Adventure Gamers - Forums

Intense Degree - 18 March 2015 02:07 PM

Came across this and thought I would share.
http://www.nodontdie.com/al-lowe/

Thanks for the link to the article. I suspect a lot of current gamers started playing adventure games long after Sierra’s heyday, and haven’t heard about the original Sierra being destroyed by a hostile takeover.

tomimt - 18 March 2015 02:53 PM

Thats pretty old news. Sierra was indeed pretty much taken over by a couple of people who were sentenced to jail time about it later on. The end of Sierra really was a messy affair.

Well, anyone who stops making adventure games for other types of games is a criminal anyway. That’s just plain old common sense.

What happened was Ken didn’t really want to sell. Sierra wasn’t for sale at the time. Walter Forbes (head of CUC) was a longtime member of Sierra’s board of directors. Someone who Ken happened to trust. He approached Ken by surprise after a board meeting with an offer to have his company buy Sierra at roughly 90% higher than it’s stock price, for $1 billion.

Ken at first balked at the idea of selling when he heard the idea CUC had for what Sierra would be like post acquisition. Their plan was to buy several companies at once and merge them into one gaming giant. This made Ken feel Sierra’s identity and unique corporate image would be lost basically and so he made a list of conditions under which he would sell.

One was that there be a software board composed of himself, the head of what would be CUC Software, the head of Davidson & Associates, and the head of Blizzard Entertainment. No major software related decisions could be made without the agreement of the heads of this group.

He was to be made Vice Chairman of CUC, which would in theory make him responsible for the overall game group and thus put him in a position to protect Sierra’s interests. He would also main solely responsible for Sierra’s R&D.

What ended up happening was after the acquisition, CUC put Bob Davidson, of Davidson & Associates, at the head of CUC Software. Davidson & Associates was a children’s education company and they hated Sierra products (especially Leisure Suit Larry and Phantasmagoria), viewing them as demonic and blasphemous and wanted to recall or eliminate them completely, but only managed to cut their marketing budgets and take them off some shelves. They also messed with KQ8 and tried to take the religious elements Roberta had put into it. They also shut down a number of Sierra design groups. This led to warfare between Ken and Davidson, with them head to head often.

The promised software board only met once.

Ken was indeed elevated to Vice Chairman of CUC but found his post meant little in terms of actual authority.

Because of all the fighting and feuding, the Davidsons left CUC Software. Ken felt at this point, he should’ve been made CEO of CUC Software since he was the most experienced in the software field of the senior staff. Instead, they picked a guy from their marketing department who had no prior experience in games at all.

Ken stayed on at least in name as Sierra’s CEO until November 1997.

At this time, CUC merged with HFS, a hotel company, to form Cendant, a mega corporation with 50,000 employees touching on almost every area of business. Despite all the internal struggle, Sierra business wise was doing better than ever.

But then in March ‘98 it was uncovered that the CUC end of Cendant had been “cooking the books”—artificially and illegally using accountants to inflate their income. For years, Cendant had been losing money and actually been near bankrupt, but had bought up smaller companies to hide these losses and inflate their income. They used Sierra’s accountants to facilitate this. When all of this came out, Sierra’s profitability was pretty much destroyed and many of Sierra’s employees 401Ks, even of those innocent of any wrongdoing, were wiped out.

Cendant sold Cendant Software to Vivendi. Sierra, with a new CEO, and now in dire straits financially, began shutting down studios and eliminating non-high selling product lines (adventure games) in an attempt to save the company—What we know as Chainsaw Monday. They also ceased developing games in-house, with some minor exceptions,  to save money as well.

In all likelihood, if Sierra had been sold to an honest company, they’d probably have 30,000 employees by now and be on top of the industry. When they were sold, their only rivals were considered to be EA and Microsoft. They were the market share leader of PC gaming at the time of the sale.

Will love to see more SIERRA games.