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Ken Williams’ book is out

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Thanks for the answers, Ken. Now, I do have to ask about this thing I just learned about King’s Quest 2. I tested it and this works on my copy of the game, it is legit.

The game allows you to use some rather unflattering words if you want to look at the female characters. So, you know, it accepts “look at woman” for every female character just as it accepts “look at bitch”. There are some even more unflattering ones I shan’t repeat here.

First, do you have any idea how those particular words were left in the lexicon of the game? And furthermore, did anyone ever write back to Sierra about them?

     
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Kenwilliams - 05 October 2020 04:59 PM

1) If you hadn’t been involved in the design process, how many Sierra games you could have solved without a walkthrough? Did you play games by other companies and did you finish them without any cheats/help?

*** I was never a gamer, and was never particularly good at adventure games. I am an impatient person and didn’t like agonizing over puzzles. I was a big fan of Leisure Suit Larry and Space Quest—and, especially Phantasmagoria, but suspected I cheated and called the designers constantly, even on those.

Did Roberta like and still played adventure games during that time? And did you rely on her opinion when you were regularly reviewing products from other teams and designers?

 

     
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tomimt - 05 October 2020 05:36 PM

Thanks for the answers, Ken. Now, I do have to ask about this thing I just learned about King’s Quest 2. I tested it and this works on my copy of the game, it is legit.

The game allows you to use some rather unflattering words if you want to look at the female characters. So, you know, it accepts “look at woman” for every female character just as it accepts “look at bitch”. There are some even more unflattering ones I shan’t repeat here.

First, do you have any idea how those particular words were left in the lexicon of the game? And furthermore, did anyone ever write back to Sierra about them?

I asked Roberta. She said she has never heard that before, and that if we (Sierra) had known we would have fixed it before the product went out the door, and probably fired the responsible party.

She also said, “Who found that? Why were they typing such things? That’s what I want to know!”

 

     
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giom - 05 October 2020 05:59 PM

Did Roberta like and still played adventure games during that time? And did you rely on her opinion when you were regularly reviewing products from other teams and designers?

 

I don’t recall Roberta ever playing another adventure game after she started making her own. I think she was always too busy. These days we are ALWAYS busy. We tried playing the newest Kings Quest game from Oddfellows and didn’t get very far, but liked what we saw. The problem with adventure games is that they take a lot of time and concentration.

We do want to take more time to enjoy things, but for whatever reason it will always be “tomorrow”.

     
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Kenwilliams - 05 October 2020 06:07 PM

I asked Roberta. She said she has never heard that before, and that if we (Sierra) had known we would have fixed it before the product went out the door, and probably fired the responsible party.

She also said, “Who found that? Why were they typing such things? That’s what I want to know!”

 

I think someone dug them out when they were making the game run in ScummVM. It may be, that without these modern engine conversion we might have never known, especially because some of the adjectives are relatively… creative.

     
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tomimt - 05 October 2020 06:25 PM

I think someone dug them out when they were making the game run in ScummVM. It may be, that without these modern engine conversion we might have never known, especially because some of the adjectives are relatively… creative.

Programmers can be sneaky b*st@rds!

Smile

-Ken W

 

     
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TimovieMan - 05 October 2020 03:01 AM
rtrooney - 04 October 2020 08:50 PM

However, if he was right about preferential treatment for older members, I’ve yet to see it, but am all for it. Turned 73 today and I need all the help I can get.

Congrats!

Thanks Thumbs Up

     

For whom the games toll,
they toll for thee.

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If you still read these Ken, I’d love to ask you if you remember any specific games you had to terminate back in the day during your product reviews. What I mean, do you recall any specific games you were at first certain sould have turned out good, but which fell on some problem or another?

     
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tomimt - 06 October 2020 05:25 PM

If you still read these Ken, I’d love to ask you if you remember any specific games you had to terminate back in the day during your product reviews. What I mean, do you recall any specific games you were at first certain sould have turned out good, but which fell on some problem or another?

I’m sure there were several, but only a few are coming to mind.

- Al Lowe did a political satire game, Capital Punishment, that never looked good
- Roberta designed a home organizer based on the Family Circle comic strip that was more in the productivity category (recipe database, insurance policies, wills, etc)
- I talk in my book about a product we were planning with John Travolta
- I started a project with Vincent Bugliosi that we never did anything with (he was the prosecuting attorney with Manson)

Generally .. if a game got as far as a running demo, we had enough money invested that we fixed it rather than killing it .. but .. I’m sure there are a lot I’ve forgotten or am not thinking of now.

 

     
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oh Bugliosi?, sounds interesting, but yet with all due respect to how you view of him Ken, I am just glad this project was never made, for all i know he wasn’t so clean after all himself, lead a life that’s full of scams and power misuse that was always kept in the dark, even before ‘69.

the latest book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties,  went thru all these gray areas of Bugliosi, Manson, and the Scene in a collective way which is indifferent and more neutral than any book (or any kinda multimedia) written or given about those very late 60s incidents.

however, it is yet after half a century has gone by, and Bugliosi’s death his story is the only way those times were documented; its only Helter Skelter and nothing else ever gonna be remembered, and guess when it comes to this vision there is nothing really left unsaid.

     
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I’ve heard about that Al Lowe Capital Punishment game before, he has mentioned it in a couple of interviews, but by all counts, it does sound like something that would not have had that long of a life span.

About Sierra Network, you did mention, that you didn’t quite manage to find a way to make it profitable. What did you think later on about Ultima Online which managed to crack that dilemma? I do believe it is often touted as the first MMO to actually make a profit and what made EA shift their focus on online multiplayer games.

Also, in this time of crowdfunding, the budgets of games often turn up in discussions. Do you recall in what kind of ballpark Sierra games were in the ‘80s and the ‘90s? Obviously, there’s inflation that needs to be taken account, but approximately.

And on the same breath, Sierra did produce some remakes of their older titles, like King’s Quest 1 and Space Quest 1. Were they disappointments commercially? Did they underperform from their initial projections?

     

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Sierra On-Line had some absolutely amazing marketing and iconic branding. Some things jump out as obvious: the Quest series titles, the use of similar menu icons and designs across Quest games, the steady release schedules for each Quest line, and InterAction magazine all come to mind.

Are there any elements of the Sierra marketing and branding that strike you as having been particularly effective, in hindsight? And what determined when a game was given the “Quest” title, as opposed to some different title? (For example, why wasn’t Pepper’s Adventures in Time called History Quest?)

     
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Advie - 06 October 2020 06:58 PM

oh Bugliosi?, sounds interesting, but yet with all due respect to how you view of him Ken, I am just glad this project was never made, for all i know he wasn’t so clean after all himself, lead a life that’s full of scams and power misuse that was always kept in the dark, even before ‘69.

the latest book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties,  went thru all these gray areas of Bugliosi, Manson, and the Scene in a collective way which is indifferent and more neutral than any book (or any kinda multimedia) written or given about those very late 60s incidents.

however, it is yet after half a century has gone by, and Bugliosi’s death his story is the only way those times were documented; its only Helter Skelter and nothing else ever gonna be remembered, and guess when it comes to this vision there is nothing really left unsaid.

I knew nothing about him other than reading Helter Skelter. You’ve intrigued me that there is more to the story. I’ll dig deeper. After I signed him up I tried to excite my team about working with him and no one at my end was interested. I guess I was the only one who was excited about the idea of a Legal Quest type adventure game.

The project went nowhere…

     
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tomimt - 06 October 2020 07:07 PM

I’ve heard about that Al Lowe Capital Punishment game before, he has mentioned it in a couple of interviews, but by all counts, it does sound like something that would not have had that long of a life span.

About Sierra Network, you did mention, that you didn’t quite manage to find a way to make it profitable. What did you think later on about Ultima Online which managed to crack that dilemma? I do believe it is often touted as the first MMO to actually make a profit and what made EA shift their focus on online multiplayer games.

Also, in this time of crowdfunding, the budgets of games often turn up in discussions. Do you recall in what kind of ballpark Sierra games were in the ‘80s and the ‘90s? Obviously, there’s inflation that needs to be taken account, but approximately.

And on the same breath, Sierra did produce some remakes of their older titles, like King’s Quest 1 and Space Quest 1. Were they disappointments commercially? Did they underperform from their initial projections?

I wanted to be the publisher for Ultima Online, that Richard was calling “Multima” at the time… I don’t remember why a deal didn’t come together. I think Richard wanted a bigger budget than I wanted to spend, and I was losing a lot of money on The Sierra Network at the time.

The remakes of our older titles did very well. We were delighted with the sales. They didn’t need to sell many copies to break themselves even, so .. they were profital quickly. My guess is that the budgets for the “upgrades” was in the $50,000-$100,000 range. We would have had around $15/unit of gross profit .. so at even 5,000 copies we were making money.

As to budgets for games .. it depended on the game, but most games (in the early 90s) were probably budgeted around $750,000 to $1.5 million. Phantasmagoria was the outlier—with a budget of around $6 million.

It has been over 20 years .. so, no promise of accuracy on any of this!

-Ken W

 

 

 

     
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WitchOfDoubt - 06 October 2020 07:19 PM

Sierra On-Line had some absolutely amazing marketing and iconic branding. Some things jump out as obvious: the Quest series titles, the use of similar menu icons and designs across Quest games, the steady release schedules for each Quest line, and InterAction magazine all come to mind.

Are there any elements of the Sierra marketing and branding that strike you as having been particularly effective, in hindsight? And what determined when a game was given the “Quest” title, as opposed to some different title? (For example, why wasn’t Pepper’s Adventures in Time called History Quest?)

The digital versions of my book are only around $7—and I have all of our product and marketing strategy in the book (http://www.kensbook.com) ..so, I’ll defer to the book for that answer.

Calling Pepper History Quest would have been a great idea! Why didn’t we think of that? We were ahead of our time with Eco Quest!

-Ken W

 

     

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