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Classic Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Ken 'Sierra On-Line' Williams Interview 26

Posted by simoniker from the softporn-adventure-highlight-of-career? dept.
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."
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Ken 'Sierra On-Line' Williams Interview More

Ken 'Sierra On-Line' Williams Interview

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  • Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)

    by funkhauser ( 537592 ) <zmmay2 AT uky DOT edu> on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @03:03AM (#5996996) Homepage Journal
    ...or how he tried to buy id Software.

    First-person Leisure Suit Larry... sounds like fun to me! :)

  • I cannot believe... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dot.Com.CEO ( 624226 ) * on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @06:09AM (#5997415)
    how little attention this thread has been getting! Sierra games basically sum up my adolescente computer game playing. I remember being stuck with an Atari ST with a mono monitor (640x400 resolution baby) and Sierra and Lucasarts games were the only ones playable on the machine without needing to occupy the family TV. Anyhow, I remember playing Police Quest, yes, Leisure Suit Larry, Hero's Quest, the ultra-funny Space Quests and, of course, the epitome of frustration that was King's Quest IV. I still remember that stupid scene where you had to tiptoe on a whale's tongue....

    Even though everyone remembers them for the "Quest" series, the memory of playing the two Manhunter games [vintage-sierra.com]. 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...

    • Yeah, me neither. Everybody in my house was into the Quest games, on our Tandy ... what was it, 100? It was the one with three-voice sound. Man, I miss that thing. Anyway, my mother, my brothers, I don't know about my sister ... my dad always stayed away from it for some reason though. But Sierra games are definitely an important part of my fledgling geekdom.

      The interview was a great read. Ken Williams seems to come off a bit strong, though, but I guess it worked for handling his company. It was very inter
      • It was a Tandy 1000. One of the first PC clones. It had 16 color CGA and three channel sound with one noise channel. One of the better comptuers out at the time. The two front joystick ports were perfect. The only problem was that you could not plug in a standard HD controller for an IBM PC and have it work.

        I defeated KQ2 and 3 on a Tandy 1000. Those were the days.

        Google turned up this...
        http://www.oldskool.org/shrines/pcjr_tand y/

  • Good old games... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ude ( 572968 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @06:12AM (#5997421) Homepage
    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.

  • Old Games on Apple (Score:3, Informative)

    by robbway ( 200983 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @07:24AM (#5997558) Journal
    Interestingly enough, Ken doesn't remember that the Roberta Williams Collection, a very good buy (don't know about XP compatibility), had an Apple II emulator on it to play Roberta's Apple games. He didn't have to download it at all, his own company sold it.

    He's right though, old games typically don't hold your interest, mainly because we're used to a higher standard for graphics and sound.

    [The first Sierra game I played was Sammy Lightfoot on the Apple II (a Donkey Kong clone). You literally had to line up pixels before you jumped back then.]
    • The first Sierra game I played was Hi-Res Adventure #1: Mystery House [vintage-sierra.com]. That was on an old Apple ][ back around 1980. The graphics were so primitive by today's standards, but naturally back then you didn't even notice.

      I remember there being a slightly corrupted sector on my disk back then that caused one of the images to be drawn incorrectly. If you didn't know about the game before, it basically was non-filling hi-res graphics. In other words:

      hplot 10,10 to 10,20

      hplot 10,20 to 20,20
      hplot 20,20 to 20,10

  • Who killed sierra? (Score:3, Informative)

    by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @08:46AM (#5997820) Journal
    The interviewer asks why sierra is no longer the company it once was. Read to the very bottom of the article and you will see the answer.

    After talking to Bill Gates (Just the person to ask about making profit on games :) he decided to switch the company around. No longer make HIT games but focus on edutainment (yah kid love that) and renewable games.

    So who killed Sierra, the founder after talking to gates.

    • Edutainment and renewable games definitely fall in line with Bill's marketing strategy and even reflects a model that the software industry is going to nowdays. MMPORGs, leased software...business models that continue revenue after teh intiial sale. I think part of Sierra's trouble is not necessarily that Bill lead him toward a bad business model, but that Sierra chose the wrong aspect of that model. I'm sure it was in large part because the technology hadn't matured to that level yet but I know I would hav

    • Re:Who killed sierra? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Torgo's Pizza ( 547926 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @11:09AM (#5998649) Homepage Journal
      You've got it all wrong. This was actually a *good* thing. Have you even noticed the instability in the game industry? It isn't a question of making hit games, but weathering the storm when the bad times come. This is how Sony has survived the past decade. When the electronics giant had some serious problems due to the economy, the Playstation saved its butt. When the economy improves, Sony can use its other divisions to prop up the gaming side.

      In fact, the most successful game publishers have other divisions that complement the game development. Lucasarts has the myriad of George Lucas properties. Cendant had hotels, car rentals to help them during slow periods. (Of course, the recession hit all their industries hard.) Microsoft became a juggernaught by using their other divisions to prop up the XBox and game publishing side. Heck, even Electronic Arts has edutainment software.

      So it ends up being not just making hit games, but being able to take on the slow periods. If the game industry has another year like 1984, only those companies who have a large enough nest egg or are able to lean on other sources of income are going to survive.

    • He doesn't even refer to them as games. He calls them "products".

      That's where Sierra went wrong.

  • just me? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Baron_911 ( 664953 )
    ... or does Ken kinda come off as a big ass?
    I had no tolerance for anyone who didn't understand my goals. I thought of business as war. Sierra's employees were my soldiers and competitors were the enemy. If someone wanted to have fun at work, they should do so - but, not at Sierra. Go elsewhere.

    I bet all the fun was Roberta's idea, and dude was the grumpy money guy. He doesn't even PLAY games for cryin out loud! Sry... I do love old Sierra games BTW, so im not tryin to be too cruel >:)
    • I was thinking the same thing. I especially cringed when I read the part about him keeping his fingers into everything, long after he should have stopped.

      I mean, really....KNOW what your company is doing, but trust the damn people you hire to do a good job. You don't need a manager hanging over your shoulder for every decision. Geesh
    • It is not just you... I think it is telling that this guy raves about how you have to be completely immersed in something to make a game about it (fishing, golf or whatever) but now, he doesn't even play games and has little idea of what is going on in the industry. Makes me think that maybe he never knew what he was doing and benefited mostly from the facts that their were not a lot of competitors in his genre and he surrounded himself with talented people. I mean, Phantasmagoria is one of his favorite g
    • Roberta Williams is an elitist snob.

      She was once quoted by Old Man Murray [oldmanmurray.com], when talking about why adventure games aren't popular anymore, as saying something along the lines of, "Well, back then, you had to be at least somewhat intelligent to use a computer. Nowadays, a lot more average people feel they should own one."

      Besides, everyone knows that the old Sierra adventure games sucked. LucasArts' adventure games were 100x better.

  • Wow (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Monkeylaser ( 674360 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @11:08AM (#5998644)
    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.
    • I believe Sierra purchased Dynamix then they released a bunch of games together including Space Quest 5, the Incredible Macine, Willy Beamish, Front Page Sports Football (the one you're trying to remember), and many others. That was around the time when Sierra also purchased the French company Coktel-Vision who released the Inca and Gobliins games to name a few.
    • As far as I understand it, Dynamix Studios was a subsidiary of Sierra. A group of designers doing games that Sierra wouldn't normally do (I.E. The awesome Aces series, A-10, etc.) Of course, I believe Dynamix also penned Willy Beamish, which is pretty much EXACTLY what Sierra would normally do :)

    • Re:Wow (Score:3, Interesting)

      by xingix ( 601512 )
      I forgot to add that I used to love that Sierra magazine InterAction. It was very cool in the day (or so I thought) especially when Ken and Roberta's son had his own column every week. He was around my age so I thought he must've been the luckiest kid alive. I used to pore over every word of that magazine every 3 months that it came out.

      Back in the early 90's I used to call up Sierra's customer service several times a year requesting free demos and they used to send me boxes of floppies with 5 or 6 demo

  • Yeah, Ken Williams does come off sounding a bit arrogant, but this article does give a good idea of what the industry was and will never be again: a small business that can be run by 10 people or less, possibly out of someone's house.Sure, there are still a few out there, but they are not the power they once were (like Sierra Online, Origin, or even id during the commander keen/wolf3d days...)

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