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Al Lowe also made the third episode of the Leisure Suit Larry series in 1989, a game that ended up in the back lot of Sierra On-Line itself!
The last game to be made in the AGI system was Manhunter 2: San Fransico in 1989 After that, Sierra solely used the superior SCI system for all their adventure games. The Manhunter series didn't become successful enough for more sequels to get done.
In the same
year, Sierra’s sister-company Infocom, who only made old-style text adventure
games but had improved them to near perfection, was shut down. People didn't
buy enough text adventures anymore, as Sierra On-Line and others created
more and more impressive-looking graphical adventure games. The golden
era of text adventure gaming was over, but the success story of Sierra
On-Line was far from over...
In celebration of their ten years
in the business, it was decided that Sierra On-Line should make new, enhanced
versions of the first games in their five most popular game franchaises:
King's
Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest
and Quest for Glory, using the new SCI system. As Roberta Williams
had begun work on the next King's Quest game, newly hired game designer
Josh
Mandel was assigned to the project of remaking the first King's Quest
game. Roberta kept an eye on the project, but Josh still had pretty free
hands in designing the game.
In 1990, Sierra revolutionized the adventure game genre again with King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder. It was written in SCI version 1 (the previous version being called SCI 0) and had beautifully hand-painted background scenes, scanned in 256-colors. It looked absolutely stunning compared to the average computer game of the day. It also 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. 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.
A
new version of Mixed-Up Mother Goose was also released this year. After
two years in development, it was released on CD-ROM and had digitized speech
instead of text. It was the first true multimedia adventure game to be
released on CD-ROM. Developing was not an easy process. The speed of CD-ROM
drives at the time made it impossible to find speech data on the disk without
a noticeable delay whenever a character in the game was going to say something.
Synchronizing the lips of the characters to the sound was also impossible.
Of course, few people had CD-ROM players at the time, but the ones who
did got to experience something truly amazing. It won the Software Publishers
Association's 1990 Best Early Education Award. Ken Williams
was in fact one of the nominees for the Lifetime Achievement Award
at the same ceremony, but he lost it to Steve Wozniak, the legendary
co-founder of Apple Computer.
"I can't imagine a better guy to
lose to than Steve. He's always been one of my major inspirations in this
business." said Ken. (Quote from
Sierra News Magazine.)
The releases of the SCI versions of Sierra's old classics in 1990-91 unfortunately proved a sales disaster. It turned out that old Sierra fans liked the originals much better, despite their outdated graphics and sound, and new players were not very impressed with the gameplay.
A CD-ROM version of King's Quest V was also made in 1991. The voice acting was mostly made by sierra employees. It was the second Sierra game to be released on a CD.
In
1990, 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. A number of heralded adventure games, like
Rise
of the Dragon, Heart of China and Adventures of Willy Beamish
were released by the company in the following years. But they also designed
successful games in other genres, such as the award-winning flight simulator
Red
Baron, the Front Page Sports series and the innovative puzzle
game The Incredible Machine, just to mention a few.
A
very interesting project was started at Sierra in early 1991: Ken Williams,
always eager to explore new technologies, decided to look at the possibilities
of a new way to play 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 making a backgammon and then a chess game just to kill time
while Jeff and Matt continued working on the system. Eventually, they realized
that it was not going to be possible to make the multiplayer adventure
game they had planned. They couldn't even figure out how the game should
really work. But the simple games they already had were fun enough to play
to make it a real product. Al's wife, Margaret, came up with a name for
it: Constant Companion. It was later renamed The Sierra Network,
or TSN for short. For a monthly fee, everyone with a modem could
connect to it and play simple games against each other, send email and
things like that. It was very cool and very ahead of its time. Unfortunately,
the number of people who owned a modem and the technological limits (it
was even estimated that in order to make it a profitable affair, they needed
50,000 users, and in order to service that number of users they needed
about 20 people working only on installing new modems!) made it very unprofitable.
Eventually, when it was losing 10 million dollars a year, half of it was
sold out to AT&T for 50 million dollars. Later on, AT&T
bought the rest of it for another 50 million dollars and renamed it The
ImagiNation Network, or INN. About a year later, still losing
a lot of money, it was sold to America On-Line for 10 million dollars.
After a short time, AOL unfortunately decided that it wasn't going to be
profitable enough, so they shut it down.
The TSN/INN
network is barely remembered today. It was simply too ahead of its time.
Today, Internet gaming is a huge thing and it's growing like mad. Only
now can it be realized to full extent how great this network really was.
The only real problem about it was that it was invented too early! After
failing with the multiplayer adventure idea, Al decided to never make a
Leisure
Suit Larry 4, and that's part of the reason why he named the next game
in the series Leisure Suit Larry 5.
1991
also saw the release of Eco Quest: The Search for Cetus, a very
sucessful adventure game for kids. Taking place mostly underwater, the
game blended facts with fiction in a successful and original edutainment
adventure, encouraging kids to become aware of ecological issues and environmental
hazards. Shipped together with the game was also a book entitled I helped
save the earth: 55 fun ways kids can make a difference and a part of
the proceeds from the sale of each copy of the game was donated to The
Marine Mammal Center in California. The game was also sold with the
stamp
Games to Get Young Minds Moving on it. The other games in
the series were Mixed-Up Mother Goose CD, Lori Ann Cole's Mixed-Up
Fairy Tales, Corey Cole's Castle of Dr. Brain and Jones in
the Fast Lane.
In 1992, Sierra On-Line bought Bright Star Technologies, a multimedia technology company famous for their Lip-synching technology. This technology was used in King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow, the biggest project Sierra had ever undertaken. The game was co-designed by Jane Jensen and featured proffesional voice acting, motion-captured animation, a multi-threaded storyline and an impressive 3D-animated introduction sequence.
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. With its brilliant storytelling, featuring
a neo-gothic horror story about voodoo and a family curse, set in modern
New Orleans, 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.
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In 1993, Sierra
bought Coktel Vision, a Paris-based software developer that provided
the company with games such as the Inca and Goblins series,
and was a valuable asset in international development and distribution.
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Sierra
had grown enormously since its first years and put Oakhurst, California
on the map. 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 travelling between Oakhurst and different
business meetings at other places. Microsoft founder Bill Gates
had previously asked Ken how he could run such a successfull business from
such a remote place, and it was now apparent that it wasn't possible to
keep doing that and still grow. It was time to move the headquarters.
The decision was made to move north, 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 development moved to Seattle, the company could continue growing and still keep developing games in Oakhurst. The company was now made out of four separate development and marketing divisions: Sierra Publishing, Dynamix, Bright Star Technologies and Coktel Vision, each one working separately on development of new products but sharing manufacturing, distribution and sales resources.
On
to Part 4 - A New Era (1994 - 1998)