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hi, well it says here i have a 500k limit, strange ’cause i think i’ve posted bigger stuff here, but…If you give me an address i would gladly send a cd with the trailers. through regular mail
of course. shouldn’t be too expensive, right?. not that i’m gonna charge you or anything, but it should be only a couple of bucks. if you can tell me how to post larger stuff here we can save us the time.Hi, I’ve collected Sierra demos for some years, and i have a few. I’ve downloaded them from fan’s sites or directly from the games , old ones and collector’s editions.
So, i have at least:
Castle of Dr. Brain
Dagger of Amon Ra
Eco Quest 1 & 2
Freddy Pharkas
Gabriel Knight
Island of Dr. Brain
King’s quest 1, 4, 6 & 8
Larry 1 , 2 3 & 5
Police Quest 3
Quest for Glory 1 & 3
Space quest 1 & 5
Mother Goose Demo
Phantasmagoria 1 & 2Now most are trailers, non playable demos, or what were used to call plain demos. In addition to this i have some old trailer
packs, with the following trailers:SQ 1 & 2
Mothergoose
Larry 1
Helicopter Simulator
PQ
Thexder
KQ3
Manhunter NY
Gold Rush!I don’t believe we need any of these for the project… and I think I have these all in my personal collection as well, though perhaps not in as nice condition as these ones here – they look great! Here’s the links, happy bidding!
Vivendi Games Mobile Gives Leisure Suit Larry Fans a Chance to Tell All and Win a Wii system
MySpace Promotion Enables Mobile Subscribers To Post Dating Catastrophes; Win Prizes
PARIS – July 30, 2007 –Vivendi Games Mobile, a division of Vivendi Games,
today announced an online contest for mobile phone subscribers in
Europe to support the recent launch of Leisure Suit Larry®: Love for
Sail. Fans of Leisure Suit Larry can post their ‘worst date ever’
stories on Larry’s blog for a chance to win a Wii™ system.Mobile subscribers can enter the contest by posting their worst date
experiences on the Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail Myspace Web page
at http://www.myspace.com/larryLoveforSail and adding Larry as their ‘top friend.’ One lucky winner in the UK,
France, Germany, Italy and Spain who have posted their ‘worst date
ever’ story will be selected by Vivendi Games Mobile to receive a Wii
system.“This unique contest will give Leisure Suit Larry fans
the chance to share their most Larryesque dating experiences with a
worldwide audience, and enjoy the consolation of receiving the hottest
gaming console of the moment,” said Paul Maglione, president of Vivendi
Games Mobile. “Terrible dates are something that everyone experiences
but few ever really talk about, so this is a chance to celebrate
Larryness and engage in some collective laughter therapy courtesy of
Nintendo and MySpace.”The iconic Leisure Suit Larry videogame
franchise is based on the dating trials and tribulations of Larry
Laffer, a 38-year-old geek with playboy-like pretensions. In Love for
Sail, Larry finds himself aboard a cruise ship for the trip of a
lifetime, with the holiday theme providing the perfect context for
summer mobile gaming fun. Larry’s adventures have been adapted to a
global, all-ages mobile audience; while retaining the cartoon-style
graphics, puzzle-solving gameplay, and humorous storyline that have
made Larry one of the most distinctive videogame personalities ever.To be eligible for the contest, users have until 07/08/07 at 23h59 to post
their worst date story to the Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail Myspace
Web page. Fans can also download wallpapers and Instant Messenger Buddy
Icons from Larry’s page at http://www.myspace.com/larryLoveforSail .
Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail is now available on wireless networks
throughout Australia, New Zealand, and across Europe, where it is
already among the most popular mobile games of the summer; and will
soon be launching on carriers in North America as well.
About Vivendi Games Mobile
Vivendi Games Mobile http://www.vgmobile.com
a division of Vivendi Games, creates and publishes quality titles for
the mobile games market. The division runs a global business, with its
headquarters, operations and an internal development team in Paris, a
US-based team in Los Angeles and its Centerscore studio in San Mateo,
California. The company publishes games based on original IP, popular
entertainment licenses and classic Sierra Entertainment IP, which are
distributed by more than 90 operators and dozens of Web portals in 60
countries around the world.Wii AND THE Wii LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF NINTENDO.
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:-O !!
Before you sell them, get with Brandon! He might still need some missing scans for the archival project here at sierragamers!
I collect Sierra games (at least, the classic Sierra games) because they represent, to me, the Golden Age of computer games.
When I first became aware of Sierra as a company, it was Space Quest II that caught me. I’d just booted up the game (oh, the glorious days of DOS!), and within five minutes, I’d accidentally sent Roger Wilco floating off to his inescapable doom in the depths of space.
It was hilarious. Not because I’m a cruel person, you understand, but because Sierra made it *fun* to see how much trouble I could get poor Roger into. No matter how many times I blew him up, unzipped his spacesuit in the middle of deep space, threw him off a cliff, or got him eaten by Some Alien Being on Unknown Planet X, there would always be a wisecrack or a joke around the corner to make his endless galactic wanderings just that much more enjoyable.
Sierra truly *cared* about the games they made. Moreover, they obviously had fun making them, and wanted *us* to have fun playing them.
Sierra loved their work, and I loved Sierra. That’s why I collect Sierra games.
Question
for Marc: You said you were around during the last days…Do you have
any idea what prompted Sierra’s move to using only external, third
party developers?I can’t say exactly why, but a reasonable guess is that it’s sort of the difference between dating and marriage. With a third party dev, the publisher agrees to give the dev a set amount of money in exchange for a specified product, delivered at a specific date. If the dev is late, they don’t get any more money (valve worked fro free for a year before shipping HL). Generally speaking deals are set for a limited number of SKUs or titles. If it works out, you can do it again, or maybe get acquired or whatever. It’s fairly low-risk. The publisher isn’t paying overhead or salaries, they are just paying aflat fee for the product. the only risks are does the game get delivered, and does it sell well. The opposite is true of internal development where if you go over schedule and budget, you keep burning cash b/c i you don’t cancel the project, you have to keep feeding it. The burn rate on a project like QfG 5 was enormous, but you get to a point where it gets really hard to kill a project in crisis. So to answer the question, publishing is a lot better deal than developing most of the time.
Question for both of you: Why did Sierra make so many investments in the productivity area (Arion, Green Thumb, Pixellite..)?
good question. Ken?…..
Also…Marc,
you said that grabbing another developer probably wouldn’t have changed
the situation at Oakhurst..What if, let’s say, Sierra acquired iD,
closed down the iD studios, and moved the iD employees into the
Oakhurst headquarters, setting them up as another team at Oakhurst
which used the iD label…How would that have worked?That is an interesting ,but highly unlikely scenario. For one, you end up loosing a lot of people when you try to relocate a studio, that and all the costs etc. When they moved the B5 and LoTR On-Line teams to Seattle they lost at least half the devs and spent god knows how much money moving us, paying off our housing , building new office space, etc. it was a huge investment (and they laid us all off 6 months later anyway! hahahaha). More than likely if they had been bought, they would have just been another of our far-flung dev studios.
There wasn’t any sharing of tech between studios. The only thing that happened all to commonly was that other studios poached our systems guys all the time to get games done. B5 was delayed 6 months because the entire team (minus a few artists) were hijacked to get the multi-player portion of Red Baron II working.
But yeah, as a whole the company was diversified, but studios tended to be pretty calcified in terms of content. Dynamix is a good example of a studio that actually was really diversified, and for whatever reason, got the axe too.
Hi, Ken
I have a question: Under your leadership, Sierra did at times use third party, autonomous developers, but from interviews you seemed to be adverse to using them…Why is this?
Question for Ken: Why wasn’t there ever a move to acquire Valve? If there was, what happend?
Question for Marc: You said you were around during the last days…Do you have any idea what prompted Sierra’s move to using only external, third party developers?
Question for both of you: Why did Sierra make so many investments in the productivity area (Arion, Green Thumb, Pixellite..)?
Also…Marc, you said that grabbing another developer probably wouldn’t have changed the situation at Oakhurst..What if, let’s say, Sierra acquired iD, closed down the iD studios, and moved the iD employees into the Oakhurst headquarters, setting them up as another team at Oakhurst which used the iD label…How would that have worked?It seemed like Dynamix was doing well in the 3D game arena with Stellar 7, Nova 9 and Red Baron. Why didn’t Oakhurst incorporate their knowledge?
Good question. At the time, the FPS was the big thing , we probably should have been working that angle, perhaps looking at a another crack at strategy (we deserved a second chance on Outpost).
Ken can answer this but there was always this rumor that John Carmack came around looking for either a buyer or for a publishier or something and Ken said no. Around that time productivity was coming to a stand-still because of Wolfenstein addiction. In my estimation, investing in iD would have been a great idea. Sierra di finally get it right in investing in Valve, but in either case, grabing another developer wasn’t going to change anything in Oakhurst.
I do have a confession, in that I was developing a Myst-like title at one point (who wasn’t) and Ken asked me if it could be converted to a FPS. I told him no way, and the project was canceled. If only I had said “sure!, you bet!”.
I wish we had put more capital into the Realm so it could become something more than a 2d combat/chat game. We had a ton of new ideas at the time (many of which are now incorporated in most fantasy MMOs). Unfortunattely that project was funded by outside capital once INN was bought up and couldn’t be sustained beyond bing much more than a tech demo.
Sierra Oakhurst did make efforts to move into these areas (FPS, MMO, RTS), but we never really had any success in anything other than adventure games. Partly because we were built to make adventure games. We had a handful of systems programmers and a boatload of application programmers, most of whom weren’t ready to make the major leap that modern game engineering required. The whole company was built around SCI and developing outside of that very specific API wasn’t likely to happen. The kind of technology expertise we needed to really go after 3d didn’t exist until the last year of the studio’s existence. We did have a fair amount of 3d experience on the art side. In my last 4-5 years with the company, nearly all the artists were using 3d in one way or another, but we were a long way from making a real 3d game. We had something on the order of 4 years or more of tech catch-up to play by the time we made the effort. Then again, I moved on to Firaxis and we still weren’t doing 3D for my first 2 years there, but I digress.
To be honest, we should have recognized that the market was changing and we should have been moving on to making the kinds of games we were all playing. Few of us were playing adventure games at that point. Mostly it was RTS, RPGs and FPS. The only adventure games I was playing up to near the end were Lucas Arts titles. While we were investing God knows how much money in a state-of-the-art FMV studio (to make 2 games), iD and Blizzard were poising to dominate the industry.
Hi
if you want to practice a spell, just cast it anywhere.. you don’t have to be somewhere in particular
IMO (since I was there near the end), “Sierra” didn’t really die, it just got folded into a larger entity and dissolved slowly. But, if you are referring to the classic period of Sierra, it died because games had moved beyond adventure games long before Sierra stopped trying to make them. We responded to the superficial technical changes (3D), but tried to bend the adventure genre to the 3D environment rather than bend our game designs to the new possibilities the tech provided. By the time we were trying to ship KQ8, Larry 7, QFG5, etc, the market had largely moved on to Doom and Quake, Warcraft and Diablo. Heck, I was working on the Babylon 5 project while we watched space shooters die all around us. The last great thing Sierra had in its hands was the Lord of the Rings MMO. We practically invented the MMO with The Realm and had Sierra really gotten behind that project 100% (it was massively understaffed), it could have kept the Sierra label afloat.
Sierra (Oakhurst in particular) was really good at making 2D adventure games and unfortunately, while the rest of the industry was getting serious about developing other genres and technologies, we relied on our old tools and old ideas about what games could be.
I agree that the growth of Sierra lead to some decline, but for different reasons. From my own perspective, Sierra was leading in technology and that required me to upgrade constantly. I could not financially keep up the pace. At the same time Sierra was creating so many games that I wanted to play at the same time. Buget wise, I had to pick and choose which ones I wanted to play. It tended to be any game from King’s Quest. Sierra was also changing their style as seen in King’s Quest VII.
To me the different companies that Sierra had only made stronger. If one area fell the others would possibly survive and/or grow.
Ultimately, Sierra was a target for some bad individuals that changed the leadership of Ken Williams through lies.
MxCoder
Actually, your ideas from ten years ago were the best, and were ahead of their time. In 1996, you said that you could foresee Online Multiplayer gaming becoming very important…It did. Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing games are the most successful, most profitable and most influencial part of the gaming market today. For example, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, an expansion pack released in January, sold 2.7 million copies in the first day of release alone in the U.S, Europe and Australia. Within the first month, after being released in Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Africa, it sold 3.1 million copies.
World of Warcraft, the online gaming nextwork by Blizzard has over 6 million customers and has allowed Blizzard to go from having just 360 employees in 2004 to having 2,700 (Blizzard has only 250 in development; they have over 2,000 in customer service and tech support to manage and help players with Warcraft)
In an interview in ’96, you mentioned that Sierra knew how to program a DVD drive. That’s something that the majority of companies have only managed to do in the last 2-3 years, and it’s role in the PC game industry is growing.
I remember reading an interview where you said you were interested in console and using a console system to go on the internet for multiplayer gaming. That idea is very ”new” and is a hot seller today…Just check out an XBOX 360 and it’s XBOX Live Arcade, which is a console based internet system through which you can play with players all over the world. There’s even a headset and microphone with which you can communicate with said players!OK .. one more thought on this topic.
My suggestion to Sierra Management would be for them to read my various postings on this website, and perhaps send me an email, or post here with questions. If they think I’m way off base, and that the ideas that worked 10 years ago wouldn’t work today, then they should say so, and I might agree, or I might disagree — but, were I them, I’d at least be curious to get my opinion.
-Ken W
It’s bad timing for me to do anything with games. I’m in San Diego now taking delivery of a new boat. For the next year, we’re 100% focused on the boat and not thinking about much else. A year or two ago, I would have been thrilled to offer free assistance to Sierra, but that time has past.
Too bad . it would be fun. but, it’s just the wrong time.
-Ken W
Hi!
The new management of Sierra seems to be doing a little better than previous regimes but…They’re not making ”Sierra” products. Around 99% of the games published under the Sierra label are licensed products from Vivendi’s partners and are based on films or books. For example, Sierra has published games based on: Eragon (the 2006 Film version), 50 Cent: Bulletproof, Scarface. Very few titles based on legacy or original IP are being produced and the ones that are are very flawed and not up to par with the originals. The games Sierra publishes are either action or strategy titles, and nothing really innovative or ground breaking. Mostly retreads of what’s already out there. Sierra works as an umbrella for 4 of Vivendi’s studios: Massive Entertainment, Radical Entertainment, Swordfish Studios, and High Moon Studios.
The top guys at Sierra are: Martin Tremblay. He acts as ‘President of Worldwide Studios’, and Al Simone, who acts as Senior VP of Global Marketing. Peter Della Penna is the President of High Moon Studios and until this year was COO of Sierra. Bruce Hack is the CEO of Vivendi Games, and he’s the one who made the decision to ”revive” Sierra in the first place.
Would you consider trying to contact any of these guys to maybe point Sierra in the right direction? Sierra should be focusing on it’s own IP, growing the titles that were hits…Not making game versions of crappy movies! I know you’ve tried before, but that was a different management team and at a different time in Sierra’s history….It can’t hurt to try, can it?In your opinions, what was it that led to Sierra’s downfall? Mismanagement? Lack of funding for it’s projects (by later owners such as Vivendi)? Too much consolidation? Or was it perhaps Sierra’s growth in and of itself that led to the company’s decline. I personally think that Sierra’s growth was a factor in it’s downfall. Sierra made an error when it acquired so many companies. The companies Sierra acquired were not only very different and from very dissimilar backgrounds, but were also were allowed to maintain their corporate identity. Instead of just intergrating them into the main Sierra organization, (IE, buying Impressions, closing it down, and moving it’s employees and copyrights to Oakhurst and Bellevue) the only things these companies shared were funding, distribution, and manufacturing. they didn’t share a common corporate identity. As Sierra acquired more and more companies (In 1995 alone Sierra acquired 8 companies; from 1995-1997 the company acquired 12 in total), Sierra became more of a publisher and competing against over 10 other studios, the quantity of Oakhurst and Bellevue’s products decreased and the two studios were squeezed. With later management teams, development was focused at Sierra’s subsidiaries rather Sierra itself. Also, I think that another source of Sierra’s decline was it’s later use of and partnerships with third party companies such as Valve and Blizzard. After Vivendi acqured the company, Oakhurst was shut down, and Bellevue was relegated to producing the company’s minor titles. Third party companies, instead of Sierra’s own studios, became responsible for Sierra’s ”development”. Even Sierra’s biggest titles began to be developed only by third party companies rather than Sierra itself. Personally, I don’t consider products made by Valve and other third party companies ”Sierra games”. There’s also a markedly different style in games produced by Sierra’s studios compared with games produced by Oakhurst and Bellevue. That was the object, yes, to create a company which had variety…But even the spirit of those games was different, as if they were made by different companies.
Add to this later management who focused not on product development but on maintaining a rigid corporate structure with a focus on the bottom line, a financially dishonest and troubled parent company who squeezed Sierra’s products into deadlines and the decline of the adventure genre, Sierra’s main line of interest and in my opinion, you have Sierra’s downfall.
