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(re: I always like Sierra) Would it have been better for us to have stayed a private company? … the answer is that I honestly don’t know. I also ask myself at least once per day if we would have been better off if we hadn’t sold the company. These kinds of questions make you crazy…
As to grand kids … we wish. Neither of our sons are very good at finding girlfriends. DJ is 30 and Chris is 24. By the time I was 20 I already had a house, a wife and two kids. They’re both good looking, intelligent, and have great jobs — so, I’m not sure what the problem is. Somehow we must have raised them wrong…
On the future of Adventure games: Roberta is absolutely convinced that the market is huge for adventure games, and that it is just a matter of someone making a good one. She says she will consider coming back to the industry when adventure games start selling again.
I’m less optimistic. I do believe there’s room for an adventure game to succeed, but only if it does something new. The old style games are best left in the past. Someone needs to move the state of the art another generation forward. I don’t see any companies innovative enough to do so.
-Ken W(re: Police Quest 3 Pentagram)
i had this problem (kept me from progressing in the game). i couldn’t even get it after i looked at a picture i found online.
that was on a copy of PQ3 that i had downloaded. i don’t know if that could have anything to do with it (some of the games available as abandonware have bugs in them… like GK1). anyway, i now own a legal copy but i haven’t tried again…
-emily
(I always like Sierra) I starting gaming in 1985. The best games out were Sierra Adventure Games. Space Quest, King’s Quest, I bought all the Adventure games. Even at the price at the time of 50 bucks.
Ken and Roberta just were ordinary folks who started making games. They were straight forward and honest. I was really suprised when they sold it. Maybe it would have been better for them to stay a private company.
Do you think Ken and Roberta that Adventure games will make a comeback? There is one called “Journey to the Center of the Earth” coming out. The last good one was “The longest Journey.”
I asked this in the messages section but I will ask here. Are you spoiling any grand kids yet?(re: re: Electronic Christmas Cards)
I happen to have the ’90 and ’92 Christmas Demos. I’ll upload them here.
These demos were wonderful ideas Ken, by the way.
Xmas Demo 92
Xmas Demo 90(re: Electronic Christmas Cards)
Several of them can be found on The Ultimate AGI & SCI Web Site
(re: Electronic Christmas Cards) OK, I’ve moved this topic into the “Sierra History Museum.”
I don’t actually have the original files of any Christmas cards. But here’s an AGI one (I’m assuming 1986 because that’s when the files are date-stamped), it was sitting in one of my Sierra folders so I must have downloaded it from somewhere. I’m sure there are sites out there with the other ones too, maybe someone could track them down and post them here.(re: Electronic Christmas Cards) I hope you find them, and post them here!
We used to do them every Christmas, and then give them away. I used it as a filler project when a team was waiting around for some reason or another.
Some of them were great…
-Ken W(re: Funniest Leisure Suit Larry Moments)
I have fond memories of the running barber shop joke in LSL2, as well as the disguise puzzle on the holiday resort. “Only Russian women…” đ
(re: KQ4 AGI)
I own the AGI version of KQ4, but only used it a few times for some nostalgic fun on my old PCjr… Neer finished it though.. I remember when I “accidentally” bought it at a local used game store, I was wondering what in tarnation I was installing, but after all was said and done, I felt like I had stumbled upon a treasure! I really love the fact that this version exsists, it’s almost a homage to I-III to me! These games nver get old to me. The only games that look bad these days are bad 3-D games.. Like N64 games or Ps1 games… Simple graphics are just that. Simple. Simple is often beautiful. But Bad graphics are BAD..
Anyways, always nice to think of better times!
(re: re: re: re: KQ4 AGI)
I also have the AGI version of KQ4 and I finished it several times, so it IS possible, I guarantee you. I don’t know whether it’s freeware or not, but someone told me recently. I’m really curious if this is true. If it is, I’ll probably make it available for download somewhere, since it’s a real fun game!
(Designers Documents) An update regarding other designers having their design documents or other Sierra material. I’ve emailed a number of former Sierra staff now… and the results are good and more people agree to help every week or so. So the project is well under way… and with any luck, come January I will have some goods to show for it… or at least be able to give you considerable news.
(re: re: re: re: re: Biggest mistake) I don’t agree with this at all. There are certainly more variations in the PC market but they cannot necessarily be deemed as more buggy than a console. A PC developer writes a piece of source code to operate with an expectation of what’s available on the platform – certain class of gfx card or similar. He then probably wouldn’t test it fully on anything other than his local PC (which is probably the same as everyone else’s in the dev team!). Come to the testing phase, the developer/publisher would try the software on different configurations and it never quite works as expected, so changes would have to be made to suit. Consoles have the luxury of being a static technology platform – that doesn’t mean to say that there are less bugs, just probably/hopefully known in advance!
(re: re: re: re: Biggest mistake)
Ken,
Thanks for the response. I can see the dilemma… must have been a difficult and exciting period.
I won’t question more about managing developers… But it is an issue that I will keep in my mind towards the future.
Manish
(re: re: re: re: Biggest mistake) It must be way easier for game software companies to produce games for console systems. They don’t have to deal with buggy O/S and ever-changing hardware. Well, they do but not in a 6month range….since some consoles live for 6-7 years sometimes. I would have to guess that’s the case since Nintendo continues to drive the market since 1985.
(re: Funniest Leisure Suit Larry Moments)
Near the ending of larry 2, when you are on the island I saw on the screen some weird looking flowers so I typed âlook flowersâ, the answer was something like this: These flowers date from the Mesozoic era, since most jokes from this game are from the same period it seemed appropriateâŚ
(re: re: re: LSL3. Cherri Tart won’t stop dancing.)
OR, you could get a utility called dosbox, run the lsl3 within dosbox, reduce number of CPU cycles and wait just a couple of seconds, your choice.
There is a fine section devoted to larry games troubleshooting on Al Lowe’s site, and I suggest that you check it out.
(re: re: A little request (probably not realistic but I thought I would ask anyway))
Cool! Thanks for considering it. I’ll look forward to seeing it take shape. Sadly, I’ll probably be offline for the next month or more. I was recenly laid off from Gateway (the computer company) and did not have much luck in locating a new job here in Virginia, so I decided to get back into school and finsh working on my Bachelors Degree in Computer Science and will be moving to North Carolina next month to fulfill that goal (ok, enough of the sad-sap story) Anyway, I’ll try to check things out in a couple of months of so…Thanks.
(re: re: re: Biggest mistake) I have no idea what is happening in the industry today. My sense is that it’s a different world.
The money today, in games, is in the video game space. It’s a world where the target platform isn’t changing every six months. As you said, some of our product slippage came from problems dealing with the changing market.
Generally though, our problem, was in managing creative people. They don’t like having tight schedules. Some groups, like the artists, don’t even relate to the concept. Telling an artist you need one pencil sketch every two hours just doesn’t work. Creative people hate budgeting their time. I’m over generalizing, and being a bit unfair – but, in the big picture, what I’ve said is true. Imagine what it is like to tell Roberta Williams or Al Lowe, I need your game design by the end of March. They don’t think that way. They try, but creativity doesn’t happen on a schedule. Having a schedule sometimes slows things down.
I do believe that Sierra succeeded because we managed the balance between creative needs and schedule needs better than our competitors. We succeeded because we were awesome at building great software. But, we were far from perfect.
There is already a lot that I’ve posted on this site about managing developers, so I don’t want to bore anyone through being repetitious.
-Ken W(re: re: Biggest mistake)
Ken,
Thanks for the quick reply. The comments are definitely interesting coming from a respectable executive in the software industry. My only few questions are:
Isn’t software deadlines a stigma in the software industry as a whole tho? Isn’t the ultimate question is “When is software truly done?”.
Also, since the industry moves fast
, isn’t 6 months too long of a time period besides the software becomes obsolete? I find these issues quite interesting, and it may be a path I may take in the future. It seems like large corporations like IBM, Microsoft, and Apple all seem to have similar issues. I’m sure Sierra had problems dealing with buggy O/S’s during the days of game development.
The history software and computers in general has been quite interesting, if anything… what if plumbing had bugs in it? What a mess that would be…
Manish
(re: A little request (probably not realistic but I thought I would ask anyway)) Good idea .. and, not hard to add. There are lots of chat clients out there that could be linked.
I’m bogged down working on the next release of the software. My guess is that it’ll be a month before I can think these kinds of thoughts. Brad Herbert and Brandon Klasson have been helping me out with webmastering this site. Perhaps one of them (or, someone else) could assume a leadership role in making this happen.
I think all that would need to be done is to choose someones chat, and link to it, from somewhere on this site. It is possible that no code needs to be written.
I’ll focus on this next month…
-Ken W(re: Biggest mistake) what do you think is the biggest mistake you made at Sierra?
I had a major problem dealing with being a public company. As a public company, there are people who track and predict your quarterly revenues. A huge portion of our revenue came from new products. If a product shipped late, this could skew a huge amount of revenue from one quarter to the next one. Missing a quarterly profit goal meant the stock price would slide, demotivating employees.
The right answer is to finish products six months before release, like the film industry does. I never had that luxury. I did try to leave time in the schedule, but products always shipped later than we thought.
Time after time, we would let the street (financial community) know when we thought products would ship, we would spend 100’s of thousands of dollars on marketing, and the product wouldn’t be there.
My biggest mistake was sometimes shipping a product I knew wasn’t ready. There were times I folded to the pressure, and shipped a product that I shouldn’t have.
This happened because of all the pressure from lots of directions.
The street – we had our quarterly revenue goals to hit
Marketing – product slippage sometimes means the marketing runs months before the product is in the stores. With a game called Outpost, we ran several different campaigns, some a year before the game shipped – because we kept thinking the game was months from shipping (for years)
Budget – late products are also over budget products. If the budget for a game is $2 million, and the team is burning $200,000 per month – a six month delay means an additional $1.2 million on the budget. This may exceed the original profit projection for the game.
Add all this together, and you see why I spent 20 years stressed out.
On those occasions where I shipped a product because of all this pressure — I paid for it later.
I used to always talk about customer acquisition costs. It was how I thought of our business. All customers I fit into one of three categories:
people that hadn’t bought from us
people that bought from us, and liked us
people that bought from us, and had a poor experience
For each game, I would think about what it costs, per unit sold, to reach each of these three offices. Reaching a new buyer might cost $4, an existing buyer $2, and bringing someone back into the family who had bought from us, and had a poor experience, $20. In other words, you canât make money no matter what you do, attempting to sell products to people who donât like you.Obviously, we made a lot more people happy than unhappy â but, I canât say that our record was perfect. If I had it to do over again, I would not have shipped some products until later, and some I would have never shipped.
(re: List of who has which magazines) Brad, it seems your USAP site hasn’t really caught on… nor am I sure it’s necessary. In any event, I’ve setup my own page listing what I have:
Link: http://www.sylpher.com/relight/sierra.htm(http://www.sylpher.com/relight/sierra.htm)
(re: re: re: A new language maybe? (I accidently posted this in the Q&A section first)) I think I was clear. Sorry. What I’m suggesting is offer this palatte to all of the users. They would be able decide how the site looks, so they can’t complain about how it looks. It’s kind of like choosing different skins for your media player. I like the way the site looks personally.
(re: re: re: re: re: King’s Quest V for NES) If videos are to be made I suggest that the intro/extro sequences of SQ3 and SQ4 should definitely be among them! Especially the SQ3 Sierra and SQ4 Magmetheus scenes – also, comparing the Beatrice Wankmeister we know from the SQ4 extro hologram to the real one Roger meets in SQ5 would be interesting (I always thought that the real one didn’t hold a candle to the hologram. It’s probably always that way… :o)
The KQV extro scene would be greatly appreciated by me because my computer always crashed lately when I was going to watch that… :o(i.e., if it’s even good… ;o)(re: re: I have to say Sierra sucks now)
From what the developers say, The new larry will be much like GTA and Hit and Run in the fact that you have complete control. You can explore, touch things, break things and talk to people. You won’t be able to drive cars and kill people……its not like that. They just want to style of play where you can be Larry and have freedom to move. I don’t think it will share the type of game (ie: action) as the other two.
