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Sierra Reorgs, Fires 135 Programmers
Anonymous Coward writes "Sierra had a big, bad reorg this week. Management shut down 4 development divisions, laid off about 135 programmers and artists, and began to transfer the remainder to its HQ in Bellevue, WA. The CA-based Yosemite Entertainment division (the old Sierra On-line) is among the casualties. Ken Williams feels terrible. A support page for ex-Yosemite employees is here. " Man-I can remember playing King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and all sorts of other great Sierra games. Too bad Outpost was never quite what they said it would be, but it's still sad to see stuff like this.
When I first played King's Quest on a Apple IIc... I was stunned. The first couple of Space Quests raised the tech and took a humorous slant. Police Quest(did that have quest stuck on the end? I can't remember), neato! They actually had some real police procedure (well, not a whole lot) thrown in. After King's Quest III and Space Quest idunno, I lost interest in the whole interface.
I guess they just quested out.
I've been a gamer longer than having any computer skills, Sierra USED to be the bomb. Quest for Glory 1, Space Quest 3, Kings Quest 3, all were classics. Then in the early 90s they started branching out, with stuff like Outpost (horrible),
Phantasmagoria (Ok) and other forgettable titles. The whole idea I've gotten is that they used to care about what they did, but now they're corporate & just pump out titles that the market wants. Big problem: They never did a very good job of it. In the past 5 years, I never saw a Sierra game worth buying, but companies like Microprose, id Software and Origin have always had places in my heart and wallet. Oh. Wait, well I've got Half-life, but sierra only distributed that, valve produced. Summary: Sierra (in-house) games suck. Sad to see something formerly great go crappy.
-jGondek
I lost interest in the sierra games when they got rid of the text based interface... I mean, that thing was so cool! I must have spent hours testing its vocabularly of dirty words... Unfortunately, point and drool seemed to coorespond to all that multimedia hype. If they want to be succesful again, then they should go back to the text interface.....
Believe it or not, some programmers LIKE working 20+ hours per day on chunks of code... it's amazing some of the stuff you come up with at 3am while loaded up on coffee
Wow, this is poor journalism (not /., gamecenter.com). The big five questions that should be answered: What? Who? Where? How? Why?
There is no "why" here.
himself a big 'ol bonus? Or maybe just keeping his
wife employed so she can continue to help sink the
company with sappy/crappy games is enough.
If you ask me, those programmers are the lucky
ones. Sierra's been a slowly sinking ship for
years, relying on spin-offs of some good game they
had in the 80's (King's Quest XIV!). They haven't
done anything new or interesting in almost a
decade.
Also, that comment about the "20 hour days" was
telling: if your company tries to work you like
that, it's time to quit. It's a sign that they
can't get their act together, so they're working
you like some 14-year-old kid in a Nike factory in
Malasia.
Anyhow, maybe I'm just pissed 'cause I had to
replay most of one of the King's Quests when I was
12 because I missed picking up some magic golden
mushroom that the wizard hiding under the bed in
the first screen was supposed to give you, and
which stays in your inventory until you reach the
very end of the game (at which time you can't
finish the game without it).
I couldnt agree more with the guy who said the first 2 kings quests and space quest were some of the best games of all time. sierra then went on to make the worst installer of all time - "Sierra Utilities". I still see parts of it laying around my system.
fortunately Nichols, the main guy for Middle Earth online, is relocating to Bellevue. at least that project will continue, maybe at a limp, but it will see the light of day. glory hallelieua, amen.
Makes sense. an RPG maker cant survive when all the gamers want is first person shooters. if i hadnt had space quest growing up i dunno what i would have done. It was going nowhere anyways, space quest 6 was horrible. all the more reason for me to be bitter. Oh well, i can always load up spacve quest 1-5 to get my fix.
I remember getting an extra 512kb of RAM for my Amiga 500 and an extra diskdrive just to play Larry 3. And waiting for 20 minutes of loading on a standard Amiga 600 to get Police Quest 3 to load.
I'm not into the 3D-First-Person-Blast-All-You-See games that are the 'hype' today.. Give me an adventure that is funny. So I am happy with the new Monkey Island.
I hope the adventure-type of game does not die out together with good-olde Sierra Online.
release the old siera sources!
...I wouldn't LET you work 20+ hours/day. Not for HR reasons (although those apply, too). But because I don't want to have to clean up your code the other 4 hours.
No matter how brilliant you THINK you are at 3 am hyped on coffee, trust me, you aren't.
Yes, I agree. King's Quest III rocks! I have
never played a better adventure game.
Ahh, I remember Hero's Quest I and II the old versions. The best games sierra ever made
I hope Sierra will release the source to some of the old games like larry 1 and hero's quest 1 where you type what you want to do instead of this mouseshit used in the newer games. Porting these games to linux and improving their graphics would be great fun.
Thank you, Ken, for creating something utterly unique, something warm, fun and beautiful. Damn you, Ken, for allowing others to tear it down.
It's all a bit theatric, but I cannot help thinking about 1987-1990 when I was just getting into computers and Sierra games were (and for some, still are) my favorites.
I just hope we can see the source for LSL, PQ Manhunter (just replayed it a few months back, it is still so awesome) released so we can port it to Linux and maybe spin some sequels off.
The games actually got pretty damn good. Space Quest III
was extremely enjoyable. (Especially since they stopped
doing the 'fat-pixel' thing.) I think the end of
the "Old Sierra" came around the time of Space Quest
VI, and that horrid Kings Quest with the "cartoon
animation" and was only for Windows.
(Or perhaps to sum it up: When they switched to Windows
only support.)
Had I known what Sierra is about to do, I would have never bought KQ8.
I have bought and played all the -quest games
and some liked a lot and some less. But they were a part of my youth and life.
I am very sad to see Sierra go under in this way.
a former loyal client
This is EXACTLY how I feel. I envision a new development
group that is game-centric, not money-centric. Developing
for Linux, DOS, Windows (wretched as that makes me feel),
Macintosh, Amiga, etc. iD showed us it can be done.
Perhaps, some day soon. Oh yes.
[intense scheming and metal clang noises of something
in the background]
I've been a developer on a number of games, some of which were big hits, and some of which were really great games that never got marketed correctly.
The PC Game industry is on its deathbead. Sierra is just the latest. Ever since the "Hollywood" period a couple years ago when the suits decided that games were just like movies and let MARKETING take over the CREATIVE aspects of game design, the industry has been in a deathspiral.
The only companies exempt from this are the likes of id, who are rich enough to control their own destiny and not be dependant on publishers.
Hwere's how it works: Publishers put up the money for developers to do a game. (3DRealms is a developer, for instance, GT Interactive is a publisher.) The Publishers have absolutely no creative talent and the developers tend to have no money. When a hit game comes out (Such as Warcraft) the publisher says "Hey that, sold, I'm only gonna fund games like that" and they start forcing their developers to re-mold the games their working on into derivative pieces of crap. You, the buyer, purchases said crap and gets upset and it doesn't sell well.
Notice the scores and scores of "quake" or "real time strategy" games... the market can only support one or two.
Its gonna get a lot worse before it gets better. Notice the popularity of Deer Hunter. The ultimate (so far) expression of marketing over quality.
If you want to change this cylce, buy innovative games from innovative companies, such as Zombie (Spec Ops:Rangers lead the way) or the forthcoming Akolyte from Revenant. (www.zombie.com and www.revenant.com respectively)
Mark my words: GT, EA, and especially Activision are killing the games industry by focusing on marketing over quality.
Inprise/Borland had bad layoffs a couple of weeks ago. They got rid of 20% of the workforce including R&D. Makes you wonder how they are going to compete in the tools market. Inprise/Borland is definitely company going down the drain.
Original poster
Have you ever actually played Kings Quest? Compared to what was out at the time, it was one of the best games. Take for instance, the plot of Kings Quest III? ( To Err is Human ). You start out in a magicians house, as his pig boy. You have to figure out how to get out of the house, make magic spells, turn the sorcerer into a cat, find the magic map, etc. They were really well done games. Hero's quest did not come out until signifigantly later. I admit that Kings Quest 5+ were crap, but the originals were really well done. They had far more plot than the great Diablo RPG that you just mentioned, and they taught kids typing and reading skills. What do the games of today do?
I admit diablo is fun. Going around killing half naked devil spawn is, umm, amusing, But, it isn't exactly the well done plot and game play of Kings Quest I - IV.
A cool piece of information on Softporn and Sierra can be found at http://psycho.simplenet.com/home/softp orn.mv. It would be neat to have this version ported to Linux as well.
i think they should release the code to LSL 1 or the like.
wouldn't that be kewl playing that under a *nix OS. =) even over telnet.
i'm sure there would be people who would help port it across, be it a little bit of nostalgia.
as for Sierra. RIP. many many many hours of joy in my younger days were spent on the LSL, Kings Quest, Police Quest and LOK series.
lest we forget.
That just sucks... god damn... at least let him walk out with his dignity. My heart goes out to him and all other programmers who had to do that. I wish you all the best of luck.
And I think it's safe to safe that 20+ hours wasn't the rule, it could very well be an exageration, sure they may have worked 20+ hours sometimes, but all of the time? I think it's a friendly gesture more than a literal saying of how much they worked every single day.
I'm well aware that late night "code binges" are legendary. Doesn't make them productive. Overtime towards "brain jobs" are rarely (if ever) worth it.
And you do NOT code "just fine" when half asleep--it just seems that way. Maybe the program works but I will bet you any amount you care to name that if we ranked your output according to difficulty of maintenance we'd find your "I'm half asleep and STILL BRILLIANT" code right at the top.
Of course, if you started programming in the 1970's you could nap during compiles...
...when something is unstated but "obvious" there's usually something else going on. I wonder if MS made a bid for them or something...
I've worked 48 hours straight
I sort of meant that with what I wrote. :) There ;)
is still hope. It's always been my lifes dream to
start a software company like how Sierra was back then.
People have tried to tell me that those days are
long gone. Impossible to do again. I nearly started
believing that, and didn't push hard as hard as I
should have to make the dream come true. But now...
I can see that the fire is still alive. Perhaps my
arrogant goals are too high...but maybe I'm just stupid
enough not to know any better and succeed.
Yeah. Sierras were really no fun, dieing all the time.
I purchased a Windows 95 Sierra game for my 10 year old son (Nascar 500 Stock Car Racing or something like that). It had a long list of hardware and software requirements including Windows 9X, P133, 32 mb Ram, 4x CD-ROM, etc.) I installed it on my home machine and it installed an elaborate Sierra Utilities installer thing, then installed the game. A variety of confusing choices were required regarding Microsoft Direct X and so on but we finally got it installed. The instructions had a long list of options for controlling your race car that my son carefully studied with enthusiasm. But when he started the game, it was dud. It started out with a long wind-up video of race cars, then the game starts. You control your race car, move out of pit line, enter the track and try and race. My son played it maybe two times and was bored. I tried it and I was bored. Sierra seems to be so obsessed with the technological details of making a game like this work on Windows 9X that they have lost sight of the fact that the game just isn't fun. Almost any Nintendo 64 game beats the socks off of a comparable Windows action game. The control action is much better, the graphics are better, and the games are just more FUN. And starting a Nintendo 64 game is as simple as turning on the TV set. Starting a Windows game means booting the computer, clicking the icon, waiting while the program loads, and then the startup delay and so forth before you ever touch the joystick. Of course there are a lot of fun computer games but they have to be designed for the platform they are on. As a postscript, games my son has downloaded for free are much more fun than the Sierra game. His two favorites are a Windows 9X game called "Bad Toy" and an OS/2 game called "Sheriff." So I can see why Sierra is tanking. I predict they will be gone in a year or less.
While it's true that Sierra did adopt the tactic of using novice developers in those innocent, halcyon days of The Brotherhood, Ken Williams thought that he could change the world for the better, change the lives of those novice developers for the better.
The problem was that Williams hadn't counted on the human equation. I think it took an emotional, somewhat immature young man named John Harris to disprove Williams as visionary and reveal him as mere _businessman_.
Read Steven Levy's excellent book for the entire story. The stormy relationship between Williams and Harris, I believe, gave rise to programmer shops like Rich and Rich, and set the stage for the current state of affairs in the gaming industry.
Sierra deserves whatever they are going through. I wish they would be forced to shutdown completely after releasing the crap they have.
But if Sierra or another game company was to release Baldurs Gate done right they could make millions. Specifically:
(1) take BG rules or another rule set from D&D or a different RPG game
(2) get a real graphics engine that can't accurately model combat. Something along the lines of Myth II or Total Annihilation Kingdoms
This game would be assured of making you big time money.
I still remember when Sierra said
how lucky they are, when gammer grow with them and allow them to learn from mistakes.
But did any of us (gammer) told you, that we want our freedom back in the RPG games?
I Love your early LSL and Hero Quest, because I actually feel that I am the role,
There wasn't a FIX sequence story line to follow... (your walk-throug won't be the same as mine).
Later I feel bore when I need to guess "Where do you want me to go next" with your
ONE and one only story line.
As a gammer, I played most of your -quest game.
Love your text interface.
Please when mouse start added.
Angry when you take away my text. (Star hate mouse)
Mad when rpg become a fixed story book.
Many of us thought "Sierra is Game".
Search for Sierra first when look for new game.
Wait and wait for the our next quest.
Reply n times to get the full score.
Now.. Ken.
Can you please let go the old code and make it open source.
So we all will remember you and your achievement.
Wish things will goes better for you and your old workmates.
Ok, so who's going to start the Sierra Boycott Page? They've cancelled the Leisure Suit Larry Series. Al Lowe, one of the reasons I wanted to be a programmer, is gone. Sad.
This is a lot like what happened to Infocom, except instead of being acquired by a big marketroid-driven distributor company which then fired everyone and kept the name, Sierra grew into a big marketroid-driven distributor company and then fired their own. Right?
It's sad, but not particularly surprising (especially given the sports game refund issue). Hopefully the SOL marketroids will at least make sure the old games are still available (like the Mediagenic (or is it Activision this year?) marketroids did with Infocom's stuff).
those capitalist pigs will finally pay for their crimes. eh? eh, camrades?
If you want the source code to the old games like Larry 1, KQ 1-3, etc, you can get it, provided you have the game.
:)
I was involved in a project a couple of years ago to work out how the AGI (Adventure Game Interpreter, the engine used for the games) works. Myself and others worked out the formats for all the data, including the scripts. I wrote a program called AGI Studio which will let you browse the source code, and even edit it. However, you need to have the actual game in order to decode the scripts. Someone is working on an interpreter that will run under Linux, but the original runs work under dosemu quite well.
It's quite interesting looking at the source code to see how the games are done, and I also found a few secrets in there that I don't think had ever been found before. And there's a few suprises if you look through the vocabulary of some of the games, esp. KQ2
More info at http://www.ozemail.com.au/~ptrkelly/agi
- Peter Kelly
(had a login but forgot it)
I just hope we can see the source for LSL, PQ Manhunter (just replayed it a few months back, it is still so awesome) released so we can port it to Linux and maybe spin some sequels off.
hahahahahahahahahahaha. sorry ignorance amuses me. (just kidding) you will never see the source.
It's always sad when i see the game industry change this way. Whatever happened to companies that made great games? Whatever happened to "classics"? Everything today is about 32-bit color, full motion video and opengl 3d with enhanced fogging, etc. The companies that are still around need to get back to their roots--where ECA/Interplay was out with hits like "Wasteland" and Origin had it's Ultima series...I don't know what's going to happen in the next few years, but i hope we'll see some drastic changes. But until then, I just can't have the same level of respect that I once had for game companies...
al
You seem bitter.
You certainly have the dramatic aspect down. Maybe you should write the next press release.
Well, Sierra was never really big into RPG's. The only good RPG they made was Betrayal at Krondor. I guess QFG was kind of a hybrid RPG...
But there is demand for RPG's... Look at the success of the Fallout series and Baldur's Gate. (Both from Interplay, which still supports and sells games from 10-15 years ago.)
There doesn't, however, seem to be much demand for adventure games anymore, and these used to be Sierra's bread-and-butter. I'd still like to play a good adventure game from time to time, and I only find myself replaying games I've already played through a dozen times.
Actually,
m b36500
There's a thriving AGI group on the web... Not only are they attempting to port the AGI interpreter to other OS's including Linux, but they are also devoted to creating new games using the AGI engine.
There's an active AGI message board at http://www.insidetheweb.com/messageboard/mbs.cgi/
Interplay is great. They're both a publisher and a developer now, but their in house-stuff has always been great. The original Star Trek TOS adventure games, the Castles games, all top-notch stuff.
And the Fallout series, even with it's slick interface and high-res graphics, made me feel like I was back in the mid 80's, playing an addictive RPG on a C-64
Interplay is one of the few companies that doesn't arbitrarily discontinue their products... They still sell and support almost everything they've produced in the past decade.
woo! sic.
.. ehheh
this will be so cool once AGI gets ported. it brings back sooo many memories of playing the LSL games.
daym and i thought the LSL were pr0n back in the day
thanx for the link. =)
Scot Murphy was one of the guys who was offed on Monday. Mark Crowe is still at Dynamix, however.
well this is a spam ;) but i'm in the process of writing an gnu/opensource(ooh catchphrase!!) interpreter to play the old sierra AGI games... eventually will be ported to hell n back etc...
take a gander... wanna help?
http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~entropy/agi/
ja ne!
-df
One of them is at http://www.scottmurphy.com
Remember, people, Sierra Online have firmly
established themselves as blatant spammers.
Search Dejanews for "Sierra" in news.admin.net-abuse.email for more information...
It might happen, stay tuned...
I'd hate to have to destroy years worth of my own work. That's just about the lowest blow a programmer can take. Jeez, at least let him keep a few zip disks with the data on it.
I once worked 3 days straight on a project, with no sleep. There were some slow parts where I just sorta stared at the screen blankly for an hour or two, but for the most part, we were *wired* and pumping out good code.
The project was worth a couple million, and was quoted by various sundry consultants as taking a couple of months. We (me an 3 others) got it done in a week.
The worst part about it was the following days after we'd all recuperated... there's nothing quite like the rush of having shipped a product that you've worked so hard on...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
We got paid a good bit more than $8k, and there is more to the results of that project than the end paycheck - there was a great deal of business obtained for our small firm as a result of that deal, well worth the effort, and which we're all reaping the rewards from still years later ...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
I can remember being knocked back on a game design by a lame suit about four years ago because the entire system was estimated as requiring about 50 Mb of disk storage.
Now the demo's are nearly that big.
There is definatly something rotten in the game market at the moment.
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
Well, yes and no. I don't think that the problem is a graphical interface.
With text only games, the designer had to concentrate on the story ( that's all there is in a text game ).
Unfortunatly, the lame idiots who own the marketing franchises can't see the importance of the story-line, just the cosmetic appearance of the interface.
So while you can have a good story with a graphical system, I tend to agree with you. Most suites will inevitably place a premium on appearance over content and then wonder why it doesn't sell.
I remember being horrified by what was being said of sierra's strategy in the book `hackers' (if my
memory serves me correctly). They believed that games were effectively a product of mass production,
that it was better to train up cheap novices than rely on talent. I remember wondering what would
happen when that tactic `matured'. Now I know, a string of really crap games. If they did not have
the good games they *distributed* it would be even clearer how bad their production has been.
And to think that ken williams mused about merging with blizzard (aaargh) a company which well represents
the other extreme, rewarded by a string of quality titles.
On the other hand when management abandons the productive departments within a company you also
know things are going to go downhill soon (and it won't be the managers loosing their jobs).
I have tremendous respect for Yosemite entertainment.. my hearts go out to them.
... don't get me started.. what a great concept, what poor exectution.
This *is*, however, a business decision.. the layoffs would have to come from somewhere, most likely, tho I really don't understand why they had too axe one of their most creative group's.
Look at some of Sierra's (not Yosemite's) last few titles... they were really, really bad. Phantasmagoria genereated more hype about having 7 CD's then its actual gameplay & story, which were so-so at best. Outpost
It's ironic that Yosemite pays for the many mistakes of its parent... i saw this re-org coming back in 1995-96... I'm just surprised that it took this shape. (I want that Babylon 5 game, dammit!)
IN the end, life ain't fair, but we live in a competitive world & if sierra games don't sell, things like this happen..
-Stu
I would have thought Sierra would be rollling in cash after the success of Half Life.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Man, I played all the Sierra games as a young kid. But from the point they took away the typing interface (Kings Quest 5), the quality of their games just went WAY downhill. I don't really have any respect for them, anymore.
It just goes to show that you can't publish crap and get away with it.
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
No matter how brilliant you THINK you are at 3 am hyped on coffee, trust me, you aren't.
I don't agree. I'm most productive when hyped up on coffee, and I have to go to the bathroom, but don't want to stop what I'm doing. (Coffee's a dioretic.) So I'm squatting in my chair, hunched over the keyboard with tears coming down my face, because I just don't want to stop my flow of conciousness. At some point I just HAVE to go, or make a mess in my pants, and when I come back I'm all relaxed and comfortable, but I'm not as focused on working.
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
Interplay has been doing some good work, recently.
I have to say that Westwood kicked some serious ass, until Lands of Lore 2. I hope they clean up their act.
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
I've never played a QFG game before 5, but found the demo way too easy. Run around and kill things.
Isn't that what Diablo is for?
Has anyone played the new King's Quest? I love kq 1-6, but 7 really disappointed me. My favorite is 5, but I'm wondering if the new 3d concept in King's Quest 8 can satisfy those of us who loved the old-style king's quest. Please reply if you've played it and you have an opinion either way.
Corporate HQ in Seattle wanted to thin out the ranks and move the remaining talent to their home turf. There must have been a great cultural rift between old timers in Oakhurst and the new managers in Seattle.
I wonder if any of the management at Sierra that they recently recruited are M$ refugees?
Kudos to the many laid-off programmers and artists from Sierra. By no fault of your own, you have been shafted. Take some time to deal with the pain. Then move on.
Dont get mad. Get ahead.
Mark my words.
When Sierra starts hiring again, the managers in Seattle will hire their friends, nephews and mistresses to replace the masses of workers laid off in this "big, bad re-org."
In the words of the poet.
Meet the new boss.
Same as the old boss.
Does that also mean we won't see the next episode of my all-time favourite games, Quest for Glory and Gabriel Knight?
Or is it in the other way and they will ONLY make these from now on? I certainly hope so...
Guikachu: Resource editor for PalmOS developers
...is not really going great lately, or so it seems to me. Of course, that is probably only because my opinion of a great computer industry is rather opposite of those that are driving it now. I'd even think that if you asked them, they'd say it's going great and that they're nearly where they want to be now.
;) - I'd be worrying sick about how it would be received. Not in terms of how well it would do commercially, because that wouldn't really be a sign of what people thought of my product. I would be worried about whether they liked it, if they liked those little bits I put in it that probably contradicted a lot of other things but that *meant* something to me, if they *got* the points I'd have been trying to make.
It upsets me that products reach the market and the only thing the producers care about are how they perform. Okay, sure - most of the time the producers are only tossing cash at it, and only want cash back - but still, so few worry about how their product will fare out there.
If I ever published something - sadly, that's highly unlikely
Most of all, I'd be worried about if I could walk arround proudly and smile when people looked twice upon hearing my name, saying: "Yes, I'm the one who made that. Hey, glad you liked it."
Even if I made a million buckazoids, I'd be horrified if I discovered that my product was really terrible - though it's unlikely it would have been published in the first place if that were the case.
What I'm trying to say is that I find it sad that only the financial success of a product seems to matter nowadays. Though the pressure of making something that will sell well does tend to result in a number of hours of work spent polishing a product, you can easily tell if something is a labour of love, something that was almost hard to let go of, or if something is floating on the wave of ambition that lies in trying to score bucks.
Utterly sad. Though my heart is not all cold and void, for there still exists one community in which people care about what they create. A community in which people only create things because they care about them, actually. A community of which I am proud to say that I belong to.
Uhm, since you mentioned the Spec Ops product, I decided to drop them a visit, but it seems the only way of getting a demo is by using some "gigex" thing which seems to rely on Windows. That's a problem I think I can cope with, when it comes to actually playing the game, but Windows networking is sort of out of the question. Is there not perhaps some more convenient way of obtaining this demo? Like, good old-fashioned ftp? There is a Specops.exe file in their FTP site, but it's only 84 K and contains the word "gigex" all over the place...
Heh, cheers ;-)
Hm, I'd say that's a flaw right there, in their distribution system - *and* in pissing customers off as in your case. It's not "innovative" as I like to think of it.
I might feel motivated to actually browse by this gigex thing and see what I need to download the demo for Linux, though I'll be severly surprised to find anything.
Hrmph! "Gigex 2.0 is the leading Internet delivery, fulfillment and logistics service for senders of digital packages. Gigex offers guaranteed delivery!"
Whatever is wrong with TCP?
Tell me again why it is that character doesn't matter....
Then give that same reason to the folks who lost their jobs, their investments and 20 years of their lives.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I don't know what to think. "Another good company goes under" or "coders get fired after supplying pigs with sufficient amounts of cash."
---
the text parser certainly did rock. i remember when they remade hero quest (quest for glory 1) in vga, with that lame mouse interface. it was nowhere near as cool as the original.
i never liked the adventure games of sierra.
well, i did, but when i saw a lucasarts game (zak mc cracken) i never wanted to play an other sierra adventure again...
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Yeah...
I remember being stuck in SQ2 for a whole week cause I typed "put gem into mouth" and the damn thing only understands "put gem in mouth"...
Adds a whole new quality to the gameplay! Still, I have to admit I liked LucasArts' adventures more cause you didn't die all the time.
Late night is one thing, but 20+ hours straight on a consistent basis is quite another. I think the most I've ever worked straight on a consistent basis is about 14 hours.
_Deirdre
I remember playing King's Quest I when it came out for the PCjr (anyone else have one of those?). I was only 5 at the time... It was a truly revolutionary game at the time. Does anyone else remember wondering what the heck the gnome's name was?
Hmmm. I remember getting turned into hamburger meat. Oh, and eating too many Monolith burgers too. *looks around for his dust covered A500* I might just go play it again :)
Where are the two dudes from Andromeda?
This is just the week of death -- MST3K, Babylon 5's spin-off series CRUSADE, and now also the section of Sierra Games that was working on the upcoming B5 space simulator. Let's hope something playable can be salvaged from this.
UGH
-Augie
Y'all might not give a damn, but Sierra (Havas) has also closed a division in the SF Bay area. Books That Work makes (made?) Sierra's home design software, including "Complete Home." BTW is on of the few money-making divisions in the stable and their home design product absolutely leads its market segment in sales and reviews.
Sierra's not really the culprit, IMHO. Havas is probably the big bad stinky french bad guy here.
I never understood why everybody liked the King's Quest series. I though the lot of them were horrible games with dumb plots that only got put out because they were made by the owner's wife. Of course sales speak differently... but I still think they were crap. The Quests for Glory, on the other hand, were very cool. Police quest was kind of neat, but totally fake as far as police procedure goes. QFG 1 thru 4, now there was a series. I used the same character for all 4 games... that was a neat feature. Lost that disk, but still planning on getting QFG 5.
And if they have to reorganize everything, why cut the most sucessful division? That's the part that I don't get. Yeah, RPGs might be losing ground, but wasn't Diablo the #1 game last year (or before)? that's not exactly Quake.
rooooar
So do I, sometimes. But it's used too often as an excuse to rescue a project that was underbudgeted, understaffed, and underestimated. If Ken Williams is talking about the first few years of Sierra, fair enough, but if it was a consistent feature of the "20 year ride", then it's a different story. IMHO of course.
Actually, as I recall, the trick was to write down the alphabet, then write down the alphabet backwards below it, lining up a with z, b with y, etc. Then using that as a cypher, translate the word rumplestiltskin.
:)
I'm wondering if anyone ever actually figured that out on their own. It's been so long ago that I can't remember if I did or not.. I have a feeling I called the help line.
-Statler
Doesn't make sense to me. Is the new Kings quest any good. How could gamers let this happen!