. Still, the novelty of full motion video was striking when I played it for the first time.
Of all FMV games, the only one that clicked for me was the Rebel Assault. Star Wars visuals were impressive, even if space combat was nowhere near as interesting as in Tie Fighter.
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