(re: re: re: re: re: re: re: PQ and real police training) > “Hopefully, I’m not wrong on this: but I belive Rod was married to, or living with, or both, Tammy Dargan – who ran the SWAT project.” Any truth in that Rod? I can image it already, two SWAT fanatics living together, SWAT stuff everywhere and a whole armoury in the basement :p > “It’s really sad how they screwed up Sierra. I remember thinking that it was OK for Roberta and I to sell, because Sierra was strong enough to withstand just about anything. One expression I used to use was that “I wanted to build a company that our grandkids could be proud of”. I always wanted to focus Sierra on a 100 year game plan, and do the little things right that would keep us “in the game” for many generations, even when it might mean temporary pain in return for long-term gain. I thought we could weather out periods of time when there might be poor management. Now I know I was wrong. Bad management can bring down a good company with amazing speed.” Did you ever consider to keep the company and have someone else run the day to day operations while you and Roberta took it a bit more easy and maybe just advise? I guess you probably did think of it but I just like to know what made you sell in stead of keeping it. > “BTW- Ken is on the cover of the SWAT 3 boxes (guy in the center).” Ken(neth) Thatcher you mean right? > “Lots of stories to tell about the SWAT days as I could go on and on….” Please share some with us 🙂 > “many of my Sierra dev. team members went on to make SOCOM 2 at Zipper interactive.” How many people left in total and how many are still at Sierra from the SWAT (3/UJ) team? I know about some of them but not all. So many people left or got laid off at Sierra from different departments there is hardly anyone left anymore it seems… What did the police departments/ SWAT think of those space helmets in SWAT 3 btw Rod? As I said before SWAT 3 seems to be a true Sierra game to me for the reasons mentioned above somewhere but also because in the beginning they offered a lot of support and great FREE downloads to upgrade the first single player version, Close Quarters Battle, with Multiplayer, a lot of free maps, mods and editing tools. The website had a lot of info and was kept up to date. Probably also because in the beginning it was a new game of course but still… now it is pretty much dead. Also some time ago the company did not want to make the 2.2 patch to fix some (serious) bugs, it was the company not the developers. The developers were great and did their best to help and fix it. They looked up some old code where they already fixed some bugs, called old ex developers to see if they knew some more stuff, and interacted nicely with the fans to try and fix it, bugged management to release a patch/fix etc. Of course the game was old and a small patch for a small community (as SWAT was) was not very profitable and would cost (a lot) of money, we knew that. But reading some of Ken’s posts on this website I would believe the old Sierra might have released it. What do you think Ken / Rod? They also never shipped the TGOTY version to Europe even though you can still buy SWAT, SWAT 2 and SWAT CQB/ Elite Edition here. I just saw an advertisement paper of a toy store which is offering “SWAT Generations” now, which include the SWAT 1/2/3 EE version but not the TGOTY. The SWAT series must still sell. Rod, since you are not working for Sierra anymore could you tell us some more about the reasons why you left and how things were going with SWAT:UJ that you didn’t like? What do you think of the Sierra before (VUG) and the Sierra now, since you experienced both? Ken, if you ever decide to make a new game or start a new game company there are a lot of (ex) developers from Sierra who were laid off or left (hope most found a job though) so there is plenty of talent out there to recruit. I think the old Sierra way will definitely sell games. It also seems to be a trend that ex developers of large companies start their own game company and make great games, like Infinity Ward with Call of Duty for instance. Also Sierra seems to use more and more external development teams to developer their games. So there is still a large market for good original/ innovating games made by dedicated (small) companies Ken 🙂 Most companies do however follow (the current) trends/themes like the WWII theme and now it’s the Vietnam theme I think. When you have played one of those games and see an other one from an other company you usually think “been there done that already”. I still have not found my perfect game but SWAT 3 got pretty close, a lot of games seem to lack something or a lot, including good gameplay and have something irritating, not only bugs. Most games also seem to be released with several, sometimes very irritating, bugs and that spoils a lot of game fun. They might offer patches later on but then some players might already have put the game away. Making a perfect or good game which is not full of bugs is very rare. It’s the money again, sell it fast then fix it to a normal level. Micha
