GOGathon: The Early Adventures of Dynamix

Though I have finished my runthrough of Sierra’s adventure games as developed in-house and begun a look at LucasArts, I haven’t quite covered the full story of Sierra’s adventure game output – for Sierra were a publisher as well as a developer and did release a number of games made by other development houses, both independent firms and full Sierra subsidiaries.

These are frankly a mixed bag. Coktel Vision’s main adventure output, for instance, was the Gobliiins series, which I just can’t stand: it’s an interesting concept (you control a party of little goblins who must solve puzzles with their different skills, and the art style is rather unique and it makes an interesting attempt to convey narrative without language) marred by absurdly nonsensical puzzles and poor story logic. There’s a bit where you need to have a chat with a wizard, but he won’t talk to you until you physically put a diamond into his hand – which is subject of a puzzle – when in his own self-interest he should just stoop down and pick up the diamond when you lay it at his feet. It’s the sort of ridiculously obtuse crap that exists only to sell hint books.

Perhaps the most important of these development houses in adventure game terms was Dynamix, who became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sierra’s in 1990. Adventure games weren’t Dynamix’s most significant output, mind – perhaps their biggest success was their line of flight simulators like the World War I-themed Red Baron – but they still made their mark on Sierra’s adventure game history. The 3D engine used in the ill-fated King’s Quest VIII was a repurposed version of one of their flight simulation engines; more directly, Mark Crowe took up a post at Dynamix after he exited the Sierra mothership, and it was his team at Dynamix, not Sierra, who developed Space Quest V, which I increasingly feel is the best entry in the series.

Dynamix would also develop another four graphic adventures, three in an intense burst from 1990 to 1991 and one in 1996. That latter one, Rama, was a Myst-alike based on the novel series by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee, complete with a FMV’d Clarke appearing after you beat the game to give you a little lecture about Rama’s ecosystem or giving you tips if you get killed. It was the second game to adapt the material, but sold poorly and sequels were cancelled; it is not available through any legitimate channel presently, which makes me suspect that the rights situation has become tangled. Since I cannot easily get it legitimately and don’t care about it enough to steal it, I’ll ignore its existence and cover the three adventure games which used the DGDS (Dynamix Game Development System) engine.

Spoilers: they’re trash.

GOGathon: The Last Adventures of Sierra

So, here we are at the end of our journey. We set forth from Daventry Castle with King Graham, mopped up space-swill with Roger Wilco, chased perps with Sonny Bonds, and trawled the bars with Larry Laffer. Princess Rosella introduced us to a brave new world of SCI-powered adventure, Laura Bow and a Quest For Glory took the format in interesting new directions, and Cedric the Owl introduced us to a new point-and-click control system (and warned us about a poooisonous snake). We waved goodbye to a departing Christy Marx and Jim Walls, and welcomed new talents like Josh Mandel and Jane Jensen. We even had a jackbooted fascist swing by to tell us a story, and plumbed the depths of Torin’s Passage.

Now we’re there, at the end of the road. The adventure isn’t over yet, but it’s about to be. This is the story of Sierra’s last days as a developer of adventure games.

GOGathon: Sierra’s Final Days of Independence

After a very busy 1993, Sierra had a fairly quiet 1994 when it came to releases of their in-house adventure games. Part of this may have been due to the fact that they were not done with their 1993 releases yet; standard practice at the time was to release a game on floppy disk first and, if it performed well enough, greenlight a CD-ROM “talkie” version with voice acting added. With lots of games released on floppy in 1993 and doing pretty well for themselves, a lot of CD-ROM updates needed to come out in 1994.

The market was changing, however; CD-ROM drives were increasingly not just a luxury toy that only owners of truly top-end PCs had, but an integral part of many systems, and with certain CD-ROM-only games (which we’ll note as we go along) released in 1993 selling astonishingly well, it was apparent that the format was fast becoming the default.

New technology created new expectations, and the next crop of Sierra adventures – one coming out in 1994, the rest in 1995 – would try to meet those expectations by taking their graphical presentation to a higher level. The new FMV craze was sweeping the industry, and Sierra would make their own impact there with the first Phantasmagoria and second Gabriel Knight games. They did not, however, put all their graphical eggs in one basket – sensibly, since FMV turned out to be a bit of a short-lived fad. Other adventure games released at around this time looked into the new possibilities offered by 3D graphics, or new ways to incorporate traditional animation into a videogame. And naturally, Roberta Williams led the charge…

King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride

It had become an in-house policy at this point for trusted senior Sierra designers like Roberta Williams or Al Lowe to cook up their projects with the assistance of a junior designer – like Jane Jensen helped with King’s Quest VI or Josh Mandel helped with Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist. Whilst in some quarters it caused a certain level of resentment in terms of fair credit and attribution, at the same time it genuinely seems to have been intended as a means to train up fresh new talent – after all, Jane Jensen got to make Gabriel Knight after making a success of King’s Quest VI, and Josh Mandel was allowed to helm Space Quest 6 with Scott Murphy acting solely in a creative consultant role before Sierra’s bullshit prompted him to quit – but I’ll get into that later this article.

Mini-Kickstopper: Mills Takes Us On An Adventure

Shawn Mills’ The Sierra Adventure, funded through Kickstarter through a campaign too straightforward and orderly to merit a full-fat Kickstopper article, offers up a history of Sierra’s time as a game development studio, focused mostly but not exclusively on their adventure game output. I picked it up because it seemed like worthwhile fodder for my ongoing review series of Sierra’s adventure games.

In his introduction to the book, Josh Mandel talks about how just about anyone of note at Sierra has occasionally been told by fans that they should write a book about their experiences, but nobody has yet managed to. It could be that an outsider like Mills was precisely the person needed to undertake this project – with all the strong feelings, both positive and negative, that former Sierra employees have about their times there, the friendships they made, and the feuds they fought, any personal account by a Sierra person could only ever provide their own, highly subjective opinion.

In giving his own thumbs-up to the book, Ken Williams said that he wasn’t even aware of half the stuff that Mills recounts, and in one of the backer updates Mills mentioned to backers his interactions with Ken and noted that whilst Williams is planning a book on the company, it was very much intended as a memoir of his and Roberta’s personal journey rather than a history of the company as a whole. In contrast, Mills is someone who was a fan, but never an employee; the fan side of him allows him to offer a sympathetic ear to the people he interviews, whilst his distance from the company allows him a bit more neutrality than someone who was in the thick of it could ever muster.

GOGathon: Sierra’s 1993 Stockpile

The story so far: Sierra had pioneered a new age of graphic adventure games where the graphics were a major aspect of the game, rather than a nice embellishment on a text adventure, in the form of the King’s Quest games. The AGI engine developed for that series also kicked off other marquee series for the company – Space Quest, Police Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry – and then the object-oriented SCI engine formed the underpinning of a clutch of more technically advanced sequels. Sierra were riding high by the end of the 1980s, made the leap to VGA graphics and a purely point-and-click interface in 1990, suffered growing pains in 1991 and had a 1992 which, whilst inconsistent, at least gave us the best King’s Quest yet.

That King’s Quest was co-designed by a certain Jane Jensen, who having served her apprenticeship under Roberta Williams finally got the chance to do the gothy Anne Rice-ish modern-day occult horror series she’d wanted to do. If Sierra had done nothing else in 1993, the first Gabriel Knight game would still stand as a landmark moment in graphical adventure development, but as it turns out, that wasn’t all they accomplished this year. In fact, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers came out at the end of a year which was very, very busy for Sierra in terms of adventure games coming out under their aegis…

Space Quest V: The Next Mutation

After Space Quest IV, Roger Wilco has decided to better himself by signing up to Starfleet Starcon Academy, with dreams of becoming a fearless starship captain for the Federation Star Confederacy (uh, bad choice of name, guys). He’s miserably badly suited to the job, of course – but a computer glitch reminiscent of the one from the start of Brazil scrambles the test results, inadvertently giving him a perfect score.

Starcon can’t justify not giving Roger his own command, but super-slick space hero Captain Quirk has taken against Wilco, and pulls strings to ensure Roger ends up captain of the most unimportant, unglamorous, irrelevant ships in the fleet: the garbage scow Eureka. In the process of interstellar rubbish collection, Roger and his crew uncover a sinister plot – someone is distributing dangerous chemicals which cause people to transform into aggressive mutants. Who is behind this conspiracy, and could it have some connection to the dodgy-sounding communications your comms officer Flo intercepted on the Starcon standard channels? Under your leadership, it’s time for the Eureka crew to take out the trash and clean up the galaxy!

Ooops…

In case anyone’s RSS or other notifications brought them here: I accidentally published my review of Sierra’s 1993 crop of adventures early. It’s gone back to draft form because it’s not ready yet (there’s two games I need to play before I can finish it).

If you were lucky enough to see it, congrats, you got a sneak preview about my feelings on Space Quest V, Leisure Suit Larry 5, and Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist.

GOGathon: Sierra’s 1992

By 1992, Sierra’s graphical adventure credentials were well-established. After pioneering the form, first with the early King’s Quest games and then a range of other flagship series, they introduced their SCI scripting engine which would underpin most of their remaining adventures. The end of the 1980s found them producing more than ever, and then 1990 saw them take the plunge into full-fledged point-and-click, setting aside their old text parser after it had long since ceased to be cutting edge. 1991 found various hands at Sierra trying their hand in the brave new frontier of point-and-click, with mixed results.

1992’s crop of adventures enjoyed the benefits of an upgrade to the SCI system, SCI1.1. SCI0 had been the EGA graphics-based parser-powered adventures of the late 1980s, following the earlier AGI-powered adventures, and SCI1 had introduced VGA graphics and the new point-and-click system. SCI1.1 did a lot of backend housecleaning, which included setting up a brand new automated system for downscaling graphics to EGA, avoiding the need to do different versions of each game for different graphical standards. It also included better support for scaling spites, as well as support for including videos in games, like the prerendered 3D video that acts as the opening scene for King’s Quest VI.

This was ultimately an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary shift, and Sierra’s output for 1992 perhaps reflects this – it’s all sequels of established series rather than anything particularly bold. Let’s take in the year’s crop…

The Dagger of Amon Ra

Laura Bow’s second outing (following The Colonel’s Bequest) saw Sierra break with tradition somewhat: whereas the vast majority of Sierra’s ongoing series had been associated with a core designer or a pair of designers, much as a series of novels is sold in part on the reputation of its author, here Roberta Williams stepped back (credited solely as a “creative consultant”).

The initial plan, as recounted in a rather informative retrospective interview with the creative leads from the Campo Santo Quarterly, was for Josh Mandel (the voice of King Graham in King’s Quest V!) to write and design the game – a prospect he found daunting given the bar set by The Colonel’s Bequest and the fact that he had more of a knack for comedy writing than designing mysteries. Bruce Balfour had been lured to Sierra, having previously worked at Interplay contributing to various adventure games and RPGs – including Wasteland, the forerunner to the Fallout series – but the plan was that he’s write for a comedy game called Little Larry’s Guide To Life, a reinvention of the Leisure Suit Larry series aimed at a teenage audience with the intention of giving them advice about difficult topics like divorce, school, relationships and whatnot. (I guess the vision was some sort of edutainment take on Porky’s.)

GOGathon: Sierra’s Muddled 1991

So far in our journey through the graphic adventure output of Sierra we’ve seen how the first King’s Quest trilogy bedded in the AGI engine before a range of new games explored a wider variety of genres and then the debut of the SCI engine brought about new technical improvements. Further experimentation followed, and 1990 saw the end of Sierra’s EGA graphics era and the dawn of the VGA era.

This included the unveiling of Sierra’s first fully point-and-click-based adventure game, King’s Quest V, which ditched the old text parser in favour of an icon-driven system. In 1991, four new games in very different genres would take this system out for a spin – but who would excel in this brand new world where the mouse ruled supreme, and who would reveal themselves to be stuck in the game design ethos of yesteryear? With LucasArts’ Secret of Monkey Island having released the previous year, this question is all the more important…

Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers

This picks up right where Space Quest III left off. Roger Wilco has saved the Two Guys From Andromeda and dropped them off safely at Sierra’s headquarters, and now he’s set a course back for his home planet of Xenon, which he hasn’t seen since the start of Space Quest II: Vohaul’s Revenge. Stopping off at a bar for a drink, he immediately runs afoul of the Sequel Police – a time-travelling paramilitary force under the command of Vohaul himself, who still lives after a fashion.

GOGathon: Sierra’s Fantastic 1990

Whilst the golden age of the graphical adventure game was arguably the 1990s – an era when text adventures fell out of commercial favour and largely lay dormant until the fan community came up with robust tools like the Inform or TADS languages to produce new content, and a time when the most widely-celebrated classics of the genre came out – Sierra had arguably built the foundation for that success over the course of the 1980s.

Specifically, they had pioneered the format with the early King’s Quest games, explored an intriguing variety of genres, cooked up first the AGI game engine and then the significantly more powerful SCI engine, which would debut in 1988 and versions of which would underpin their adventure games for much of the next decade, and in 1989 they rounded out the decade by producing the largest and most diverse portfolio of adventure games they’d make in-house over the 1980s.

They would also, with the two Manhunter games, dip their toe into publishing the adventure game works of other development houses. (I’ve not covered those since I’m concentrating in this series strictly on the games that Sierra developed in-house with perhaps an exception or two – I intend to do Space Quest V even though technically Sierra outsourced the development on that, since it’s an entry in one of their iconic series.)

At the same time, change was in the air. Although Sierra’s artists were very capable, and had produced some fantastic work within the confines of EGA graphics, the VGA era was dawning and previous graphical standards were beginning to look dated. And whilst the SCI system incorporated mouse support for the first time (though ScummVM, the engine often used to play old adventure games on modern computers, does patch mouse support into at least some of the earlier AGI-driven games), the adventures still weren’t full point-and-click, relying on a text parser which, whilst robust to brute force puzzle solving, at the same time also occasionally caused frustration when the verb or noun the game was expecting you to type in wasn’t the one which came to mind first. Recent adventures by the likes of LucasArts had pioneered full point-and-click setups, whose ease of use made the Sierra adventures seem less user-friendly, less welcoming to beginners, and generally less convenient than the competition.

Thus, over the course of 1990 Sierra girded themselves for a technical great leap forward. Rather than putting out a similar number of games to the swathe they produced in 1989, they put out 3 adventures, two of which came out close together towards the end of the year, and all in the fantasy genre. Each game was by a different main designer and represented a different take both on game design and the genre in general. Would this turn out to be a good start to the decade, or would Sierra bungle in the same year that LucasArts put out the universally acclaimed classic Secret of Monkey Island?

GOGathon: Sierra’s 1980s Peak

1989 saw the fifth anniversary of King’s Quest, and with the old AGI game engine well and truly retired and the shiny new SCI engine firing on all cylinders, Sierra were not resting on their laurels. As well as pushing the technical boundaries of graphical point and click adventures, they had also developed the medium to a point where they could reasonably be said to be pushing at their creative boundaries too, and 1989 would prove to be a fantastic year on that front, with five games which each in their own way developed the genre in a different direction and based in a different genre.

Two of these would be sequels to big-name Sierra series, two would initiate series of their own – one much-beloved, one more remembered as a bold experiment that laid the groundwork for better things – and one of them was absolutely terrible. Which is the stinker? Let’s find out?