Comment by deckarep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deckarep | Hacker News Reader

I loved Sierra’s games: it was my gateway into the world of computers and was my inspiration for being a software engineer. I still have all my Sierra games, original boxes, documentation, and disks.

I also have a few—around 24 issues of InterAction magazine.

Incredible Machine was different than most other of Sierra’s point n click adventures but still inspired nonetheless.

My plan at one point was to move to Coursegold California and contribute to building the next Sierra adventure...

Oh well...I’m older now, and just hack on distributed systems...but thank you Sierra for allowing me to be inspired and intrigued of what it means to create...

Okay I’m getting cheesy now...

To save people a lookup, this is one heck of a history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sierra_Entertainment_v...

please keep in mind sierra was "just" the publisher for a lot (most?) of these games, such as the one in question (TIM) which were actually developed by other game studios.

In the early ‘90s era almost all Sierra games were developed in-house. The Incredible Machine is a special case because it was developed by Jeff Tunnell who had previously co-founded a game company (Dynamix) that Sierra had acquired. So when he wanted to do his own thing outside of Sierra’s multimedia-oriented production system, Sierra decided to publish his game rather than lose him.

Sierra was just so great, particularly their Impressions Games group. Lords of the Realm, Civil War Generals, Caesar, the Dr Brain games

Sierra even published Half-Life

The Caesar series was my favorite growing up. And the other city-building games that followed, like Zeus, Pharaoh, and Emperor.

There have been a handful of indie games lately doing things in the same style, but nothing that seems quite polished enough yet.

They also published Homeworld. I've yet to find a comparable - let alone superior - 3D space RTS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com