That seems like a horrible design choice, though. It just randomly and gratuitously punishes the player for something they couldn't even have foreseen.
It's not the same. I still remember playing Grim Fandango all the way to one scene before the end, getting hit by a bug that meant I couldn't trigger the final scene, thinking "fuck this" and quitting.
I never did finish the game, even though it was the only game I'd have in a few months. Injustice is injustice, and players resent it.
Did Sierra games explain their reasoning? Was it "well, you didn't give me information when we first met two years ago, so I won't tell you who my boss is now", or was it indistinguishable from a bug?
From memory, and it's been a few years, Sierra games had both bugs and severe plot-related consequences.
Usually of the "This thing happened because you did / didn't do that thing" format.
E.g. the infamous bomb detonating your police car, if you didn't first walk around it to complete an inspection (something no one would have thought of the first time) or the myriad of ways to arbitrarily die in Kings Quest by walking onto the wrong screen
If you played Sierra adventure games... that was just part of the schtick tho.
I wonder what percentage of that was given to death scenes in Sierra games? In e.g. Space Quest 3, there were a lot of gruesome, unexpected ways to die.
I meant it from the perspective that games had to be made longer (in terms of playthrough) without using more bytes.
And killing the player and making them replay the game adds a LOT of playtime.
Also, and probably more importantly, I feel like gamers' attention spans and tolerance for bullshit was higher. We mostly played games because we were bored. If not {game}, then what?
We didn't have access to the everything, whenever, wherever post-mobile-internet, on-demand world. The web was slow, static, and sucked for ~1980-2005. (Flash was a poor substitute for real games)
That's a fascinating question though... how much disk space did death scenes take up?!
