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Hello Ken,
On previous posts, you talked about contact you’ve had with other leading people in the industry (Infocom, ID, Activision), so I’m curious – did you ever have a chance to meet Rick Dyer? I have recently watched documentary footage about Dyer – he’s probably best known for developing the “Dragon’s Lair” arcade game, but he started his career with very similar ideas to what you’ve done in Sierra – adding graphics to the text-adventure format (his first game, “Secret of the Lost Woods”, did so by using paper tape!), and in 1984, the same year “king’s Quest” came out, his company even developed an interactive cartoon, “Thayer’s Quest” (unfortunately, their attempt at selling a home laserdisc-based platform proved too expansive for the average consumer).
So did you ever get a chance to meet him, or see his works when they were originaly released? -
No – I don’t think we ever met, or at least I didn’t know him. I do remember someone coming to visit us who demo’d Dragon’s Lair, and my attempting to license it, so that may have been him. My vague recollection is that Dragon’s Lair was ultimately released, but not by us, and didn’t do very well. I remember Roberta and I playing it, and thinking “This is beautiful, but it just isn’t fun.” The problem was that there were too many times when the player had no control, and these cold get boring. I thought it had a market, and that people would buy it just to show it off, but it would quickly get tiresome. -Ken W
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Wow. You nailed that one. I don’t know if anyone remembers the old Panasonic 3DO systems, but I actually purchased one of those for around $300 I think. This was in 1994 (or maybe 1995). I bought Dragon’s Lair for the exact reason you mentioned. It looked really cool and whoever marketed that product needs a raise because of all the pretty pictures and exciting descriptions on the box that made me feel like this was a “must buy”. But this game was a dud in my opinion, as was almost every other game I bought for the 3DO system. You had almost NO control whatsoever of your character. You would move the controller when the character was ready for direction ( a few times per scene at best ), and the rest was simply eye candy.
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