Why SIERRA GAMES Failed (And How They Could Have Succeeded) 

I think you hit the nail on the head with Activision not putting forth the effort necessary to make "New Sierra" successful. But I want to tell you what it's like working for a large publisher from My experience at THQ. They were at one time in the mid 2000s the largest video game publisher... When you're publishing many games, your job as a publisher is to provide the high level guidance to make sure you make every game as profitable as possible. That might mean simple things as changing the cover putting a gun in the character's hand, and telling the developer to add one gun segment, or could be deep market research and communicating to the developer what kind of players are going to be playing the game, so dev teams can test against those kinds of players to verify the gameplay they are making matches the competition. At the end of the day big publishers put out samey kind of games not only because they make money, but the player education necessary to sell a lot of units takes a lot of effort and commitment from your entire publishing team to A) get the positioning right, and b) communicate that to the established people who buy the game, and c) educate new customers that this is a game they will like. When you look at the massive effort "New Sierra" would have had to put in to understand and attract players outside their wheelhouse, you can see why they abandoned the market segment. Telltale had immense success with The Walking Dead selling multi-millions, but Activision never could capture that level of success. And because they couldn't they gave up and put those resources into Blizzard and Call of duty proprieties, since they are still selling 20+ million per release. In terms of Personality, that's all Community Management and PR, and Activision has gotten away doing it the old way of just being a big nameless company. I took a ton of inspiration from Sierra when starting my company, building a story around it, and creating open communication channels to speak directly with the customers. At the end of the day it's our job to serve YOU the customer, and it's easy to hear it from you when we have those direct lines open.

My my first gaming experiences ever were with Sierra's games. I loved them. My dad started playing with me and taught me to play them on my single digits. The first game I got addicted to, in life, was 3D Pinball. Good memories of Sierra.

I came here to gain some of your insight on Sierra and left not only with that but also reassured that Soup is definitely On 10/10

I think the authors of the games and the characters are the ones who can select who to continue their legacy. However this must be coordinated with the owning company for copyright issues. The main issue here, do the authors want to continue "their legacy" with new episodes? I for myself, can't imagine Space Quest without both Scott and Mark's intellect, art, jokes, style...

Was afraid to watch this from the title but then realized it's How THE NEW SIERRA Failed! Yeah I think you're absolutely right, just didn't have the spirit and personality behind it. And I don't really get very excited about a game called Geometry Wars...I admit I do yearn for the olden days, if I get committed do I still get to play old school adventures in the asylum?!

Where did you get that screensaver of Sierra running on the computer behind you? I have been searching and cannot find a Sierra Screensaver to download..Thanks

Still think the real shame is that, while it definitely had its problems, the new King's Quest did some super interesting stuff, and got undeservedly overlooked. Sigh.

The biggest problem in the New Kings Quest was that he never was kicked out of the Condo Association. The storage requirement were actually on par. But I wish NVIDIA called there GPUs the RA-RA-Boom GA

I was brought up with the original point and click adventure games. I had all the Sierra games, and most of the lucasarts games too. Zac mcracken, maniac mansion indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis, willy beamish, heart of China, leisure suit Larry, space quest, police quest, monkey Island etc... those where my favorite game genres of the 90s and its such a shame the old point and click adventures aren't made anymore.

The first episode of kings quest in particular really pulled at the nostalgia strings for me

Admittedly Geometry Wars pretty much solidified the twin stick shooter as a genre and was one of the early big examples of how small gameplay focused internet distributed games could work and work well. It was a real darling of the Xbox live arcade. I'm not terribly surprised it got a revitalization.

I'm not sure that Sierra's new take "Hey, Telltale does their games in episodic releases, we'll have to do that too now!" did it any favors either... Not that it'd be that relevant anyway, as these games never sold any Activision numbers of copies even back in the day when Sierra ruled the world.

Sierra didn't fail. Ken decided to sell and move to Redmond. Fail is the wrong context I think. The old sierra did not fail (pre sell off to Activision). The new one basically faded away yes because of the failed KQ remake etc. I remember on my second tour of Sierra in Oakhurst - Ken explained everything and what his plans were.

man now i want an uncensored hot take on Daedalic Entertainment and the new leisure suit larry.

For me it's when Sierra tried to compete in the newly formed 3D era. Kings Quest 8, I'm talking to you.

I am playing Elden Ring while listening to this and fighting a giant flower with flaming swords.

I hear the ‘Cloud Temple’ music from Spyro when I hear the ‘Sierra’ logo pop up. 👌

Came for the story, stayed for the swearing!

As a kid I remember the names Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy being just as recognizable to me as Steven Spielberg. In Space Quest III we finally got to see the faces behind those names, and they were aliens from Andromeda. It explained a lot.

Activision like many other large companies are very bureaucratic and did not care about the Sierra brand or the games, they merely temporarily revived the brand and an ip to avoid trademark and ip abandonment issues. Vivendi did the same lazy move in 2007 when they released the sloppily put together "quest collections". Sierra's biggest mistake ever made was when Ken allowed the company to be listed as a public company on the stockmarket which then made it the target of a hostile takeover by a greedy shortsided company the Cendant Corporation only looking to cash in on the dot com boom at the time.

Great video, and I agree 100%. I’m curious as to your thoughts on the new LSL game. Is it that bad? I haven’t heard much about it. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!!

They should give the creators there rights to there games seeing the big companies aren’t doing shit with the titles

The new King's Quest was really good! I enjoyed it quite a lot actually, but I don't know how much of that is some nostalgia talking.

It's a shame how branding works in this world; something (Sierra) gets beloved by being innovative and taking risks and being personable, only to have their success draw the attention of Dragons who take their treasures and sit on them just in case their valuable. That is if they don't pervert them into something it never was as if they can lasso loyalists and fans of the most popular genre all at once. Sure, Sierra On-line was trying that somewhat too, but I like to think if they could have survived their situation into the millennium maybe they could have realized they that not everything needed MOE levels of "innovation" (Gabriel Knight 3 was a great game IMO, as the last of the "old guard"), and catered to the audience adventure gamers they had cultivated - either with the lower budget typical of these days, or figured out how to innovated in a flashier direction. But then, maybe they would have turned into a different kind of Dragon then Activision is - with too many patrons to be that personable. Either way, i think I was pretty naive 27 years ago, expecting by now we'd have King's Quest 23, Space Quest -20 1/2 and Gabriel Knight and Laura Bow Mysteries comparable to Poirot's, all more or less in the spirit of what they once were. I mean what actually keeps doing that, Final Fantasy? Only books seem to be able to sometimes stay true to what they were, over so long a time.

Hi i was wondering if anybody knows who owns the exculsive and copyright rights to the 1995 sierra game phantasmagoria.

I also wonder how the MicroProse resurrection will turn out that is currently in the making...

I enjoyed the first chapter of the new King's Quest, but the second chapter was so difficult that I stopped playing it.

Despite being a huge fan of Sierra and King's Quest, I never bought the new games, because I just didn't want to give Activision that much money for something that might be total shit. I see other fans here commenting that it's good. I will have to pick it up one of these days...been watching for Steam sales but so far I haven't seen a discount deep enough for me to jump on. So yeah, I guess I'm part of the problem. I can't say I feel too guilty though considering how many re-releases of all the old games I've purchased and re-purchased over the years...

I'm here because of my love for Sierra games...good video you should add visual effects to your videos

I'm wondering what's going on with the old Sierra HQs, like the one in Oakhurst. It would be cool to visit, a piece of Sierra's history I think. I think it would be cool if it was turned into like a Sierra museum or something. I know this has nothing to do with the video, but thinking about Sierra's past and fall made me wonder this.

The biggest crime that Activision did was not using the Sierra name on the Crash and Spyro games, since Sierra published the games since 2004.

My #1 greatest hope is that the company, to remain unnamed here, would allow for all of the old classics to be ported into VR. This is where those games were meant to go. I would replay damn near their whole adventure catalog again in VR and probably be happier then ever playing video games. Please lord, please!

Sierra's strong suit were the AGI/SCI engines. It's hard to compete with something like Unreal Engine nowadays. But if they want a come-back they could do the same thing that got them started. I.e create an updated adventure style game for the modern hardware, first using Unity or whatever. Use modern techniques, motion capture, touch screen, VR etc. Then, using that game as a prototype, see what works in an adventure game, does it sell, prototype it, tweak it. And then make a specific engine + tools for that type of game.

The revitalization of the Sierra brand is pretty much identical to when they tried to revitalize Atari. It just feels hollow. You know no one from the original company is involved.

These are great keep them up.

I am sure someone else must have mentioned it but there is also yhe gabriel knight and phantasmagoria franchises

Great video (constructive comment: Could have benefited from a small bit of self-editing, but meh, I'm picky, and considering the length of this post, who am I to criticise!). As an old-school Sierra Quest games fanatic... I'm not quite sure why the 'relaunch' of the brand didn't work. I haven't played the (then) new 'King's Quest' game so I can't comment on it directly (It takes a LOT for me to ever want to sit down and play a new game nowadays), you raise some good points and I feel there were a number of elements that led to the eventual failure. Personally I'm just not a fan of the modern 3D-esque graphics in such games - heck that's what even put me off of later instalments of LucasArts's legendary 'Monkey Island' series. Yes they might think they need "the new graphics" to appeal "to the yoof", but in my view the aforementioned style of graphics just does not work. HD 2D-style graphics for adventures games, else it just kills it. Maybe the 'retro' market (if that's what it would be termed) is just maybe a bit oversaturated. Sierra certainly wasn't the first "old name" revived by another label and likely won't be the last, but maybe average Joe Public consumer has got a little weird of it. From what I've seen, the new KQ didn't bring anything major or new or exciting to the table, so to average JP gamer, it likely just seemed yet another "old classic computer game tarted up with new graphics". Actually, I'd bet that half of the old-school players actually presumed this new KQ game WAS the old version with new graphics ... so maybe that's another point to consider, the simplistic title didn't really sell it. And at the end of the day... I just don't think Activision really understood their market or even who they were particularly aiming this new line at. "Buy up old games label... few old titles... revive couple of old popular games". All very sterile and generic and, as you say, with little real character or flair, of which the original Sierra titles were so famous for. I wonder if it will be the "official" end to the Sierra brand... I'd hope not as I feel there could be life for it, if handled and directed right, but I just don't think Activision had their finger on the pulse with it. There's been previous attempts at reviving old Sierra titles (My memory still blanks ouf the horrific Leisure Suit Larry revival... puke) and that (deservedly) bombed too. I think it potentially could be done but they need to go back to the drawing board of how they'd go about doing it.

IMO the only thing that would have worked was a Quest for Glory 1 remake... 3D, open world and with improved combat.

Regardless of any bad business dealings or mismanagement, the Sierra IPs that a lot of us came to love were doomed, anyway. Quest games were enthralling in the 80s and early 90s, but as the capabilities of computers and video game platforms increased, that style of gaming was not going to live past the 90s. As I recall, there was only a very brief flirtation with Full Motion Video point-and-click adventures (Phantasmagoria 1 and 2, Star Trek: Borg and Star Trek: Klingon come to mind) in the mid-to-late 90s and that was all she wrote. Those games would have had to have transitioned to either first person shooters or MMORPGs to have even stood a chance. Quest for Glory could have easily made the jump into the Diablo space. A Space Quest MMO does sound insanely fun right about now....

I miss the games I grew up on. Visited the CA. Grew up cross the freeway from the bellevue campus, tried to sell a game my friends and I created to them...

All I want is more space quest, Wilco must pay!

Truth is that nobody(or most people) cares about brandnames anymore nowadays. It's true for cars, it's true for tools, it's true for food. Product and price are important, it's not very important who makes it anymore.

I would love to see a remaster set of the quest for glory series and maybe even quest for glory 6???

I liked the new King's Quest, but they really shouldn't have followed the Telltale model by making it 5 episodes long. In fact, they could have just made enough content for 3 episodes and then released it as one big game. They lost a lot of steam (and sales) by overscoping the project and then releasing bits of it months apart from each other. Switching back to 2D wouldn't hurt either. With 3D, all the time spent painting beautiful backgrounds is now spent texturing rocks and trees. We can do so many amazing things with 2D art today, and adventure games are the perfect canvas to showcase it.

BTW, I would really like an SCI companion tutorial series if you know how to use it. The language confuses me.

Playing King's Quest II was one of the first games I ever played, followed by the Space Quest series. To me they seem much more enjoyable than modern RPGs. At the same time, I don't know if they'd make popular games today if they were active and had the budget, unless reinventing themselves to something far different. Though there is still a market for their old RPG type of game, it has become a low-budget release niche. If they made some big RPG with excellent graphics, some of the narrative components (like the mockery and sarcasm) would conflict with immersion fantasy that most games try to have. In a Sierra game, you took it serious, but you and the narrator never pretended you weren't playing a game, and had fun with that. Also, in those days you had to figure out how to do a puzzle and that was one of the key rewarding aspects. Perhaps now everyone would hear about the solution online and the games would pass in a blur. But if the same people were working on games and had all the needed resources to do whatever they wanted, I'm sure they'd make more hits. I just don't see how they'd succeed with their old style. That is, I think they'd succeed, because they were revolutionary at the time, but I have no idea what they'd do now. If the original team had gotten sent to the future, I think they'd make a bizarre new type of game that no one else did. Like maybe a VR game with adaptive AI character interactions. That said, I would try any sincere Sierra resurrection gladly. Miss the feelings of those games, and it would be great if there was one that had an active community of the old fans and got some new ones.

This is fun as shit to watch, and accurate as fuck. I love geometry wars too, but the loss of good Sierra titles is depressing

After seeing what they did with Blizzard Entertainment, it's no surprise to me that Activision bought the Sierra brand/catalogue, and let it go to shit. Bobby Kotick is a horrible person.

You said it, man! Agreed with most of your thoughts on what happened. I will say that Geometry Wars is fun, though. It's like an 80s arcade game on crack! That said, I think mainstream gaming is just way too different now. Just like the movie industry people want their big, epic games or they are focused on mobile stuff since so many casual gamers have multiplied ten fold thanks to smart phone usage. I know I am kind of spitballing here, but I guess you could sum up my point by saying the average gaming environment doesn't have the attention span for adventure games, even when they are more briskly put together and way more user friendly like Telltale games and the new King's Quest. It's a tough part about getting old. I love the 16-bit era for gaming consoles, for example, and as time goes on I can't help but see less and less attention on that era, aside from the most popular RPGs from that time or whatever.

At one point, Sierra took a really hard turn, in a new direction, that seemed to put an end to everything. They acquired Berkeley Systems, and seemed to kill the age of screen savers and adventure games, in one fell swoop. They then changed focus to online casino type games. Don't know what was going on behind the scenes, but the whole thing seemed to be a conscious decision - not necessarily a gradual decline.

I miss sierra. I always liked strategy games. I still play lord's of the realm 2 and lord's of magic from Sierra.

Well, considering the timing, The Gabriel Knight Remake was supposed to be part of this and then just wasn't...

I couldn't imagine getting an email response from the CEO of my favorite gaming company. I'd be giddy for days telling everyone about it.

Sierra made a ton of my PC games growing up, including NASCAR Racing II, and my most beloved PC game of the 90’s, Silent Thunder: A-10 Tank Killer II. It was odd to see them go from seeing their branding on game boxes to nothing.

I think for us in the adventure game echo chamber it‘s very easy to overestimate the value of these dusty old franchises…

The only King's Quest game which I liked was King's Quest 6. And I've yet to complete an entire playthrough of it because I kept getting stuck in the middle. Eventually I'll finish it completely. It's my goal.

It was such a disappointment that they quit so quickly.

are you dutch or scandinavian? norwegian maybe?

they could remake all caesar games, it is soo god btw

Well maybe things might change since Microsoft bought Activision-Blizzard so once the deal is finished going through the grace period that it needs and the FTC accepts it then they might do something with the Sierra IPs. Phil Spenser head of the Xbox Division of Microsoft said that he is interested in King's Quest again but who knows what might and could happen. I never played the Episodic King's Quest game but I do own it on Steam. I may play it to see how is it because I heard it was not that great. I loved Wadget Eye's Games especially the Blackwell Legacy games those are awesome. Telltale also did a good job with their adventure games. The Back to The Future the game is awesome it like playing the 4th movie.

Plus, I think a big reason could be that stuff was going in the true 3D direction and their adventure style doesn't really translate to that very well. The newer Kings Quest Mask of Eternity was very bland and dark. 3D engines back then were more suited to FPS games cause for some reason it was hard to make colorful upbeat graphics and the style just doesn't really fit the 3D environment.

Can someone make kings quest in vr?

I say this with sadness... but I don't think Sierra will ever return to its glory days. The problem is, it is not the "new-Sierra" per say who is the problem, but rather the new-Sierra is merely the symptom of a changed gaming world on a global level. You see... the early 90's was a totally different universe... and a much simpler world. There were no mobile phones, no internet (at least not a "global internet"), no social media, no iphones/ipads, etc... You must know what I am talking about (since I assume you are a late Generation X person, born in the 80's, am I right)? It is undeniable that all these things mentioned completely flipped the entire gaming World (and not just Sierra) 180 degrees. Of course, I won't deny that some modern post 2010 games for instance have some really good ideas and concepts, but the problem is that the "electronic plane of existence" in the World spiraled out of control after the start of the second millennium, leading to a changed society. Social Media and mobile phones made it permanently impossible to return to the good olden gaming days. Therefore, as long as the World doesn't change on a global level and remove its uber-excessive capitalistic mindset, the olden days of creativity will not return. This comment is more of a philosophical reflection instead of a specific explanation though. I hope it sheds on philosophical light on today's gaming society though?

Almost 2021 ---- NEW GAMES are still coming!!! According to Sierra's website!! WOO!! ~holds breathe~ I kid, no wanna die!!!

Read Kens Book! Not all fairytales have happy endings

I enjoyed the first of the new Kings Quests. I think there's room for a time traveling police fuck quest investigation game though. Wish it could be.

The mountain is real. It's called Half-Dome. It's in California. It's better than that insane state deserves.

Lol, calling LSL fuck quest. XD I think I'd describe the game as raunchy or lewd humor. It's a good setup. It stood out if nothing else. I always enjoyed humor in adventure games.

I liked the new Kings Quest as a game, but as a Kings quest it was bad. The story was bananas 1. Graham being a dimwit 2. Two Valanice's. WTF!? 3. The Valanice you dont pick becomes Queen Icebella 4. Manannan being responsible for everything that happened from 1-6 The writing was less professional and more bad fan fiction

Because Sierra had a niche point and click market and when those games fell by the wayside so did Sierra. They never adapted. Not hard.

It failed because the one game they had sucked. I wanted so badly to love the Odd Gentlemen’s King’s Quest. I did. But everything about it was such trash. It didn’t feel like a KQ game outside of a guy with a feather in his cap, some puns (actually too many puns this time around)….the dragon and some medieval aesthetics. The rest of it, SUCKED. We needed the new King’s Quest game to be about inventory, puzzles, story and references to a slew of pop culture/fantasy/fairytale//adventure/sci-fi/mythological/biblical material and insanely creative death scenes. POINT & CLICK. Had they just made a souped up modern take on the game instead of trying to create something entirely different with the source material, I think they could’ve revived every single one of those franchises. I purchased the entire chapter series and didn’t bother checking for new ones after the third installment I think. I can’t even remember. I did, I really wanted to love this game…..but that first experience had me online asking chat forums “is anyone else going to make remakes of the originals for modern home consoles? Where are the Williams’!!!??!?!!”. and die hards are still waiting for this. The remakes and the new installments. Retro is hot right now. They don’t have to make some crazy 3D anything. Just a very polished and attractive, well designed, nostalgic and refreshing point & click adventure. We are still waiting!!!!

Everyone: please bring back the magic. Sierra: No Soup for you.

Far Cry of Duty :P

YOU FAILED!!! SIERRA GAMES RULED THE 80's!!

Original Kings Quest was a horrible series of games. It was, as far as I know, the ONLY Sierra game that was literally "broken" on purpose. I hated it. You could do one random thing wrong and never know it till 2 weeks of playing later. There was no way of knowing that the you were unable to proceed due to some unknow error earlier in the game. How stupid is that? "HAHA, you didn't know that the past 2 months of gameplay was worthless because you picked up the wrong random object 4 weeks ago..Take that!"

"Gone Home" and "awesome" don't belong in the same sentence.

Sierra never failed, you failed, Sierra was ahead of its time, just look at the graphics/artwork, the script makes today's boys pee in their pants. Stop crying. Whats with that woman-wig-of-the-90s'? If you wrote a bait-and-switch video then finger to you!