"It didn't die. They killed it."

October 29, 2020 9:04 AM

The Death of Sierra On-Line a longread from Vice Gaming
posted by backseatpilot (17 comments total)

This was fascinating. Kings Quest was one of my favourite game series growing up, and it's good to read the post-mortem of why the company died. Friggin' capitalism.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 9:34 AM on October 29, 2020 [4 favorites]

There’s a secret of business that Ken Williams says he learned from Bill Gates. Ask an executive or a prospective hire for their golf handicap, and if they give an answer, write that person off. Serious executives don’t play golf.

Quoted for relevance.
posted by acb at 9:38 AM on October 29, 2020 [39 favorites]

Ken Williams was always just so comically inept at running a business, but somehow saw himself as the next Walt Disney. He was only ever propped up by the immense creative talent that he somehow was lucky enough to be surrounded with.

Capitalism is a diseased system that always seems to pick the worst people to place into positions of influence.
posted by zixyer at 10:41 AM on October 29, 2020 [7 favorites]

First, I'd suggest that the sierraonline tag be added; there's a lot of previouslies on the blue, some of them under that tag, some under sierra, some under both.

The business was called Comp-U-Card, or CUC. (Time obviously has been unkind to the acronym.)

These days, Brochu talks about Sierra like a gunslinger about that ranch where he could have settled down.

That's just a couple of great lines from this very-well-written article. I have to admit that my prior knowledge of Ken Williams came about 90% or more from Steven Levy's book Hackers, and it wasn't a particularly sympathetic portrait. His tendencies eventually came around to bite him in the ass, obviously.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:45 AM on October 29, 2020 [6 favorites]

+1 on zixyer. My first real job out of college was for the footnote company Williams founded after he left Sierra, and it was a mess, right down to another liquidation of the creative team less than a year and half after it was founded. Great people - Bowerman was there, as well as Al Lowe's wife Margaret, who was pretty awesome as head of Personnel/HR. Loved the people I worked with on a daily basis, but there was a tension between the upstairs (creative team) and the downstairs (software team and management).

It limped on for another 2 years trying to reinvent itself as webcasting software, but the product was already inferior to new entrants in the market. Maybe if Agile methodology had been more mainstream at the time, they'd have succeeded, but so much was 5-7 years ahead of its time. Broadband really needed to be in place for it to work.

I don't remember Williams as being in any way personable or "open to arguments," but maybe that was a response to feeling like feeling like he'd lost his first company. He definitely still liked flash, hiring Rush Limbaugh's producer as the executive producer for the online talk radio channels. Overall, I felt like Williams just couldn't decide whether he wanted to make something creative or make a lot of money. And just poor management skills. So many bad company-wide emails that sucked the morale out of work.

I will say in his defense that I had the most fun on that job that I've had in my career, and met and fell in love with my wife there. He definitely had the vision to carve out space for the right creative development, but there were too many market/finance pressures and he definitely didn't have the stomach for the constant churn of technologies needed to optimize the web in those early years.

I will say that when your vision is game design, I'd imagine it's very easy to get distracted by worldbuilding through M&A, or John Galting by 30. Shame that it's not changed much in tech.
posted by SoundInhabitant at 11:40 AM on October 29, 2020 [15 favorites]

Huh. It's interesting to compare this to some other post mortems of Sierra (for example) and see how little overlap there is. They say failure is an orphan, but this has many, many people claiming paternity.
posted by mark k at 12:09 PM on October 29, 2020 [4 favorites]

The Digital Antiquarian, who writes about early computer games (particularly intfic and simulation games) has many posts on Sierra's rise and fall.
posted by cheshyre at 2:34 PM on October 29, 2020 [3 favorites]

Ask an executive or a prospective hire for their golf handicap, and if they give an answer, write that person off. Serious executives don’t play golf.

Better to ask for their max bench. If they give it to you, you can still write them off. Serious executives do the military press.

Good, though depressing - I loved the first Gabriel Knight game - read.
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:02 PM on October 29, 2020

I've never heard of a tech story that ended well, even the successes. Would be nice to hear that someone works for a Facebook and enjoyed the niche they carved out. Even the Amazon story I posted earlier made it seem the suits came in rather quickly after the money started to explode.
posted by geoff. at 5:13 PM on October 29, 2020 [1 favorite]

I've never heard of a tech story that ended well

OTW and AO3 are doing just fine. Of course, they're not trying to make a profit.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 7:19 PM on October 29, 2020 [1 favorite]

Zixyer said, "...Ken Williams was always just so comically inept at running a business ..."

Zixyer, Trust me. Lots of people felt the same as you do. Many of them got their chance after I left the company. It didn't turn out so well. Running a software company is tougher than it looks.
posted by kenwilliams at 7:36 PM on October 29, 2020 [19 favorites]

The fun thing about talking about Sierra On-Line is that there is a non-zero chance that Ken and Roberta will read what you say. It is very early-internet in that fashion.

I think it is telling that everyone has a different theory as to why Sierra didn't ultimately survive. Ken definitely made some bad calls in his time, but there's smart calls and coodabeens in Sierra's history, too. (King's Quest V sold, as far as has been made public, probably double the sales of The Secret of Monkey Island, despite the wildly different critical reception these days. Sierra routinely outsold Lucasarts, even with Lucas' hobby money.) I'm not sure Sierra would have weathered the first death of adventure games particularly well, but then they did see the promise in Half-Life, and I wouldn't be surprised if Sierra's constant attempts at making online gaming happen would have paid off.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that Sierra failed because it was bought by charlatans, because I think that Sierra's mistakes (other than the last one) weren't as dire as some of the other big collapses in the gaming industry.
posted by Merus at 8:33 PM on October 29, 2020 [2 favorites]

I have so many child hood memories of waiting for lode runner to boot up- the foot steps, the little blue monster dragging out the logo: "Sierra".

Then building our own levels and playing co-op except as death battle, filling the level with honey pots, gas guns and nooses.

I was pretty gutted when I tried to install it recently- it should have worked, but the installer was 16 bit, so I couldn't even try the 32 bit on 64 bit.
posted by freethefeet at 8:59 PM on October 29, 2020

Zixyer said, "...Ken Williams was always just so comically inept at running a business ..."

Zixyer, Trust me. Lots of people felt the same as you do. Many of them got their chance after I left the company. It didn't turn out so well. Running a software company is tougher than it looks.

So several years ago (I'm not going to bother looking it up), I made a disparaging comment about Jim Butcher's novels and almost immediately regretted it. Like I don't know the guy but I just imagined him reading my comment and feeling crummy about it. I doubt he ever saw the comment, but since then I do my best to not directly criticize people online that aren't actively like villainous.

Also, jaw drop!
posted by Literaryhero at 4:48 AM on October 30, 2020 [1 favorite]

Serious executives don’t play golf.

WAAAAAAAY back in my insurance days, neither the CFO nor I, the CIO played golf. The CEO and the "guy in charge of Marketing" played golf. Make of that what you will.
posted by mikelieman at 5:56 AM on October 30, 2020

I was pretty gutted when I tried to install it recently- it should have worked, but the installer was 16 bit, so I couldn't even try the 32 bit on 64 bit.

I would look unto DOSBox, which is often capable of bringing games like that back to life. I don't see a lot of good news about folks who have tried Lode Runner in the past, but support may have improved since then.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 8:11 PM on October 30, 2020

I'm sympathetic to the idea that Sierra failed because it was bought by charlatans, because I think that Sierra's mistakes (other than the last one) weren't as dire as some of the other big collapses in the gaming industry.

One of the things about business stories in general is that people don't seem to see the sheer randomness or luck in it all. If Microsoft were to collapse Bill Gates would have been shortsighted in not seeing the Internet, cloud computing, rise of iPhones, you name it. We don't congratulate the first fish for figuring out how to climb out of the ocean. I'm sure if you were reading The Fish Street Journal you would have seen stories like, "Herbert McFish saw slime on land then got greedy and decided not to come back, he later died of asphyxiation. A fish shouldn't look to land to survive but perhaps maybe a quick meal once in awhile."
posted by geoff. at 11:44 AM on October 31, 2020