The history of Sierra Entertainment

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Part 2 - The Golden Days (1984-1988)

IBM comes to the rescue and King’s Quest is born

But to showcase the features of this new computer to the public they needed a game that would take use of its impressive features, and they wanted Sierra On-Line to make that game. IBM would fund the entire development of the game, pay royalties for it and even advertise for the game on TV! But they wanted in return a game that was not only good; it had to be ground-breaking!

Of course this was a great opportunity, but also a big risk for Sierra On-Line. They could simply not afford to fail. The challenge was irresistible for Ken and Roberta, who accepted and started right away on the project. Still, it was a pretty controversial project. Sierra On-Line had been faithful to the Apple right from the beginning, and now they were working on a computer game for IBM! The venture capitalists who helped funding the early Sierra On-Line didn't believe in the project at all, but that didn't stop Roberta!

In the spirit of Wizard and the Princess, Roberta came up with a story based on classic fairy-tale elements where a knight would have to save a kingdom in distress by recovering three lost treasures. Her game concept 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 much more competent text parser that would understand advanced commands from the player and music playing in the background through the PCjr sound hardware. Your character should be able to move in front of or between objects on the screen, his graphics covering or being covered by these objects accordingly. It was going to look and feel just like an animated cartoon that the player could control himself! Something as advanced as this had never been made before and some people simply didn’t believe it was possible to turn Roberta's concept into a real game. But Roberta was as determined as usual and didn't let go of her requirements.

In order to bring together all of the graphics, text and logic code for Roberta’s new game, Sierra On-Line needed brand new programming tools. A complete adventure game development system, called AGI (short for Adventure Game Interpreter) was developed. All of the text, graphics, sound and game logic would be designed to run in this interpreter. It would be easy to write other games for the same interpreter in the same way, and if Sierra On-Line wanted to port AGI games to other systems, they only needed an AGI interpreter for the new system that would run the games. Little or no changes to the game data itself was needed. (Basically the same idea as HTML code, being viewable with different browsers on different systems looking almost the same everywhere.)

In the summer of 1984, only a short time after the big cartridge market crash, King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown, the first game developed for the PCjr was released, and people were amazed! This game was simply outstanding for its day. Sierra On-Line had succeeded and IBM got the kind of game they wanted. King’s Quest was a big hit on the IBM PCjr (nicknamed "peanut") and helped keeping the company alive. Unfortunately, the PCjr itself was not well received. It was very incompatible with the standard IBM PC, and its ”chicklet” keyboard wasn't working very well and couldn't exactly be called user-friendly. The introduction of the PCjr was also overshadowed by the release of the Apple Macintosh at about the same time. The PCjr was doomed for failure, and it spelled a new disaster for Sierra On-Line.

But once again, a lucky coincidence saved the company, as the Tandy Corporation introduced the Tandy 1000 in 1985, just a few weeks after IBM finally stopped production of the PCjr. It was compatible with the PCjr (although not marketed as such because of its bad reputation), it was compatible with MS-DOS and it was a life-saver for Sierra On-Line since you could play King’s Quest on it. As lots of people started buying the Tandy 1000, that quickly became the leader of the home computer market, lots of people started buying King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown as well. In a dramatic way, Sierra On-Line once again started earning money and was soon back on track, ready to take on new challenges.

History in the writing

The company changed their logo to the more well-known design that they used for many years to come.

In May 1985, Sierra On-Line released King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne, a highly anticipated sequel that was just as popular as its predecessor. It used the AGI system developed for King's Quest: Quest for the Crown and didn't bring much technical innovation to the series, but it was a bigger and better game in every other aspect. Just what the fans had asked for.

1985 was also the year when Sierra On-Line moved out of their rented offices to 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 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.

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.

In the same month as Space Quest was released, Sierra On-Line and Roberta Williams also released King’s Quest III: To Heir is Human. It spanned five double-sided disks and was thus their second biggest game ever, beaten only by Time Zone in size. It was much bigger and much harder than the previous King’s Quest games.

This was also the year when Lucasfilm Games (now called LucasArts), a division of Lucasfilm Ltd., released their first adventure game: Maniac Mansion. It used an interpreter called SCUMM, similar in concept to AGI. They would later become the most serious competitor to Sierra On-Line in the adventure game genre. They didn't publish nearly as many adventure games as Sierra On-Line, but their games were always well done and most of them went on to become classics.

1986 was also the year when Ken Williams made his first business trip to Japan. His intentions with the trip was 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 insted of several sold. It was the action game Thexder that had captured Ken's interest. Sierra aquired 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 80's.

In 1987, another classic Sierra On-Line game series was born. 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 a game called Softporn Adventure written in 1981 by Chuck Benton. It was the only pure text adventure that the company had ever released.
Al brought home a copy of  Softporn Adventure to check it out, and discovered that the whole game was heavily outdated. He scrapped the original game material almost totally and came up with a main character called Larry Laffer, a nerdy loser in his 40:s that lived together with his mom until just recently, when she finally threw him out of the house. With a receding hairline and a 70's 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. Al, a very humorous guy, filled the game with funny answers for almost every single thing the player could think of writing. The game, directed specifically to a more adult audience than other Sierra On-Line adventure games, mixed with Al’s humor was a fresh and bold combination that proved to be a huge success. Ken Loved the result and Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (now, how’s that for a title!) was released in 1987. The game 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, beaten only by the King’s Quest series. Interestingly, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards was probably also the most pirated game of the late 80’s. Sierra On-Line actually claims to have sold more hint books, providing the solution to the game, than they sold copies of the game itself! Larry Laffer has become one of the most famous computer game characters of all time and the theme song to the games, written by Al Lowe himself, is so extremely catchy that practically no one that has ever played a Leisure Suit Larry game can forget it!

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. With an exciting story that unfolded to a dramatic ending and a gameplay that required proper use of real life police procedures, Police Quest brought yet another breath of fresh air to the adventure game genre. Sierra On-Line was really writing computer gaming history during this time! 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!

Roberta, resisting the pressure from the company and the fans to make a King’s Quest IV right after King’s Quest III, decided this year to write an educational game aimed specifically at younger kids. The result, Mixed-up Mother Goose, received great acclaim from the industry.

In 1988, Dave, Barry and DeeDee Murry designed an original adventure game called Manhunter: New York. Using location picures 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.

1988 would be the last year when Sierra On-Line used only the AGI system in their adventure games. In order to keep up with the technological evolution of computers and computer games, they developed a brand new interpreter called SCI (Sierra's Creative Interpreter). Although still pretty similar to AGI in many ways, it had lots of improvements: First of all, the graphic capabilities was now improved, as standard 320x200 EGA graphics was introduced. It doubled the resolution of the old AGI system, enabling much more detailed graphics. The old vector graphic techniques for background pictures used to save disk/memory space in the AGI games was brought along to the new interpreter, but now offered some improvements as well. The AGI system used dithering of pixels to approximate the original 160x200 16-color graphics when it ran on a computer capable only of showing 320x200 4-color CGA graphics. Now this idea was brought along to the 320x200 16-color EGA-supporting SCI, allowing game artists to mix all 16 colors with each other in patterns to create even better looking graphics. The SCI system also introduced mouse support, enabling the user to direct the main character on screen by moving the mouse cursor to the desired location and clicking it. The old-style keyboard support was naturally also supported, as well as joystick control. An improved menuing system enhanced the look and feel of a game, and whenever the user pressed a character key, a command window automatically popped up, freezing the game until the user had finished the command, unlike the AGI system that always displayed a command prompt at the bottom of the screen and never froze up the game when you typed in a cmmand. So now the user could write commands without hurry even when the character on screen was in immediate danger, a very convenient feature. The SCI system also showed the current score and the name of the game at the top of the screen at all times.

All of this was very nice, but even more interesting was the things that the players didn't see: The SCI system improved scripting technology in a dramatic way, by supporting object-oriented scripting code. In a style similar to C++ or JAVA programming, game programmers could now write script classes for basic handling of things like moving creatures in the game and then re-use that code, adding/modifying only the parts separating different creatures. Sierra On-Line was way ahead of its time with this interpreter!

But the most revolutionary thing about SCI was that it introduced support for extended sound hardware on the PC. Other popular computer platforms such as the Atari and the Amiga already had good sound, but the PC still only had the dreaded single-voice PC Speaker that wasn't really intended for music at all, although bravely used by Sierra On-Line and other computer game developers nonetheless. When the first proffesional sound devices compatible with the PC hardware, such as the AdLib and the Roland MT-32, were introduced, very few people believed in them. But Ken Williams foresaw what others had not realized: This technology would become big one day! He worked hard to make sure that the company would promote these cards and make people buy them.
All in all, over $400,000 was spent on developing the technical improvements in SCI.

In September of 1988, the first SCI game was released: King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella. It was a really impressive game, taking full use of the superior SCI system. For the first time ever, people with the right hardware could hear real soundcard music in a game on their PC:s. It was a stunning experience that, combined with Sierra's agressive 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 PC:s

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.