(re: Sierra History Questions for Ken) Sorry for the abbreviated response .. as you suspected, I’m heading out of town for Thanksgiving … actually, I’ll be gone for about eight months except for a few days – so, Roberta and I are scrambling today.
1) Was AGI designed by Sierra and if so who? Was it vector based like SCI?
AGI was designed between Jeff Stephenson (one of the first Sierra employees) and myself. It’s primary difference with SCI was that it was a normal procedural language, like C. SCI was 100% object oriented, like C++. I used to say at the time, and I’m fairly certain I’m right, that we shipped more object oriented code in the 80’s than any other company on earth.
(2) Were there any qualifications you had for your artists in the early days? Was computer experience needed?
There was a gradual improvement in the quality of the people we hired; from initially amateur artists, to professionals. By the end we were regularly hiring people from the film industry.
(3) I understand the artists worked with hand drawn sketches when creating images for games such as King’s Quest IV. Were these sketches scanned in and traced over with vector lines or just used as simple reference?
I think different artists did it differently – but, my recollection is that some artists started with a pencil sketch, scanned it, and then painted on top onscreen (for animation). For the backgrounds, these were almost always painted, and then scanned as final paintings.
-Ken W