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(re: What are the odds?) Yes, Syberia is probubly the closest to the old Sierra games as far as the way the story was done and the amount of little hints they hid around. I have almost all the Dreamcatcher games and you are right, they are all missing something that was present in Sierra games. The later Nancy Drew games do come close to old Sierra as well but some of the earler ones had a poor engine. Ovcourse I am a Gk, Kq and Lsl fan and I am aftaid no one will ever make a game as good as they were.
Another game I was very sad to see go was the Tex Murphy Sierries thanks to good old Microsoft. Ha ,Ha
I would love to see all the folks at Sierra start up again even if it had to be under a different name and I would be waiting in line to get there new games like a lot of others, I bet.
Jim(re: Kq9) Well exactly, SQ7 probably received that exactly because Sierra was planning on doing some SQ stuff, I mean, there was tons of hope in the SQ community when Sierra made a SQ product page, and all the official SQ7 rumours. I guess they never pursued the SQ7 team further, probably because they stopped working on their own. Therefore, the SQ7 team was no longer an immediate threat.
I guess if Sierra had any thoughts about reviving any of their other series, such as KQ, then they would go about and want to shut down the KQ projects like KQ9 and Tierra.
I think the threat is always there for shut-down, but these teams won’t stop their passion just because of a possibility. They will keep going until it’s a reality. And so far their luck has been with them…(re: Kq9) About sueing, I don’t think you’re right, Ken. Colin Davis, the SQ7 team leader got a threat from Vivendi. He tried to contact them on and on to talk with them about it. I’m working on a fangame myself (
Link: http://www.greenghoulie.com/sqvsb/(http://www.greenghoulie.com/sqvsb/)
) so I was prepared for the worst. But Vivendi never gave a response and hasn’t even bothered to contact Colin ever since. So I assume this is their way of saying “We don’t care!”. Besides, their project bearing the Space Quest name got cancelled not so long ago.(re: Update Info Page Error) I temporarily took the member list off-line — I’m not sure if I’ll add it back or not. My current thinking is to have the “name” at the top of each message hot-linked to a page where you can view info about the person that posted the message, or send them an email.
-Ken W(re: Update Info Page Error) I think it is fixed .. try it now
Actually … there is currently nowhere where this information is displayed. I’ll be fixing that this week.
It’s actually a cool feature .. the website administrator can easily decide what information to collect.
-Ken W(re: Hello Ken. Many korean pc gamers want to know about you & Roberta’s recent conditions.) Sierra was started in 1979 … which would mean I was 25. Unfortunately, this makes me almost 50 now. Roberta is roughly the same age. That said, whereas I seem to have aged, time seems to have forgotten her.
-Ken W(re: Hello Ken. Many korean pc gamers want to know about you & Roberta’s recent conditions.)
How old were you when you started Sierra? (and how old are you now, if one may ask. And with ‘you’ I refer both to you and Roberta…)
(re: Hello Ken. Many korean pc gamers want to know about you & Roberta’s recent conditions.) I don’t want to get overloaded with answering questions, but am always willing to answer any questions anyone sends to me.
With respect to Roberta: She isn’t very “computer-centric”. Most of her days are spent playing with her dogs, reading or working out. She only checks her email at most once per week. She accused me the other day of being hopelessly addicted to the internet, and spending WAY too much time at my computer. I suspect she is right… I’ve tried to get her to look at this site, but haven’t been successful thus far.
My current hope is to get her to take the site more seriously, and to have her help me with the “design”. The user interface could be a LOT better, but it’s tough for me to see where looking at things through my “programmers eyes”. Programmers are always notoriously bad at design. If you ever see this site looking one million percent better (and, actually easy to use), you’ll know I was able to get Roberta to see still and help me.
-Ken W
(re: The history of Sierra…) I haven’t spoken with Al about whether or not he would ever write a book. I’m not sure about others.
I have always planned that one day I would write a book. There is some amazing history that is worth telling. My garage (actually a storage unit) is overloaded with boxes of all my old Sierra correspondence. I don’t know that I’ll ever sit still long enough to actually write the book, but it has been on my “to do” list for years.For now, the best “reference” on Sierra in the old days is the book: Hackers, by Steven Levy. It’s not a very flattering portrait of Sierra or myself, but it is certainly compelling reading. When Roberta and I started Sierra we were younger than most college students, and this comes through in the book. Oh well…. History isn’t always pretty.
-Ken W(re: re: Website bugs and discussion) Yup – good idea. I’ll work on it. I’m thinking I may even switch over to not displaying email addresses – only userids. I can support emailing individual users through the system without ever showing the email address.
-Ken W(re: Hello Ken. Many korean pc gamers want to know about you & Roberta’s recent conditions.) If Ken agrees, I think all of the people on this site would love to read the interview as well!
Also, why doesn’t Roberta go on this website???
(re: What are the odds?) I played one Dreamcatcher game, and I looked at many others, and was not very impressed at all. I find the fan games, just for example those made by AGS users, to be much more entertaining. I really look forward to specifically-Sierra fan projects like KQ9, Hero6, and SQ7.
I also played the Syberia demo, and found it nice, but I don’t know if I’d buy it.
I forgot what else I was going to say.(re: What are the odds?) Hi All
Now would be a great time to get into the adventure game business. If you havn’t already you might try one of Dreamcatcher games. They are very close to the old Sierra games except for one thing. The graphics are ver y beutiful in my apinion they are missing on very important thing. They don’t have any clues hardly at all and can leave you wondering what to do next. They really need to take some lessons from the old Sierra crew. The Clues do two things. They help you get through the game and when you figure out what a clue is telling you to do it makes you feel really good.
Adverture game are taking off again and the reason is because they just learned that they were missing half the market by targeting the male teens with shoot’em ups. They found that woman and older people want to play games too but couldn’t fine anything that they thought they might like to try. This is all changing now and it’s companies like The Adventure Co. (Dreamcatcher) that are doing something about the problem. Another company that is targeting only woman is Her Interactive and they have some very big sellers as well.
Adverture Game are not dead any more and now that every one can find a game they might like to play I think it will only get better.Jim
(re: re: General Conversation about Sierra) Al did contact Sierra about being able to sell his old games from his website. I’m not sure what the status is, but I think he is still waiting for a response.
-Ken(re: I need help with Silent Thunder: A-10 Tank Killer)
actually, of the older sierra games, the dos versions sometimes run in XP when the windows versions won’t. (king’s quest 5 & 6 for example.) some games require help from a third party software like DosBox or VDMSound.
i don’t have this game so i can’t help you. try the technical forums at Gameboomers or Adventuregamers or NTCompatible.
http://www.gameboomers.com/ubboard/ultimatebb.php
http://www.adventuregamers.com/forums/
http://www.ntcompatible.com/forums/ -emily
(re: I need help with Silent Thunder: A-10 Tank Killer) Hmmmm…. I think we did a re-release of it that ran under windows. Not sure though. I know we did one, but I’m not sure if it ever shipped. Maybe someone else knows. If it runs under windows, I would have to believe it would run on XP Pro.
-Ken(re: re: Laura Bow Area) There are two Laura Bow games. AdventureGamers.com recently reviewed the first game in the series, the Colonel’s Bequest.
(re: Kq9)
the people at tierra have said many times that they’d shut down immediately if sierra asked them to. they’re very respectful of sierra as the copyright holders and i’m glad that sierra has let them peacefully coexist (so far, anyway). tierra’s king’s quest 2 remake was the best game i played last year.
i don’t know as much about the KQ9 team (a different group), but i hope they take the same approach — i’ve been hearing bits about their project for a few years now, and am looking forward to what they produce.
as disappointed as i was that sierra abandoned its roots, i have to admit that allowing these fan games to continue is really good of them. at least, if sierra never gives us another oldschool adventure, they’ve “allowed” the release of tierra’s two KQ remakes and hopefully will do the same for Quest for Glory 2. (unlike lucasarts, who is vigilant about shutting down fan projects…) and the tierra team plans to use what they’ve learned doing remakes to go on to make original commercial games… which might help fill the hole for a lot of fans who miss sierra’s good old days.
-emily
(re: Kq9) To be technically accurate: Whether or not Tierra charges for KQ9, if Sierra decides it violates their copyrights they could shut it down. There doesn’t need to be a profit (or, even a revenue) motive on the part of Tierra.
The key issue here is whether or not Sierra cares, or, if they do care, if they would hire lawyers to shut Tierra down. Given that the Tierra group has been around for over a year, and that Sierra almost certainly knows about their project, I’d be very surprised to see Sierra get aggressive in attacking them. If they were going to do so, I would think they would have at least sent a nasty letter by now.
I don’t know the people at Sierra anymore. In fact, I’ve only been back in the Sierra offices one time in almost seven years (and, that was years ago). I’m not sure how they think, or what kinds of issues they care about. My hope is that they have better things to worry about that a KQ9 game.
I did hear, a couple of years ago, that they were starting a KQ project. I never heard anything else about it though.
-Ken W(re: Kq9) Exactly, this KQ9 isn’t about selling or profits so there’s no legal issues to worry about. It’ll be released as an “unofficial, fan-designed ninth episode in the series”.
I’d also like to personally thank both you and Roberta for the King’s Quest series. They definitely made a major impact on my life and the gaming industry at the time. It’s a shame that the games of today are purely based on violence or sex and barely have a storyline or plot. I’m hoping that KQ9 will impress both old fans of the series and entice gamers of today into this genre of gaming.
Yonkey
