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?
The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisition
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Re: The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisition
#12Aren'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.
Re: The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisition
#13Sierra 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…
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.
Re: The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisition
#14Aren'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.
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?
Re: The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisition
#15Aren'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.
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.
Re: The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisition
#16It'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".
Re: The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisition
#17Sierra 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…
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.
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.
Re: The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisition
#18It'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.
Re: The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisition
#19Aren'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.
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 example…
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.
Re: The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisition
#20It'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 p…
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.