The Sierra Adventure
This is the definitive story of Sierra On-Line, the most remarkable and innovative computer game developer of the early Apple II and PC era of gaming, with a catalog of industry-defining games such as King’s Quest, Space Quest, Gabriel Knight, Quest for Glory, and Leisure Suit Larry.
Through interviews with over fifty of the key players at Sierra, management, producers, artists, designers, musicians, and marketting executives, Shawn tells the story of Sierra, in their own words.
“Along comes Shawn Mills, who accomplishes the seemingly impossible by delivering a beautifully comprehensive overview of Sierra, talking to dozens of interested and involved parties, culling the smaller, less interesting stories (which are legion) but touching on pretty much every major development the company went through from start to finish. You’ll find in-depth looks at many of the major games and some of the larger conflagrations and conflicts. Basically, this is the book that people have been asking for all these years, and it’s an astonishing and loving tribute.” (From the introduction by Josh Mandel).
Excerpt
From Chapter 8: Old Favorites New Tech
Sitting at his desk in the middle of the night, working overtime, Corey Cole was more than a little frustrated. He knew that game production would always have its problems, that it was never a smooth process, but with his and his wife Lori’s new game, Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire, the challenges seemed to keep coming.
After production had already started, newly hired creative director Bill Davis turned things upside down, completely revamping the entire game creation process to better cater to the upcoming VGA games planned. Gone were the days of everyone sitting together and working on portions of the game as they were needed. Everything now had to be completely designed and penciled out. Sketches were required of all artwork, and these were to be submitted through team leaders to the producer, who then handed them off to the programmers. The game was to be built using those placeholder sketches, which would later be replaced by final artwork, forcing the programmers to go over their work multiple times.
It was hell.
Tempers were short, and everybody was tense. The stress of the situation became so bad that the anger even made it into the game itself. In a subtle dig at the changes being made at Sierra, the second city the Hero would visit was named Raseir, a brutal dictatorship and anagram of Sierra. The leader of that oppressive regime, Khaveen, was named after Rick Cavin, Sierra’s general manager, while the major antagonist Ad Avis was named after Bill Davis.
It was the success of the first gamethat inspired the decision to put a sequel into production straight away. “We had originally planned the series to come out in bang, bang, bang, four consecutive years. For people to play all the way through from beginning to end. Ken had other ideas; he was going to have us do one game, then switch off to other stuff. But the success of Hero’s Quest took them by surprise. It sold a lot of copies,” Corey recalls.
Quest for Glory II followed a path similar to the first game by supplying the player with a number of quests to complete, along with two new cities and a vast wilderness to explore. This time, however, events demanded a more restrictive time frame, with certain essential puzzle elements occurring only on set days. This allowed for a more focused story, keeping to a slightly more linear path than the original, although players could still undertake secondary tasks and challenges at their own pace.
The Coles set to work to create a new adventure for the Hero in the desert land of Shapeir with a large portion of the team they had worked with on the first game still in place, including composer Mark Seibert.
Trial by Fire, although already planned as the subtitle for the game, would become a very apt description for the production.
…
It’s with hindsight that Corey looks back and reconsiders his opinion of the three men he blamed for making his life miserable during the production of Quest for Glory II: “At the time, we were totally stressed and we had our three archnemeses, Ken Williams, Rick Cavin and Bill Davis. [After leaving Sierra], Lori was president for several years of the Yosemite Western Artists group, and a few years ago Bill Davis joined the group and we discovered a few things. For one thing, we discovered that he is an enormously talented artist, which we didn’t get to see at Sierra because he was managing and spending much more time with spreadsheets than drawing anything.
“Second is that he’s a really good guy, and he really cared about making conditions better for his artists. Because if we thought the designers had problems, the artists were all massively underpaid. Some of them were making what they made in the late seventies and they were still being paid that in the early nineties. So it had not kept up with inflation. Generally, Bill made life better for the artists and he really cared about making the art quality of the games as good as possible and he succeeded in that. So, Bill Davis, archvillain, is actually a really good guy.
“Now we have Rick Cavin, who was the general manager, who we felt was a tyrant and expected everyone to adhere to his hours, which [meant] starting work at 7:00 a.m. In retrospect, Rick managed to keep the place operating through a lot of different dramas and changes. So we had our troubles with him, but he was actually a pretty good guy, too.”
Finally, Corey reflects back on Ken Williams himself: “Talking to him years later, we discovered that he really intensely cared about the games he was making. It wasn’t just about making money; he loved the games. . . . He thought it was really neat he could make a living making games and that this was just awesome, and when he merged [Sierra] into CUC International and later became Cendant Corporation, he did that to save the company. He said, ‘These games are important and I want them to keep going, and if we have more money, we’ll be able to make better games and keep the adventure games going.’ So, all three of them [were] actually good guys, just working in impossible circumstances. All these processes that we hated at the time, all had a reason. They all made sense, we just kind of felt like we were the guinea pigs on it.
“Working for Sierra was really a roller coaster ride. When it was good, it was really good. When you got into the creativity, you got into working with great people, it was just amazing,” Corey reflects. “Then when you had just these massive amounts of soul-numbing overtime and not getting enough sleep and coming in and trying to write code when you couldn’t remember what you did last night and stuff like that, those were the bad parts.
“I got stopped by a local sheriff at one point at one or two in the morning, telling me I had turned a corner without stopping for a stop sign. He was convinced I had to be a drunk driver out at that time of night, and I said, ‘Actually I’m just coming home from work,’ and he eventually let me go with just a warning. But I was constantly coming home between midnight and two in the morning.
“Good times, bad times.”