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I really enjoyed the answer to #2. Now that is definitely a book I would buy – one where you talk about past Sierra managers – the what and why’s that made them good/bad for Sierra.
Thanks for your messages! You really should write a book on your experiences with Sierra someday…
About Cyan….Sierra didn’t own Cyan. Cyan was the company which developed Myst in ’93…Broderbund published it for them. Sierra owned:
Dynamix (Acquired 1990)
Brightstar Technologies (Acquired 1992)
Coktel Vision (Acquired 1993)
Impressions Games (Acquired 1995)
SubLogic (Acquired 1995)
Papyrus Design Group (Acquired 1995)
Green Thumb Software (Acquired 1995)
Arion Software (Acquired 1995)
The Pixellite Group (Acquired 1995)
Synergistic Software (Acquired 1996)
Headgate (Acquired 1996)
Books That Work (Acquired 1997)
Berkely Systems (Acquired 1997)
PyroTechnix (Acquired 1997)Embedded with ***
-Ken W
Quote:
…nico, r., 2007-07-17 16:52:19Hey Ken! I have some questions.
1) What was a typical day at Sierra like?
*** I tried to stay out of all the corporate bureaucracy and spend my time with developers. Our development group was almost 700 people scattered all over the world. I flew from place to place, and tried to sprinkle cool ideas from one place to another place. I also tried to spot projects that were in trouble and get them help.
2) Who was the CEO or President of Sierra before you? I know you founded the company, but I’ve heard about this guy named Dick Sutherland. What was his role?
*** I founded the company and was the Chairman/CEO/President. Dick was brought in sometime around 1975, reporting to me. He was a senior R&D manager at a company I had previously worked at. It didn’t work out, and I feel bad about it. Dick was a great guy, but it was in the early days of Sierra and we weren’t ready yet for professional management. We were a company comprised of smart kids, with an emphasis on kids. We needed adult supervision, and it was Dick’s job to provide it. However, in any creative business, it is ultimately the talent (meaning the creators of product) who call the shots. Dick wanted us to grow up, and we wanted to have fun and make cool games. It didn’t work, and at the time I thought he was wrong, but now I can see it from both sides.
3) How did you make the various studios and companies that Sierra acquired feel like they were all part of the same ”family”? Why did Sierra begin acquiring companies in the first place?
*** Each studio had its own culture. I split the world into stuff a customer sees in a game, and all the behind the scenes bureaucracy. My job was to give each studio the freedom to have whatever culture they wanted, while centralizing and cost reducing all of the non-creative ends of the company. We were all part of the same family, but I wanted Dynamix to feel very different from Impressions or Sierra. My goal was to get everything good about being a big company, with worldwide distribution, and a world class sales force, and manufacturing team, but with games that weren’t built by a “big company”. I felt game studios should be small independent units with no other focus except building great games.
4) How were the companies Sierra acquired chosen? Why weren’t others (Such as Blizzard, Cyan and others) acquired?
*** Cyan? OK .. I’ve forgotten. Did we own a Cyan? It sounds familiar .. so, it’s very possible. Mostly I chose companies based on thinking of the market as a series of vertical niches. I used music as an analogy. Music can be split into lots of categories: rock, country, gospel, classic, etc. Some people listen to more than one category, but generally, each person has what they like. To be a major company, we needed to be a player in each category. I sought to buy the company which dominated each niche, and then raise their revenues through giving them wider distribution, while simplifying their lives by handling all the other crap associated with peddling games for them – so that they could focus on building great product.
5) What’s the one thing you miss most from your days as the Chairman and CEO of Sierra?
*** Pioneering. I miss being able to literally change the world. Sierra was a very influential company… now, I’m just a nice retired guy who used to do some cool things. That’s probably better than just being a nice retired guy …
…
Hey Ken! I have some questions.
1) What was a typical day at Sierra like?
2) Who was the CEO or President of Sierra before you? I know you founded the company, but I’ve heard about this guy named Dick Sutherland. What was his role?
3) How did you make the various studios and companies that Sierra acquired feel like they were all part of the same ”family”? Why did Sierra begin acquiring companies in the first place?
4) How were the companies Sierra acquired chosen? Why weren’t others (Such as Blizzard, Cyan and others) acquired?
5) What’s the one thing you miss most from your days as the Chairman and CEO of Sierra?AGDInteractive and the former KQ9 project (now The Silver Lining) both received permission from Vivendi to use the King’s Quest material in remakes and, in the case of former-KQ9, an original fan project.
I think other fan projects that start up hope to receive permission as well in the long run, as it’s been proven by those two teams that it can be done. The trick seems to be to 1) have a high enough quality product and 2) bring the project to Vivendi once it is complete or close-to-complete.
I don’t remember the exact timeline, but I think AGDI had already finished their first remake and KQ9 was of course well into development, when both teams were contacted first by Vivendi, who then, through negotations, gave them some kind of license.
Maybe he means that Ken and Roberta were the Pioneers that helped or inspired people like Warren become who they are today. Maybe Warren worked for them at one time. Maybe they colaborated on some projects. I, too, have no idea why he references Warren.
Off Topic:
All I know is Deus Ex was awesome. Its follow-up was frustrating…too many load screens. I want Warren to revisit Deus Ex and bring all the voice actors back. Such a collosal game. Too bad it won’t happen.I bought a used copy of ‘Starsiege Universe’ (Starsiege + Tribes 1) a few weeks ago. Just case & disks, no manual’s. So, I’m tryingto found out the name of the person (woman) who VO’s the game’s movie sequences. imdb.com lists everybody but doesn’t have specific names to what they did, just ‘voice over’. Searched the net & all the tribes sites don’t have that info.
Anybody know?
Forget the Inferno link as the P2DOS patch cannot be used in XP. The batch file needs to be modified for XP. You can find a version that will work in XP on The Sierra Help Pages. Also VDMS is a dead end program. It requires the heavily flawed NTVDM, which isn’t even included with many newer versions of Windows. Vlad Romascanu, author of VDMS, has abandoned it. DOSBox is, by far, the best solution.
Hi!
I also had some problems running Phantasmagoria I and II on XP. See the following links for more information.
Phantasmagoria I:
http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=13398&sid=05e3c8be3e60ae00d22b1ab3c5854929Phantasmagoria II:
http://home.earthlink.net/~angeldancer27/XpGameListP_T.htmGood luck!
PS: Both solutions worked for me
Hey Thomas,
Good to see someone from Australia 🙂
I recommend you try and work with the existing KQ4 remake, from the Magic Mirror games team. Some good people there.
It’s been proven in the Sierra community that people who ‘go it alone’ or try and also remake something when others are already doing it generally fail (and the better project usually fails, too, from lack of team members).
Also, definitely, don’t approach Vivendi about a potential remake.
Just some friendly advice. Wish the assets were public domain also though 😉– Alistair
The rights to KQ4 are held (lock and key) by Vivendi. KQ4 I believe has a desktop PC remake but maybe not for the PocketPC. Brandon Klassen, here, may know more about the remakes.
It’s been quite a while since I last posted here. Since that time, I have made all of the “lands” except for the Schoolhouse and Arena available. The Schoolhouse and Arena client software are not included with the versions of INN that I have, so they can’t be accessed. The Shadows of Yserbius was the latest addition to the server and it has really brought people pouring in, so to speak. Since I opened Yserbius, the highest number of users online at once has gone from three to eight and the number of unique visitors to the server has gone from seven to over twenty.
All of the people getting online and sending supportive e-mails have really made the hard work worthwhile. Although it is an arduous process bringing new features to the server, because of the support coming from the community of former/aspiring INNers, I don’t see the work stopping any time soon. The next major feature that I am working to bring back is Red Baron.
Hi Roberta and Ken,
I’m a professional game developer from Melbourne, Australia and a huge fan of the old sierra adventure games. I’ve gotten a Palm Treo 750 recently and started toying with it. I ended up starting to write an adventure game engine called Scribe for it. I’d like to make a fan game based on KQ4 or even do a remake of the original for the PocketPC platform with full orchestral arrangement and stylus/jog dial controls, but what’s stopping me is the assets, because I’d like to keep the look of the original. Who owns the original KQ4 assets? I want to ask for permission to use them for the remake, which will be strictly a non-profit fan effort.
Best Regards,
Thomas Mayer
I haven’t checked the whole video (I’m at work
) but I don’t think it is the documentary I saw…If I’m not mistaken, Sierra isn’t mentioned in the documentary.
I’ll check YouTube…
Good thinking!
Do you recall what the name of this documentary was? I’d like to catch it the next time it’s on.
Thanks!
So, yesterday when I was having dinner, I saw this really cool documentary on the Discovery channel. The documentary was about the evolution in gaming and started with Pac Man, Pong and the rise and (almost) downfall of the consoles. But, the coolest thing about the documentary was the inclusion of Sierra Online! Ken, Roberta and Al were interviewed and told about the early days of Mystery House (first game with graphics), KQ I and Leisure Suit Larry (first adult oriented game).
I know a lot about Sierra (games) but the documentary gave me some new insights. First of all, cool Porsche Ken! Never knew you drove a Porsche 944 in the early days 😛 Second, I knew that MH was special because it had graphics but the coolest thing was that MH quickly sold about 10.000 copies. This may not be a staggering amount nowadays, but at that time it meant that for every PC sold, a copy of MH was sold. According to the documentary it was almost one-on-one. Not many PCs were sold back then (way too expensive) so this is quite impressive! Hence the Porsche 😛
Well, we all know why KQ was special… Showcase for IBM’s PC jr, cool tunes, improved 16 color graphics, nice text parser etc etc.
LSL, as we all know, was one of the first games marketed for an adult audience. Al said that at that time, almost every game had a hero. Hero saves the day, hero gets the girl bladibla. LSL was one of the first games where the main character of the game was a big time loser. Larry, our lovable anti-hero is a loser, is put down by everybody (even dogs), doesn’t have a lot of luck in love but still is our hero. Most games at that time were set in space or in a magical kingdom, but LSL was the “first” game that had a “realistic” setting with real characters, real places and real life stuff. Also, most games back then were action games like shooters and platform games. In the documentary, it is said that because of the pace of those action games, story telling was difficult and actually a non-issue. The Sierra games however, had a much slower pace and were the ideal platform for story telling. Throughout the years story telling became more important and nowadays game stories rival big movie productions. It was really cool to see the evolution in terms of production value. According to the documentary makers, the next big thing in games are realistic charismatic characters. So, not just realistic characters, but characters that you really care about (anybody remember FF’s Aries?), characters with a life story. We’ll see what this will bring us…
I’m done rambling 🙂
PS: I saw the documentary yesterday, if you’re Dutch you can probably see it again sometime this week.
Wow. This is… amazing. Writing a fan-letter to the people who made games in Sierra is something that was always on my mind, as a teenager in the 1990s, but I always dimissed the idea thinking that it’s probably this huge corporation, so the letter will never reach the individual it’s addressed to, and that anyway they’ll never send a response-letter overseas (I live in Israel)… should have had more faith, I guess!*
Do you still keep the letters sent to you by Roberta? Any chance you’ll post their contents here?
Your demo reel on YouTube is also very cool, by the way* Little did I realize that a decade and a half later I will be able to contact the same indviduals through email, and that when I ask one of them (Jane Jensen) for an interview, she’ll gladly agree. I mean, if someone told me back at 1995 that one day I’ll be interviewing the woman who made ‘Gabriel Knight’ one day, I would have probably laughed at him for even coming up with the idea.
Hello, Brandon.
The links to your scanned ad for Gabriel Knight in the museum pages come up with “Page Not Found” messages. I just thought you’d want to know that something is goofy with the links there.
Gaming Gramma
P.S. Do you remember a message in your hotmail inbox sometime last week (I think it was 5/20) with the subject header of “Help please” from a named person that you didn’t recognize, and you thought it might be someone asking for money or some other such Internet nonsense, so you ignored it perhaps? It was me. I’m Forum Impaired and need your help when you have a moment if you still have the message.
