Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Zork, like all the other Infocom Games were highly descriptive and detailed. The PLOT was always the highest priority on their games. Very similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure Books.
King’s Quest I and King’s Quest II were both drawn on Sierra’s original graphic text adventures, which I’m sure were highly influenced by Scott Woods’ ADVENTURE. KQ 1 and KQ2 were both treasure hunt games.
Space Quest I was written in between KQ 2 and KQ3, and that was the time when Plot became a much more important detail in Sierra’s games.
In my opinion Infocom’s games were more in-depth and detailed, and true to the term Interactive Fiction. But this style appealed to a limited audience and therefore the market did not lost very long, and the company went out of business.King’s Quest III and King’s Quest IV, combined good plot elements (less borrowed from traditional fairy tales) and still were challenging to gamers. That’s why they’re my favorite of the series. Imagine if the Icon system had been in place for KQ4 and how much easier reaching the Whale’s uvula would be. That would have removed the entire challenge to the puzzle if you could simply click the feather on the uvula.
I still believe Sierra made the right decision to go with the Icon system in the nineties, because times were changing. Just like B/W TV gave way to color.
Unfortunately nothing that was done from that point on in the KQ series made everybody happy. Some people complained that KQ5 was too linear and not challenging enough. So, KQ6 was written with two possible endings (reminds me of the Dynamix adventure games, Rise Of The Dragon and Heart Of China gave those options). KQ7 was written and designed to be easier and more family friendly, but that still bothered some people, so KQ8 was designed as a Action/RPG hybrid….And that of course brought the biggest outcry from fans, so it seemed nothing Roberta pleased everyone, but I doubt she cared about making everybody happy.
I prefer the traditonal orginal Sierra games, but I still play the Icon based ones. Space Quest V is my favorite Space Quest game, but of course there is the abysmal Space Quest 6. Personally, I hated the move to a single cursor….
although I liked Dynamix’s Adventure games and it was pretty much one cursor if I recall…I’ll have to go take them out of storage and play themi dont think zork games have been influencial at all. if they had, we would have seen a lot more adventure games that had magnificent stories, but the norm really seems to be stories that were just ok, but include good graphics and sound. In that sense, kings quest was definetly more important. i think most gamers would rather see something than read about it. thats just the way most people are, otherwise books would be more popular than tv. i guess it should be that way, but it’s not.
i think its unfair to compare the two since they are entirely different styles though. i mean, to say kings quest was lacking because it included graphics and sound is just dumb. i think the biggest problem i have with playing old text only games is that i have to ask the parser what is around and what things look like just so i can get a feel for what is going on. not only did you have to solve a puzzle, but you usually had to ‘discover’ the puzzle first, i dont like that. in a kings quest game, everything is presented for me to become a part of. i feel like i am in daventry, but i didn’t get that feeling from zork. it’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words.
i dont know, maybe my mind is less imaginative than the zork lovers. i guess it does remove something from the experience if you just give the player everything and not make them imagine it for themselves. i am a big final fantasy fan, and i do feel that way about the newer games. i think they are too detailed. back in the mid 90s, you had a little sprite guy that represented your character, but you also had a more detailed image of that character in you mind. now, they are so detailed it leaves nothing to the imagination. i guess i think some place in between ALL text and ALL graphics is where i prefer games to be. maybe thats why i spend most of my free time playing 15 year old sierra games.
I also remember him designating Ken’s brother John, as a ‘anti-infocomrade’ because John had suggested remaking some of Infocom’s text-adventures as 3-D Graphic adventures.
When I asked Ken about that a few years later, he said the idea was never seriously considered.
In my opinion Remaking Text Adventures is almost as bad as remaking classic films.
JT
Absolutely!
Actually we got a lot of press for EVERYTHING about The Sierra Network. It’s hard to imagine, but the internet wasn’t mainstream yet, and email was still an evolving concept — and, here we were doing massively multiplayer games and wide area network flight simulators.
Those were some very cool times.
-Ken W
‘I remember that guy from Prodigy about 14 years ago. He was always a big fan of Infocom’s games….’
It’s funny, but I remember his name from Prodigy, too. I think he was involved with a petition against Sierra’s icon interface when it first came out. I still have a printed e-mail from that around here somewhere. I think it’s packed in the basement somewhere. Ahh… the good old days. 🙂
Off topic… It’s hard to believe that Prodigy was once the leader of online service providers. I remember the day they started to lose ground was the day they switched from monthly pricing to hourly pricing.
Brandon, I’m sure your correct! He was somewhat of a psychologist. SB also had a talking parrot and a music maker. With Sierra’s close ties to Sound Blaster, I wonder who came up with the parser first?
Leslie Balfour was at one time co-director of the canceled Space Quest 7 If I recall. Did she do any one projects at Sierra.
Is/Was she Married to Bruce Balfour, co-director of Dagger of Amon-Ra and creator of Outpost, or another relation?
JT
Oh, I’m sorry, on Realm they have a current credits and then they have a ‘historic credits’ too, which is the one I posted. When Codemasters sold the game, they auctioned it. Stephen Nichols tried to buy it with his company but they lost to Norseman Games, a company owned by a longtime Realm player (Scott Wochholz). These are the current credits:
Norseman Games Realm Staff
Lead Artist/Designer:
Alex Krumweide
Chief Operating Officer:
Ellington ‘Duke’ Ellis
Community Relations Manager:
Brett Wochholz
Customer Services Manager:
Lynn Havens
General Manager:
Michael Crow
President:
Lee Wochholz
Producer:
Scott Wochholz
Lead Programmer:
Aaron Sowers
Programmer:
Corinne Fell
That appears to be the original credits from Realm. Maybe the game is essentially the same as when we released it? I recognize most of the names.
I had forgotten about Steve Nichols. My recollection is that he was an engineer, not a designer. He must have taken over both the technical lead, and creative lead position from David Slaybeck.
The Realm was a technologic breakthrough for its time. It needed an engineer to lead it more than a creative person, as every design detail had network ramifications.
-Ken W
Contributor History
Original Concept: David Slayback
Designer: Stephen Nichols
Programming: Janus Anderson, Stephen Nichols, Kerry Sergent, Bryan Waters
Interface Art Designer: Terry Robinson
Art: Linda Lubken, Mike Cicchi, Deanna Yhalkee, Tim Loucks, Dan Peters, Scott Multer, Al Eufrasio, Ananda Linde, Robin Phanco, Jason Piel, Barry T. Smith, Clayton Larabie, Michael Hutchison, and Christopher Willis
Music: Victor Crews and Dan Kehler
Writing: Leslie Balfour and Nancy Grimsleyobin Phanco, Jason Piel, Barry T. Smith, Clayton Larabie, Michael Hutchison, and Christopher Willis
Music: Victor Crews and Dan Kehler
Writing: Leslie Balfour and Nancy GrimsleyI remember the first game I saw was Zork. My brother was printing out pages and pages on track feed paper. It was alot like ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books. I remember sound blaster had a good text parser in ‘Dr Staboto’. I’m not sure on the spelling.
Some of the games I thought were ground breaking were not Sierra’s: Mean Street, Ultima (Avatar), Street Fighter II.
The guy has all the rights to his believes but I don’t see how Zork influenced future games? It was one of the originals and has a great place in history.Dear Ken and Roberta,
I couldn’t agree more about Sierra being a part of a great history. I would like to contribute my part of the book with a little history of my own.
I first became acquainted with Sierra in the winter of 1990. My parents traded an old car that we had for a Tandy 1000 (PC-XT class) computer. The system was used and came with a number of peripherals as well as software. There were three Sierra titles that came with it as I recall. These were King’s Quest I, King’s Quest III, and Helicopter Simulator.
I was immediately engrossed by these games. I was 14 at the time and life was rather grim for us back then. It was nice to have a world that I could escape into and forget my worldly cares for a time.
My Christmas and Birthday for the next few years involved collecting other titles in the King’s Quest series as well as Space Quest and Quest For Glory.
In 1992 my parents took us to the then headquarters in Oakhurst for my 16th birthday. That was an experience I will fondly remember throughout my life. I had the opportunity to meet Ken and he autographed our game manuals. I think I still have them in a box here somewhere. We also got to meet Lori Cole when they were working on Quest For Glory 3.
That visit and the monthly messages from Ken in the magazine really inspired me. From that time on I wanted to be a programmer at Sierra and contribute to making truly awesome games, but it just was not to be. I did learn to program though and it was due to Ken’s stories from his early programming jobs that inspired me.
I can really relate to what Ken was saying about the history and nostalgia of not just games, but computers also. In the years that I played Sierra games I bought my first hard drive, CD-ROM drive, sound card, and VGA monitor. The term MPC or Multimedia PC was born during these years. This protocol dictated a certain criteria of system performance, CD-ROM type and speed, and sound capability. These are all things we take for granted now.
I remember one article Ken wrote back in the early 90’s about his goals for the future. I remember distinctly he mentioned that he would like to see Sierra grow larger than her biggest competitor Electronic Arts. I think we can all be proud that this goal did not come to pass. Many of Sierra’s competitors that still produce games are deeply driven by Hollywood. Content and quality are sacrificed to meet deadlines that coincide with movie releases.
For me I would much rather see Sierra pass away to remain with me as a fond memory than to see her sell out to the demands of Corporate America. A lot of what Sierra was helped shape me into the person I am today and I am thankful for that.
Henry Paul
Orem, UtahI remember that guy from Prodigy about 14 years ago. He was always a big fan of Infocom’s games….
BTW, I think A Mind Forever Voyaging is perhaps the greatest computer game written from a plot development point of view. Steve Meretzky himself is in the science fiction writers hall of fame.
I don’t necessarily look at the article as Sierra bashing. Ken himself admitted in The Roberta Willams Anthology that Infocom’s games were a lot more developed and detailed because they didn’t use graphics. And I’m sure that appealed to a lot of people at the time. I think I’ve seen somewhere on that guy’s website, where he says how much he loves a lot of the original Sierra games, but was disappointed with the move to non-parser interface. I’m sure he’s entitled to his opinion…and many people share that view….it doesn’t make them evil…
JT
I’m not sure what the Realm looks like today, and how much it has changed from the original release. Are there any credits on it?
I’m fairly certain that David Slaybeck was the original designer. He was an engineer, not really a designer, but did a good job (as I recall). David dropped off the project early – I think because of a fairly nasty medical problem. For some reason, my memory is that he did come back, but I don’t recall him coming back to the Realm, and I don’t remember who took it over.
If you happen to see a credits page, post it, and perhaps that will jog my memory.
-Ken W
I hope someone will post a note about doing it soon…I just finished playing through all five games last week as a fighter, and am going to play as a mage next month. It’s been a good seven years or so since I’ve done that…I think I’m having an early midlife crisis…I finished SQ5 today and will start on six tomorrow. I think I only played that one once, because by the time XP came around I could never get it to run on it.
I think there was a way to play the game whenever you wanted because I don’t remember ever having a problem and one of my strategies was to play it over and over to raise my magic skills until dust started approaching, and then I’d rake leaves to build my strength, sleep at Erana’s and repeat the next day.
Were they both on TSN (INN) at the same time, or did The Realm replace Shadows of Yseurbis as the RPG on the network?
JT
Shadows of Yserbius was a completely separate product. It was an RPG/strategy dungeon game that you could play multiplayer on INN (it also had a single player game mode) and it was developed by Sierra.
In my Space Quest 5 newsletter (which I pulled out last night to play), there is an offer for trial membership to TSN (or INN, can’t remember if it had been renamed yet). Anyway, one of the things they mentioned was playing SHADOWS OF YSERUBIS on TSN. Was ‘The Realm’ on TSN as well? Was the Shadows of Yserbuis something that evolved into The Realm? Or were they two different projects entirely?
JT
I played on TSN a lot (as much as I could get away with thanks to my parents) but I don’t remember much except that I was addicted to certain parts of it, like the miniature golf game.
As far as Realm goes, was it up and running in its first version on TSN, and then later became an individual game?
Not off the top of my head.
This was over 10 years ago, and The Realm was only one of 20+ games running on The Sierra Network. Most of my meetings at the time had to do with the marketing, technical and financial aspects of the overall network. I attended MANY meetings on server and network plans, but I was the last person to ever get involved in plot/character issues. On those types of issues I always left the thinking to the creative team.
TSN (The Sierra Network) was in a seperate building, which we called the old barn, in Oakhurst. Their offices were a couple miles from corporate, and they were set up as an independent business unit. I visited them perhaps once or twice a week.
They had extreme visibility in the organization, in that it was a project of huge dimensions for Sierra. Although they were an infintesimal part of our revenue, they were a major part of our spending. Some thought it was a project that should be shut down, and others thought it was the next big thing. These were the pre-internet days, and had we stuck with it — it probably would have been something enormous.
Sierra was a public company at the time, and TSN was a large drag on earnings. I spent a lot of time on the road explaining to the financial community why this was a justified expense, and raising money to fund the project. At one point I raised $50 million primarily to fund the TSN effort.
-Ken W
That’s great! One of my hobbies is taking things and restoring their history, and preserving it and getting it out to as many people as possible. For example, I am going to my 10 year High School reunion on the 30th and I’ve found some old yearbooks, scanned them, and I’m going to give out CDs of them at the reunion.
Anyhow, I’d love to use this kind of hobby (obsession) with Realm, since I’ve recently put up a Realm website at RealmCenter.com
Do you remember if there were any aspects for the game that were considered but ultimately deemed too complicated, or too advanced for the technology, etc?
