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Ken, this might be more appropriate in the Ken Williams Q&A, but since we’re on the subject, I was wondering about how the rights to the game characters/worlds for other series besides King’s Quest was handled. For instance, I’ve noticed that the creators of Gold Rush are selling their game online as educational software. Obviously in order to do that, the creators must have retained full rights to the game. When you were still in charge of Sierra, what was the arrangement when someone floated an idea across your desk? Did you take the rights and pay royalties, or did the creator retain the rights while Sierra took a cut of the sales? In the case of the former, were the rights released back to the authors on the sale of Sierra to CUC? What is the status of Space Quest/Leisure Suit Larry in that regard?
Actually, I find one case particularly interesting. The Black Cauldron was originally a children’s book series by Lloyd Alexander which was adopted by Disney and made into an animated film. My understanding is that Disney approached Sierra to make the adventure game tie-in, which was executed by Al Lowe. Today, Al Lowe gives it away on his site. How exactly does THAT work?
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Chris, I moved your topic :p
Al Lowe surely doesn’t have the rights to the Black Cauldron game. He just figures VU Games & Disney probably don’t care, and he’d be right.
Ken previously wrote about some of what you’re asking here: http://www.sierragamers.com/bbs/BBSTopicPage.asp/t/4474/p/1
In summary, he said: “I do remember that the authors [of Gold Rush] kept trying to get the rights back so that they could sell the game themselves… my remembrance is that I gave them permission. Most publishers wouldn’t.”
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Brandon, you must be tied into this board Matrix-style. Didn’t take you long to bump my post 🙂
Disney has been known for doing some inane things. I think the only reason Al has never gotten a C&D letter from them is because they don’t know about BC being on his site yet. But, The Black Cauldron is more like the Black Sheep for Disney, it’s true. Something they’d rather forget about…However, BC was one of my favorite Sierra games, and in fact it’s the one that introduced me to Sierra games in the first place. After that I couldn’t stop buying the things.
If Al REALLY wanted to test the water he’d release the source code :>
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Well Chris the time the board recorded our posts was 1:12 and 2:56 (whatever time zone that happens to be) so I guess I am not plugged in to the max 🙂 But I have the email notification option set, and I check my email too much.
True about BC and Disney. Isn’t BC openable with AGI Studio? You could then see the source code 🙂
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True about BC and Disney. Isn’t BC openable with AGI Studio? You could then see the source code 🙂
…”I did that awhile ago, but the impression I got was that the source code variables and function calls were obfuscated at one point. There are some tiny code fragments I have from a magazine cutout about KQ1 written waaay back in the day (I can dig it up and post it if anyone’s interested), and from that I saw that the variable Sierra liked to use to reference the main character was Ego, but I don’t remember seeing such a thing when I looked at it with AGI Studio. Variables in the logic resource when opened by AGIStudio look like they’re all referenced with v(integer). I also saw no code documentation whatsoever. It looks like the true source code was chewed by some kind of preprocessor before being dumped into the resource files that the game uses. Ken, you helped write the AGI interpreter in the first place. Is there any truth to this?
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“… (by Chris Schweiter)
It looks like the true source code was chewed by some kind of preprocessor before being dumped into the resource files that the game uses. Ken, you helped write the AGI interpreter in the first place. Is there any truth to this?…”Yes — the code was run through a compiler, and compiled to an intermediate language. You cannot get back to the original source code. My guess is that it has been lost forever. I doubt Sierra was organized enough to preserve it.
-Ken W
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Yes — the code was run through a compiler, and compiled to an intermediate language. You cannot get back to the original source code. My guess is that it has been lost forever. I doubt Sierra was organized enough to preserve it.
…”That’s a shame. I’d be very interested to see an example of the true source, or better still the source for the complete game. Ah well, perhaps it’s on a QIC80 tape or WORM disk somewhere on the planet. But then finding something that can read it is another matter…
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