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Ken 'Sierra On-Line' Williams Interview
DasJan writes "Adventure-Treff has conducted an extensive interview with Ken Williams, the founder and former boss of Sierra On-Line ("Leisure Suit Larry", "Space Quest", "King's Quest"...) Ken tries to give insight into his gaming philosophy, and talks about the history of Sierra and adventure gaming. He also mentions several little-known and intriguing anecdotes, such as his meeting with Bill Gates or how he tried to buy id Software."
Even though everyone remembers them for the "Quest" series, the memory of playing the two Manhunter games. Truly a testament to excellence. Manhunter and Loom were two of the most original games of the 80s, and I cannot help but think of the Manhunter people doing Loom 2...
Ah, I guess I'm getting old...
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
Man.. I just remembered how much fun I had with the old Kings Quest series and my favourite, Quest for Glory series. But I also enjoyed Space Quest.
I think it's too bad that all games now are "point-n-click". I actually enjoyed typing in what I wanted to do.
hmm.. all those good memories... And the nice graphics aswell. I think it's the expectation that the games now should be so stylish, and they completely forget about gameplay. Which in my opinion is the most important thing.
Anyway.. I could always play those games on my old AMD K-6 233Mhz.
Judging from the interview, now I can figure out the exact point at which Sierra games started to suck. Those perennial products and edutainment games weren't what people wanted to see from Sierra, as far as I can tell. At one point I think Sierra or Dynamix, (they tend to sort of run together in my mind), produced a football game that was pretty brutally bad. It got pretty much owned by Madden, if I'm not incorrect. Can someone tell me what the relationship of Sierra and Dynamic were? I just remember Sierra's magazine always selling Dynamix products such as A-10 tank Killer and the game with the futureistic hovertanks in it, the name of which escapes me at the moment. Stellar 7, that's it. King's Quest 4 was the first game I picked up for my 286. The copy protection came as something of a suprise for a 10 year old, as I thought everyone was trustworthy and wouldn't steal games. You'd have to literally memorize the entire manual to get around the copy protection. It wasn't much fun at all, but the game was cool. Well, if you liked a single misstep sending you plummeting to your doom, or otherwise dying in a relatively amusing way in-game. I never realized the kind of production values and work that went into these games until I saw the crap that gets churned out today without a single interesting story thread. And no, I'm not some retro freak, I still play games, I just wonder whether these EGA graphics and text combining games didn't somehow lend themselves better to storytellers rather than corporate moneymongers.