**Hmm. I Titled the thread Sierra Oddities, but it dropped the word Oddities… that’s odd.***
Hi everyone! Like all of you here, I’ve been a Sierra fan for life but I just started getting into this site after using Sierra for a class project regarding the change in logo and how it reflects the image of a company’s technical documents. (everyone else was doing the BORING Cingular/AT&T merger) This is what got me back into re-discovering the games. This site, as well as many others like it have helped me learn a lot more about Sierra than I thought I knew!!
Introductions aside, and not wanting to clutter the post with my personal reflections, I’ve noticed a few oddities lately when searching e-bay auctions to help fill holes in my Sierra collection. For one, I’ve always been a fan of the tan-colored disk labels with the picture of half-dome on them, but only really associated them with the 3.5″ low-density 720k disks. I’ve only ever seen the white lables with the color bands on high density disks for the newer 256-color games. (I associated this with the change from the old, 16-color, parser Sierra to the new, 256… well, you get the point)
Much to my surprise, I noticed a version of Space Quest 4 – high density disks – with the tan labels! Now I assume this was during the transition period to the colorband labels, but it’s still cool to see them on black disks for a new(er) release.
This leads me to my second oddity discovery: The “odd” version of King’s Quest 5. (with the goofy photo of King Graham dragging everything and the family dog into the game on the box) The 256-color versions I’ve seen of this release all had 8 disks on 3.5″ and the 9th (startup disk) on a 5.25″ What was the reason behind this? Seems to me this would cause some problems along the way somewhere. Later versions had all 9 disks on 3.5″
While on the topic of disk colors, in both the Space Quest 4 and King’s Quest 5 listings I saw on eBay, the 3.5″ disks changed colors from black to blue for a couple of the disks. Now while this is not uncommon (We’ve all had that one “odball” colored disk, either white or blue, throw off our perfectly symmetrical Sierra sets!) it IS uncommon to see a high density disk that’s blue. (they’re all usually black unless it’s an AOL disk) So this leads me to my next question: Were these early releases of these games, on the tan mountain labels a mix of high and low density disks?
Other disk label “oddities” include the picture of Half-Dome being glossy on some labels (like my QFG2 set) but not on later ones (like my Jones in the Fast Lane set). I assume the change in label design (to the color bands) was due to a cost issue. Those full color pics on each label were nice, but probably VERY expensive!!
Had a few more oddities on my mind before I started writing, but they escape me right now. I’ll come back when I think of them! 😉
Tom.