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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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".
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/
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.
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.
> 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.
Who else grew up playing 3-D Ultra Lionel Train Town Deluxe?
Still works on windows, still fun.
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.
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?
There's some of that in Steven Levy's book Hackers, which has a section on the 80s called "Game Hackers: The Sierras."
Browse the blog archives, Mr. Maher has written repeatedly about Sierra and their games: https://www.filfre.net/sitemap/
Edit: common homophone issue
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?