The Sierra Vault

[Unknown,Unknown]

I’ve been posting about specific InterAction issues as I posted them but I don’t like spamming other people’s message boards so this will be my last callout – the scanning and posting has continued and my new site is coming together pretty quickly.  I will be continuing to scan the InterAction magazines (in addition to the other Sierra content I’ve put up) and they will be available for download forever.

Please visit my site at http://www.sierravault.com .   The magazines are located under the “InterAction” tab.  There is content under all of the other tabs and that will be expanding once I get all of the InterAction scans up.  In addition I have a message board up there so I can post updates there and quit abusing other’s message boards.

Thanks!

Andy

[Unknown,Unknown]

Hey all,

This is one last quick post to let you know that I have completed my InterAction scanning project.  28 Issues of the Sierra magazines are available for download.  I’m missing ten of the issues.  If anyone has a copy of any of the missing issues I’d like to try to work out some way to get a scan of the issue from you so I can put it up with the rest, whether that involves you scanning, me scanning or whatever.  I’ll even consider reasonable offers to buy a few of the issues.

My site is SierraVault

The InterAction Issues Available are:

Sierra Newsletter (1987-1989)
Sierra Newsletter Volume 1, Number 2 (1987) 3D Helicopter Simulator
Sierra Newsletter Volume 1, Number 4 (Winter 1988) King’s Quest 4
Sierra Newsletter Volume 2, Number 1 (Spring 1989) 1989 Releases

Sierra News Magazine (1989-1990)
Sierra News Magazine Volume 2, Number 2 (Autumn 1989) Roberta Williams
Sierra News Magazine Volume 3, Number 1 (Spring 1990) Conquest of Camelot
Sierra News Magazine Volume 3, Number 2 (Summer 1990) Sierra 10th Year Anniversary
Sierra News Magazine Volume 3, Number 3 (Fall 1990) Christmas Tree
Sierra News Magazine Volume 4, Number 1 (Spring 1991) Space Quest 4

InterAction Magazine (1991-1999)
InterAction Volume 4, Number 3 (Fall 1991) First Issue
InterAction Volume 5, Number 1 (Spring 1992) Building a Computer Game
InterAction Volume 5, Number 2 (Summer 1992) Sneak Peek: Fall ’92
InterAction Volume 5, Number 4 (Winter 1992) Computer Football
InterAction Volume 6, Number 1 (June 1993) Space Quest 5
InterAction Volume 7, Number 1 (Fall 1994) Outpost
InterAction Volume 8, Number 2 (Fall 1995) Space Quest 6
InterAction Volume 8, Number 3 (Holiday 1995) Gabriel Knight 2 / Torin’s Passage
InterAction Volume 9, Number 1 (Spring 1996) Earthsiege 2
InterAction Volume 9, Number 2 (Summer 1996) Baseball Pro 96
InterAction Volume 9, Number 3 (Fall 1996) Lords of the Realm II
InterAction Volume 9, Number 4 (Holiday 1996) Rama / Golf
InterAction Volume 10, Number 1 (Spring 1997) Shivers
InterAction Volume 10, Number 2 (Summer 1997) Betrayal at Antara
InterAction Volume 10, Number 3 (Fall 1997) Red Baron II
InterAction Volume 11, Number 1 (Spring 1998) Sierra Sports
InterAction Volume 11, Number 2 (Summer 1998) Half-Life
InterAction Volume 11, Number 3 (Fall 1998) Starsiege
InterAction Volume 11, Number 4 (Holiday 1998) King’s Quest 8
InterAction Volume 12, Number 1 (Holiday 1998) Homeworld [Last Issue]

The Issues i’m missing are:
Sierra Newsletter Volume 1, Number 1
Sierra Newsletter Volume 1, Number 3
Sierra / Dynamix News Magazine Volume 4, Number 2
InterAction Volume 5, Number 3 (Fall 1992) King’s Quest 6
InterAction Volume 6, Number 2 (Summer 1993) Betrayal at Krondor
InterAction Volume 6, Number 3 (Holiday 1993) Santa
InterAction Volume 6, Number 4 (Spring 1994) Gabriel Knight 1
InterAction Volume 7, Number 2 (Holiday 1994) King’s Quest 7
InterAction Volume 8, Number 1 (Spring 1995) Twisty Brained Kid
InterAction Volume 10, Number 4 (Holiday 1997) Lords of Magic

Thanks guys and I hope you enjoy the scans.  I’ll be continuing to work on other parts of the site so keep checking back.

Andy
SierraVault.com

[Unknown,Unknown]

As part of my early growing pains I’ve had to move the site to it’s own domain on my webspace.

New link:
SierraVault 

The actual domain is at http://sierra.graecnroark.net/ but you can get there via http://www.sierravault.com

The site has been busy – since we wen’t “live” about a month ago I’ve sent out around 60 gig of downloads.  I am continuing to work toward getting scans of the missing InterAction issues but in the meantime have been spending a lot of time on box cover scans, articles and ads.   There should be a video file update over the weekend with another 10-15 videos going up.

If you haven’t come by, come on!

Andy

[Unknown,Unknown]

Thanks for your work, I used to love to read sierra magazines and catalogs.

[Unknown,Unknown]

Thanks for posting these. I haven’t looked at them in years, and seeing them again made me smile.

A much younger and more dweebish version of me appears in Volume 4, #1, on page 43. I was the winner of the “Come Home and Meet the Family Contest” way back in 1990. I spent all summer reading old computer magazines and browsing microfiche to come up with the longest list of Sierra and On-Line Systems games produced over the previous ten years. I also read Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which includes a rather sordid account of the early years of Sierra (concluding with KQ1 for the PCjr, I think). It’s funny to think that in this age of the Internet and Wikipedia, no company could ever run a contest like that one anymore; it would be too easy to collate a perfect list.

My family and I flew to Oakhurst the day after Christmas, 1990. We had dinner with Ken, Roberta, and their sons that evening, and toured Sierra the next day. At the dinner, Ken looked really embarrassed when he heard that I had read Hackers. I remember him saying forcefully “Don’t read Hackers. Don’t play Leisure Suit Larry.” It was like a “This is your brain on drugs” moment. Hilarious. Roberta and I laughed about searching for the bridle in KQ4, and she apologized for making it so hard to find in the original version.  I remember that one of my questions was whether they had considered integrating a hint system directly into the games. I was surprised when they said they would never do so because they actually made a lot of money from selling hints.

I don’t remember much of the tour. It was kind of a whirlwind meeting all the developers. Mark Seibert played the new music for SQ4, and Scott Murphy showed off the game itself. I remember looking at the screen and saying, “It says here Space Quest XII.” I think Scott said, “Oh, yeah, that’s just a joke. We still have to change that.” Looking back, I think he was trying to cover up for what was, in retrospect, a significant spoiler. My only other memory is of talking to Jim Walls. He told me he was working on another Police Quest sequel and I said, “But the Death Angel is dead!” He responded, “This time, it’s his brother.” I was too young to remark how much of a Hollywood cliché that was, and instead just thought, “His brother! Brilliant!” Haha.

It was a great experience–a real dream come true for a huge fan who had been playing and replaying Sierra games for years. My son is just now getting old enough to be interested in computer games, and we walked through the AGD Interactive remake of KQ1 a few days ago. I still remember every detail. He calls it “the goat game” because he likes the part where the goat knocks the troll off the bridge. He’s also really into the dragon burning Graham up into ashes. Such a boy. It’s fun to be revisiting it all again.

[Unknown,Unknown]

David,

And your reply has made me smile.  Less than a week ago a conversation took place in my forums where I talked about the exact contest you won.  I tried very hard to be your competition.

http://gracenroark.net/roark/sierraboard/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=51&p=111&hilit=contest#p111

As for Ken Williams telling you not to read “Hackers” – that’s absolutley classic.  If you’d be willing to I’d love to use your writeup along with some of the pictures from that issue of InterAction on a new section of SierraVault at some point in the future.  It ‘s just too cool not to!

Andy

[Unknown,Unknown]

Sure, Andy. That’s fine with me.

[Unknown,Unknown]

Hello all.  It’s been a while since I’ve updated this forum on SierraVault’s progress so I wanted to point out the update highlights over at SierraVault in the last couple of months.  I’ve been working pretty hard to archive a lot of the game specific files (manuals, box covers and contents) and I’ve had several big submissions from readers as well.  All in all I felt a brief ‘look at me!’ post was justified for those of you who might have forgotten about ‘the new Sierra site’ and aren’t checking me on a regular basis yet.

First things first.  You can access my update log here.

Sierra Newsletter, News Magazine and InterAction scans

A reader, DaveJustDave, has mailed me two issues of InterAction magazine and the Sierra/Dynamix News Magazine.  This now brings the total missing issues number down to six and the number of available issues for download to 32.  Right now there is a slightly outdated ‘.zip’ archive of the issues available as well as individual downloads of each issue.  At some point this weekend I’ll be updating the .zip to include all of the issues.

If anyone is interested, the missing issues at this point are:
Sierra Newsletter Volume 1, Number 1
Sierra Newsletter Volume 1, Number 3
InterAction Volume 5, Number 3 (Fall 1992) King’s Quest 6
InterAction Volume 6, Number 4 (Spring 1994) Gabriel Knight 1
InterAction Volume 8, Number 1 (Spring 1995) Twisty Brained Kid
InterAction Volume 10, Number 4 (Holiday 1997) Lords of Magic

If you have a copy of any of these issues, please contact me at alinnenkohl@fusemail.com and we’ll work out a way to get them scanned and uploaded.  Several of my readers have sent in items to me for scanning and I’ve started a thread on my forum so the readers can report back the reliability of getting their items back from me.  That thread is located here.  The first box of submissions went out in the mail this week and it’s return has not been reported.  If you are concerned about getting your items back you can at least check that thread to make sure I’m not stealing and ebaying anything sent to me 😉

Sierra Hint Book Archive

Another reader sent in a DVD of his collection of carefully scanned Sierra Hint Books.  Vasyl had worked at it and determined a technical way to alter his scan settings so the red ‘cover’ in the text books could be seen through on the scans.  The PDFs are created with a scan of the page on one side (red cover intact) and then a second scan of the same page with the red cover gone and the answer visible.  While I haven’t done a one to one check on whether or not all of the Hint Books are available I think everything I knew about is there.  

As with most sections of SierraVault, I have created a single .zip file with all of the Hint Books in it for download.  You can still download each file individually as well.

The Games

While my readers have been stealing my thunder by sending in better submissions than what I’m putting out I am still working at scanning the original manuals, catalogs, box contents, diskettes and CDs.  I am attempting to digitally ‘recreate’ the contents of each Sierra game by making PDF scans of each item available along with the best quality box cover scans I can find.  This is very much a work in progress and I doubt, very seriously, I have ANY of the content mixes right.  At the same time I’ve worked through about 80% of the manuals and box contents and those are available for download.  As is always the case at SierraVault there is no abandonware – what I’m making available is everything EXCEPT the games.  If you are one of these excellent OCD collectors and can give me a hand in determining which ‘files’ to link under which releases I’d love to hear from you.

As always, thanks for reading and I hope you like what you find over at SierraVault.  My forums are here.  If you like what you find, drop by and let me know about it.  Thanks!

Andy

[Author]

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