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(re: The Ken Williams Interview) Excellent interview. Most interesting to read… I just love all these inside Sierra facts. 🙂
(re: The Sierra HQ’s) Hi, there! Jess Morrissette of the aforementioned Virtual Broomcloset here. I did indeed make the trek to Oakhurst while visiting Yosemite National Park on my honeymoon in mid-March. As Petter mentioned, the “redwood building” (now called the Sierra Professional Center) is presently a medical clinic. As an interesting side note, I went into the building and asked a receptionist if it was indeed the old Sierra On-Line building–just in case I was crazy. Her response? “I’ve never heard of Sierra On-Line. Is that like a telephone company or something?”
Anyway, I also dropped by the “warehouse” building while I was in town. As of March 20, it was still Codemasters. The place was fairly deserted when I stopped by, but their name was still on the door. For what it’s worth, though, I did notice a promotional box in their lobby for a Gameboy Color (or Gameboy Advance) title.
Want to see some photos? Here I am at the “redwood building.”And here I am meeting the World Famous Talking Bear!
I have one of me at Codemasters, but it’s fairly boring. After all, as Ken mentioned, it really does look like an aircraft hanger. 🙂 Best wishes!
Jess(re: The Sierra HQ’s)
Maybe it is an idea to place some old photographs here of the ‘Sierra building’ . If there are any of it….
‘Oakhurst facilities’(re: The Sierra HQ’s) Wow! Very interesting! You must be right that the move to the Redwood Building was made around 1982. If you worked there during the cartridge crash times it cannot have been in 1985. I don’t remeber where that year was mentioned… I doubt it was the year you moved to the other building either, as the Redwood Building/Sierra Professional Center is seen in Space Quest 3, which was released in 1989.
Anyway, I’ve discussed this with Jess Morisette of the website “The Virtual Broomcloset” (
Link: http://www.wiw.org/%7Ejess/roger.html(http://www.wiw.org/%7Ejess/roger.html)
) who recently visited Oakhurst during his honeymoon. He claims the Redwood Building is used as a medical clinic today. He also visited the other building down the street, which he claims is still used by Codemasters.
The info about Sierra Telephone is very interesting, and something I’ve never heard before. If this is true I have no idea what has happened to Codemasters. Interestingly, I found this website a few months ago:
Link: http://www.pulsarinteractive.com/(http://www.pulsarinteractive.com/) Since the website apparently hasn’t been updated since 2000 this company may no longer exist in this form, but as you can see Chris Iden worked there, as well as (I assume) his wife Marie and former Sierra employees David Mace and the legendary John Harris, working on several projects, including a couple of GameBoy Color games!
Checking the SierraTel website also provides some interesting information. No mention of any game services that I could find, but apparently they are hiring game designers, programmers and artists, as can clearly be seen at this page:
Link: http://www.stcg.net/jobs.html(http://www.stcg.net/jobs.html) So there’s definately something going on there…
(re: The Sierra HQ’s) Here’s my remembrance:
The “redwood building” was built for Sierra. I don’t remember it being as late as 1985, but it may have been. My guess would have been closer to 1982.
Soon after we moved in the company hit hard times, and almost bankrupted. The building was part of the problem. We had huge payments, and couldn’t afford the building. It’s a long story, but we had shifted to doing video game cartridges, and got caught with extra inventory when the market crashed. I even offered the owner of the building 10% (and more) of Sierra if he would give us temporary forgiveness on the rent, which he refused. He made the wrong choice. Anyway — within a couple of years, we turned it around and outgrew the building.
We then bought 5 acres nearby and built our own building. It looked like an aircraft hangar. 40,000 square feet of metal building – half for manufacturing and half for offices. This is the building that CodeMasters took over when the Oakhurst location was shut down.Here’s an amazing conclusion to the story: !!!! I just heard that the building was sold to the local phone company, Sierra Telephone. For some reason the phone company decided to enter the online games business and rehired several ex-Sierra people. In the rumor I heard, developers like Chris Iden and Bob Heitman are back in their old offices, with several other ex-Sierra developers, working for a company called Sierra, building online games.
Cool!
-Ken W
(re: Interaction Magazine Poll) Hi Brandon! Glad to see you are still working on this. 🙂 It means a lot to those of us who don’t have the pleasure of owning copies of the original magazine!
In answer to your questions, I too have to emphasize that these scans should represent the magazines as-is, i.e. with EVERYTHING in there. Please do not skip pages with little or no Sierra-related material on them! It is still relevant to scan these pages to represent how the magazines looked.
As for the file sizes, unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any good DjVu encoders available for free, at least for Windows. If you’re using Linux you might want to check out the djvulibre, which features an encoder that allows for mask images to be used, i.e. a manually drawn black-and-white image of the same size as the image you’re encoding to specify what should be background and what should be foreground. This would eliminate the problems of the crappy foreground/background detection problem we’ve discussed before and thereby allowing great quality pics with much smaller file sizes than PDF. Encoding the scans as photos would still make the file size/quality ratio better than PDF, but since this is a poor utilization of the DjVu format it would probably be just as well to go with PDF as you seem to have decided to do.
And I can’t stress enough that you should make the scans high-quality from the beginning and archive them for later. I’d definately be prepared to buy them on CD, and in any case there might be chances to upload those somewhere later anyway. You shouldn’t spend so much time on perfecting the quality though. Just take care to scan the pages in their entirety and with correct alignment. If there are stains, folds etc. on the pages, they can always be touched up digitally later, and the important thing is to get the pages scanned correctly in the first place.(re: Interaction Magazine Poll) Brandon,
It’s the most time consuming of all the answers, but one that I feel (as a Sierra Historian myself) that if you are going to dedicate the time to scanning all of them in, I would reproduce them exactly – that means EVERYTHING from Front Cover to Back Cover. I would also scan them in at a high enough resolution where they could be reproduced (ie color laser printer) should in the event that all of the magazines in the world were to self-destruct (heaven forbid – I would lapse into a coma) we could print out “reprints”.
As far as the ones you PDF (or DejaVu if I remember correctly from QuestStudios.com) and place on the web I would post scaled down versions (screen res) and have the high-res ones on CD for requests. Out of the magazine list that you Email me.. I have all of those except for two of them, and have about 20 others or so that aren’t even on the list. I need to work with you to get these scanned in. I have so many things in my collection that I want to archive at Super High Quality.. just not enough time. Still have some holes I am looking to fill, in order to launch a full-fledged walk down memory lane.. if anyone else out there would like to donate to the physical museum, and future projects (email me for details) please let me know!!! Any and all Sierra items accepted =)
ttyl
-Brad(re: Jane Jensen is working on a new game!) a press release was issued today by The Adventure Company (dreamcatcher’s adventure label, who published Syberia in the US). They will be publishing the game, which is being developed by Jane’s own company.
I can’t find the press release on the Adventure Company’s site, but you can read it at the link below.(re: I changed how messages get posted) Emily:
Good idea … I’ll consider that… this board is growing in size at a fast rate. It will be interesting to see what happens when I go out of town (eastern europe) for a month this summer.
Hmmm … one problem I can think of is that this system doesn’t really distinguish between messages and menu items. Any message can be a menu item. For instance, there are messages that exist purely for navigation, and others that are part of the system (much of the system is written in itself) – such as the logoff message. These would get “pruned” if I didn’t think of a way to stop that from happening.
Oh well… it’s like a big adventure game!
-Ken(re: I changed how messages get posted) That’s it for me for the night …. I’m wiped out. I just noticed that the emails that go out about posted messages get sent, but then don’t bring up the message. Darn – it’s always something… I’ll figure it out tomorrow.
I also need to optimize the sending of the “new Message emails” because they are taking too long to send, and impose a delay when you post a message.
This hobby is becoming a job!
-Ken W(re: I changed how messages get posted) one way many bulletin boards limit the number of threads displayed is to have the user specify how many days old the topic should be, with a drop-down menu that says
Only display messages from…
today
last 2 days
last 5 days
last 20 days
etc.Then depending on what the user has selected, only the topics from that number of days are displayed. Don’t know if it would be worth implementing here, but it’d be one way to go about it. It could muck up the pages where there are fewer posts, though.
-emily(re: I changed how messages get posted) That’s cool Ken. Glad to see where you are headed with this… just piping in where I can. Keep it up, and let us all know what we can do to help you test it out.
-Brad(re: I changed how messages get posted) You are right … that would have been a lot simpler.
I have lots of ideas for extending this that I couldn’t really have done with an “off the shelf” BBS package.
In particular, the code that I wrote was never really intended as a BBS. The idea was that it would create custom websites for “associations” based on pre-existing templates. If you go to
Link: http://www.talkspot.com(http://www.talkspot.com)
you’ll get a sense of where I’m going longer-term. The idea is that it feel like a website, but have the dynamic attributes of a BBS (data driven).
-Ken W(re: Ken Photo – Summer 1996 Interaction) Brandon –
Please Email me about the Interaction Magazines.. I too am close to having the complete collection from the beginning of Sierra till now.. still need a few – maybe we can trade – I have a few duplicates. Email me
Link:Brad@bradherbert.com (mailto:Brad@bradherbert.com)(re: I changed how messages get posted) Ken,
This is merely a thought, and in no way intended to intrude on your programming. Have you thought about using something like
Link: http://www.vbulletin.com/(http://www.vbulletin.com/)
that has a pre-built interface and such that can do almost anything message / file wise? It’s merely a thought, and I am not quite sure what your ultimate intentions of this site is in the end (functionality-wise) but thought I would throw it out on the table.
I know what it is like to do your own programming and such – it can be fun to tinker – and that is fine, sometimes I just get done doing things, and in the the end am like – “oh I could have just used this”. Anyhow.. whatever it may be, just please keep this site up! – being able to chat with you on a very casual basis, and talk to the Sierra Source himself is an experience equal to playing an ‘ol Sierra game =)
Thanks for the site Ken!
-Brad(re: About Mask of Enternity….) Thank you!
KQ8 is a wild story.
KQ8 was in development at the same time that the company was sold. Basically, Sierra went through changes during the development of the game, and those changes are reflected in the game. During the first half of the game, I was the CEO – during the last half of the game my status shifted to “reasonably nice guy who used to work here”. My way of doing things was different than the new way of doing things.
My #1 issue was always to maintain the “clarity of vision” of the game designer. A Sierra project, like KQ8, has nearly a hundred highly creative people on it. Many of these people were working at Sierra because they wanted their shot to be a game designer. It was not uncommon for everyone on a project to seek opportunities to “put their mark” on the game. This is a delicate issue. I recruited people who could be designers, and I was a huge supporter of creativity. Roberta wanted ideas from the team, but at some point, if you accept too many ideas, the product can become a muddy mess. There were dozens of people on KQ8 who could have been the designer, any of which would have made a great designer. But, unfortunately, if this tendency, on the part of developers, to add their creativity to a product, isn’t carefully controlled, the product starts to veer into “design by committee”. Roberta had her vision for the product, as did almost every person on the project.
When I lost control of Sierra, Roberta’s ability to maintain her control over KQ8 was also eroded. The product that shipped is very different than what would have shipped had the company not been sold.
There was another issue at work on KQ8. Roberta is a perfectionist (I’m guilty of the same sin). Whenever she would play the game, she would turn in lists of hundreds of “bugs”. Perfectionist can be a pseudonym for nit-picker. When a development team gets a long list, the natural tendency can be to look at some bugs as nit-picky. I always supported my designers. I wouldn’t let a game go until the designer was happy (with a couple of exceptions that I regretted later), even when it seemed like we were spending lots of money to fix stuff no one cared about. It was critical to me that the game our customers played represented the game our designer wanted produced. When I left Sierra, Roberta’s ability to get bugs fixed diminished.
Ultimately, the last year of KQ8 development was a tough one for Roberta. For a long time, she refused to let the game ship and there was threatened litigation floating around.
This is not to say that the game that shipped isn’t a good game. Roberta was reasonably happy with it at the end – but, it reflected a much wider product vision, than Robertas alone. People other than Roberta influenced its development, in a greater capacity than in her previous products. There will be some gamers who see the change as positive, and some who wanted a Roberta product more consistent with her prior products.
There is an example I used to use on this point. One of my favorite authors is: Steven King. I also like Peter Straub. Each alone is a bestselling (mega-selling in Kings case) author. They cowrote a book; the Talisman, which bombed. Either alone could have sold plenty of copies, but together, the whole becomes less than the parts. KQ8 had wonderful people on it. This message should not be construed as being derogatory to anyone (other than that I am definitely critical of the management changes that took place.) My belief is that if the new owners had taken a couple of days to ask about “what made Sierra special” in the days after acquiring it (they could have asked me, or better yet, its customers) before dramatically changing things, things would have gone a lot smoother in the transition.
-Ken W
(re: Interface of Sierra games) I could be wrong, but wasn’t Jeff Stephenson one of the godfathers of game engines during Sierra’s early days? Anyways, the game engines were of course team efforts where several people should be mentioned.
In the case of AGI, I would love to know how much of the original design was Sierra and how much was IBM. Did IBM control the technical development of the game engine for KQ1 in any way, or did they just provide the hardware and money?
As for the icon interface introduced in KQ5, I would also love to know how much of that was Roberta’s artistical vision and how much was the decisions of the technical staff. My view of it is that it usually was Roberta imagining great things that had never been done before and the programmers struggling to implement this, but it was probably more of a give and take situation with exchange of ideas between lots of people.
Still, it’s kind of sad when you think back at the days when Sierra, and especially Roberta’s games, led the technical evolution of interactive entertainment, while they now can’t seem to produce anything new and fresh themselves. No offense to the current Sierra employees, but I don’t think it’s possible to be that creative in such an environment. I don’t even know what the last Sierra game produced in-house was, even though I believe they still hire a lot of programmers. It seems to me that the company is mostly a publisher of others’ games today.(re: Where is everyone now?) I would also say that games aren’t just kids stuff nowadays, and adventure games do sell, look at Syberia and The Longest Journey. It’s all about marketing the product.
And there is still designers that want to have control over everything when they make a game, and with success, look at Tim Schafer for example. His games, DOTT, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango where all great games with Tim as a Director/Producer in charge of almost everything. And I think that his newest game, which is still in development, Psychonauts also is Tim’s “own” game, or as I have read somewhere: “Tim’s games is his own babies” or something like that. I hope I made my point.(re: re: re: A big thank you)
Sierra was awesome!!! King’s Quest 1 was the first computer game I ever played. I was so inept at the beginning I couldn’t get Graham across the bridge those dang moat monsters. Anyway that started the addiction, I couldn’t wait to see what happened next in the stories. Qfg, SQ, LSL, and KQ are among some of the greatest games created. I am suprised with how many people know of them. And I would like to thank you Ken for starting up this webpage. It is great to have a resource where people can remember the golden age of computer gaming, which was Sierra On-line!
(re: Thanks!) Since everyone else is talking about their childhood fantasies I might as well chime in.
I too was always trying to think of ways at the age of 8 back in the early 80’s on how I could get out to California and convince Ken to let me give it a try, I just had to work for this company. Growing up then I would basically memorize the Sierra newsletters, save all the mailings that came to my door, and save money up to buy the next game. I remember saving up $50 for King’s Quest III and my dad really quizzing me to make sure I wanted to spend a whole $50 on a computer game!!! YES DAD YES!!!!
Back at age 8 before I really understood how high/low level languages and interpreted languages worked, I would always try and figure out how they got all the high color graphics and animation to work on my little IBM PCjr, I would sit for hours in BASIC writing little animation routines, and couldn’t ever get the screen to refresh fast enough. I remember in one Sierra Newletter you guys talked about some of the programming logic about King’s Quest IV, you guys had a snippet of code in there about “Ego” “Room Numbers” and other small subroutines….I went crazy when I saw it.. it was like I was “behind the scenes”…. I even remember trying to hack into the files on the disks, to see if I could find “in-game” dialouge and such to help me when I was stuck.. I know it must sound pretty dorky.. but to be honest here today 20 years later I am operating off the same type “high” that I had in my early childhood – Sierra evokes the same exact emotions inside. It’s simply stated, “an addiction.”
Okay enough of the rambling… I’ll make room for someone else to speak…. NEXT!!!!
-Brad(re: a question about copyright)
Thanks. That’s kind of what I expected. It’s too bad that Sierra won’t relinquish the copyrights they hold but have no intention of reviving… but from a business standpoint, it makes perfect sense. No matter how long it’s been since the original games were developed, a King’s Quest or GK game (or novel) is always going to reflect back on Sierra.
-emily
(re: Jane Jensen is working on a new game!)
GK3 is the last adventure game that sierra put out. that was in 1999. they don’t seem to have any interest in doing another one…
the press release doesn’t give any info about what company she’s working with, but more information should be forthcoming!
🙂 emily
