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hi Andy
i have the DEMO version of the game
(it’s not good as the full version but it’s better than nothing)
if it’s still relavant i will gladly upload it to some site and post the link hereDavid:
I’m not sure who owns the rights to Police Quest. My guess would be “Activision”, but I’m not sure. Our contract with developers was very all-encompassing, so my guess is that I did obtain the movie rights, but I don’t have copies of the contracts anymore.
As to my involvement — sorry, no time to focus on anything.
Overall, unless you get lucky, and someone at Activision decides to work with you, I suspect you would be wasting your time.
-Ken W
Greetings Matt.
Many years ago, I advised the TSL team to obtain a license for their game, or not continue. I heard they had a license but hadn’t realized it could be pulled at any time. I’m surprised the license was pulled, but hope that it means Activision, or someone, is finally going to do something with Kings Quest.
As to my feelings on fan games….
Were I running a publishing company again, I’d do what I could to support the various fan projects. It seems paranoid to fear competition from games with no, or severely limited, budgets. That said, there is a serious issue with the need to police your trademarks and copyrights, or lose them. And, there is risk that someone will use your characters in an offensive manner. However, there can be ways to resolve this through a simple license agreement that spells out terms of use. 99% of the time the projects are harmless, and help generate enthusiasm around the brand, whereas efforts to shut the projects down tend to make the company look bad to the fans.
I haven’t seen the TSL project and don’t know whether or not there really is a finished game or not, or what its’ quality is. I remember being told years ago it was months from completion (and doubting it.) If there is indeed a project, and a good one, they should simply change the name, the character names, and a few plot points, and launch their game. In other words, make it different enough that it is not a Kings Quest game, but retain the game play. If the game is fun to play it will do fine. Although they won’t have the Kings Quest name, they’ll have plenty of media attention, and name recognition (for The Silver Lining). If the game does exist, I doubt the team is just turning off the lights and going home.
Good luck with your article!
-Ken Williams
Jaap:
Johnny Castaway was one of my favorite products at Sierra, and one of our biggest hits. It was a money factory! It’s amazing to me that no one has gone after the business, and were I a younger guy, it would be at the top of my list of projects. I’ve sent my son, who is a developer, probably 20 emails saying, “Go after Johnny Castaway.” It’s a simple concept, and I’ve got cool ideas for how to launch a product that is similar, but free of copyright and trademark issues, and targets today’s world.
Why someone would want to try to bring that product back to life though completely puzzles me. It’s a lose-lose proposition. If you do something cool, that gets noticed, whoever owns the copyright will shut you down, and if you do something rotten, no one will care, but, why would they? My advice would be the same as it was to the Kings Quest project, “It’s a fun idea, but a huge waste of effort. Do something new and original, or get permission.”
As to a direct answer to your question…
I have nothing that could help you, and never did. Dynamix ran pretty independently, and Jeff Tunnell’s group ran independently of Dynamix. I tended to spend more time with projects that were broken than projects that ran well. At Jeff’s group I was more like a fan. Everything they did blew me away, and tended to ship on-time and on-budget. It was easy to say yes to anything they proposed, and I didn’t need to get too involved.
Best wishes,
Ken WPhemail:
At the time we were acquired, the company wasn’t for sale. Walter Forbes had been on our board for a number of years, and blindsided me after a board meeting with the offer of acquisition.
In the weeks following his (Walter’s) proposal there were intense negotiations, and the deal almost fell apart several times. Price was certainly an issue, although the price was the simplest issue negotiated. We resolved the price almost immediately.
The huge issue was the management of the company post-acquisition. I needed to believe that the company would retain its independence after the acquisition and be able to continue producing great product. After intense negotiations, a structure was put in place that I believed would result in a major win for Sierra’s employees and customers.
Walter Forbes vision was to roll together all of the larger software companies, creating one huge entertainment company. The acquisition of Davidson (Blizzard) and Sierra was really intended as just the beginning.
We agreed that the non-creative groups, such as manufacturing and distribution would be consolidated, but that the product groups would retain their independence. A complex structure was put in place that not only gave me clear command of Sierra, but also visibility and influence over all of the products across the consolidated company. This would allow me to focus on what I did best (product) while creating a distribution company that could deal with the operational issues.
The deal would not have closed were I not convinced that it was in the best interests of ALL of Sierra’s employees, customers and shareholders.
Almost immediately after the deal closed I realized that things were not going to be as we had planned, and not all of the problems were with the acquiring company. Sierra’s sales force was consolidated with Davidsons, and there were problems with the Davidson sales force selling Sierra products. They had been selling educational software which had a very different sales profile than computer games. There were also issues with a cultural difference between selling preschool software and Leisure-Suit Larry. Some of our biggest hits were offensive to some people at Davidson. It was an issue no one had expected.
Prior to the acquisition, the potential for these kinds of problems had been discussed. A structure was put in place to deal with them, and it was all ignored. A software board was to have been created, but it never had a single meeting. I do not know why. Also, Bob Davidson, who was running all sales for the consolidated company suddenly left the company. I felt that I, or someone from my senior management team, should have been installed to run the company, but CUC brought in a member of their senior management with no experience in software. I was frustrated and unhappy, and wound up leaving the software business entirely.
I have heard rumors that Bob Davidson’s departure was hastened by his asking tough questions at the board level. I was also on the board, and did see some things that perhaps with 20/20 hindsight should have been yellow flags. That said, the accountants who had studied the company (CUC) for years didn’t see the problems, so I can’t beat myself up too much for not seeing the problems during a few board meetings. Actually, it is still tough for me to see Walter Forbes as a criminal. He was a very visionary person, who I had tremendous respect for. It never would have occured to me to suspect him of criminal conduct. I do think all of the trial transcripts are available to the public, and someday I’d like to read them to form my own opinion about what happened. To this day, I still have trouble saying, absolutely, that he was a crook. I have accepted that he was, but it is so out of sync with the Walter Forbes that I knew that I’d someday like to see the evidence myself and form my own opinion.
It is a huge disappointment for me that Sierra died. Actually, Sierra didn’t die, it was murdered. We had tremendous momentum, and a system in place, that I thought would keep the company going forever. It shouldn’t have been possible that the company would be so poorly managed. It was a horrible turn of events, and should have been avoidable.
-Ken W
Fun topic everyone!
I’m obviously biased, but I think of something as a Sierra product if I was the one who greenlighted the project, funded it, mentored the developers, shaped the marketing campaign, etc. Sierra had around fifteen development groups, and my process with each development group was the same. Some of the groups shipped better product than others, but they were all Sierra products.
I don’t remember all of the development groups and products.
– Brightstar
– Coktel Vision
– Dynamix
– Papyrus
– Impressions
– Headgate (is that their name? They made a golf game for us)
– ??? (there was a group that did productivity products)
– Sierra (can’t forget that one)
– There’s a bunch more, but I’m drawing a blank.We also did products with companies like Henson, Disney, and, Playboy!
-Ken W
Andy:
I already uploaded all of the old issues of Interaction to this website. If you check the directories on the Sierragamers.com server, in the Interaction directory, you’ll find them. All they need is linked.
Don’t link them all at once. I made the mistake of doing that once, and everyone downloading them brought the server to its knees.
Release one more per week, until they are all out there…
-Ken W
Andy:
Move the content to here… and become the webmaster on this site. I pay the bandwidth, so there is no cost involved.
The Talkspot system that this is based on is VERY powerful, and this site is only doing about 1% of the cool things that are possible. The problem is that I don’t have time to focus on it, and neither does anyone else :{
-Ken W
DJ, our older son, now 35, is living in Cabo (Mexico) where he is trying to get a catering business going. He supports himself by working on my http://www.talkspot.com project.
Chris, our younger son, lives in Seattle. He is working on a game development system, for building 2d or 3d network games. He’s probably six months or a year from having something to show.
-Ken W
Greetings Laine.
There was never any formal relationship between Sierra and Infocom. Our staffs were friendly with each other, and I hung out with their senior management from time to time, but we were never connected in any way.
It has been 30 years, so my memory is somewhat cloudy on all of this.. but…
My recollection is that they were slightly ahead of us in the market, and had the early momentum. At one time they were on top of the world, and considered us a minor annoyance. I recall them once having something like six of the top ten products. We loved their games, and thought their success was well deserved.
They received perhaps more recognition than us, in the academic world, because they did games that were arguably less mass market and more cerebral. They used words, and we used pictures. Ultimately, we did grab all the marketshare, but it’s really not as simple as that.
Infocom’s management wanted to make accounting software, not games. While we were pushing hard to do better and better games, they were downplaying games to focus on their business software (I forget the name of it). They took their eye off the ball, and we grabbed their customers. The business software, and its failure, crippled Infocom, and I don’t remember them really being a force after that. Lucasfilm gave us much more competition in the years that followed.
I may remember more if you freshen my memory…
-Ken Williams
I’ve thought fifty times about doing Johnny Castaway for iphone, but have no idea who has the rights — and, odds are no one at Sierra, if there is a Sierra, has any idea either.
It was a very cool ‘game’ and it’s a shame to see it forgotten.
Ken
(former Sierra Employee)I working for you Ken back then, I believe the complier was named for his wife. I know that we did not sell the complier very long after I started there, but I think we did use internally for a while.I don’t know if the new board can support it, but something that I miss from other boards, like phpBB and Invision, is a “Go to first unread post” icon for threads. The current board has it so that you can have all new messages merged together in reverse order, but this mixes up all the threads and you have to read posts backwards.
I know exactly what you mean! Not being able to copy text on these old message boards
can be very frustrating. I don’t like using IE, so I never tried it. In any case, though, I get
the feeling that the new system will be different.And see? I like messages like this. 🙂 It may not end up that the new site will have this
problem, but I greatly appreciate messages like this so I can be aware of stuff that I
may not have noticed. Thank you for sending it!Without any threads in the new forums, yet, I can’t see if it still has the same annoyance I have with these forums. When displaying a message in Firefox, you cannot select any text in the message body. You can in IE, but not in Firefox. Usually this is not much of an issue, but occasionally I want to copy text in the message, like when a link is displayed as just text and not a hyperlink. The only way to copy the address is to retype it or to turn off the Javascript.
Ah! Good to hear! I had a feeling they would. There was no reason
they shouldn’t, but it’s still nice to hear that the accounts move
happened just fine.Josh
BTW, thank you for going to the new site and commenting on the blog. At least the
comments work. 🙂 Have you tried signing in to the new site? I’m just curious. In
any case, I’m also going to add the Sierra Forums site to the link page on the new
site, as well.Josh
Actually, no, the links page is not low priority. That’s going to be one page I’ll try to maintain as
frequently as possible (adding new links and such). In fact, I went ahead and added the Sierra
Help Pages to the Link list on the new site. 🙂 Thanks for telling me!Josh
I know that there is much to do and things like updating the Links page is low priority, but I noticed that The Sierra Help Pages is not listed. SHP is the largest classic Sierra game tech site on the net. In fact, if you Google “Sierra help” the first 7 hits go to my site. You can find all of the official game patches, utilities, my new XP Collections patches and installers that I wrote that automatically install and setup your old Sierra games to run in DOSBox. It has a ton of information and resources to get almost any classic Sierra game to run on modern machines. “Qbix”, one of the two main authors of DOSBox has described SHP as informative and fun. He is also a member of the SHP forums.
HiI just finished my initial work on the http://sarien.net website, it features online play of Sierra’s original AGI games such as Space Quest, Larry, Police Quest and more to come. Also, it features online play and there is some initial support for the iphone and the wii.
I hope you other sierra gamers will like it!
Regards,
Martin Kool
Oops, we missed that one! Thanks for telling us, we have fixed it!Also thanks for the Sierra Gateway tip, I am posting there right now.
It’s nice to see that there are still fans of the game after all those years.You may wish to announce on the Sierra Gateway, a hub for a number of Sierra fan sites/boards that have come together to fill the void left by the demise of the official boards. You will find there a number Sierra diehards that may be interested in your work.
