from Hacker News

Sierra Gets Creative

by ColinCochrane on 8/29/16, 4:32 PM with 51 comments

• by shmerl on 8/29/16, 6:24 PM

  > One could wish that Roberta’s ambivalence about killing her new female heroine at every possible juncture had led her to consider the wisdom of indulging in all that indiscriminate player-killing at all

  It's interesting, how in comparison in Loom[1], there are practically no such deaths at all. The most that can happen - you'll get stuck with progress and will have to return to previous areas to finish what you missed. King's Quests on the other hand are infamous for brutal deaths caused by all kind of mistakes, like failing to feed hungry chicken in time.

  [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loom_(video_game)

• by danso on 8/29/16, 6:11 PM

  > Roberta Williams, an example of that rare species of adventure-game designers who don’t actually play adventure games, likely had little idea just how torturous an experience her games actually were. Taken as a whole, Roberta’s consistent failings as a designer seemingly must stem from that inability to place herself in her player’s shoes, and from her own seeming disinterest in improving upon her previous works in any terms but those of their surface bells and whistles. That said, however, King’s Quest IV‘s unusually extreme failings, even in terms of a Roberta Williams design, quite obviously stemmed from the frenzied circumstances of its creation as well.

  Wow, I had no idea that KQ4 was so controversial. I remember it fondly, though now that I think about it, I remember it fondly for its graphics and setting. I don't remember actually ever finishing it. All the KQ games do seem poorly designed in retrospect but I do remember chugging through the first few of them through trial and error. I've wondered if that perseverance is something that is part of the stupid bullheadedness of youth (or the weakness of age), or if at the time, we just accepted that games were supposed to be unfair and cruel.

• by mschuster91 on 8/29/16, 6:43 PM

  Ah, hearing the name "Sierra On-Line" brings back some memories. Caesar, Earth Siege... Does anyone here happen to know where their licensing portfolio/copyrights/code have ended up?

• by eriknstr on 8/30/16, 4:02 PM

  I found a video with a full play-through of King's Quest IV without commentary. The video is almost an hour long.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCqDIRMRTTY

  Interesting to watch, but I can certainly see what they meant when they said that the game was fundamentally broken, that it requires you to perform a bunch of actions which you must wander around trying to figure out pretty much without any help at all.

  As a play-through video, I enjoyed it. As I game, I would have become very frustrated, I would not have enjoyed it and I would have given up within short time.

  The story as a whole combines a lot of folk tales and IMO does so to pretty good success. I also think that there are some elements from the game which would be worth basing another game on for something like a gamejam entry. For example, the scarab that scares away the zombies and the mummy, that could be reused in such a game. Just, the scarab would not be so hard to come by.

• by stuart78 on 8/29/16, 6:12 PM

  Great post, I love the "basic" challenges of development back in the early days. Dealing with Sound, in this article, jumped out at me. We take so much for granted about how our computers work today.

• by justinlardinois on 8/30/16, 10:12 PM

  Worth noting that a bunch of Sierra games are in this week's Humble Bundle, including all of the King's Quest games at the higher tiers.

  https://www.humblebundle.com/sierra-bundle

• by danso on 8/29/16, 10:57 PM

  h/t r/themakingofgames

  A NBC News piece about Sierra Online in 1983; brought back lots of great memories, and feels like the 80's version of the feature piece on a startup unicorn: http://www.nbcuniversalarchives.com/nbcuni/clip/51A17175_s01...

• by roschdal on 8/29/16, 8:31 PM

  You might enjoy Ken Williams yatch blog: http://www.kensblog.com