Sierra Entertainment is an incorporated entertainment software company which is headquartered in Los Angeles (US). It was founded in 1979 by Ken Williams as On-Line Systems, before being renamed Sierra On-Line in 1982. The company set out producing video games for the Apple II and went on to produce many popular and long-running series of adventure games such as King's Quest and Space Quest. Recent titles have included the Half-Life series and Spyro the Dragon. The company is currently a subsidiary of Vivendi Games (a subsidiary of Vivendi SA). Sierra itself owns four in-house development studios: High Moon Studios, Massive Entertainment, Radical Entertainment and Swordfish Studios.
Beginnings edit
Corporate History edit
On-Line Systems was founded in 1979 by Ken Williams. Located in Simi Valley, California, Williams and his wife Roberta created and published the game Mystery House. Due to the game's success, in August 1980 the Williams moved out of L.A. They bought a house in Oakhurst, a small gold mining town in the Sierra Nevada foothills just south of Yosemite National Park, and shortly afterwards they rented the first corporate headquarters of On-Line Systems, also in Oakhurst.
In 1982, On-Line systems changed their name to Sierra On-Line, which related to their location in the Sierra Nevada area. They also adopted the shape of Half Dome, one of Yosemite's most spectacular and famous landmarks, in their logotype.
Sierra moved out of their rented offices in 1985 and into the Sierra Professional Building, a structure built specifically for the quickly growing company. The structure would eventually grow to a whole complex of buildings in the following ten years as the company expanded.
In October 1988, the company took a major step by going public, thus becoming Sierra On-Line Inc. Allowing public shareholders to buy Sierra stock gave the company working capital to develop new products and technologies.
In 1990, after a deep discussion with friend and Microsoft head Bill Gates, Ken Williams decided to change Sierra’s corporate strategy: From now on, Sierra would be 1/3 Perennial Series (such as King’s Quest, Space Quest, etc.) 1/3 Educational titles and 1/3 Productivity software. In order to meet this goal, Sierra would have to begin purchasing other companies in order to create a more diverse product line.
By 1991 the company had grown to employ over 300 employees and was only growing larger and stronger as time went on.
In February 1992, Ken Williams met with John Carmack and John Romero, the founders and heads of id Software and offered to buy id Software for $2.5 million. The two developers turned Ken down, and id Software went on to release Wolfenstein 3D and later Doom and Quake, games that defined and brought first person shooter gaming to the mainstream market, a genre that continues to be popular to this day and led to the decline in popularity of Adventure Games starting in 1996.
Bellevue, Washington edit
The Oakhurst facility constantly grew and new buildings were needed to hold recording studios, warehouses and other things needed to continue making games of the highest quality using the latest technology. The company had grown to become the single biggest employer in town. With over 500 miles to the closest university, finding people to hire was becoming a major problem. Without an airport available nearby, Ken Williams found most of his time being spent traveling between Oakhurst and different business meetings at other places. Microsoft founder Bill Gates had previously asked Ken how he could run such a successful business from such a remote place, and it was now apparent that it wasn't possible to keep doing that and still grow.
The decision was made to move to Bellevue, Washington. The Seattle area was much better suited to run the company from and with companies such as Microsoft based nearby, finding people to hire wasn't a problem. With management and some of the development teams moved to Seattle, the company could continue growing and still keep developing games in Oakhurst.
The company was now made out of five separate, and largely autonomous development divisions: Sierra Publishing (Oakhurst), Sierra Northwest (Bellevue), Dynamix, Bright Star Technologies and Coktel Vision, with each group working separately on product development but sharing manufacturing, distribution and sales resources, overseen by the management of Sierra and the main Sierra organization (Sierra Northwest). This strategy created a large and diverse but well managed company with various brands that brought the whole company more success and Sierra only continued to grow as time went on.
1994 saw the sale of the ImagiNation Network to AT&T Corp due to its low profitability and high cost. However, in an agreement signed as part of the sale, Sierra would still retain exclusive rights to develop games for it.
1995 was a great financial year for the company. With $83.4 million in sales from its software-publishing business, earnings were improved by 19 percent, bringing a net income of $11.9 million to the company. This caused the stock price to jump from the 1994 value of $18 to $26.
Michael Brochu, a longtime executive and advisor at Sierra was named the company President and COO by CEO and Chairman Ken Williams. Brochu was responsible for the day-to-day management of the company while Williams would focus on product development.
Acquisition by CUC International and aftermath edit
Acquisition by Vivendi Universal edit
Development Studios edit
Dynamix Later that year, the still growing Sierra On-Line made their first big acquisition of another computer game company: Dynamix, founded by Jeff Tunnell and Damon Slye in 1984. Dynamix had hit upon hard times and was at the verge of bankruptcy at the time of acquisition yet Ken Williams saw the profitability possibilities of the company and in doing so saved it from closure. A number of successful adventure games, like Rise of the Dragon, Heart of China and The Adventures of Willy Beamish were released by the company in the following years. But they also designed very successful games in other genres, such as the award-winning flight simulator Red Baron, the 1993 hit RPG classic, Betrayal at Krondor, the Front Page Sports series and the innovative puzzle game The Incredible Machine.
Broderbund In March 1991, there was much discussion of a would-be merger between Sierra and Brøderbund Software. Brøderbund was a major competitor of Sierra and an influential player in the computer entertainment industry. Brøderbund had over 200 employees that specialized in making mostly educational software. The merger would make the combined company the largest and most powerful independent software developer and publisher in the world. The truth behind the merger was that Sierra was acquiring Brøderbund, but after the acquisition, the Brøderbund would exist as a subsidiary with its own publishing unit, and the combined company would be named Sierra-Broderbund. Sierra and Brøderbund signed a letter of intent to merge but that agreement was terminated in April 1991 when Sierra and Broderbund came to a disagreement upon what the structure and management of the combined company would be after the merger. Brøderbund would go on to publish Myst in 1993, which would end up becoming the highest selling computer game of all time, a title which it would hold for eleven years.
Acquisition of Coktel Vision 1993 saw the acquisition by Sierra of Coktel Vision, a Paris-based software developer that provided the company with games such as the Inca and Gobliiins series, and was a valuable asset in international development and distribution. The acquisition was also beneficial to Coktel in that it introduced the company’s games to a much larger market.
A number of investments and acquisitions were made in 1995 in the home productivity area. In May, Sierra acquired The Pixellite Group and with this acquisition came the rights to produce and distribute Print Artist, a desktop publishing program enabling the user to print high-quality documents at home. Green Thumb Software, a company creating gardening and landscape products, was also acquired by Sierra as well as Arion Software, producer of the MasterCook culinary series, acquired in September. A joint venture with P.F. Collier to jointly develop and publish a multimedia general reference encyclopedia was also made in November of 1995.
But investments were also made in the gaming area. Sierra On-Line purchased the strategy games publisher Impressions Games, creators of games like the Caesar series and Lords of the Realm. Papyrus Design Group, designers of acclaimed racing simulations such as the NASCAR and IndyCar Racing series, and flight simulation software developer SubLogic, designers of Pro Pilot, were also purchased by Sierra On-Line in 1995.
The beginning of 1996 also saw another jump in the stock price to $32 and with 1,100 employees spread throughout the United States and overseas and approximately 100 products in development at any given time, Sierra was growing faster than ever.
Games and Products edit
Hi-Res Adventures and SierraVision edit
The first game produced by On-Line systems was the murder-mystery Mystery House. Written by Roberta Williams and programmed by Ken Williams, production took three months to complete. Roberta Williams as well as designing the story for the game, wrote the text and dialog and drew the graphics using a crude graphics tablet with a mechanic arm that could transfer a drawing on paper to a computer image. Ken Williams programmed the logic code needed in the game as well as designing a system where-by they could fit the amount of graphics required into the very limited memory of their Apple II computer.
On May 5, 1980, Mystery House was released at a retail cost of $24.95. The game was distributed to the only four software stores available in Los Angeles County at the time by Ken and Roberta Williams personally.
Mystery House was the first computer game to have graphics, and eventually sold about 15,000 copies earning $167,000, an unprecedented number for the time.
A number of notable titles were developed and released by On-Line Systems over the following few years, notably their High-Res Adventure series (which included Adventure in Serenia, Troll's Tale and Time Zone) and their SierraVision arcade games. The SierraVision games were successful licenses of arcade games, including Frogger and Jawbreaker. They also released a few non-entertainment software products, such as the HomeWord Speller word processor.
In 1981, On-Line Systems also published Chuck Benton's Softporn Adventure. As well as being the only pure text adventure that the company ever released, it was also used as the basis for designer Al Lowe's Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards in 1987.
Adventure Games edit
Sierra was most notable in the 1980's and 1990's for their Adventure games. Many games and series introduced new concepts into computer games, as well as a number of titles winning gaming awards and being best sellers.
As well as their major series, Sierra released other adventure games between 1979 and 1999. In 1988, Dave, Barry and DeeDee Murry designed Manhunter: New York. Using location pictures of famous city landmarks for realism, they set the story in a dark future where alien eyeballs had invaded the earth, turning humans into slaves. The player starts out safely as a spy for the aliens, but has the option to risk everything and turn against them when the time is ready. Manhunter: New York was the first adventure game created by Sierra that was not parser-based, but used an interface similar to the later point-and-click adventures.
Acclaimed author Christy Marx produced two adventure games for Sierra, Conquests of Camelot, which explored the legends of King Arthur and the Holy Grail, and Conquests of the Longbow, which explored the legends of Robin Hood.
Phantasmagoria was another project of designer Roberta Williams. It featured live actors captured in Full Motion Video. The project was much bigger than anything Sierra had previously undertaken. The development cost of this game reached the levels of Hollywood movies. A brand new video studio, featuring a 16×16 meter blue screen, the latest in digital recording equipment and the best Silicon Graphics computers available at the time, was built for the game and over 20 professional actors were hired. Almost a million copies were sold when the game was first released in August 1995, making it the best-selling Sierra adventure game ever.
A more traditional game, Torin's Passage, was also released in 1995. Developed by Al Lowe at the main Sierra studios in Bellevue, this family oriented adventure game was in great contrast to his trademark adult themed comedy ventures. It was conceived in late 1994 after Lowe was inspired to create a game which both he and his young daughter could relate to and enjoy. It was developed under the new SCI 2 engine and used cel animation like King's Quest VII, with an atmosphere similar to contemporary Disney films and featured a very innovative hint system. It was designed to be the first in an epic series similar to King's Quest, but the declining popularity of adventures post 1996 would put an end to these plans.
Kings Quest edit
In 1983, Sierra On-Line had been contacted by IBM to create a showcase game for their new PCjr. IBM would fund the entire development of the game, pay royalties for it and advertise for the game on television.
Roberta Williams created a story based on classic fairy-tale elements where a knight would have to save a kingdom in distress by recovering three lost treasures. In order to bring together all of the graphics, text, and logic code for William's new game, Sierra developed a complete adventure game development system, called Adventure Game Interpreter. All of the text, graphics, sound, and game logic would be designed to run through this interpreter. It would be easy to write other games for the same interpreter in the same way, and if Sierra wanted to port AGI games to other systems, they only needed an AGI interpreter for the new system that would run the games. Few changes to the game data were needed.
In the summer of 1984, King's Quest was released. The game included animated color graphics, a pseudo 3D-perspective where you could see the main character on the screen and be able to control his movements with the arrow keys on the keyboard, a text parser that would understand advanced commands from the player and music playing in the background. The character would be able to move in front of or between objects on the screen, his graphics covering or being covered by these objects accordingly.
Seven more titles in the Kings Quest series followed, each bringing something new to adventure games. Kings Quest III was the first adventure game featuring auto-mapping, with a 'magic map' found in the game that can be used to teleport to most locations that the player has visited before. This feature was unpopular among some fans who claim it made the game too easy, hence magic maps in future Sierra games were more limited in their teleporting ability (if they had the feature at all). In September of 1988, the first SCI game was released: King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella. For the first time ever, people with the right hardware could hear real soundcard music in a game on their PCs. It was a stunning experience that, combined with Sierra's aggressive marketing efforts made people rush out to buy PC sound hardware, thus launching the soundcard boom that has made it a standard component in today's PCs.
In 1990, Sierra introduced King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder. It had beautifully hand-painted background scenes, scanned in 256-colors, and scrapped the old text parser interface for a totally icon-based system where you could interact with the game solely using the mouse. Some old text-parser fans complained that this new system greatly reduced the challenge and fun in playing an adventure game, but at the same time it made adventure games more appealing to new players and the new system prevailed. King's Quest V was the first Sierra On-Line game ever to sell more than 500,000 copies and was the biggest selling game of all time for the next five years. It won several awards as well, such as the Best Adventure Game of the Year from both the Software Publishers Association and Computer Gaming World Magazine.
Space Quest edit
While working hard on finishing The Black Cauldron, programmers Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy discovered that they had a mutual sense of humor and began to plan for an adventure game of their own. It was going to take place in outer space and it would be filled with crazy humor and an incredibly nerdy main character called Roger Wilco, a space janitor who fell asleep at work and ended up having to save the galaxy from an alien race known as the Sariens. They knew that Ken Williams wasn’t very interested in space themes, so they put together four sample rooms for Roger to walk around in using the AGI system in their spare time before they actually showed their ideas to Ken. Their simple demonstration impressed him enough to allow them to start working on the full game. It was named Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter. The game, released in October 1986, was an instant success and would get many sequels in the following years. The series has earned cult status today with a big community of fans all over the world. The Space Quest series is full of warped humor and classic adventure game moments.
Leisure Suit Larry edit
Al Lowe, who had been working at Sierra On-Line for many years, most recently as lead programmer for King’s Quest III, was asked by Ken Williams to write a modern version of Chuck Benton's Softporn Adventure from 1981, the only pure text adventure that the company had ever released.
Al Lowe scrapped the original game material almost totally and came up with a main character called Larry Laffer, a nerdy loser in his 40s that lived together with his mom until just recently, when she finally threw him out of the house. With a receding hairline and a 70s leisure suit in white polyester, earning him the nickname Leisure Suit Larry, this anti-hero comes to the city of Lost Wages hoping to lose his virginity. The game had funny answers for almost every single thing the player could think of writing.
Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards was a great hit (although not instantly), and it even won the Software Publishers Association's "Best Adventure Game" award of 1987. A long series of Leisure Suit Larry games would follow in the coming years and become the second best selling game series of Sierra On-Line after King's Quest. Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards may have been the most pirated game of the late 80s. Sierra On-Line claims to have sold more hint books than copies of the game itself.
Police Quest edit
1987 also saw the start of yet another successful Sierra On-Line adventure game series. Produced by Jim Walls, ex-Officer of the California Highway Patrol, Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel put players in the shoes of Sonny Bonds, a veteran police officer who had to track down and capture a very dangerous drug dealer known as the Death Angel. Jim had no previous experience in computer game development. He met Ken Williams during a leave from service after getting involved in a shootout. Ken asked him if he wanted to use his experiences as a police officer to write an adventure game for Sierra On-Line. He accepted, happy to do something else after his traumatic incident. The result was a great success. It has been told that Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel was even used to some extent in the training of actual California police officers!
Quest for Glory edit
In 1989, yet another successful Sierra On-Line game series was born with the release of Hero's Quest I: So You Want to be a Hero, later renamed Quest for Glory) written by Lori Ann Cole. This was not entirely an adventure game, as role-playing elements was seamlessly woven into it as well. It was thus the first Adventure/RPG hybrid ever made.
Gabriel Knight edit
Right after finishing King's Quest VI, Jane Jensen started production on the first game in her own series. Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers was produced as a CD game right from the beginning, with an all-star voice acting cast, including Hollywood actors Tim Curry, Mark Hamill, Leah Remini and Michael Dorn. The game received much critical acclaim and won several awards. The success helped launching Jane's career as a novelist and she soon wrote a paperback novelization of the game.
Japanese Imports edit
1986 Ken Williams made his first business trip to Japan. His intentions with the trip were to set up methods of selling Sierra software there. He traveled there with the impression that he could teach the Japanese a thing or two about computer gaming and perhaps sell a few products to them. What he found there was a total surprise. The Japanese computer gaming industry was not at all behind the American. On the contrary, they were way ahead of them. Nintendo, a company few people in America had even heard about yet, had already sold their Famicom console to over 4 million Japanese homes, and games like Super Mario Brothers were well known in the whole country.
The games themselves were outstanding for the day, with stereo soundtracks and incredible graphics. Ken soon realized that it was the Japanese that could teach him, not vice versa. The trip ended up with one game bought instead of several sold. It was the action game Thexder that had captured Ken's interest. Ken arranged for Sierra to acquire the rights to port and publish the game in the U.S. from Game Arts, the Japanese publisher. Thexder was a phenomenal success when it reached the shelves just before Christmas 1986. It became Sierra's bestselling game in 1987 and cooperation with Japanese publishers continued throughout the late 80s.
Collaborations edit
The Dark Crystal, a game based on Muppet's creator Jim Henson's animated movie, was also released in 1982. The Dark Crystal was the first computer game to be based on a movie. It was also released in a simplified version intended for younger players as The Gelfling Adventure. This game was the first one made by Al Lowe, who would later make the popular Leisure Suit Larry series.
In 1986, Sierra On-Line teamed up with Disney and released three adventure games aimed at younger children, called Mickey's Space Adventure, The Black Cauldron and Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood.
The Sierra Network edit
In late 1990 Ken Williams decided to look at the possibilities of playing adventure games in multiplayer over a global network. He assigned Al Lowe, Jeff Stephenson (who did much of the programming on the AGI and SCI systems) and Matthew George to the project. Matthew would work on the low-level modem communication system, Jeff would write a multiplayer version of SCI and Al would program the high-level applications. He started to think up Leisure Suit Larry 4 as a multiplayer adventure game.
There were many problems to solve if this was going to work. They installed 32 new telephone lines in the building, bought a bunch of 2400 baud modems and connected them all together. The system proved difficult to implement, so Al wrote a simple checkers game to test its basic features. It worked, and he went on and made a backgammon and a chess game while Jeff and Matt continued working on the system, and by 1991 the project was up and running.
Due to the lack of technology at the time, the multiplayer game was ultimately dropped. (Because of this, Leisure Suit Larry 4, is nonexistent; the series continued with Leisure Suit Larry 5). The company decided to continue with a lower scale version of the multiplayer gaming using smaller, more simplistic games. Margaret Lowe, Al Lowe's wife, created the name in which it was referred to as Constant Companion. It was later renamed The Sierra Network or TSN. A monthly fee was implemented allowing users to connect to TSN to game multiplayer against one another. The TSN system is considered to be advanced for its time.
Modem restraints, lack of interest, and slow growth contributed to TSN's downfall. An estimated ten million dollars was being lost per year when TSN was sold to AT&T; TSN continued a downward spiral being sold to America On-Line, and then consequently, it was dropped
1994 saw the sale of the ImagiNation Network to AT&T Corp due to its low profitability and high cost. However, in an agreement signed as part of the sale, Sierra would still retain exclusive rights to develop games for it.
Complete list of titles edit
Since it's beginnings in 1979, Sierra Entertainment (previously known as On-Line Systems and Sierra On-line) has developed and/or published video games for a variety of platforms, most notably for the PC in the 1980's and 1990's, as well as for consoles such as the Playstation and X-Box. The company has produced a number of best-selling games and series such as Gabriel Knight, Kings Quest, Spyro the Dragon and SWAT.
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