I worked for a game studio that was acquired by Sierra in late 1995. Being acquired by Ken and Roberta was surreal; they were two of my idols from childhood gaming and they were every bit as great to work for (via multiple layers of bosses) as you'd hope. They were gamers; they cared about people having fun playing games. They were also hard-nosed about their development teams creating product that would achieve that goal. I remember having to answer to Ken in person in a meeting about what my plan was to get my title shipped. He was firm and fair, but he didn't like my hand-waving at the schedule and task-breakdown. (He'd come to visit our studio in general, not to ream me out about shipping late, but he was spot on that I'd not been diligent enough in my prep and planning. We didn’t call it that, but my burndown chart was not tilted downward.)
Every step along the rest of the journey with Sierra was a nightmare for employees. CUC, Cendant, Vivendi, and maybe there was another link in the chain, but I got fed up and quit in spring of 1997. We had incredibly talented and passionate artists (2D and 3D) and along the way a lot of that got shipped out of country to artists who seem to have never seen an American auto race. Several employees sued over shenanigans with our stock options treatment; I didn't join in (though perhaps I should have as I think we were getting screwed). IMO, the acquirers just sucked all the fun out of the room and a lot of talented devs and producers left. If you're not having fun working in computer gaming, you might as well go not have fun someplace that pays well.
Ken and Roberta are two of the good ones in my book.
Thanks for sharing! I played the Quest games as a kid and only heard in passing about Ken and Roberta and early Sierra (I was young enough to not know how unusual it was for a software company to be started and run by a married couple). In my completely presumptive head canon, Sierra petered out because LucasArts games were so much better, and Ken & Roberta sold out and moved into early retirement. I hadn't known Roberta was fighting to the very end for her vision on King's Quest VIII.
That actually was briefly true as I recall. It was an early sign of the problems of "preorder culture" in games (a lesson we're still relearning/refighting time-and-again today): KQ8 was a preorder darling with a ton of hype and anticipation. Grim Fandango was a sleeper that "no one" thought to preorder and the preorder shops (for their reasons) weren't pushing. Grim Fandango was considered a "flop" for a bunch of years, though obviously it's done far better in the long tail of post-preorder sales than KQ8.
I think with Sierra you are right but it was a slower build up imo.
I remember KQ6 being a big bit of pomp and circumstance with its production values etc, more promotion than you would see for a computer game at the time.
And then KQ7 happened. A victim of a bit of overhypeing and a LOT of WinG pain. Could never get it running on a pc our family owned, even proper pentiums.
Yes, there were at least two genres where LucasArts seemed to make games that were strictly better than Sierra's: adventures and (arcade-ish) flight simulators. Not only better, but the best. For flying games, Origin was a contender, but despite all the advanced graphics and FMV, flying and shooting in Wing Commander was not as fun as in X-Wing and TIE Fighter.
I played and still love many of the LucasArts adventure games: Sam & Max Hit the Road, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Grim Fandango. But the game which still holds the biggest emotional resonance for me all these years later is Gabriel Knight II: The Beast Within. Maybe there's just something about the full motion video format that allowed me to identify more with the characters or something, but I still find myself replaying scenes from it in my head every now and then. Robert Holmes's score added so much to it (and even the non-FMV predecessor) as well.
The X-Wing series were definitely hands down the best arcade flight sims though.
The biggest emotional resonance for me was the first Gabriel Knight - Sins of the Fathers. I still have memories of the scene where Wolfgang dies. Amazing game and I feel blessed that I had the opportunity to play games like these as a child.
These games would be such good material for feature films. With Hollywood so completely out of ideas and the huge popularity of occult horror I'm surprised it hasn't been done yet.
I played only Wing Commander: Prophecy (one of the last ones) and I found it way better than the older star wars games, probably just a normal passage of time thing honestly.
If you love those kinds of games and are missing them, check out Freespace, which you can get cheap on GOG, and the Knossos launcher, which allows you to download mods like the open source re-implementation of the game engine which vastly improves things, and some fan made campaigns/overhauls including a great Wing Commander style one.
Alternatively, EA (the owners of Origin's intellectual property) recently released StarWars Squadrons, which has a short campaign that certainly scratches that old itch. However I don't know how I feel about the multiplayer.
Wing Commander 3 and 4 were much better engines than the first two games. Even with some fondness in my heart for Privateer those early WC engines were awful. And modern patches and tweaks the controls still leave them feeling jerky and imprecise.
There have been fan efforts to port them to newer engines, though all look janky IMO. Here's hoping for a proper remaster.
This is not the first time I hear good things about Freespace. I had the first one, and I didn't think it was as good as X-Wing or TIE Fighter. Guess I should try the open source version of Freespace 2...
I spent so much time on Decent/Freespace. The other game that gave me the same feeling was MechWarrior 3 (I had just learned of derivatives in school and used to gawk that they showed the derivative for heat production in the HUD).
Modern games have beautiful graphics but just don't recreate the feeling. Alternatively, perhaps, I am a different person and unable to enjoy the simple pleasure.
When I was a kid I absolutely preferred Sierra's adventure games, especially the King's Quest series. They were so much more sincere and aesthetic, while the Lucasarts ones were more cartoony and full of corny jokes that broke the 4th wall. (To be fair Space Quests did this a lot too, and those were great.) I was always offended by the point-and-click interface which felt dumbed down compared to the bare text input. Even if the latter was of course severely limited and frustrated a lot of gamers, it always felt more open-ended and limitless to me. You never knew when some longshot idea you typed out would actually work, like yeah you really are on the same wavelength as the designers. I used to dream about making games like that with far more advanced parsers and dictionaries (but like so many, I tended to get sucked into the rabbit hole of building the engine and development tools rather than the actual games).
The curse of the programmer! The one game I finished recently: a polyomino puzzle game, but of course had to make a solver from scratch first. But at least I finished it :)
Never had more than a passing interest in IndyCar or NASCAR races, but I remember enjoying both of those on a 486 DX with the turbo button on the case when I was a kid. Links: The Challenge of Golf was another one.
Daytona USA was released around the same time... and had a karaoke mode so you could sing along to the soundtrack while racing. That was Papyrus' true downfall, they never identified karaoke as a critical feature in any of their games. :)
Ironically, Daytona was actually one of our downfalls or at least a thorn in our side. Sega had the license to the Daytona name and usage for electronic games and that’s one of the most well-known tracks and events. We had every other Cup and Indy circuit, but couldn’t get Daytona.
(For our in-house racing series, we had a “Florida” circuit that was the first and middle race in the schedule. For some reason, it was surprisingly close to Daytona International Speedway in design.)
We’d have probably sold more boxes and surely would have gotten more online subs if we’d been able to offer Daytona. (Some of the Papyrus crew went on to form iRacing and they’ve got a great product over there; still no karaoke though...)
I guess that doesn't surprise me too much for a sim, though the future of racing games may be the other way around. Some of the most loved tracks in racing games are fantasy ones where you have full control to iterate on the experience and scenery.
Would be nice to see next-gen racers returning to that in a big way and eventually have people wanting to license the tracks for real-world construction after they've been battle tested by millions of virtual drivers.
I'm a foreigner, we don't have either. But Indy 500 was groundbreaking at the time, and then came IndyCar. The graphics and all around racing was really great.
I worked for several game publishers as a developer, and would be called in to firefight games at other developers in danger of not shipping or shipping past a critical deadline. The Sierra productions were typically nightmares, at least the ones that needed publisher bailouts. I never interacted with Ren or Roberta beyond introduction, as firefighting a failing production tends to be upper management scarce.
I have a very vivid memory of Papyrus' NASCAR game in the late 90s. I was in the sales and service industry, I was realy just a couple years into it, still 17, and had sold a beefy system for gaming to a guy who was a NASCAR fan. The day I was supposed to deliver it I dislocated my kneecap. I cslled him, let him know, and came home from the ER with him in my driveway waiting for me. When I got out of the car in the leg brace, he said "Oh thank god your'e hurt! I thought you were trying to rip me off!" I will always remember that game for reasons unrelated to gaming. :D
Oh wow, I totally forgot about that game. I was not very good at it, but eventually I figured out that I could drive the car in reverse and because there was no hitbox on the bumper, the racetrack's wall just kind of guided me along while I accelerated to maximum speed. Fun memory
Haha, yes, backwards was the best way to play Nascar!
I remember being absolutely blown away that the game kept track of tire rubber on the track, and you could see your own spinouts and stuff on the next lap.
The former NASCAR engine still exists in a new simulator called iracing. You can still notice the same graphics style. Lots of famous real race drivers using it.
Every step along the rest of the journey with Sierra was a nightmare for employees. CUC, Cendant, Vivendi, and maybe there was another link in the chain, but I got fed up and quit in spring of 1997. We had incredibly talented and passionate artists (2D and 3D) and along the way a lot of that got shipped out of country to artists who seem to have never seen an American auto race. Several employees sued over shenanigans with our stock options treatment; I didn't join in (though perhaps I should have as I think we were getting screwed). IMO, the acquirers just sucked all the fun out of the room and a lot of talented devs and producers left. If you're not having fun working in computer gaming, you might as well go not have fun someplace that pays well.
Ken and Roberta are two of the good ones in my book.
0 - Papyrus Design [IndyCar and NASCAR Racing]