Sierra Entertainment
Sierra Entertainment, Inc. was an American video game developer and publisher founded in 1979 by Ken and Roberta Williams. The company is known for pioneering the graphic adventure game genre, including the first such game, Mystery House. It is known for its graphical adventure game series King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, Gabriel Knight, Leisure Suit Larry, and Quest for Glory, and as the original publisher of Valve's Half-Life series.
After seventeen years as an independent company, Sierra was acquired by CUC International in February 1996 to become part of CUC Software. However, CUC International was caught in an accounting scandal in 1998, and many of the original founders of Sierra including the Williamses left the company. Sierra remained as part of CUC Software as it was sold and renamed several times over the next few years. Sierra was formally disestablished as a company and reformed as a division of this group in August 2004. The former CUC Software group was acquired by Vivendi and branded as Vivendi Games in 2006. The Sierra division continued to operate through Vivendi Games's merger with Activision to form Activision Blizzard on July 10, 2008, but was shut down later that year. The Sierra brand was revived by Activision in 2014 to re-release former Sierra games and some independently developed games.
Following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft, the Sierra brand is under Microsoft's ownership through its gaming division.
History
Founding as On-Line Systems (1979–1982)
Sierra Entertainment was founded in 1979 as On-Line Systems in Simi Valley, California, by the husband-and-wife duo Ken and Roberta Williams. Ken, a programmer for IBM, had planned to use the company to create business software for the TRS-80 and Apple II. Ken had brought a teletype terminal home one day in 1979 and, while looking through the host system's software catalog, discovered the text adventure Colossal Cave Adventure. He encouraged Roberta to join him in playing it, and she was enthralled by the game. After Ken had brought an Apple II to their home, she played through other text adventures such as those by Scott Adams and Softape to study them. Dissatisfied with the text-only format, she realized that the graphics display capability of the Apple II could enhance the adventure gaming experience. With Ken's help in some of the programming, Roberta designed Mystery House, inspired by the novel And Then There Were None and the board game Clue, using text commands and printout combined with rudimentary graphics depicting the current setting.Mystery House was released through mail-order in May 1980. It was an instant hit with about 15,000 copies sold, earning. It is the first computer adventure game to have graphics, although made with crude, static, monochrome, line drawings. The two shifted the focus to developing more graphical adventure games. Mystery House became the first in the Hi-Res Adventure series. The Hi-Res Adventure series continued with Mission Asteroid, which was released as Hi-Res Adventure #0 though being the second release. The next release, Wizard and the Princess, also known as Adventure in Serenia, is considered a prelude to the later King's Quest series in both story and concept. Through 1981 and 1982, more games were released in the series including Cranston Manor, Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, Time Zone, and The Dark Crystal. A simplified version of The Dark Crystal, intended for a younger audience, was written by Al Lowe and released as Gelfling Adventure.
Rebranding to Sierra On-Line (1982–1988)
On-Line Systems was renamed Sierra On-Line in 1982, and moved to Oakhurst, California. The "Sierra" name was taken from the Sierra Nevada mountain range that Oakhurst was near, and its new logo incorporated the imagery of Half Dome mountain. By early 1984, InfoWorld estimated that Sierra was the world's 12th-largest microcomputer software company, with in 1983 sales. It produced some non-game software, such as an Applesoft BASIC compiler.The company weathered the video game crash of 1983 with only a 20% increase in sales, after analysts in 1982 had predicted a doubling in 1983 of the entire software market. The company had spent much of 1983 developing for the VIC-20 and the TI-99/4A which were both obsolete by the end of the year. Ken Williams was reportedly described as "bewildered by the pace at which computers come into and fall out of favor", and Williams said, "I've learned my lesson. I'm not moving until I understand the market better."
Many of Sierra's best known series began in the 1980s. In 1983, Sierra On-Line was contacted by IBM to create a game for the new PCjr. IBM offered to fund the entire development and marketing of the game, paying royalties. Ken and Roberta Williams accepted and started on the project. Roberta Williams created a story featuring classic fairy-tale elements. Her game concept includes animated color graphics, a pseudo 3D-perspective where the main character is visible on the screen, a more competent text parser that understands advanced commands from the player, and music playing in the background through the PCjr sound hardware. For the game, a complete development system called Adventure Game Interpreter was developed. In mid-1984, King's Quest: Quest for the Crown was released to much acclaim, beginning the King's Quest series.
While finishing The Black Cauldron, programmers Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy began to plan for an adventure game of their own. After a simple demonstration to Ken Williams, he allowed them to start working on the full game, which was named Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter. The game was released in October 1986 as an instant success, spawning many sequels in the Space Quest series in the following years.
Al Lowe, who had been working at Sierra On-Line for many years, 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. Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards was a great hit and won the Software Publishers Association's Best Adventure Game award of 1987. It can be deduced that the game first became famous as an early example of software piracy, as Sierra sold many more hintbooks than actual copies of the game. A series of Leisure Suit Larry games followed.
Ken Williams befriended a retired highway patrol officer named Jim Walls and asked him to produce an adventure series based on a police theme. Walls proceeded to create Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel, which was released in 1987. Several sequels followed, and the series was touted for adherence to police protocol, and presenting some real-life situations encountered by Walls during his career as an officer.
Quest for Glory is a series of hybrid adventure/role-playing video games designed by Corey and Lori Ann Cole. The first game in the series, Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero, was released in 1989. The series combines humor, puzzle elements, themes and characters borrowed from various legends, puns, and memorable characters, creating a five-part series of the Sierra stable. Although the series was originally titled Hero's Quest, Sierra failed to trademark the name. Milton Bradley successfully trademarked an electronic version of their unrelated joint Games Workshop board game, HeroQuest, which forced Sierra to change the series' title to Quest for Glory. This decision caused all future games in the series, including newer releases of Hero's Quest I, to switch to the new name.
In 1987, Sierra On-Line started to publish its own gaming magazine, about its upcoming games and interviews with the developers. The magazine was initially named The Sierra Newsletter, The Sierra News Magazine, and The Sierra/Dynamix Newsmagazine. However, since Sierra Club already published a magazine called Sierra Magazine, the name of the magazine published by Sierra On-Line was changed to InterAction in 1991. It was discontinued in 1999.
Sierra's Adventure Game Interpreter engine, introduced with King's Quest, was replaced in 1988 with Sierra's Creative Interpreter in King's Quest IV. The game was released under both engines, so those who had newer computers could use the new engine and better rendering technology.
Going public (1989–1995)
Sierra became a public company in 1989, trading on the NASDAQ under the stock ticker "SIER". Additional public investment allowed the company to engage in further acquisitions over the next several years.In 1990, Sierra released King's Quest V, the first Sierra On-Line game ever to have more than 500,000 copies sold and the highest selling game for five years. It won several awards, such as the Best Adventure Game of the Year from both the Software Publishers Association and Computer Gaming World magazine.
The Sierra Network was launched on May 6, 1991, as the first game-only online environment. Development of the network began in 1989, as Ken Williams was inspired by the launch of the Prodigy service in 1988 to create something similar for Sierra's games. As a free service other than access use charges, the network provided a "land-based" precursor to MMORPGs and internet chat rooms, each land theme for the type of content provided multi-player gaming and category based bulletin boards and chat rooms throughout the continental United States. By July 1993, having reached about 40,000 subscribers, AT&T announced a plan to invest into the network and add more games, gaining partial control as part of its expansion into the growing online services. AT&T later took sole possession of the network on November 15, 1994, so the name was changed to the ImagiNation Network. The network failed to find a mass audience, and was sold to America On-Line in 1996.
In 1991, Sierra released the first game in the Dr. Brain series, Castle of Dr. Brain, a hybrid puzzle adventure education game, which has several sequels. In 1993, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers was released, beginning the Gabriel Knight series. The game and subsequent sequels were critically acclaimed in the mainstream press at the time.
Sierra and Broderbund started merger discussions in March 1991, but the idea was discontinued later that month.
Sierra needed a new building due to growth, and moved its headquarters and much of its key staff to Bellevue, Washington. Sierra's original location in Oakhurst was later renamed Yosemite Entertainment, and continued under that name until closing in early 1999.
The company was now made up of five separate and largely autonomous development divisions: Sierra Publishing, Sierra Northwest, Dynamix, Bright Star Technology, and Coktel Vision, with each group working separately on product development but sharing manufacturing, distribution, and sales resources.
1995 was a successful year for the company. Sierra was the market-share leader in PC games for the year. With $83.4 million in sales from software-publishing, earnings improved by 19 percent, and a net income of $11.9 million. In June, Sierra and Pioneer Electric Corp. signed an agreement to create a joint venture that would develop, publish, manufacture, and market entertainment software for the Japanese software market. This joint venture created a new company called Sierra Venture. With Sierra and Pioneer investing over $12 million, the new company immediately manufactured and shipped over twenty of Sierra's most popular products to Japan and created new titles for the Japanese market. 1995 also saw Sierra acquiring a number of development companies, both small home developers and larger companies.
Phantasmagoria was by far the largest project ever undertaken by Sierra. The anticipation for the game was high at release in late 1995. Although nearly one million copies were sold when the game was first released in August 1995, Sierra's bestselling adventure game created, the game received mixed reviews from industry critics.