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(re: The Colonel’s Bequest-Manual) I’ve heard that this particular manual is rather long, so I don’t blame you! I have been looking around for a CD copy of the game so I won’t have to deal with the copy protection… prolly a lot easier than scanning (or downloading) the whole manual.
🙂 emily
(re: The Colonel’s Bequest-Manual) I could scan the Museum Guide and the Museum Map (the actual manual, if I recall correctly, is just a generic Sierra adventure game manual they used to have in those days) if it weren’t for my slow, poor-quality scanner. The Guide is pretty thick and I’m in crunch mode on many projects right now, things that I have to give top priority. When any of these things change, I’ll take a look here, see if anyone’s gotten there first, and if not, do it. Also, I don’t really have a clue how to make a PDF document of the scans, so I’d have to post the pages individually.
Considering all this, it might be best if someone more experienced did it, but as I said, I will keep this in mind. Sorry for being such a slowpoke about this – I feel guilty being unable to contribute something myself right now, considering how much I appreciate others’ contributions.(re: New Version of Site Uploaded) Ken, I”m sure whatever you said is fascinating, but I can”t read it due to the miniscule font. 🙂 In other words, I think the font shrunk with the upload. Also, when I started this message there was already a link stylesheet tag and open and close body tags. Should my message go between those? Woah. And this edit box is huge. It”s more than a full screen long. Oh, and this isn”t related to the update you made, but something I noticed yesterday. It would be helpful to have the options for additional pages at the bottom of each thread. Right now they only appear at the top of the thread so we have to scroll down to read and then back up to read more. I also think that the page change drop box is super-repetitive. That makes 3 ways to change the page.
(re: Ken & The Bilestoad) I wasn’t a fan of Bilestoad. I was facinated with the fast pace, inovative sound, and the zoom display. It’s a game that must be well practiced. I read the interview on your link and wanted to compare it with Ken’s memory. I know Ken has seen alot since 1982, but there’s no doubt that wasn’t Sierra’s style.
(re: Ken & The Bilestoad) Here is a link to an interesting interview from the guy who created Bilestoad:
Link: http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/GOODMAN.HTM(http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/GOODMAN.HTM)
He claims that Sierra rejected it for the violence, or at least he claims that’s how he remembered it. He also mentions piracy killed any commercial success he Bilestoad may have had. An interesting, if dry, read.
(re: sierra’s future) Thank you for the kind words….
I have been speaking with Brad and Brandon (the site admins) about putting up a FAQ for newbies, and it’s definitely our intent to do so.
In a way, it isn’t that bad answering the same questions over and over .. when I’m lazy I just post a link to a prior message, but usually I answer the question again. It’s fun to see if I remember the same things, the same way on different days.
There are some topics, where if I had stopped after my first answer, the full story wouldn’t have come out.
Anyway…. we’re all thinking the same thought – we need a FAQ with answers to the common questions. Keep watching… it will appear in the next month or two. The tricky part is that we decided to put in links to the original messages, rather than just capturing my comments. It’s more interesting when you see the full discussion.
-Ken W
(re: sierra’s future ) Look, here I am butting my head in again…
I don’t know why a lot of people are here, but I’d imagine at least a few of them are here for the same reason I am – I have incredible memories as a kid (I’m 25 now) of playing and experiencing Sierra games. I don’t remember finishing any of them, and knowing my attention span I probably didn’t, but I remember how incredible it was to play the games, and how they felt like worlds of their own, as opposed to Ms. Pac Man munching little balls and ghosts around the same screen, over and over. These games were MAGIC to a lot of us, and you were the man behind the curtain, at the end of the yellowbrick road.This is why it’s still fascinating for me to come here and chat with you.
I’ve know a few moderately famous people in my time, all in the music business, and I’ve never met anyone who has taken as much time as you have to respond to fan requests, questions, etc. To make it even more remarkable is that you aren’t really famous as much as you are a legend – in 50 or 100 years when college classes are taught by historians on interactive gaming, Ken and Roberta Williams will be there alongside Nolen Bushnell, Shigeru Miyamoto, and other pioneers. So it goes from remarkable to mind blowing.
I believe, based on viewing a lot of these boards, that the discussion seems redundant due mostly to newbies. Although it’s extremely polite, you don’t have to respond to the same stupid questions (“Do you regret selling Sierra?”) over and over. Have one of your admins create a few good FAQs answering these questions, and then allow the Sierra discussions to continue in positive directions. Don’t censor discussions, but only respond to negative questions and discussions if they are original or haven’t been addressed before. But please continue to participate in the nostalgia discussions. Otherwise this site might lose some of it’s magic, and there is a ton of magic floating around right now!
Thanks again for everything, and have fun on your trip!
(re: Ken & The Bilestoad) I remember seeing Bilestoad, but don’t remember evaluating it for publishing, and turning it down.
I am opposed to violent games. Flight Simulators didn’t bother me, such as our Red Baron game — but, a game like Bilestoad, with people hacking off arms really wouldn’t have been my style.
That said, I did publish Half-Life and Phantasmagoria …
My overall philosophy is: Children need protected, adults don’t. If adults want to buy a particular product, let them. My job was to find products that our customers wanted to buy, and bring them to market. We published everything from Micky Mouse to the Playboy Calendar on CD-Rom – seriously. I am opposed to the idea that large media companies get to decide for me what I can watch, read or listen to. I understand, and support, the need to protect children, but I am not a child, and neither were many of Sierra’s customers.
I do confess that if there were two products to publish, and one reinforced positive values, and the other was a hack and slash — I fought to publish the “good” game. For the most part, we avoided publishing violent software, but it wasn’t because we had a rule against it. I felt it was better for Sierra’s overall image, and the industry, to promote products that conveyed positive values, and to the extent that it didn’t adversely affect the bottom line, that’s where I focused.
Which is a long way of saying – if I turned down Bilestoad, it was probably because I didn’t believe it would be a hit, or because the deal was wrong, not because of its content. I don’t recall ever turning down a product that I thought would be a hit, and that we could make money with. It wouldn’t be my style…
-Ken W(re: Goofy’s Word Factory – long lost Sierra/Disney game?)
The Wayback Machine saves the day. The link in question shows a product list of sorts.
(re: Goofy’s Word Factory – long lost Sierra/Disney game?) Jukka:
I asked Roberta about Goofys Word Factory, and she was like me — no recollection, beyond that it existed. She thought Al Lowe may have written it (
Link: http://www.allowe.com(http://www.allowe.com)
).You could try writing him – to see what he remembers.
-Ken W
(re: Goofy’s Word Factory – long lost Sierra/Disney game?) Thank you for such quick reply.
Excuse my enthusiasm (and you probably hear it so often) but this is so cool to be talking to the Man himself :). Respect. And my best regards and compliments to Roberta; King’s Quest is my favorite series though I love all those wonderful games. Interesting to hear if she remembers the Goofy-game.
Of the Disney-series games my favourites are The Black Cauldron (it’s in my top Disney-movies too) and Donald Duck’s Playground.
The Goofy is alright very forgotten since there isn’t anything written about it on the net than my site. There was a brief mentioning about it at following link, but it’s gone and unfortunately I didn’t think to save it:
Link: http://www.livingsoft.com/ds4/products.htm(http://www.livingsoft.com/ds4/products.htm) To my recollection was something like “Goofy’s Word Factory”, “Apple II”…
– Jukka E.
(re: Torin Passage used to be has a sequel plan ?)
Yes, Torin’s Passage was going to be a new adventure game series. I read somewhere in an interview that Al Lowe had planned the first 2 games in the new series. Torin’s Passage was an OK game I really liked it (although I thought the original trailer looked more fun that the game did) and don’t know why there never was a sequel. The game probably didn’t sell well enough…
(re: Source of images) Jason:
Good luck with your FauxINN project! You can’t imagine how much I wish INN existed — just so I could play it. I really miss it… Yes … you have my permission to “borrow” the images from here of INN for your site. Factually speaking — all images are/were of Sierra copyrighted material —so, it’s not clear that anyone, other than possibly Sierra owns them. I have no right to “give” you anything (or, for that matter, to have it myself).
Speaking of lawyers… here’s something interesting…
Recently, I spent an hour on the phone with lawyers for American Online. Apparently, they somehow wound up being the owners of INN. You cannot imagine what a pioneering effort INN was. The Internet did not really exist yet, and modems were barely running at 1200 baud (some people were just starting to have 2400 baud).
I had the foresight to patent what we were doing. Apparently, AOL understand that owning the patents on key aspects of multi-player games is important and called me recently to ask about the patent. I’m listed as the inventor, along with a few other Sierra folk. AOL has been working on getting the patents through the filing process for over 10 years! I had no idea this was going on. I remember filing the patents, and that they were very broad (we really were first in MANY ways).
The key thing to know here is that AOL understands the value of the patents, and that they are close to being issued. I doubt that your faux INN project is “in their crosshairs” …. but, it is possible that many other, larger, “infringers” are…
-Ken W
(re: Goofy’s Word Factory – long lost Sierra/Disney game?) Jukka:
I don’t remember what happened to Goofy’s Word Factory — I don’t even remember who was working on it. Strange …. I vaguely remember that the game did exist, but that’s it. I’ll ask Roberta if she remembers it.
I remember that my favorite of the games was Donalds Playground, that Al Lowe did.. Here’s a little known fact: Micky’s Space Adventure was designed by Roberta!
-Ken W
(re: Source of images)
Hi Cyriak,
I run the fauxinn.com website, and I’m the project lead for the TSN-remake. We opened up a section recently on our forum, called the scrapbook, where we’re trying to create a collection of screencaps so we can figure out how TSN worked, and what it looked like. I was wondering if you’d mind me posting your images there? I think they’d be a great help to our cause, since screencaps are so hard to come by.Also, if you have any other pics you want to send, please send them to me atjldougl@fas.harvard .edu 🙂 I’ll be happy to convert them for you and post them!
Thanks,
Jason(re: Building a Sierra Computer) if you want to play old sierra games and not deal with the hassle of putting together and old pc, try dosbox. You can set the CPU speed to whatever you like, so it can run without getting timer bugs. You just have to make sure you configure it right so you get optimum speeds (setting cpu cycles, opengl on)… it supports General midi and I *think* the regular version supports MT-32.. if its not supported in the official version, i know this version supports MT-32: http://www.artworxinn.com/alex/downloads.htm
one thing though, for certain games you need to hit the exact CPU speed to get MT32 to play correctly (ie at normal settings QfG2 really sounds screwed up)
(re: PQ2 and PQ3 manuals)
Hi…
I don’t have them, but will also need them at some point since my collection didn’t come with a manual.
A tip to get into PQ2 — keep filling in Jesse Bains until you get it right. One of the mug shots is his and it’ll come up eventually if you keep tyring.
-emily
(re: no need to criticize Ken Williams)
I’d love to, but I currently don’t own a computer at home and probably won’t for awhile, so I don’t have access to Photoshop. I do a lot of things through Microsoft Paint, but it’s very limiting. I’ll come up with something soon!
(re: GK III – ahead of its times ala Da Vinci Code)
GKIII was so awesome. All of the puzzles were thought out very well; and they weren’t impossible, but they’d require you to really think, and explore around to find clues.
(re: Shadow of Darkness) there is a fellow who has created timer fixes for the most critical parts in sierra games:
http://geocities.com/belzorash/ however, it does not fix everything; if you want the game to run as it was intended, use dosbox 0.61. It supports general midi now, the sound and music is great in this version; better than i could get it working in VDMSound, and theres absolutely NO timer related problems (in qg3 & 4 the whole stamina thing was messed up when you did certain things ie cross the rope in the cave).
you just need to make sure you set up dosbox right; they say it varies from pc to pc but i found running it at about 4500-5000 cycles would give me pretty much full speed. you’ll also want to enable opengl mode unless you want a slowfest while playing in windowed mode.
(re: QfG4 – Collection version vs. standalone)
personally i wouldn’t wait for the VGA remake to come out; the original QfG2 is arguably the best sierra adventure game ever made; but then again, knowing AGD’s dedication, they’ll probably one up the original game. From what I heard, the conversation element in QG2VGA will be using a text parser, while the rest of the game will be point & click; thats good news because the text conversations is really what made the game world feel so alive and real.
The collection version of QG4 is the same version as the standalone as stated earlier.. just make sure when you play it (and QG1VGA/QG3) that you use dosbox to play it so you wont get the dreaded timer bugs..
(re: re: The Colonel’s Bequest-Manual)
Is there any possibility you’d scan the LB2 manual?
I bought LB2 in the box at goodwill, but the manual and hint book inside were for LB1. I think someone got confused when they were packing up their games for donation!
I haven’t been able to find the LB2 manual online anywhere.
-emily
(re: The Colonel’s Bequest-Manual)
This is beautiful – thanks so much for posting it. I’m fortunate enough to own LB2 in its original box along with all the extras, but have so far been unable to afford LB1. What beautiful creations these two games are, from the boxes, through the manuals and maps, to the adventures themselves. They sure don’t make them like they used to!
