Speaker 1: Text with Technology with tech Stuff from stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I am your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer at how Stuff Works
Speaker 1: and I love to talk about the tech and today
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about a company called Sierra Online. It
Speaker 1: was a game company that was a dominant player in
Speaker 1: the PC games space in the eighties and nineties. And really,
Speaker 1: when I say dominant player, that is serious understatement. Sierra
Speaker 1: Online was the PC game company of that era. In nine,
Speaker 1: just to give you a little spoiler for later in
Speaker 1: the episode, the company was acquired for the princely sum
Speaker 1: of one point zero six billion dollars, though that was
Speaker 1: all in a stock swap, it wasn't for cash. If
Speaker 1: you adjust that for inflation for today's money, that ends
Speaker 1: up being about one point seven billion dollars. That's how
Speaker 1: much the game company was acquired back in nineteen and
Speaker 1: considering its origins, that's phenomenal. Now I got the chance
Speaker 1: to speak with Sierra Online co founder Ken Williams, and
Speaker 1: he and his wife Roberta founded Sierra Online back in
Speaker 1: and we're gonna play the interview first and then I'll
Speaker 1: fill in some of the gaps with the timeline for
Speaker 1: Sierra Online and go into more detail about what was
Speaker 1: going on with the company. But the interview is pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: One thing I want to mention right off the bat
Speaker 1: is the interview with Ken really drove home the fact
Speaker 1: that there's no substitute for talking with a primary source.
Speaker 1: Because I had researched Sierra quite a bit before I
Speaker 1: had a conversation with Mr Williams, and as you'll hear,
Speaker 1: I didn't even have a full understanding of things that
Speaker 1: were going on behind the scenes. You know, you read
Speaker 1: about these articles, these reports, you read all this information,
Speaker 1: all this supplemental information, and then when you go to
Speaker 1: the primary source, you find out, like now, that's not
Speaker 1: exactly how things happened, and you realize the written record
Speaker 1: of history appears to be different than what actually happened.
Speaker 1: That's a valuable thing to keep in mind all the time, always,
Speaker 1: but particularly for this episode. I don't want to spoil anything,
Speaker 1: so let's go straight to the interview. Ken Williams, Welcome
Speaker 1: to Tech Stuff. Thank you so much for taking time
Speaker 1: to talk with me and my listeners. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Thank you, and I think so too. It is really
Speaker 1: a dream come true for to get the opportunity to
Speaker 1: speak with you, just to give you a little bit
Speaker 1: of an idea of where I'm coming from. I was
Speaker 1: born in so I grew up right as the era
Speaker 1: of the micro computer morphing into the small computer was
Speaker 1: taking place. We had an Apple to e in my home.
Speaker 1: I was one of those folks who, largely because my
Speaker 1: dad is also one of those folks, started playing games
Speaker 1: early on. And obviously the Sierra Online series of games
Speaker 1: became a huge, uh influential power in those early days
Speaker 1: and I think definitely played a role in pushing forward
Speaker 1: the narrative aspect of gaming in general. That was something
Speaker 1: that you really you only saw one of two types
Speaker 1: of games in those early days before I would I
Speaker 1: would say before really Mystery House came out, which is
Speaker 1: that you either got text only or you've got a
Speaker 1: very simple arcady kind of game, but you never really
Speaker 1: had the combination of graphics and texts, something that Sierra
Speaker 1: really became known for in those early days. But before
Speaker 1: I jump into that, once a little bit about your
Speaker 1: background before you got into be eating games. Were you
Speaker 1: were you a programmer for things like mainframe systems, and
Speaker 1: things of that nature. Yep I was a program on
Speaker 1: mainframe computers and well, I don't know, I was doing
Speaker 1: software development for a lot of different companies in the
Speaker 1: Los Angeles area and it was all focused on online applications.
Speaker 1: In those days, people have mainframe computers in terminals scattered
Speaker 1: around the country and I was kind of the I guess,
Speaker 1: semi expert on dealing with that, and that that was
Speaker 1: where the name. Initially CRE was taught online systems and
Speaker 1: it was my consulting practice, and then the first couple
Speaker 1: of games I think still set online systems, and then
Speaker 1: we decided to move to the Yosemite and we named
Speaker 1: it um CRE Online Nice. And when you were working,
Speaker 1: from the stories that go around, and I don't know
Speaker 1: how much of it is apocryphal versus true history, but
Speaker 1: the story tends to be that you were, uh, you
Speaker 1: had purchased an Apple computer, that this was one of
Speaker 1: those early micro computers, that's what we called personal computers
Speaker 1: before we started calling all of them personal computers, and
Speaker 1: that you were working on a Fortrain compiler for the
Speaker 1: Apple computer when the first the first thoughts of building
Speaker 1: a game came up. Was that is that accurate? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's accurate. I had actually done oh, something very similar
Speaker 1: to Fortran compilers for a company I was working for,
Speaker 1: and the Microsoft released Visual Basic for them, I think
Speaker 1: p rs AD and I started thinking about wouldn't it
Speaker 1: be cool if there was a portrayin compiler on the
Speaker 1: Apple two and computer with Microsoft, I guess. And then
Speaker 1: ROBERTA saw a game that was on a time sharing
Speaker 1: terminal post in the mike, the original uh, the Original Adventure,
Speaker 1: and was playing it and it said that she got
Speaker 1: to be fun. It's what There was a version of
Speaker 1: it for micro computers are personal computers, and they were
Speaker 1: about that time. She got me an Apple two for
Speaker 1: Christmas and I started coding on the game for her
Speaker 1: at the same time I was working on the compiler.
Speaker 1: And when I started going door to door with computer
Speaker 1: stores to you know, kind of peddle, not the idea
Speaker 1: of my Coortran pilot. They were all excited about her
Speaker 1: game and not Fortran. So so was the game of
Speaker 1: game company. Very practical, very pragmatic approach into getting into
Speaker 1: into games, and it really it's hard to explain to
Speaker 1: people today how this was really a huge leap forward
Speaker 1: to have the graphic element the images element, even though
Speaker 1: they were static images and they were monochromatic because of
Speaker 1: the old Apple two. Uh that adding that to the
Speaker 1: element of a text based adventure where you're you are
Speaker 1: put in the role of a protagonist who has to
Speaker 1: make choices in order to navigate through a game. That
Speaker 1: combination had not really been explored before the first game
Speaker 1: Mystery House comes out, which was as the name implies,
Speaker 1: that you're solving a mystery. And I imagined that that
Speaker 1: ended up creating a bit of a stir at the
Speaker 1: time because it was it was sort of a new idea,
Speaker 1: but also as I understand it, uh, there was the
Speaker 1: world was so different back then. Today, if you want
Speaker 1: to buy a game, you tend to go with digital distribution.
Speaker 1: You will download a game and that's it. You never
Speaker 1: have to worry about it. In those early, early early
Speaker 1: days of PC gaming, there were very few places where
Speaker 1: you could actually go to buy games. It was a
Speaker 1: very young industry, and from what I understand, the initial
Speaker 1: approach to selling Mystery House was that you had a
Speaker 1: full page ad in like a hobbyist magazine, and people
Speaker 1: had to cut out a little order form and actually
Speaker 1: fill it out and send it into you. Is that accurate? Um, well,
Speaker 1: kind of that. Yeah, those are primitive times. There was
Speaker 1: no Part of the problem is how do you deliver
Speaker 1: the games. Games in those days were on audio cassette
Speaker 1: and most of the software sold for the piano said
Speaker 1: he was on audio cassette, and even the Apple two
Speaker 1: originally I think games were on audio cassette. And then
Speaker 1: they came up with the idea of a disk drive
Speaker 1: that it only had a d K of storage and
Speaker 1: that's less than you know, they're one low as picture,
Speaker 1: so it you know, how to deliberate game and put
Speaker 1: it on an ad K floppy and then get it
Speaker 1: to the user who it's kind of a challenge and
Speaker 1: how do you do pictures given that there's no place
Speaker 1: to storm and even memory I think on the original
Speaker 1: Apple two was only sixteen K and memory, so it
Speaker 1: was it was kind of a challenge that No for marketing,
Speaker 1: I think they were only what was the name fifteen
Speaker 1: stores in the United States selling computers at that time,
Speaker 1: so really selling was pretty easy. He was tapped the
Speaker 1: stores and there was so much thirst for games that
Speaker 1: you know, they do anything to get the games. They
Speaker 1: because they wanted to sell the computers. You can sell
Speaker 1: the computers without the software, and so we packaged them
Speaker 1: up and to sell to the public. Um. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: funny that the retailers didn't complain about is going direct.
Speaker 1: But we did run some ads and had had our
Speaker 1: home phone at the time and people had called place
Speaker 1: orders and then they had put them in a box
Speaker 1: and go to the post office and shipping and at
Speaker 1: the company. I mean, the company was gone so fast
Speaker 1: in those days that you know that that really was
Speaker 1: a short time stand. I think from m when we
Speaker 1: realized the company was going to be a hit, and
Speaker 1: quit my job and moved to Ysemity and we bought
Speaker 1: a home there and looked there and started selling and
Speaker 1: going back and forth to the post office to ship
Speaker 1: to When we rented an office and hired people, it
Speaker 1: was about a three month or four months span. I
Speaker 1: mean it was you know, it was literally exploding and
Speaker 1: every day, you know, sales were um way. Yet from
Speaker 1: the fire day getting rid of our personal phone number
Speaker 1: and all the ads happened happen pretty quick. Even the
Speaker 1: original companies of pustry House, I think had our our
Speaker 1: home plown for the end. Any questions call. So yeah,
Speaker 1: those were different times. Yeah, I can't imagine anyone taking
Speaker 1: those kind of pains today that would have been Uh, certainly,
Speaker 1: it was certainly an interesting approach, and the fact that,
Speaker 1: of course the industry was so small at the time.
Speaker 1: I mean still, I'm sure you're getting calls around the
Speaker 1: clock all the time, but at least it wasn't something
Speaker 1: where you're talking about a game launching and then getting
Speaker 1: a million sales right off the bed. It was in
Speaker 1: the thousands, which at that time was amazing success, especially
Speaker 1: when you look at the install base. There really weren't
Speaker 1: that many personal computers out. This is in the era
Speaker 1: where it was just emerging from that hobbyist market and
Speaker 1: starting to get creep into into more of an average
Speaker 1: consumer kind of household. But that was a very gradual process.
Speaker 1: And around the same time, while you guys had your
Speaker 1: early years over at Sierra, there was something going on
Speaker 1: with the home video game market on the console and
Speaker 1: where there was this glut of various types of consoles
Speaker 1: that were on the market, and then we know that
Speaker 1: that eventually kind of capitulated into the video game crash
Speaker 1: that happened around three And from what I understand, there
Speaker 1: was a similar kind of rough patch for software for
Speaker 1: computer about a year later, and uh, and I imagined
Speaker 1: that those early years there were some some real ups
Speaker 1: and downs over at Sierra kind of you know, I
Speaker 1: don't remember ever a softness in computer software. There was
Speaker 1: you know, kind of a period of wild growth and
Speaker 1: he sees and then the video game industry was, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of allowed. The personal computer industry is probably going
Speaker 1: from zero to ten raid and revenue. The video game
Speaker 1: industry left from zero to a couple hundred millions, though
Speaker 1: it was growing much faster, and we got interested in
Speaker 1: the video game market and shifted a lot of development
Speaker 1: resources over the video games just as the video game
Speaker 1: market collapsed. And that kind of left is with no
Speaker 1: product for personal computers and yeah, and just people focused
Speaker 1: in the wrong place. So plus with a lot of
Speaker 1: money to buy cartridges and fund the development of the
Speaker 1: video games, all of which was wasted. This is the
Speaker 1: era when people were bearing EP cartridges out in the desert.
Speaker 1: And yeah, they caught us and we went from I
Speaker 1: think a hundred and ten employees to twenty employees almost overnight.
Speaker 1: And Albert and I had to borrow on our credit
Speaker 1: cards and get a second on our home and everything
Speaker 1: in order to pay their rent and keep us in business.
Speaker 1: And but then we got lucky in that I showed
Speaker 1: IBM I guess prototypes and games that we were thinking
Speaker 1: about and um and also a work process or people
Speaker 1: forget that we were We did an amazing work processor
Speaker 1: at that point in time that was graphically based and
Speaker 1: IBM was impressed and gave us some nice advanced money
Speaker 1: towards the products. And it's time. It was a weird world,
Speaker 1: and the IBM was worried about being broken up by
Speaker 1: the government is monopoly. So when they would give us
Speaker 1: development financing, they also had assigning this agreement saying that
Speaker 1: we agreed not to sell the them exclusively. They were
Speaker 1: they were in kind of weird mode that they said, okay,
Speaker 1: we'll come the development. You can sell the product us,
Speaker 1: but we also have the promences still sell at our competitors.
Speaker 1: And we said sure, and they released their machine. The
Speaker 1: PC JR was bombed and we put the same software
Speaker 1: on the and the thousand from Radio Shack and it
Speaker 1: was a big bit and so it was kind of
Speaker 1: strange and that IBM that bringing the company back to
Speaker 1: life in order to from software that radio shack and
Speaker 1: asked me a lot of money. But but that was
Speaker 1: that was good and so it wasn't really a sack
Speaker 1: in the personal computer business. It was more of a Um,
Speaker 1: we had shifted resources and that market collapsed and then
Speaker 1: we had to refocus. But that we did and we
Speaker 1: never really had another tough match after that. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: great that you were able to pivot like that. It's
Speaker 1: a you know, it says a lot about a company
Speaker 1: that had already experienced a great deal of success still
Speaker 1: being nimble enough to recover after after a huge shift
Speaker 1: in the market. There we've seen companies, many companies go
Speaker 1: under when they were encountering similar circumstances. Uh. I assumed
Speaker 1: that the big software piece, the big game piece that
Speaker 1: was going to the PC junior into Tandy was the
Speaker 1: beginning of the King's Quest franchise. Is that correct? Yep.
Speaker 1: Kings One was kind of our first animated adventure and
Speaker 1: was huge. I mean, it's hard to believe looking back
Speaker 1: at it now, that's pretty clucky, but um, there was
Speaker 1: nothing else like it in the market, and um, and
Speaker 1: and so little competition. I mean, in a world in
Speaker 1: which there's you know, ten or twenty games released to hear,
Speaker 1: it's easier to break through than when there's uh, you know,
Speaker 1: two's five thousand games released to do today and you
Speaker 1: know most of its bomb. But in those days it's
Speaker 1: fairly easy to get a exposure. And you know, Scare
Speaker 1: was there first, which it was kind of an extra
Speaker 1: edge and plushily. We did a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of cool stuff. Yeah, King's Quest was really innovative in
Speaker 1: the sense that it had this ability where you would
Speaker 1: have objects within the frame of the picture that you're
Speaker 1: in the area that you're walking around, and you could
Speaker 1: actually walk in front of or behind different objects. That
Speaker 1: kind of lad to describing it as a three D
Speaker 1: sort of thing, because it wasn't just an X Y
Speaker 1: access where your character is stuck along one plane of movement.
Speaker 1: You actually had some depth in there, and that was
Speaker 1: a big you know, just like adding the graphics into
Speaker 1: text adventure. Now we have this animated adventure where you
Speaker 1: can even walk behind different objects, and that was really
Speaker 1: innovative at the time. And again, the focus on narrative
Speaker 1: was something that I found really intriguing. You had all
Speaker 1: these different puzzles and jokes and uh things that were
Speaker 1: really challenging and caused gamers to think in different ways
Speaker 1: in or to progress further, and it was again sort
Speaker 1: of pushing the art form of gamemaking forward. One thing
Speaker 1: I definitely wanted to mention so that my listeners could
Speaker 1: get an appreciation for it is UH, doing research on
Speaker 1: Sierra and looking at these teams that were working on
Speaker 1: these different titles, it struck me how many women were
Speaker 1: working on this as developers on these games, something that
Speaker 1: was I think a lot of people think is was
Speaker 1: unheard of really, but you had a lot of of
Speaker 1: women heading up various franchises, whether it was King's Quest
Speaker 1: or other ones. And UH, to me, that was a
Speaker 1: very forward thinking approach to it was obviously you were
Speaker 1: getting the right people for the right jobs and trying
Speaker 1: to make sure that you continued, ah, you know, pushing
Speaker 1: forward the the capabilities of your games and the narration
Speaker 1: of your games. But I found that fascinating because it
Speaker 1: wasn't It's not something I ever encounter and pretty much
Speaker 1: any other tech company unless it was a conscious decision, uh,
Speaker 1: in an effort to create more diversity within the workplace.
Speaker 1: But this seemed like it was part of the culture
Speaker 1: early early on. Yeah, I mean I don't know it
Speaker 1: was a conscious decision. It was just looking for the
Speaker 1: best person for the job. And yeah, I guess uh.
Speaker 1: In non quoting roles it tends to be a lot
Speaker 1: more evenly balanced. Quoders do tend to be male when
Speaker 1: we have some female quoders, but certainly in the creative
Speaker 1: and design and are everything else, it was far more balanced.
Speaker 1: And I never tried to balance or tried for anything,
Speaker 1: you know, it just kind of fell out the way
Speaker 1: it fell out, and you look for the best person
Speaker 1: for the job. So um, yeah, I can't say that
Speaker 1: at least a explicit effort to try to do I
Speaker 1: don't know, you coopportunity hiring anything like that. I really yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess it was just focused on don't be good games.
Speaker 1: So we got a lot of great games in this series.
Speaker 1: Like the King's Quest series, is extremely influential in the
Speaker 1: storytelling adventure game genres. You could argue the fantasy genre
Speaker 1: as well, so much so that we've seen some really
Speaker 1: remarkable even spoofs of King's Quest. One of the ones
Speaker 1: I think of is from the Brothers Chap who did
Speaker 1: Homestar Runner and did a whole Peasants Quest kind of
Speaker 1: take off of it, and it clearly relied heavily on
Speaker 1: this knowledge of and familiarity with King's Quest. It became
Speaker 1: kind of a um not just King's Quest, but the
Speaker 1: other series as well that followed in a similar kind
Speaker 1: of vein, like like a Space Quest. It really shows
Speaker 1: that it had a huge impact on the culture of
Speaker 1: gaming in those early days. Were there any particular times
Speaker 1: during those the like the eighties era of Sierra where
Speaker 1: you just were sitting back and just kind of marveling
Speaker 1: at the impact that your products were having on the market. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess to answer that question I want
Speaker 1: is yeah, every day. It was really amazing. What mean
Speaker 1: you nowhere to being um recognized everywhere? I mean, it's
Speaker 1: stunning that. Yeah, we were kind of kind of celebriting
Speaker 1: c in away and just because computers are growing so
Speaker 1: fast and we were kind of at the center of it, um,
Speaker 1: particularly as consumers. So um, yeah, I guess we're probably
Speaker 1: even now. What's funny is that I don't think we
Speaker 1: realized how much so that now we're twenty years later,
Speaker 1: you know, since we sold the company and still people
Speaker 1: remember see here online that you're talking to me. Is amazing.
Speaker 1: It's twenty years after we did the game, the games
Speaker 1: have we sold the company and retired, and there's still
Speaker 1: people that you know we existed, So it's uh kind
Speaker 1: of astounding. It's one of the things that I think
Speaker 1: back on in my childhood are all the different games
Speaker 1: I played. So it's clearly a huge impact on myself,
Speaker 1: and I know several my listeners. I mean, I've I've
Speaker 1: had people request that I cover Sierra multiple times. So
Speaker 1: I'm very thankful for this opportunity. Um now in I
Speaker 1: guess no, no, please, no. I was just gonna say that.
Speaker 1: One thing people don't, I guess relate to now is
Speaker 1: that because there hadn't been computers before and then there
Speaker 1: were that people weren't sure what they would do, what
Speaker 1: they were capable of, and there was this inferrent belief
Speaker 1: that they were educational. So parents loved buying computers for
Speaker 1: their kids, and Seeric kind of played into that in
Speaker 1: a way, and that because our games are using Parson
Speaker 1: and there was on screen texts to be read, parents
Speaker 1: had no doubt that they were educational. And I think
Speaker 1: most parents in those days the lead computers are good
Speaker 1: for their kids, which is a little different than today,
Speaker 1: when a lot of the games are kindalyticum shoot them
Speaker 1: ups and kill people at the games, and I think
Speaker 1: parents are not quite as enthusiastic about buying games for
Speaker 1: their kids anymore. It's kind of a different kind of
Speaker 1: game and as different, I don't know, just a whole
Speaker 1: different attitude any Anyway, hold on for one second. We're
Speaker 1: just trying to get yoga video going on at PV
Speaker 1: and I need be able to figure it out. But
Speaker 1: one minute, I'll be back. In nine Sierra held its
Speaker 1: initial public offering. And so you you transition from a
Speaker 1: privately held company to a publicly traded company. How did
Speaker 1: things change behind the scenes or was it essentially business
Speaker 1: as usual that were there any kind of shifts in
Speaker 1: the way you were doing things from before and after? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I guess the biggest thing was incredible stress
Speaker 1: to hit numbers. The every every employee in the company
Speaker 1: had stock options, and every employee in the company, maybe
Speaker 1: not every employment company had stock options. I tend to
Speaker 1: tended to getting to people that could really influence our growth,
Speaker 1: so i'd be more of the development teams. Although we
Speaker 1: were heavily stewed toward development. UM there were always at
Speaker 1: all times, I'd say two thirds and more of the
Speaker 1: staff were involved in creating product. So um, but everybody
Speaker 1: have stock options, and people started watching the stock price
Speaker 1: daily and the network would go up and down based
Speaker 1: on the stock price and on the rocks. So obviously
Speaker 1: all the mutual funds that held our stock and all
Speaker 1: the individual people, and if fire stock went up, everybody smiled,
Speaker 1: and if they went down, they were you know, they
Speaker 1: were depressed. So and performance as a public company has
Speaker 1: measured every ninety days, and a game hitting the quarter
Speaker 1: not hitting the quarter would have a huge impact on
Speaker 1: the top line, which would have an even bigger impact
Speaker 1: on the bottom line. And suddenly there was an incredible
Speaker 1: push to get a date. I get a game out
Speaker 1: on a particular date, and um, you know, if you
Speaker 1: look back at our numbers, there would be going along
Speaker 1: fine until you get three weeks from me into the quarter,
Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden, you know, I would
Speaker 1: have to run over the development say we've got to
Speaker 1: ship this. It's got to go out the door next week,
Speaker 1: and the team's order a bell and they would take
Speaker 1: me for fishing and release a game and they'd say,
Speaker 1: just in me another day, another day, and they will
Speaker 1: be better. And you know, I didn't want to be
Speaker 1: in that position, and they didn't want to be in
Speaker 1: that position. But it was kind of this horrible trap
Speaker 1: to found ourselves in where every quarter had to be
Speaker 1: better than the prior quarter and otherwise the stock and
Speaker 1: cut down and theoretically shouldn't be managing the company according
Speaker 1: to the stock price, and we tried not to, but
Speaker 1: it's not that easy. It really is oh horrible to
Speaker 1: be a public company. UM. At least I didn't like it,
Speaker 1: and it was stressful for me personally, and suddenly instead
Speaker 1: of trying to change the world, we think I need
Speaker 1: cool things to do every day. I was backed down
Speaker 1: and taking calls from the financial community. And there was
Speaker 1: even one point where I just said that's it, I'm
Speaker 1: out of here and took off for I think there's
Speaker 1: three months for what I called is abbatical. That really
Speaker 1: it was kind of around the world trip, just kind
Speaker 1: of reset and kind of get my jag right, and
Speaker 1: then dropped back in UM being public. UM. We were
Speaker 1: actually public for one almost eight years, and then we
Speaker 1: did we did some good stuff, but it was also
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways kind of the worst time
Speaker 1: in my life. Yeah, I can, I can imagine. I mean,
Speaker 1: you you go. You go from a world where you
Speaker 1: know you can develop a game and you can ship
Speaker 1: it when it's ready, and the success of the game
Speaker 1: continues to propel the company forward into a world where
Speaker 1: if you have a release date that you have in
Speaker 1: mind and if it's been announced at all, missing that
Speaker 1: becomes a huge problem. I know, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: criticism in the video game computer game world now against
Speaker 1: companies doing one of two things, and it puts them
Speaker 1: in a terrible position. One thing number one is that
Speaker 1: you miss your ship date and everyone goes bananas because
Speaker 1: the game is late, and that can be reflected in
Speaker 1: the stock price as well as just in the public
Speaker 1: opinion among gamers, who, among many of their traits, patients
Speaker 1: is rarely one of them. And then on the other side,
Speaker 1: you have the the option of shipping on time, but
Speaker 1: the game itself is either not really complete or there's
Speaker 1: a lot of things that need to be fixed on
Speaker 1: a zero day patch, and the the announcement is this
Speaker 1: game is coming out and over the next couple of
Speaker 1: months it's going to improve. So there might be some
Speaker 1: rough spots at the beginning, but don't worry, it'll get better.
Speaker 1: And gamers don't like that either, right, they want that finished,
Speaker 1: polished game where they feel like the thing they're buying
Speaker 1: is a complete experience, it's not something that they have
Speaker 1: to add on to after that purchase. So then it
Speaker 1: puts the actual companies in a really tough position where
Speaker 1: you can't miss your your ship date without dire consequences.
Speaker 1: But if you send out something that people perceive as
Speaker 1: not being complete, you get lambasted. So you kind of
Speaker 1: are in the worst of all worlds, as opposed to
Speaker 1: going in that that privately held company route, where you
Speaker 1: have the luxury of not necessarily announcing things like a
Speaker 1: ship date so that you can continue to develop it
Speaker 1: until it's ready. And of course, in your you know,
Speaker 1: heyday of of creating games, there was no option of
Speaker 1: patching after the fact. What you shipped was the complete game.
Speaker 1: That was it. When I went Gold, it was set down,
Speaker 1: And so I assume that that must have I mean,
Speaker 1: I can't imagine the amount of stress you're talking about
Speaker 1: here on a on a daily basis of dealing with
Speaker 1: this kind of shift in culture. Really, yeah, now, we
Speaker 1: well we did actually have a I remember it's called
Speaker 1: a BBS and there's one computer that'st in the corner
Speaker 1: and we would put patches on it that people could
Speaker 1: download that. Most people didn't have modems early to unfold
Speaker 1: in those days, so it was the big dial a
Speaker 1: phone number directly into that computer and it could support
Speaker 1: some number users. And we didn't catch that. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was kind of a flawed process. And on being development,
Speaker 1: people don't realize that there's there's people that have analytics
Speaker 1: skills and people that have creative skills, but they often
Speaker 1: you know, that same person that you know I had
Speaker 1: always think of artists is um creative and getting an
Speaker 1: artist to be able to say, you know, I expect
Speaker 1: twenty cells of animation out of you per day, Um,
Speaker 1: that's just never going to happen. An artists will set
Speaker 1: it to create and agonize over one cell of animation forever.
Speaker 1: And and it's tough to that allowed to creative people,
Speaker 1: designers or musicians. I mean, it's managing a game, is
Speaker 1: it's message. The coders also will be a problem in
Speaker 1: times that you know, I I developed kind of a
Speaker 1: system for doing it which worked well at UM. Oh
Speaker 1: we were we were scattered. And it's one thing people
Speaker 1: don't realize about there is that I had kind of
Speaker 1: the core philosophy that too many developers in one place
Speaker 1: can destroy creativity. Mentally, I would I would think, you know,
Speaker 1: we start getting million developers in one place, it's just
Speaker 1: too many, and it suddenly there comes a democratic machine
Speaker 1: instead of a uncreative group. And so we were scattered too.
Speaker 1: Toward the end, I think twelve different locations, and I
Speaker 1: would fly feature those locations and we would have a
Speaker 1: kind of a review and people would shot their game
Speaker 1: and I did my ideas for what to do and
Speaker 1: try to help them the kind of the metrics for um,
Speaker 1: you know, this is your budget, this is your ship date. Um,
Speaker 1: it looks to me that you even have the money.
Speaker 1: And I would go through team by team, and we
Speaker 1: have many fifty games in development at any time, and
Speaker 1: by the time I finished going to all the developments,
Speaker 1: it was time to go back to the first than again.
Speaker 1: And that was kind of my life was, um, you know,
Speaker 1: fly to Boston, fly to San Francisco, um you knows,
Speaker 1: and fly over to the outside development, going in the
Speaker 1: outside of Paris, And I spent all my life on airplanes.
Speaker 1: It was kind of fun and I got to see
Speaker 1: the games, but really every every meeting with a game
Speaker 1: developer was kind of a battle, and that I was
Speaker 1: kind of the horrible corporate guide coming in described their lives,
Speaker 1: and that is that part was not fun. I mean
Speaker 1: behind the scenes, I was student for them and I
Speaker 1: loved the games and what a what a cool stuff
Speaker 1: to happen. But there's also, I guess a business side
Speaker 1: of things where you have the project development Patchet is
Speaker 1: a million ducks, then you've got to deliver for a
Speaker 1: million because you develop the free maillion. The market is
Speaker 1: that expand its um, just use money instead of make money.
Speaker 1: So and after after we did so with company, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, I was horrified that the company kind of
Speaker 1: went away, but also divided that all those people that
Speaker 1: it's your horrible chemisy, just leave us alone be mega
Speaker 1: hits on time and on budget without you. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I guess there's kind of a night culture sell there,
Speaker 1: which is that you do need some business discipline produced
Speaker 1: games or you're going to have a disaster. So in
Speaker 1: my show, I've talked about some other game companies and
Speaker 1: some of them have had relationships with Sierra and I'd
Speaker 1: love to hear your take on it. Uh So the
Speaker 1: first would be ID because there was this this time
Speaker 1: period early in the days of ID where the heads
Speaker 1: of ID software came to Sierra. Can you tell me
Speaker 1: a little bit about what was going on back then? Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's a few parts of this story. I
Speaker 1: m I saw Doom and Newcam and all the games
Speaker 1: coming along, and nobody at Sierra. You know, there's kind
Speaker 1: of a passion you have to do a kind of
Speaker 1: to do a kind of game, otherwise it's going to
Speaker 1: turn out horrible. So I wanted a game like that,
Speaker 1: but I kind of didn't kind of didn't. It was
Speaker 1: a side of me that never lived violent games and
Speaker 1: the idea of just running through a building, shooting at
Speaker 1: things and onund defensive. I mean, I really still to
Speaker 1: this day kind of a tribute. Some of the problems
Speaker 1: in schools with kids, um, kids that are unbalanced, getting
Speaker 1: out of control and shooting at other kids can come
Speaker 1: from games, well, from role playing games. They do that.
Speaker 1: So I didn't really want to shift those games. But
Speaker 1: I also recognized that customers wanted to buy them, and
Speaker 1: so I was always kind of on the fence. But
Speaker 1: then you know, when I saw Doom and stuff, I
Speaker 1: finally kind of said, Wow, this is good enough, maybe
Speaker 1: we should ship it. And then I talked to uh
Speaker 1: at John Carmac and there's body guys and come visit.
Speaker 1: And they drove out in a van and they were
Speaker 1: living out of the dam at the time I employed it.
Speaker 1: They had sports cars. But they came out. Man. I
Speaker 1: set up done at the fancy restaurant to kind of
Speaker 1: um Wyne and Dinham that Sarah should be their publisher.
Speaker 1: And they showed up looking kind of stuffy and probably
Speaker 1: would have them kicked out of the restaurant have they
Speaker 1: not had it not done me and that I was
Speaker 1: a regular customer. And but actually, I mean we did
Speaker 1: see and I we had a really nice dinner, and
Speaker 1: I think came real close to publishing their product, but
Speaker 1: they didn't think if they want to give up control
Speaker 1: and there was a side and made it didn't physically
Speaker 1: when I published their products, I just never really came
Speaker 1: together that um that's to death. It really was a
Speaker 1: nice product. So and I forget what they did. I
Speaker 1: think they published themselves, but I don't remember how they
Speaker 1: did that. Yeah, they I mean obviously made a ton
Speaker 1: of money and did well with it, and it really
Speaker 1: defined a style of game to this day, it almost
Speaker 1: dominates the industry that. Um so there there, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: the pioneers in a genre and really cool kind. It's
Speaker 1: a great guys. And I missed one there that later
Speaker 1: I made up for by publishing Half Life. But even
Speaker 1: when we published Half Life, there was a cybing made
Speaker 1: it said, you know, this is it's going to get
Speaker 1: because people killed. This is really a dumb thing to
Speaker 1: be doing on computers. But but well, you know, that's
Speaker 1: what it is. It definitely said that the ground where
Speaker 1: where the deal with Valve could go through. And obviously
Speaker 1: now Valve is is the dominant powerhouse at least in
Speaker 1: distribution for PC games that it's been a while since
Speaker 1: we've seen any development from them. But the distribution side
Speaker 1: is I mean, that's if you're not buying your games
Speaker 1: off Steam, you are in the minority at this point.
Speaker 1: So the fact that that Sierra played such an important
Speaker 1: role early on in Valves Life, um, you could argue
Speaker 1: that that is a large reason why the company was
Speaker 1: able to get a really strong foothold and move to
Speaker 1: the success that it's at now and you mentioned also
Speaker 1: that you know, seeing the Sierra name kind of go away,
Speaker 1: it's sort of emerged as kind of a almost like
Speaker 1: a boutique brand in two fourteen. Um, I I imagine
Speaker 1: that that also, it just probably feels like there's very little,
Speaker 1: if any connection to the Sierra that you that you
Speaker 1: and your wife built back in the eighties. Is there
Speaker 1: Do you feel any connection to the current Sierra name
Speaker 1: or apart from I mean obviously your long history with it,
Speaker 1: but like the way it's it's current incarnation is now now,
Speaker 1: either I played any attention to the game industry possibly
Speaker 1: part of what I really doesn't like to do interviews.
Speaker 1: It won't do them this because she doesn't want people
Speaker 1: to think she's, um, she's dumb when they say what
Speaker 1: do you think about such and such a game? And
Speaker 1: she has didn't that she has played the game in
Speaker 1: twenty years. So that's UM. Yeah, now we're pretty disconnected
Speaker 1: from we got briefly involved and the guys were doing
Speaker 1: kind of caught gentlemen. UM tried to start up the
Speaker 1: king Quest franchise and game series again and show there's
Speaker 1: something they were working on. We thought it looked pretty fun, um,
Speaker 1: but then UM, as far as I know, didn't go anywhere,
Speaker 1: and even us we kind of got a copy in
Speaker 1: started playing at the lost inter Spring quick and um,
Speaker 1: I don't know if it was a game or just
Speaker 1: be our farm kind of. Um Um, I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure what it was. But we didn't finish playing,
Speaker 1: and yet it looks beautiful and played really nice. So
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's hard. It's hard to do something
Speaker 1: that's really fun. So but I actually don't know how
Speaker 1: I did. I mean it was I had this funny
Speaker 1: that we know so a little about today's industry. We
Speaker 1: just kind of gone on to other stuff them. You know,
Speaker 1: we kind of did our second fifteen minutes of fame
Speaker 1: as voters, and that we bought a boat and circumnavigated
Speaker 1: and they've gone to lots of parts of the world
Speaker 1: that um, very few people see. Um, you know, in
Speaker 1: the Bering Sea and the Turkey and all kinds of
Speaker 1: crazy places and over four books on voting, and now
Speaker 1: we can't go to any marina anywhere in the world.
Speaker 1: Whose days about somebody saying Ken Williams, Um, so we
Speaker 1: were just kind of shifted gears, so you should say, well,
Speaker 1: I think that The legacy is certainly a worthy one.
Speaker 1: It is an amazing legacy of games from multiple incredibly
Speaker 1: successful franchises that all went on to inform later games
Speaker 1: that have games that still continue to come out. You
Speaker 1: can see the influence that you were your games had
Speaker 1: on those. Like the people who are developing those are
Speaker 1: people who grew up playing the Sierra Online games. So
Speaker 1: I think that that is continuing well. At one point
Speaker 1: in marketing, we did a list and I wish I
Speaker 1: had it, um some of the first that Sierra did,
Speaker 1: and it was like two pages long, and not just fluss.
Speaker 1: I mean there was a lot of things that we
Speaker 1: kind of pioneered that um yeah, I mean just you know,
Speaker 1: little things like music games and sound cards. We can
Speaker 1: ship sound cards and we did so many around modems,
Speaker 1: online games, and we think about this Yer network and
Speaker 1: what we did there. That's probably my most ground accomplishment
Speaker 1: in all and that there wasn't even the Internet and
Speaker 1: we were doing um we had we had online site simulators,
Speaker 1: I mean not twenty four hundreds Bob modems, years before
Speaker 1: the Internet came along. So um, I don't know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we we had some pretty pretty pretty amazing history at
Speaker 1: that time, they had a good team we had because
Speaker 1: we were Sierra and because we were first anyone who
Speaker 1: was kind of interested in doing gaming. You know, for them,
Speaker 1: it wasn't really about the money. It was about working
Speaker 1: for Sierra because we were you know, we were were
Speaker 1: we were leaders at the time. It's all. We were
Speaker 1: able to get the best engineers um that the world
Speaker 1: had to offer, and you know, I was you know,
Speaker 1: I was there helping to leave the pack. But really
Speaker 1: at least the reputation as Sierra and our ability to
Speaker 1: recruit amazing people to put us where we were, which
Speaker 1: is strange too because we were located is screwball place
Speaker 1: to put the company, And yeah, became kind of a
Speaker 1: company town. I think we've had five hundred employees at
Speaker 1: the time when there were only five thousand people in
Speaker 1: the town. And then we kind of help grew it,
Speaker 1: moved to Seattle, left the development behind. But basically, you
Speaker 1: are a company down and when you get to a
Speaker 1: point where you're your operation is so large that you
Speaker 1: don't have enough places for people to live in in
Speaker 1: the town that you're located and you have to relocate
Speaker 1: to a different city, that's pretty remarkable. I don't think
Speaker 1: there are a whole little companies that have that story. Ken,
Speaker 1: I gotta thank you so much about now. I think
Speaker 1: I think we've got a good I think we've got
Speaker 1: a good conversation, and you can. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1: We you know, the the we'll do, we'll do. You
Speaker 1: take care alright. So here's a little bit more background
Speaker 1: on the whole story of Sierra Online's origins and evolution.
Speaker 1: So how did it go from a husband and wife
Speaker 1: start up operation to a billion dollar company? Well, as
Speaker 1: Mr Williams mentioned, he had been programming computers back in
Speaker 1: the old mainframe days, and he had been doing contract
Speaker 1: work for a company called Informatics and was working with
Speaker 1: other programmers to try and build out a four tran compiler.
Speaker 1: As part of his work, he brought back a teletype machine.
Speaker 1: Teletype machines could communicate back to a mainframe computer and
Speaker 1: you would get pronounced, And it was a pretty primitive
Speaker 1: terminal kind of access to a a mini computer, not
Speaker 1: a micro computer that's what personal computers would become, but
Speaker 1: a mini computer or a mainframe. So this was kind
Speaker 1: of like having that long distance terminal. And it didn't
Speaker 1: take long after the development of the programmable computer in general,
Speaker 1: for people to start creating games for those machines. This
Speaker 1: happened well before the era of the personal computer, back
Speaker 1: when the only people who had any access to computers
Speaker 1: typically were computer programmers. Sometimes the programmer would tackle the
Speaker 1: challenge of making a game as a way to teach
Speaker 1: him or herself how to program it. Just it became
Speaker 1: kind of like an engineering challenge. How would I make
Speaker 1: a program that could play this particular game, something simple
Speaker 1: like Tic Tac toe or Battleship or something on those lines.
Speaker 1: Some of those games found their way onto the computer
Speaker 1: that Ken Williams was using for work, and he would
Speaker 1: he could access those games at home. Now. Roberto Williams
Speaker 1: was reportedly not terribly impressed with all of this until
Speaker 1: she played a game called Colossal. Cave Adventure also just
Speaker 1: known as Adventure, sometimes just called Cave Adventure, has several
Speaker 1: different names, but it's a text based game and which
Speaker 1: you play as a character exploring a cave to find
Speaker 1: various tres pasures. Now, text based games are a type
Speaker 1: of interactive fiction in which the player is taking control
Speaker 1: of a protagonist. I almost said it in the red
Speaker 1: red letter media way. The protagonist and attempts to guide
Speaker 1: the hero through a scenario, and you use typed commands
Speaker 1: to do this. If you were to load up one
Speaker 1: of those games today, what you would see as a
Speaker 1: paragraph of text that would describe the immediate surroundings of
Speaker 1: your character. You could then type in commands to either
Speaker 1: try and get more information or take some sort of
Speaker 1: action within that environment, or even to leave that particular
Speaker 1: environment completely. So, for example, if the description said that
Speaker 1: there's a threadbare rug on the floor, you might try
Speaker 1: to examine the rug, or look under the rug, or
Speaker 1: take the rug. You would type these commands in, so
Speaker 1: you might say examine rug and hit enter. If the
Speaker 1: programmer had built in a response to whatever it was
Speaker 1: you typed in, you would get that response, so it
Speaker 1: might say you look under the rug and there's a key.
Speaker 1: If they did not build in some sort of response
Speaker 1: to that, you would typically get some sort of generic message,
Speaker 1: such as you don't see anything interesting, or I'm sorry
Speaker 1: you can't do that. ROBERTA. Williams found the puzzles of
Speaker 1: this interactive fiction to be really compelling, and so she
Speaker 1: ended up playing other games along that type, although she
Speaker 1: said none of them were quite as interesting to her
Speaker 1: as the first one was. She played a lot of
Speaker 1: games written by a guy named Scott Adams. This is
Speaker 1: not the Scott Adams who is the cartoonist behind Dilbert.
Speaker 1: He instead was a text adventurer designer. He created games
Speaker 1: like Adventure Land, Pirate Adventure, and Voodoo Castle, which really
Speaker 1: threw off that whole adventure motif they had going. By
Speaker 1: the winter of nineteen seventy nine, Roberta Williams had come
Speaker 1: up with an idea for her own game, and she
Speaker 1: just kind of thought that she could tell the same
Speaker 1: sort of stories. Now. She didn't have the programming knowledge,
Speaker 1: but she did have this passion for interactive story telling
Speaker 1: that she thought that she could pursue now. According to
Speaker 1: old interviews, Roberta's influences for developing this first game were
Speaker 1: Agatha Christie, particularly the story Ten Little Indians, and also
Speaker 1: the board game Clue. So her game was going to
Speaker 1: be in the mystery genre, requiring players to unravel a
Speaker 1: murder mystery as they played through, with multiple characters dying
Speaker 1: as the game continued. The way she got Ken on
Speaker 1: board because of course, Ken's doing his job as a programmer.
Speaker 1: He wasn't immediately sold on the concept of spending more
Speaker 1: time programming but building a game that his wife had designed. Uh.
Speaker 1: She said that, well, maybe what we do is buy
Speaker 1: ourselves an Apple two computer and that will be our
Speaker 1: Christmas present to each other. This is a two thousand
Speaker 1: dollar computer, well more than that when you start adding
Speaker 1: in all the different components at back in nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's an enormous amount of money. And so
Speaker 1: they agree. You know, Ken Williams was like, I get
Speaker 1: a computer out of this, and ROBERTA. Williams is like,
Speaker 1: I can have the game I've thought of created and
Speaker 1: someone could actually play it. Now, Roberta's idea actually added
Speaker 1: in an element that was not found in other text
Speaker 1: adventures at the time, and that was graphics. Now, these
Speaker 1: were very simple graphics. They were just simple drawings. They
Speaker 1: were static, so there was no interactivity, there was no animation,
Speaker 1: but they did provide something that other text games did not.
Speaker 1: You could get a depiction of whatever that scene was.
Speaker 1: And the resulting title was Mystery House and it was
Speaker 1: a success. The game was ready to hit the market
Speaker 1: in the spring of nineteen eighty. This was a big
Speaker 1: deal in an era in which computer. Personal computers were
Speaker 1: still a very new concept. It was. It wasn't really
Speaker 1: that common to find a household that had one. It
Speaker 1: was essentially hobbyists that owned these sort of machines, and
Speaker 1: they sold it through on print ads as well as
Speaker 1: kind of going door to door to different computer stores.
Speaker 1: They developed other software as well, including other games, so
Speaker 1: it wasn't just games that were looking at. In fact,
Speaker 1: Ken Williams would use some of the tools he developed
Speaker 1: to make these games and then make them available as
Speaker 1: commercial products. So first you're like, well, how do I
Speaker 1: build this game? And then you would design a tool
Speaker 1: to help you build the game, and then you think
Speaker 1: this tool might be valuable to people on its own.
Speaker 1: It it's not just an internal tool for us to use.
Speaker 1: We can actually sell this as a product, and so
Speaker 1: they started to do that as well. They also began
Speaker 1: to sell some titles from other developers like Scott Adams,
Speaker 1: though on a small scale, so they sort of were
Speaker 1: acting like a publisher distributor in those days. In September
Speaker 1: of that year, this being nineteen eighty, they relocated from
Speaker 1: Los Angeles to Oakhurst, California, which is not far from
Speaker 1: Yosemite National Park and during the first six months of
Speaker 1: selling games, they they had brought in about seventy five
Speaker 1: thousand dollars in revenue, so that's before expenses, but not
Speaker 1: a bad start. Seventy five grand in your first six
Speaker 1: months in a startup, uh, not just a startup, but
Speaker 1: like a mon pas startup. That's kind of incredible. Right
Speaker 1: around that time, they decided to rename their company Sierra Online,
Speaker 1: named after the Sierra Mountains, which they were now right
Speaker 1: at the foothills of UH. The company would officially become
Speaker 1: Sierra Online, Incorporated on in September of n Their second
Speaker 1: original title was called The Wizard and the Princess, and
Speaker 1: this was sort of a proto King's Quest game. King's
Speaker 1: Quest would become an enormous franchise in Sierra's history. It
Speaker 1: featured color graphics and intriguing puzzles. It sold more than
Speaker 1: sixty thousand copies, which was again back in those days,
Speaker 1: it was a surprisingly large number of copies. Sixty thou
Speaker 1: copies today is nothing because the the era of PC
Speaker 1: gaming has meant that we've seen a huge boost in
Speaker 1: the numbers of people who are playing games, and digital
Speaker 1: delivery makes it way easier to produce and distribute games,
Speaker 1: but back in those days, sixty thou units. That was
Speaker 1: a lot. Other games that the small company offered in
Speaker 1: those early years included titles like Crossfire, Jawbreaker, which was
Speaker 1: sort of like a pac Man clone, Mission, Asteroid Lunar Leapers,
Speaker 1: and Ulysses in the Golden Fleece. In Chuck Benton, a
Speaker 1: programmer who decided to make a game as an exercise
Speaker 1: and programming, created a text based adventure game titled and
Speaker 1: I'm not making this up soft porn adventure. With a
Speaker 1: name like that, it probably doesn't surprise you to learn
Speaker 1: it was a game in which you control a guy
Speaker 1: who's trying to hook up with various women. Not terribly sophisticated,
Speaker 1: or you could argue, not terribly classy, But like other
Speaker 1: text adventures, it meant trying to solve various puzzles in
Speaker 1: order to achieve your goal. The game would later become
Speaker 1: an important influence on one of Sierra's most sussiful franchises
Speaker 1: just a few years later, and that's why I mentioned
Speaker 1: it here, And spoiler alert, it is not the King's
Speaker 1: Quest series that it influenced. In November two, Sierra would
Speaker 1: announce that it would invest almost a million dollars in
Speaker 1: sales and marketing, which marked the next step up in
Speaker 1: becoming a big business. And games that Sierra developed and
Speaker 1: or published in this time included a Donkey Kong clone
Speaker 1: called Cannonball Blitz. They did a port of Frogger for
Speaker 1: the Atari eight bit computer systems, and they published a
Speaker 1: little game called Ultimate to the Revenge of the Enchantress. Now,
Speaker 1: I want to take a moment to talk about some
Speaker 1: of these. First of all, the ports became a big business.
Speaker 1: You had arcades that were doing quite well, and you
Speaker 1: had video game consoles that were selling uh ports of
Speaker 1: those games, usually at around the eight bit level or less.
Speaker 1: Then you had PCs that were starting to try and
Speaker 1: get in on this too, but they were able to
Speaker 1: play arcade style games quite at the level that consoles
Speaker 1: were because consoles were a very specific, purpose built machine
Speaker 1: and PCs were general machines, which meant they weren't necessarily
Speaker 1: as good at doing things that consoles could do at
Speaker 1: the time. Keeping in mind the consoles were primitive as
Speaker 1: well in those days, but there was a big call
Speaker 1: for doing these sort of ports. Meanwhile, Ultimate too, uh
Speaker 1: that is got a special place in My Heart. The
Speaker 1: Ultimate series was created by a guy named Richard Garriott,
Speaker 1: who with his brother and his dad, created a computer
Speaker 1: game business out of their families Garage. Richard Garriott had
Speaker 1: become interested in computer programming while he was in high school,
Speaker 1: and at that time he wrote games for systems that
Speaker 1: didn't even have a computer display, so instead the computer
Speaker 1: would print out results on tape. So you had tape
Speaker 1: that was coming out of a printer and it would
Speaker 1: print out a design using common computer characters, you know,
Speaker 1: letters and numbers and symbols, that kind of thing, in
Speaker 1: order to represent stuff like walls or characters or monsters
Speaker 1: and other elements. In a basic sort of dungeon crawling
Speaker 1: kind of game, every time you make a move or
Speaker 1: take some sort of action that would change the appearance
Speaker 1: of that environment, it would have to print out a
Speaker 1: new representation of that space. So you know, you you
Speaker 1: move one space to the west, and it prints out
Speaker 1: a new version of the display so it reflects your move.
Speaker 1: That kind of thing. Now, Gary had got a chance
Speaker 1: to work with Apple computers in the late nineties seventies
Speaker 1: and he created a game called a Calabeth Just for Fun,
Speaker 1: which was a graphics Overhead display computer RPG game, one
Speaker 1: of the first computer RPG games. He was working at
Speaker 1: a computer store at the time, and the store owner
Speaker 1: actually allowed him to sell copies of his game in
Speaker 1: the store. They just made a sheet that had the
Speaker 1: art for the game on one side, basic rules on
Speaker 1: the back side of the sheet, and they put a
Speaker 1: floppy disk in there, and they put in a zip
Speaker 1: luck bag and they just tack it to the bulletin board.
Speaker 1: He managed to sell about a dozen copies, but one
Speaker 1: of those somehow made its way to a games publisher
Speaker 1: called California Pacific, and that became his publisher for that
Speaker 1: first game. They said, we want to publish a Calibeth.
Speaker 1: Are you cool with that? And he said, tote school. Well.
Speaker 1: His next game was Ultimate one, which also was published
Speaker 1: by California Pacific, and after the success of Ultima one,
Speaker 1: he began to work on the sequel, but he wanted
Speaker 1: something special for Ultimate two. He wanted to include a
Speaker 1: cloth map of the world, which was an expensive item
Speaker 1: to throw in as a freebee in a game box.
Speaker 1: It was considered to be a premium thing and most
Speaker 1: game publishers weren't interested in doing that. This was shortly
Speaker 1: after the era where all the games were showing up
Speaker 1: in just zip luck bags. So Garriott started a little
Speaker 1: look for a new publisher and he found one in
Speaker 1: Sierra Online. They agreed to his request to publish the
Speaker 1: game with a cloth map that established the way that
Speaker 1: Ultima would come out from that point forward. Coincidentally, Ultimate
Speaker 1: two was one of the first games I ever owned
Speaker 1: for the Apple to E, and I've been lucky enough
Speaker 1: to chat with Richard Garriott several times, the earliest being
Speaker 1: back when I was a teenager, and someday I'll have
Speaker 1: to do a full episode on him and the companies
Speaker 1: he's worked for, and not only his work in developing games,
Speaker 1: but also the story about how he became one of
Speaker 1: just seven citizens to ever visit the International Space Station
Speaker 1: in orbit without becoming an actual astronaut. First, but let's
Speaker 1: get back to Sierra. So they published Ultimate two and
Speaker 1: that ends up getting some more success. By three the
Speaker 1: company had achieved ten million dollars in sales. The titles
Speaker 1: that ROBERTA. Williams was working on. We're gaining special attention
Speaker 1: because they had a reliance upon storytelling that other games
Speaker 1: of that era lacked. Most other games were developed just
Speaker 1: by programmers who were really good at coding, but they
Speaker 1: weren't necessarily the most to dept at creating a narrative.
Speaker 1: So ROBERTA. Williams came at game development from a totally
Speaker 1: different angle. She would conceive of the story and the
Speaker 1: puzzles outside of the realm of coding, and the difference
Speaker 1: was noticeable. At this time, computers relied upon several different
Speaker 1: types of media. It all dependent on the system you
Speaker 1: had what kind of media you would use. You know,
Speaker 1: this was before you would log in someplace and download
Speaker 1: a code, so you had the emergence of the floppy
Speaker 1: disk that was starting to happen right around this time.
Speaker 1: But you also had cassette tapes. Some computers use cassette
Speaker 1: tapes as storage devices, and you would insert a program
Speaker 1: with a cassette tape into a drive on your computer.
Speaker 1: Some of them had cartridges, very similar to the classic
Speaker 1: game consoles of the time, like the AT and cartridges
Speaker 1: in particular were problematic for a couple of reasons. One
Speaker 1: was that they were more expensive per unit to produce
Speaker 1: than other types of media. But the other big one
Speaker 1: was that once you designed a cartridge, you couldn't write
Speaker 1: over it. It was read only memory, so the actual
Speaker 1: coding for whatever the software is was hardwired into the cartridge,
Speaker 1: so you were committed once you did this. It was
Speaker 1: an expensive undertaking. Floppy disks, on the other hand, could
Speaker 1: be erased and overwritten. So even if for some reason
Speaker 1: you didn't need the software anymore. Let's say you buy
Speaker 1: something and you realize all this software is terrible. I don't,
Speaker 1: I don't, I'm never going to use this again, you
Speaker 1: could erase the disk and overwrite it. You could still
Speaker 1: make some use of the disk cartridges if you didn't
Speaker 1: need that software. You just had a big piece of
Speaker 1: plastics saying on your hands that you couldn't do anything
Speaker 1: else with well. Sierra Online created games for the Atari
Speaker 1: computer systems, which relied on cartridges, and then there was
Speaker 1: a big crash that essentially brought down Atari, and Sierra
Speaker 1: had committed to supporting Atari, so they were affected as well,
Speaker 1: and they ended up having to downsize to about a
Speaker 1: third of what their company size had been at that time.
Speaker 1: According to Funding Universe, it meant going from about a
Speaker 1: hundred twenty employees down to third d Now another failed
Speaker 1: piece of hardware that plays a part in the history
Speaker 1: of Sierra is the PC Junior. This was a micro
Speaker 1: computer from IBM that was meant to be the first
Speaker 1: home computer, and it was the first home computer front
Speaker 1: the business giant, I should say, from IBM itself. This
Speaker 1: posed a huge threat, potentially to other computer companies like Apple, Commodore,
Speaker 1: and Texas Instruments. Everyone was sure that IBM was gonna
Speaker 1: come in, throw its weight around and put everyone else
Speaker 1: out of business and become a monopoly in the personal
Speaker 1: computer space. IBM had really deep pockets and already dominated
Speaker 1: the corporate computer landscape. And while the home computer was
Speaker 1: meant to be a general consumer device, IBM had seen
Speaker 1: some success with early personal computers, but they were aimed
Speaker 1: more toward home business operators, not so much the general consumer.
Speaker 1: This PC Junior was meant to be something that the
Speaker 1: average person could go out and buy, not just someone
Speaker 1: who was a hobbyist or home business operator. So it
Speaker 1: was their game to lose, and they fumbled the ball
Speaker 1: big time. The PC Junior had two models. One of
Speaker 1: them sported sixty kilobytes of memory and the other had
Speaker 1: a kilobytes of memory. I was designed to connect to
Speaker 1: a television that that's what you would use as your display,
Speaker 1: and you would actually have to turn the televisions volume
Speaker 1: up in order to hear any sounds that the computer
Speaker 1: was generating. IBM also sold a monitor specifically for the computer.
Speaker 1: They called it the PC Junior color Display. The PC
Speaker 1: Junior shipped with a chick lit style keyboard that used
Speaker 1: infrared signals to communicate with the PC Junior itself, so
Speaker 1: it was wireless. It had an emitter that shot infrared
Speaker 1: information to the computer that would then presumably pick it up.
Speaker 1: Used double A batteries I think four of them in
Speaker 1: order to operate. The physical design of the keyboard was
Speaker 1: one of the things that a lot of people cited
Speaker 1: as a negative aspect of this computer, and along with
Speaker 1: that came the computer's cost. It was pretty expensive and
Speaker 1: other limitations that it had that ended up cutting the
Speaker 1: PC Junior off at the knees before I could even debut.
Speaker 1: By the time it finally came to market, the general
Speaker 1: consensus was that the hardware was a big disappointment, and
Speaker 1: as a result, it became one of the biggest flops
Speaker 1: in technology. But it did create the possibility for King's Quest,
Speaker 1: because that was the game Sierra was developing for the
Speaker 1: PC Junior at the time, and while the intended hardware floundered,
Speaker 1: Sierra was able to port King's Quest over onto other platforms,
Speaker 1: and there the game found an enormous fan base. And now,
Speaker 1: before I jump into the last section to really talk
Speaker 1: about what Sierra turned into, let's take a quick break
Speaker 1: to thank our sponsor. Now I had mentioned in the
Speaker 1: last section about King's Quest. King's Quest was another big
Speaker 1: leap forward for games. Instead of a text based game
Speaker 1: with some static images the way the previous games had
Speaker 1: been over at Sierra, players would actually control a figure
Speaker 1: who could move through an environment, and as you interacted
Speaker 1: with the environment, you would get animations that would accompany
Speaker 1: your command. So this was no longer static. It was dynamic.
Speaker 1: King's Quest would spawn several sequels eight if you're being technical,
Speaker 1: and it would serve as a model for several other
Speaker 1: Sierra Online games. And again, it was very much story
Speaker 1: driven and most of the puzzles had something to do
Speaker 1: with the fairy tale nature of the game. You played
Speaker 1: as a character named Graham, and you would go on
Speaker 1: a quest in order to save a kingdom and become
Speaker 1: the king at the end. Some of the games that
Speaker 1: were also based upon this same sort of engine were
Speaker 1: licensed properties, so they weren't original. I P from Sierra
Speaker 1: Sierra created a video game version of the Black Culture
Speaker 1: and that was modeled after the Disney adaptation of the
Speaker 1: classic Lloyd Alexander fantasy series. I had read the books,
Speaker 1: saw the cartoon, and then I even played the game.
Speaker 1: They also created a game adaptation of The Dark Crystal,
Speaker 1: which is a fantasy film that was made by Jim
Speaker 1: Henson Pictures. If you've not seen it, I recommend checking
Speaker 1: it out. It is really an interesting original fantasy story
Speaker 1: and has some pretty creepy characters in it too. In
Speaker 1: nine six, after a couple more King's Quest sequels had
Speaker 1: boosted more sales over at Sierra, the company developed and
Speaker 1: published the first Space Quest game, and this is where
Speaker 1: you start seeing the word quest become very important in
Speaker 1: various Sierra franchises. Uh This one was called Space Quest
Speaker 1: the Sorry in Encounter, and he used a game engine
Speaker 1: identical to that of King's Quest, but had a science
Speaker 1: fiction theme and was much more lighthearted and comical than
Speaker 1: King's Quest tended to be. The game's creators were Scott
Speaker 1: Murphy and Mark Crow. They became known as the guys
Speaker 1: from Andromeda. They they wanted to make a game that
Speaker 1: was a little more silly and goofy than what Sierra
Speaker 1: was really focusing on. They said that the the tone
Speaker 1: of the games was a little too serious and dower
Speaker 1: for their tastes. Space Quest put the player in control
Speaker 1: of what amounts to be a space janitor who must
Speaker 1: defeat an aggressive alien force, and the game, like King's Quest,
Speaker 1: was a big success and spawned several series, uh several sequels,
Speaker 1: I should say within a series in Sarah Online. Gave
Speaker 1: Al Low, another game developer, a guy who was coming
Speaker 1: up with various stories for games in Sierra. They gave
Speaker 1: him the go ahead to adapt that soft porn adventure
Speaker 1: game I mentioned earlier that came from the early eighties
Speaker 1: into a game more in line with the style of
Speaker 1: King's Quest and Space Quest, something that was a graphical
Speaker 1: adventure where you control the character that could move around
Speaker 1: an environment and not just a text based game. And
Speaker 1: that's when leisure Suit Larry was born. The first title
Speaker 1: in the game was leisure Suit Larry in the Land
Speaker 1: of the Lounge Lizards, and not only was it a
Speaker 1: big hit, it was also one of the most pirated
Speaker 1: games of that era. Legend says that Sierra actually sold
Speaker 1: more copies of the hint book for leisure Suit Larry
Speaker 1: in the Land of Lounge Lizards then they sold copies
Speaker 1: of the game itself, suggesting that a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: people got their hands on that game without paying Sierra
Speaker 1: any money. Also, this was a time when you couldn't
Speaker 1: just casually look up hints to a game online. There
Speaker 1: was no worldwide web to go to, so you either
Speaker 1: would talk to other people who had the game and
Speaker 1: had figured something out, or you went out and bought
Speaker 1: a hint book, or you called some sort of phone
Speaker 1: number that would charge you by the minute to hear
Speaker 1: hints about how to solve puzzles in the game. Sierra
Speaker 1: continued to grow, they added more developers, they published more games.
Speaker 1: To go through all of them would be austing and pointless.
Speaker 1: There are hundreds of titles that came out over the
Speaker 1: years from Sierra, but there were some other big series
Speaker 1: that were important during the history of the company. One
Speaker 1: of those was a game called Police Quest, and it
Speaker 1: actually had a former police officer as the lead for
Speaker 1: the game. Series. That was Jim Walls, and he had
Speaker 1: no programming background, but he oversaw development of the game
Speaker 1: and incorporated actual police procedure and tactics into the game
Speaker 1: mechanics and the game design. So not only is it
Speaker 1: a game where you're playing a law enforcement officer, you
Speaker 1: actually have to follow specific protocols in order to advance
Speaker 1: in the game properly. This also spawned a series of games,
Speaker 1: although Jim Walls would leave after the third entry I
Speaker 1: Believe into the series, and a different police officer became
Speaker 1: the lead developer for the other games, which eventually evolved
Speaker 1: into a series called Swat. Sierra also developed a game
Speaker 1: called Heroes Quest, but due to a trademark issue, another
Speaker 1: company had claim over Heroes Quest. They would rename the
Speaker 1: future entries into that series the Quest for Glory that
Speaker 1: started with the second game in that series. And it
Speaker 1: was around that time that Ken Williams was meeting with
Speaker 1: folks from a little company called ID Software to talk
Speaker 1: about their games that they had in mind. Now those
Speaker 1: conversations ended up going nowhere. Ken Williams decided against pursuing
Speaker 1: being a publisher for ID Software games, and eventually he
Speaker 1: would come to regret that decision because it became incredibly
Speaker 1: successful and Sierra could have been in on that, but
Speaker 1: Ken Williams didn't really feel strongly that this was a
Speaker 1: good fit at the time, and you heard him say
Speaker 1: that over in the interview. But it did also plant
Speaker 1: the seed in Sierra to consider Valve a little more
Speaker 1: carefully when they came to the company in the late nineties.
Speaker 1: So you got a bunch of franchises that are all
Speaker 1: doing well over at Sierra, boosted by a lot of
Speaker 1: on off titles as well. In nine nine, Sierra would
Speaker 1: launch the Sierra Network later known as the Imagination Network,
Speaker 1: making it the first games only network. And this is
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine. It's still before the Worldwide Web. This
Speaker 1: is the old Bolton board system days. You would use
Speaker 1: a modem to call into a computer that would log
Speaker 1: you into this network. Uh so, very forward thinking, not
Speaker 1: something that a lot of game companies had really thought about,
Speaker 1: and it was a bit ahead of its time. It
Speaker 1: required a huge investment up front, like a million dollars,
Speaker 1: and it took some time to catch on and never
Speaker 1: really became profitable in Sierra reached an agreement with Prodigy
Speaker 1: and online service provider. Back before we had internet service providers,
Speaker 1: we had online service providers and prodily agreed to carry
Speaker 1: the network. The Imagination Network also formed a partnership with
Speaker 1: ah an outlet called seu C International. They had a
Speaker 1: service called Shoppers Advantage that allowed for online shopping, So
Speaker 1: you had this collection of services that were packaged together.
Speaker 1: The venture was never really profitable, as the cost of
Speaker 1: operating the service was parading much the same as what
Speaker 1: it brought in through revenue, and eventually Sierra would sell
Speaker 1: off its network to A T and T in return
Speaker 1: for the promise that A T and T would pay
Speaker 1: royalties to Sierra for any of the software that it used. Also,
Speaker 1: back in nine Sierra went public. It changed from a
Speaker 1: privately owned corporation to a publicly traded one. But you
Speaker 1: heard from Mr Williams what that was like. The nature
Speaker 1: of the work changed dramatically, the nature of the business,
Speaker 1: the culture changed, and suddenly there were a lot of
Speaker 1: other considerations Williams had to make while operating his company.
Speaker 1: Now Sierra had also made some acquisitions during this time,
Speaker 1: growing as a business by purchasing smaller companies that did
Speaker 1: lots of different stuff, not just games, but including companies
Speaker 1: like Dynamics, which was known for making flight simulators, a
Speaker 1: company all the Impressions Software, which specialized in strategy games.
Speaker 1: They also bought Papyrus Design Group and sub Logic. These
Speaker 1: were other companies that made things like sports games, racing games,
Speaker 1: other strategy games. It was all meant to round out
Speaker 1: the sort of games that Sierra could make without having
Speaker 1: to higher on new developers and create new divisions within
Speaker 1: the company itself. It's was seen as easier to buy
Speaker 1: an existing organization that already specialized in that, and they
Speaker 1: just added to the Sierra family. Now, well, Sierra had
Speaker 1: sold software outside of games for a while, you know
Speaker 1: it made money by selling those tools that Kim Williams
Speaker 1: had developed. It really began to pick up speed in
Speaker 1: this business in the mid nineties. They began to sell
Speaker 1: productivity software and recipes software and all sorts of stuff
Speaker 1: that wasn't at all connected to gaming, which might be
Speaker 1: a surprise to you if you only know Sierra from
Speaker 1: the game titles that it's sold. They also produced a
Speaker 1: lot of educational software, became a big money maker for them.
Speaker 1: The company created a type of software internally called Sierra
Speaker 1: Creative Interpreter. This would allow artists and musicians to create
Speaker 1: content for games without having to learn complicated coding languages themselves.
Speaker 1: So it was meant to streamline that process, and in
Speaker 1: the company released an enormous multi media game. It spread
Speaker 1: across seven compact discs. So you've got to also remember
Speaker 1: Sierra existed in a time that went from cartridges and
Speaker 1: cassettes to floppy disks, and then from floppy disks to
Speaker 1: compact discs. And at this point they had done a
Speaker 1: few compact disc based games that included multimedia in it,
Speaker 1: like full motion video, full music, full sound effects, that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. So by they were able to release
Speaker 1: their most ambitious game in this realm, and it was
Speaker 1: called Phantasmagoria. It featured live actors I think there were
Speaker 1: twenty five for an actors in the actual game, three
Speaker 1: dimensional backgrounds the characters could move around, also took advantage
Speaker 1: of the latest in PC hardware. This was a point
Speaker 1: and click adventure game and it was also a labor
Speaker 1: of love for ROBERTA. Williams herself. The game was a
Speaker 1: commercial success, but it received some mixed reviews from critics
Speaker 1: at the time. It also had experienced numerous delays before
Speaker 1: it finally came out around the same time the company
Speaker 1: was on on the verge of becoming a true behemoth
Speaker 1: in the software industry. I'm talking about on the same
Speaker 1: level as Microsoft. Microsoft of course a big software company,
Speaker 1: but Sierra was almost neck and neck with them. And
Speaker 1: it was around that time that See You See International,
Speaker 1: the company that made that shopping service I had talked
Speaker 1: about a second ago, decided to make a move to
Speaker 1: acquire Sierra. Ultimately, they struck a deal for more than
Speaker 1: a billion dollars in stocks. That's the one I mentioned
Speaker 1: at the top of the show. Sierra would end up
Speaker 1: joining a few other companies that were on under the
Speaker 1: youth the umbrella that seu C owned. They created a
Speaker 1: brand called Sendant Software. One of those other companies that
Speaker 1: Sierra joined was one called Blizzard Entertainment. I'll probably have
Speaker 1: to do an episode on Blizzard sometime in the future.
Speaker 1: And Ken and ROBERTA. Williams stayed on with the company
Speaker 1: after that acquisition until a year had passed, and in
Speaker 1: November they retired from Sierra. Ken Williams at that point
Speaker 1: had become pretty disenchanted with the way the company had
Speaker 1: been going. He really was having issues. Ever since they
Speaker 1: had gone public. They had stuck around to provide some
Speaker 1: leadership during the transition, but they wanted to move on
Speaker 1: with their lives and since then they've done a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff that has nothing to do with software, mostly
Speaker 1: sailing around the world. Now back at Sierra. Under the
Speaker 1: Scendant Corporation that was formed after c UC merged with
Speaker 1: another company called h F S Incorporated, the company that
Speaker 1: was Sierra split into four major divisions, so now you
Speaker 1: had kind of four sub brands under the brand of Sierra.
Speaker 1: There was Sierra Sports, which obviously was all the sporting titles,
Speaker 1: Sierra Home which was all the non game software titles,
Speaker 1: Sierra Attractions, which was casual games stuff like poker, that
Speaker 1: kind of thing, and Sierra Studios, which were all the
Speaker 1: big name games that people were expecting from Sierra. They
Speaker 1: published some games and expansions that are pretty well known
Speaker 1: around that time, such as Diablo Hellfire. They didn't develop Diablo,
Speaker 1: but they did publish an expansion pack for Diablo, and
Speaker 1: they also published Valves game Half Life. This was sort
Speaker 1: of a response to that passing up of ID earlier.
Speaker 1: Uh In there was a big scandal at SEU see
Speaker 1: that parent company, and it involved an accounting fraud case
Speaker 1: and so as part of the fallout of this, CUC
Speaker 1: decided that they wanted to divest divest themselves of some
Speaker 1: of their assets, including Sierra. So there was another company,
Speaker 1: a French company called Havas s A, which purchased Sierra
Speaker 1: at that time. I also mentioned that around this point
Speaker 1: Sierra began to transition from developing and publishing games to
Speaker 1: mainly just publishing them. A lot of the development houses
Speaker 1: got shut down in the company underwent a reorganization and
Speaker 1: two hundred fifty positions were eliminated as a result. Layoffs
Speaker 1: included longtime employees like Scott Murphy, that co creator of
Speaker 1: Space Quest and Al Low, the guy behind the leisure
Speaker 1: suit Larry series. He got laid off at this time too.
Speaker 1: Not long after that, the company held another reorganization, so
Speaker 1: they had just gotten rid of two hundred and fifty positions.
Speaker 1: After the second reord they got rid of another hundred
Speaker 1: positions and in two thousand Havas Esa became part of
Speaker 1: Vivendi Universal and in two thousand two Sierra Online was
Speaker 1: renamed as Sierra Entertainment. Now Sierra continued to be used
Speaker 1: law actually as a brand name for a publisher for
Speaker 1: the next several years, so between two thousand two and
Speaker 1: two thousand eight, Sierra published games, but it was almost
Speaker 1: like the name of Atari, where the name Sierra had
Speaker 1: very little connective tissue to the company that had existed
Speaker 1: in the eighties and nineties. It was almost more like
Speaker 1: just a brand name um that could be slapped onto
Speaker 1: any game that was being developed under Vivindy for whatever purposes.
Speaker 1: It might have been a budgeting thing, saying this division
Speaker 1: needs to publish this game. In two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: the Vindi Games merged with Activision to create Activision Blizzard,
Speaker 1: and Sierra was transferred over to Activision as a result
Speaker 1: of this merger, and the brand would remain dormant. It
Speaker 1: kind of disappeared. It still technically existed. There was a
Speaker 1: point where it sounded like Activision was looking to sell
Speaker 1: off Sierra, and for a while it just seemed like
Speaker 1: Sierra was gonna just gonna be a thing of the past,
Speaker 1: us that it was no longer going to be a
Speaker 1: relevant term. And then in two thousand and fourteen, seemingly
Speaker 1: out of nowhere, the Sierra website was updated and said
Speaker 1: that there would soon be some interesting news about Sierra,
Speaker 1: including new games coming out, and if you go to
Speaker 1: that web page now you'll see you can download the
Speaker 1: original King's Quest if you like. And there's also promise
Speaker 1: of things to come. So the Sierra story is not
Speaker 1: necessarily over. We may see a renaissance of Sierra Online
Speaker 1: Sierra Entertainment, so we'll keep our eyes out for that,
Speaker 1: but for now the story is at an end. Uh.
Speaker 1: It was a dramatic rise in popularity, and we could
Speaker 1: probably do full episodes about some of these games and
Speaker 1: their impact on the gaming industry and how they developed
Speaker 1: over time. But obviously, if we want to be more succinct,
Speaker 1: then we need to draw this episode to a close
Speaker 1: and maybe in the future I'll cover some of these
Speaker 1: in more detail and more depth. If you guys have
Speaker 1: suggestions for topics I should cover on tech stuff, whether
Speaker 1: it's a company or a personality or specific technology. Maybe
Speaker 1: you're sitting there thinking, I just want to know really
Speaker 1: where telescopes came from and how they work and all
Speaker 1: their varieties. You should let me know, and it doesn't
Speaker 1: have to be telescopes, could literally be any kind of technology.
Speaker 1: Just send me a message. You can write to me.
Speaker 1: My email addresses tech stuff at how Stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: or you can drop me a line on Twitter or Facebook.
Speaker 1: The handle there is tech stuff hs W. We also
Speaker 1: have an Instagram account at tech stuff hs W. You
Speaker 1: can see all sorts of interesting stuff that Crystal is
Speaker 1: posting over there. And remember, you can watch us live
Speaker 1: at twitch dot tv slash tech stuff. I record on
Speaker 1: Wednesdays and Fridays, and there's a chat room and everything.
Speaker 1: You can be part of the crowd, chatting with me
Speaker 1: and distracting me as I try and tell you interesting
Speaker 1: facts about technology, and I'll I'll do you again really soon.
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics is
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com.