(re: Why the hell did anyone want to buy Sierra?)
When you’re dealing with crooked businessmen and multinational corporations, common sense and logic don’t always apply. Unfortunately, that’s the real world. Study the corporate history of Atari and you’ll see some of the same horrendous decisions that ended up ruining a great company, made by stiff suits who wouldn’t know a quality computer/video game if they were smashed over the head with one. Ken didn’t want things to turn out the way they did, and he certainly didn’t think they would when he made the sale.
If a sad lesson can be learned from Sierra, it’s that sometimes good things can be ruined by people with greedy and dishonest intentions. The american dream becomes the american nightmare.
If you want to learn a positive lesson from Sierra, you can look at from a different perspective and the nightmare becomes a really nice dream – a young couple discover a great idea, they bust their humps turning it into product and building a company, they become rich, and now they’re retired, still relatively young, and boating around somewhere exotic for the next couple of months while the rest of us toil from 9 to 5.
If that sounds good to you, then borrow some money and start your own computer game company. We’ll be happy to purchase your games if they’re good. I’m working to open my own bar – capitalism, ingenuity, hard work, a little luck, mix it up and you have success!