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Games Entertainment

Sierra Reorgs, Fires 135 Programmers 86

Posted by Hemos from the sad-day-in-gaming dept.
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.
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Sierra Reorgs, Fires 135 Programmers More

Sierra Reorgs, Fires 135 Programmers

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  • Hmmm (Score:1)

    by drwiii ( 434 )
    Now this link [sierra.com] is kinda sad to read..

    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...
  • 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 ...
  • 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.

    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 ... don't get me started.. what a great concept, what poor exectution.

    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..

  • I would have thought Sierra would be rollling in cash after the success of Half Life.
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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...
  • ...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.

    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 ;) - 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.

    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.

  • Bah (Score:1)

    by pen ( 7191 )
    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...
  • 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 [qg5.com].

    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.
  • You will be surrounded by incredibly intelligent, hard working people, who will work 20+ hours per day when it takes it to get the job done.

    Working "20+ hours per day" for anyone but yourself might be "hard working" but it certainly isn't "incredibly intelligent". It's a sure sign that the management of the company is a failure and it will all collapse some day, probably long before your options vest (but after the management's golden parachutes have opened.)

  • Believe it or not, some programmers LIKE working 20+ hours per day on chunks of code.

    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!

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