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Ken,
I’ve searched the site and found a lot of interesting information, however one thing eludes me. If I understand your history correctly, after your initial success with Mystery House you got out of SoCal and moved up to Coarsegold.I’ve been through Coarsegold and Oakhurst on my way to Yosemite and swung by your facilities in 1990 or so. These towns are in the middle of nowhere and seem to live solely on the traffic passing through to Yosemite. And I’d certainly have to assume that they weren’t even close to being as built up 10 years before when you moved there. To build a successful company there must have been quite a challenge. My question is this – From where did you tap the talent you needed to hire to make more games? People like Mark Crowe, Jeff Stephenson, Scott Murphy, et al?
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(re: A question for Ken – Sierra after move to Coarsegold/Oakhurst) Almost everyone who worked for Sierra in a senior position, in Oakhurst, or Coarsegold, relocated there from another city.
When Roberta and I started Sierra, we had no idea that it was going to be a huge company. We moved to Oakhurst because we wanted to live there. As the company grew, our location became a larger and larger issue.
There are those who would argue that the Oakhurst location helped us. I ultimately decided that we would be better off in Seattle, but it wasn’t an easy decision. The Yosemite area was a very cool place to live, and gave us a degree of isolation from competitors. I used to say that it would be impossible to do anything creative if we were located in the same city as any of our competitors. For years, I was biased against hiring anyone who had worked for a competitor. I wanted a Sierra product to be a SIERRA product. We had our own way of doing things, and I wanted to maintain our individuality.
-Ken W
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(re: A question for Ken – Sierra after move to Coarsegold/Oakhurst)
I assume that in Sierra’s golden age you did not need to try hard to find people who wanted to work for you. But in the beginning, was it difficult to convince your early employees to make the move out to Oakhurst? What was your method of finding them in the first place? And how did you screen them to make sure they were really the people who could do the job you wanted? Obviously, if you convinced someone to pull up their roots and move to a place where there aren’t many other job prospects, and ended up having to let them go, there would be bad blood all around. Sorry for the barrage of questions, I just think it’s unique that you could build up Sierra to the size you did given its location.
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(re: A question for Ken – Sierra after move to Coarsegold/Oakhurst) “…I assume that in Sierra’s golden age you did not need to try hard to find people who wanted to work for you. But in the beginning, was it difficult to convince your early employees to make the move out to Oakhurst? What was your method of finding them in the first place? And how did you screen them to make sure they were really the people who could do the job you wanted? Obviously, if you convinced someone to pull up their roots and move to a place where there aren’t many other job prospects, and ended up having to let them go, there would be bad blood all around. Sorry for the barrage of questions, I just think it’s unique that you could build up Sierra to the size you did given its location….”
Recruiting staff was a major battle..
And, as you noted, it was also difficult to let people go. It is always painful when someone doesn’t work out in a job, but in a large city, when it isn’t working, the employee looks for another job, and within a month or two – they find a situation that fits them better. At Sierra, if someone had quit a job in the big city, relocated to Oakhurst, and then they, or we, decided it was time to part company – it was a major trauma for them and their family. There were no other jobs around. You either worked for Sierra or moved back to the big city.
Sierra’s relocation to Seattle caused major problems for our employees in Seattle. Property values plummeted. Even if an employee wanted to make the move, they really couldn’t, because there was no way to sell their home. It was not a fun time.
I had to make a lot of tough decisions, but got through it by constantly reminding myself that if I made good decisions, Sierra would someday employ 10’s of thousands of employees, and if I made dumb business decisions, no one would have a job. I used to say “I want to build a company that my grandchildren can enjoy.” Each decision was made based on my belief in its impact over a multi-year period. Were I to compromise the future prospects of the company by not making tough decisions when they had to be made, we would have all been looking for work.
Ultimately, it all ended poorly, but I still feel I made the right decision, based on the information I had at the time. Sierra was acquired in 1996. Apart from the immediate value this brought to shareholders, I felt there were long-term reasons for the merger. My view of the future was that scale was everything. The acquisition allowed us to merge with two strong competitors; Blizzard and Davidson (who was #1 in education at the time). There were discussions of rolling in several other competitors and creating a company that was dominant. I had concerns about Sierra being able to retain its creativity within a larger corporation, but was able to negotiate a position for myself, and Sierra, within the larger organization that I thought would assure our continued success.
Unfortunately, I thought I was dealing with honorable people, and instead, the company that acquired us had major problems that they were concealing. Their management team is facing criminal prosecution as I type this, and may soon be in jail.
Sad….
-Ken W
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(re: A question for Ken – Sierra after move to Coarsegold/Oakhurst)
Wow, Ken, thanks for that insight. I had always assumed that the reason you sold Sierra was that you just figured it was time to retire and enjoy life.
But I look at the state of gaming today and can see the adventure game genre has more or less died out, and is now a fringe market made up of people like me who still like to play them. Everything else is an optional multiplayer twitchfest better reserved for 14 year olds on their summer vacations. Your reply makes it clear that you were not afraid to make difficult/risky decisions to further the well being of the company. Is one of those decisions one of the reasons King’s Quest VIII was so different from the previous ones? It seems to me, that regardless of whether you sold Sierra or not, it still would have had to undergo a major change of identity to compete in today’s market. Do you feel the same way?
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(re: A question for Ken – Sierra after move to Coarsegold/Oakhurst) Adventure Games is NOT a fringe market. Though there was a lean period in the mid to late nineties, it is currently nowhere near dying out. If you lived in Europe, or as I do in a country which gets games from both North America and Europe, you’d know that.
The only genre I see imploding in on itself in the near future is the first-person shooter. The heavily hyped Doom 3 is an utter embarresment to say the least. And during the last few years the world market has been absolutely drowned in unimaginitive, repetitive dross. Why is 3DRealms taking its time with Duke4Ever’s development? I reckon they’re waiting for the market to utterly fail, so they can step in with a fun, creative game to revitalise it all (and make them look like genuises).
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(re: A question for Ken – Sierra after move to Coarsegold/Oakhurst)
Take it easy, Johann. First of all I do not live in Europe, I live in the US. Second, if adventure games are not dying out, where are all the companies that are making them? Where are the shelves upons shelves of adventure games at my local outlet? There are, maybe, three major studios that make them – all based in Europe. The adventure genre here in the US is most certainly dead. NO ONE I know plays adventure games anymore. In fact, most people look at me kind of weird when I tell them I still play them. That is from where I base my belief that adventure games are a fringe market.
You are right about Doom3 being pretty bad. But that has no bearing on the general state of gaming today. The FPS is still god, and it will be for a long time to come. Games have always pushed along the hardware market (or is it the other way around?)…It was possible to do that with adventure games for awhile as we saw the evolution from CGA, to EGA, to VGA, and then on to CD-ROM. But 2d graphics performance has been topped out for a long time, so what’s left?…The 3d market. FPS’s are the games that push people to buy $500 polygon pumps and make people go “that’s really awesome” when they look at the screen. Typical adventure games can’t generate the “wow” factor anymore, so that’s why they’ve fallen to the wayside.
Then make an adventure game in 3D you say? I think that’s where Sierra was trying to go with KQ VIII. However, as Ken noted in another post somewhere around here, Roberta was not the primary creative designer since CUC got their mitts into the deal. Otherwise, KQ VIII may have felt more like a “King’s Quest”. But, regardless of how you cut it, sooner or later the changing face of gaming would probably have ended up changing the face of King’s Quest to something its hardcore fans would have had trouble recognizing.
With that being said, there ARE a couple of games I really enjoyed that have adventure aspects with full 3d engines, which were “Broken Sword 3” and “Beyond Good & Evil”. These games had what I enjoyed most about adventure games – Decent puzzles, an engaging story, and cool characters. I think we might be seeing more of these types of games, especially if someone can come up with an engine that can do really cool, detailed outdoor environments. Bring back the “wow” factor, and we’ll see a resurgence in the genre.
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(re: A question for Ken – Sierra after move to Coarsegold/Oakhurst) Chris, you’ve been doing your best to stir up acrimony ever since you started your recent spate of posting. First with your unwarrented comments on the game project, and now coming down on adventure games. I don’t get it. What made you sign up for this forum in the first place? Especially since you knew most of us on here are adventure game fans, and to the extent that some of us are willing to sacrifice a great amount of time in order to make own of our own. What’s the story?
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(re: A question for Ken – Sierra after move to Coarsegold/Oakhurst) I’m actually playing “Beyond Good & Evil” right now. I agree with you, but for people against any action elements the game does not fit the bill. The 3D Zelda games are also very similar to BG&E, and are some of the best games ever made in any genre.
GK3 is often used as a scapegoat for why “3D is no good for adventure games”. I completely disagree. Part of my high opinion of the game comes from the fact that I had a top-of-the-line computer when it came out, so I had no trouble running it with all the fixin’s turned on. People were likely turned off by the “ugly” graphics if they had older systems.
I thought that GK3’s free-roaming camera style of gameplay was terrific. I think that controlling the camera instead of the character fits very nicely with adventure games. With any Lucasarts adventure, and any Sierra adventure post-KQ5, what you’re mainly doing is controlling the cursor, looking for hot-spots. You don’t walk your character around, and don’t need to worry about him/her being attacked while you’re leisurely doing your thing. The camera is the logical extension of a cursor for a 3D environment.
While playing GK3 I was in awe, and thought “this is the future”. I saw in GK3’s engine the next AGI (Sierra’s first engine). An engine that could be re-used for many different games that you’d remember in 15 years the way we remember the AGI games now.
I still think that GK3’s style has strong potential. Many adventure gamers are against 3D, but I believe that part of that comes from the feeling that you’re running a character around like a Mario game (Mario’s just about the best there is, but adventure gamers often frown upon that sort of thing so I’ll use the example). The camera exploration of GK3 gives it a much more adventure gamey feel. I hope that we see more experimentation with similar styles.
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(re: A question for Ken – Sierra after move to Coarsegold/Oakhurst) Chris, you’ve been doing your best to stir up acrimony ever since you started your recent spate of posting. First with your unwarrented comments on the game project, and now coming down on adventure games. I don’t get it. What made you sign up for this forum in the first place? Especially since you knew most of us on here are adventure game fans, and to the extent that some of us are willing to sacrifice a great amount of time in order to make own of our own. What’s the story?
Johann: I would like you to cite anything I have written so far anywhere on this board that would qualify as acrimony. Also specify where and what it is I said that would give someone the impression that I am coming down on adventure games. I thought I already made it clear that I’m a big fan of adventure games, but that no one else I know plays them anymore – and I stated my beliefs as to why they don’t. What more do you want?Regarding my “unwarranted comments” about the game project, I was hoping to offer some constructive input. So far you are the only person who seems to have taken issue with it, at least publicly. If the development project here is something that does not require or need comments from “outsiders” such as myself, someone let me know and I will refrain from making them.
John: You are absolutely right about the action elements of “Beyond Good & Evil”, and I admit it was a stretch calling it an “adventure game”. However, despite that, it DID have the elements I like most in an adventure game, particularly the exploration aspect, and I greatly enjoyed playing it. I have never played GK3 or even seen screen shots, but I agree with your assertation that 3D engines are the future, which was precisely the point I was trying to make in my last post. The problem right now is that a good 3d adventure game would most likely require an expansive, detailed, outdoor environment, while most engines today can only handle rat-in-maze maps. I think it’s important that the adventure game of the future use the latest 3d technology and break out of this “critical path” syndrome most adventure games have these days. By “critical path”, I mean you are locked in a relatively small area to explore until you do this or that, and then move on to the next small area, and so on. While all excellent games, Syberia, Broken Sword 3, and Beneath a Steel Sky were guilty of this.
The future, in my opinion, is to have a fully explorable environment in 3d. Ultima 9 attempted outdoor environments with disasterous results. The Torque engine (Tribes 2) is decent but I don’t see walking through an adventure game forest with it. The FarCry engine shows lots of promise for that sort of thing though. We will see.
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(re: A question for Ken – Sierra after move to Coarsegold/Oakhurst) I’ve always believed the location was a major factor in what incredible games Sierra turned out.
As Ken said, it’s a place people WANTED to live… with no rush hour to drain the creativity.
It seemed to be a secluded and relaxed family style atmosphere where you could really focus on making great products without all of the city stresses.
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(re: A question for Ken – Sierra after move to Coarsegold/Oakhurst) Chris, I fully agree about the “critical path” syndrome. This has actually become an issue for me with 3D platformers as well. The most recent great ones like Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando, and Jak II are very linear. The first 3D platformer, Super Mario 64, was open-ended with huge open spaces and was focused on “puzzles” of sorts rather than getting from point A to point B.
Gabriel Knight 3 is linear, but you basically always have the entire game world available to you, so it doesn’t have your “critical path” syndrome.
One of the best open-ended games I’ve played any time recently was Larry Vales 2, an “amateur” free adventure game. When I first downloaded the game I played entranced for a couple of hours, and then realized that I almost believed I was playing a lost Sierra game – a mix of Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry. It’s that good.
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