> It would never have been enough, not for Williams nor the board, for Sierra to have levelled out as, say, a boutique producer of high-quality adventure games.<p>Why not?!?<p>It seems like everyone in this story - Roberta, people who love games, (most especially) the employees who lost their savings, and even Ken - would be happier today if they had continued earning an honest profit doing what they did best. The scramble for more, more, MORE undid them all.<p>There's wisdom in the proverb "the love of money is the root of all evil". This story is a cautionary tale.
Great products loved by customers don't seem to be what the free market rewards. It's almost looks like customer passion is an inefficiency which the market tends to eliminate and not as an accident but rather as a general rule.<p>Customers love your product? Great, here's a very attractive offer, we buy the company and make it "efficient" which somehow tends to make the product shitty and the customers unhappy.
> Stock options had long been a major part of the Sierra compensation package, so most employees and former employees were affected by the overnight collapse in Cendant’s share price, and its continued fall.<p>Stories like this one and my own experience are the reason why I refuse to accept contracts where stock options are part of compensation package. The agents/hiring managers are quite surprised when I tell them that stock options are just a way to make people work harder for less money. It is a sweet deal for the company and a crap deal for the employee.
Microsoft owns the IP today. Would be nice to see them do something good with it. Space Quest, Police Quest, King's Quest, Quest for Glory, LSL, Gabriel Knight are all so good.
The old Sierra was such an amazing part of early computer gaming, mainly because nobody knew what genres the industry would eventually end up in. Imagine a single company today that makes games in the following genres:<p>* Police Investigations
* High Fantasy
* Fairy Tale Fantasy
* Sci-Fi Comedy
* Adult Comedy
* Arcade Games
* Educational Games
* Card and Casino Games<p>* and then had a subsidiary pretty much devoted to 3d Simulation and Action games.<p>and did all of those, including multiple sequels, in the space of less than 15 years.<p>The lack of rules also bit Sierra later on as players encountered more games from other creators and we slowly realized how unplayable many of the Sierra games actually were. But for the period where they dominated, they were kind of a wonderland.<p>Memory: I basically learned how to type playing Police Quest and Space Quest II.
As a case study:<p>- Don't let untrustworthy people in positions of confidence without controls and oversight<p>- Don't sell to untrustworthy parties<p>- Don't go public<p>- Don't take counsel of MBAs out to make a buck<p>- Listen<p>- Be cautious<p>It's incredibly hard to have the timing, build the team, and reach such a magic state of success. Guard it well and don't sell out so easily.
Lots of feelings seeing Sierra come up again. Lots of good memories playing Sierra games as a kid.<p>The story feels like it bears some similarity to the Dark Quiet Death episode from Mythic Quest. The video game industry, the husband-and-wife team, the rollercoaster of success and failure. Maybe just a coincidence. If you haven't seen it, it's a very good (and very sad) stand-alone episode. <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10084334/" rel="nofollow">https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10084334/</a>
^2020<p>An either thread: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24941667">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24941667</a>
This story reminds me of how the original owners of the Highland Mint (they make the coin for the Super Bowl coin toss) were swindled out of their company.<p><a href="https://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v19n06a31.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v19n06a31.html</a>
Similar fraud story with Dragon: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking</a>
I remember playing "Pharaoh" and also "Zeus: Master of Olympus". I really enjoyed those games.<p>In Pharaoh, you would manage the economy of an ancient Egyptian city and could build monuments and pyramids.
I always assumed that Sierra died the same way the majority of great game companies die: simply by being acquired.<p>It's interesting to hear that there was more to the story here.<p>Very sad.
Holy cow. Trying to read an article on Vice is atrocious. I’m ok with you needing to publish ads, but when it makes the site bounce around like dog chasing squirrels, I give up.
If you played the old sierra adventures you could literally feel there is something wrong with their corporate culture. And the programmers seemed to have a laugh.
> On July 20, 2018, Walter Forbes was released from the Federal Correctional Institute, Otisville in New York, a medium-security prison later to be occupied by Michael Cohen, the Situation, and Fyre Festival’s Billy McFarland. Forbes was convicted in 2007—after two mistrials—on one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and two counts of making false statements, and sentenced to 151 months in prison and to make restitution in the order of $3.28 billion. The house he’d transferred to his wife was returned to him, by court order, to be divvied up between the government and Cendant.<p>> Kirk Shelton was sentenced to 10 years and the same amount in restitution.<p>How can someone destroy a company like Sierra Online that touched millions of lives and ever get out of prison?<p>A better system would be to standardize a number of dollars of fraud is equal to a day is jail, and then just do the math to determine the jail time.
And of course the working people get screwed and bankrupted.<p>> Stock options had long been a major part of the Sierra compensation package, so most employees and former employees were affected by the overnight collapse in Cendant’s share price, and its continued fall. “I had a fair amount of my net worth at the time tied up in that stock,” says Mike Brochu. “Holy crap, it just plummeted to nothing.” Leslie Balfour, a writer and producer at Sierra until late 1997 saw her stock fall from $100,000 to $20,000. Al Lowe says he and his wife lost “the equivalent of a really nice home.”<p>...<p>> Less fortunate were the Sierra employees who’d borrowed on their stock options to buy houses, whose banks called in their loans when the stock fell and had to declare bankruptcy. “One of my employees,” Bowerman says, “went from being on paper a millionaire to being hundreds of thousands in debt with no way of payment. There were just dozens of horror stories like that.”<p>> “To this day,” he writes, “I am only 99% convinced that Walter was a crook. It remains unimaginable to me.”
wasn't this the company that famously started life by offering summer adventure game camps, but actually the helpless nerds were not allowed to leave and encouraged/seduced/coerced to write code 24x7 ? iir several participants years later had some trauma resurface about all that.. despite all that 'productivity'