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Sierra was a great influence in my choice of college degrees. I might have been a game junky for the rest of my life and been quite happy playing King’s Quest or any other Sierra game. When they stopped producing such quality games, I decided I would create my own games. I am still learning little by little. Computers today seem harder to work with from the ground up when it comes to machine code. I learned in college assembly code for the 8080. A computer that may only exist in a museum.
Sierra was a family of programmers, artist, and gammers.
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Definitely. For my part, I live in Puerto Rico. English is not our main language, spanish is. So for us learning english is a bit difficult. By playing Sierra games found an easy and entertaining way to learn english, due to the early type games where you had to nail the language just right for the game to work. So by that I am very thankful to the early sierra games.
Later on many aspects of Sierra games inspired me. So I am very thankful to the Sierra Famili for giving me so much growing up. 😉
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I guess I would have to see me and Sierra go way back.
I had played a few computer games including the Oregon Trail (greenscale version) when I was in the 2nd grade. That Christmas (I believe) which would have been around 1989 our family got a hand-me-down computer with a handed-me-down version of Police Quest 1 CGA (I don’t think we had the actual disks and manual, sorry Ken!)
I was amazed at being able to interact beyond a controller. Well, I went through many more Sierra games (and started collecting them). I learned BASIC programming in the 3rd grade, and Pascal programming in 5th grade. What I wanted to do was draw backgrounds, but I wanted to know a bit about the programming end first, so that was my focus. My best friend and I put together some basic demos using Turbo Pascal, but around that time the Web got really popular (94-95) so we started doing Internet things instead. In 1996 I founded a web site so I could pay my car insurance and I geared more towards business than programming or art.
I went to college and graduated with a degree in Computer Science and Digital Media. If I can work on my drawing skills, I’m hoping to put together Flash games, which aren’t required to be 3D like every other game that comes out. I would hope to pay for the games with graphic ads and text ads.
I had hoped to work for Sierra someday, but being here makes me feel like I’m still part of the team.
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Hi – First post.
The first true computer game I ever played was KQ4. A neighborhood kids dad brought a copy that he borrowed from a coworker home. Even though the graphics are hoakey (sp?) by todays standards, I immediatly began to imagine myself in Rosellas place walking from the fishermans house, or cleaning the 7 dwarves house. yes thats weird, but it’s true. A bit later my dad brought home our first PC “IBM Compatible (WOOHOO)” and he took me to babbages to buy a game or two. I bought KQ4 from the bargain rack and (I think) Police Quest or maybe Monkey Island. My Dad bought Leisure Suit Larry in the “pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals”
Of course the first day he was very stern and adamant that this PC was a tool and wouldn’t be used for mindless games… that lasted on day 😀
Anyway, I followed Sierra, specifically through KQ, LSL, and QFG. I do remember getting in trouble quite a few times for either spending too much time on the game or these strange 900 numbers appearing on the phone bill from Sierra Online game support (the whale trick was bogus, shame on you ) 😀
Anyway, my roots start in the commodore but Sierra kept my gamer fire burning into the early 90s.
So yeah, anyway, I’m a computer tech now.
Sierra forever!
Lucasarts games forever! -
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“…Out of curiosity, how many of you feel that Sierra proved to be your greatest inspiration or motivation to pursue a successful career or hobby?…”Well I was into computers awhile before I played my first Sierra game. My dad bought our first “real” computer, a PCjr in 1985. Before that I was playing around mostly on borrowed Commodores and my Atari 2600. The first Sierra game I played was the Black Cauldron which I bought from a kid on the playground in 1986 who couldn’t run it because he had a Mac. My sister and I both really got into that game – I must have played it through dozens of times to date. After that I started snapping Sierra stuff up on a regular basis. When I ran out of current releases to play, I went out and got Lesure Suit Larry for my Sierra fix when I was 13. I can only guess the reason my parents didn’t mind was because it deflected their duty to explain the “birds and the bees” to me, but that’s another story. Oh and by the way, Al, those adult questions at the beginning of LSL don’t stand up to trial and error by ravenous 13 year old Sierra fans.
Like anyone here, I imagine, I thought it would be cool to one day work for Sierra to help makes the games I so enjoyed, especially since I have such an affinity for mountains and wooded areas. But reality doesn’t always play out the way you’d like it to in your dreams. As it turns out I found programming to be quite boring, the right side of my brain was turned off at birth, the greatest drawing I have ever done was three stick figures on the same piece of paper, and musically, I am practically tone deaf. So, no coding, creative, artistic, or musical ability – I would say the lack of these four qualities pretty much precludes me from ever working at any level of game design. But it makes me the perfect network engineer, as it requires raw logic without the tedium of programming. Happiness is a green light on your CSU/DSU, and it is something I very much enjoy doing. And so that’s how the cards played out, but that is not to say that Sierra did not influcence my computing career.
Sierra motivated me in the sense that it gave me a lot of machine time and kept me interested in the computer – even if it was a primitive hunk of garbage like the PCjr. King’s Quest IV was actually my primary motivator to push my dad to get a new system because of its insane memory requirements at the time. The new system was a 386/16 with 1MB of RAM, a 40MB HD, and one of those newfangled VGA cards with 256KB of memory on it. I learned a LOT on that thing, and eventually learned to upgrade it bit by bit until I practically had a new computer. I eventually took my learned skills to a local mom & pop shop, where I picked up IPX networking because I wanted to play Doom with three other people. From there it was Novell, then Windows NT, then the Internet, and then I learned how to build routed networks on my own. Through these transitions the thing that remained constant is that I had always played Sierra’s games – and still go back sometimes and play them to this day.
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