[thejobloshow]

I was talking to guy who has been exchanging emails with Al Lowe, creator of the Leisure Suit Larry series, and we started chatting about how the new Larry game on the PS3 sucks and it would be awesome to do a reboot considering how good the technology is. Well, this guy already considered doing that but didn't bother after he found out that the people running Sierra at the end of the nineties DESTROYED all the documents related to older titles. Model sheets, artwork and animation cells from games like Leisure Suit Larry 7, Incredible Toon Machine, King's Quest 7 are all gone - not even soft copy was kept...

How crazy is it that these bean counters destroy this really valuable, cool stuff and make the same mistakes that film and television made in their early days... Especially when they didn't need to - We had the technology to store data and save it in 1999!!!

Imagine someone destroying all the artwork related to Street Fighter IV or GTA. What a sin.

[ozzie]

Aw, that sucks to hear. Yeah, that happens when the heads of a company aren't interested in games as games, but in games just as a money-making vehicle.
Maybe it was also part of their plan to reboot the franchises: keep the name, but take them in a totally different direction, therefore alienating the old fans and not really reaching a new audience. Only the Larry games made it to the market that way, but new King's and Space Quests made it also to various development stages.
So yeah, I agree with you.

[J.H]

I guarantee some ex-workers have some great rare animation cells etc that they "forgot" to destroy. It's a disgrace that they would do that though, I'm with you.

[aries323]

Why on earth (and the heavens?) didn't they give these as gift to the libarary of Congress? at least for documentation. I don't understand this at all. I'm still keeping an old copy of Angel Devoid around, even if I can't play it. Just untill the time where a game museum or a library might be interested in it.

Whenever I see someone with a lot of games, even from before the 1990's or the late 1980's, I'd encourage them to donate their collection (or part of their collection) to a museum or a library - just to make sure they're safe. Especially for those that will come after us - eventually.

And yes. ex-workers may have scrap and pieces for games...but back in
1999, we had the ability and the technology to save this stuff - at least on those big magnetic tapes.

[Collector]

Don't forget that a lot of this old material would not have been digital. There was all of the hand-drawn artwork for backgrounds, etc. not to mention all of the conceptual drawings, even if they weren't used directly in the games. True, these could have been digitized, but how good of scans would they have bothered with back then? Of course if it had been me, I would have made high quality scans and preserved the originals.