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Comment by yters | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much of Sierra's demise was due to CUC vs. just the change in gaming landscape. Compared to the early 90's adventure gaming is non-existent minus nostalgic kickstarters. Sierra may still be alive today, but it may be on the same shelf as Nancy Drew mysteries.

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By the mid- to late-1990s, Sierra's publishing output was far more diversified than just adventure games. They owned a large number of subsidiary development companies (such as Dynamix, Impression, and Papyrus) that were creating games in a wide range of genres.

They also published a little-known game called Half-Life in 1998...

Great point. I forgot HL was originally Sierra. It seems they were able to adapt to the new market, so CUC can probably be blamed for their demise.

If not for the events in the article, we might have ended up with Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Portals.

Half-Life came out just about when I started gaming, and was when I first really picked up on Sierra’s existence.

Then right after, they were just gone. No more new games with the Sierra logo (that I saw anyway)

The cause and effect is really tough to straighten out.

There's certainly an argument to be made that Sierra's demise was the final nail in adventure gaming and the genre might still be alive if Sierra themselves had survived (and/or if Roberta Williams was left with the budgets to keep making them). Sierra helped push the budgets of adventure games to the point where no one could compete with them (except maybe LucasArts, and LucasArts didn't seem interested in competing to the same costs) and then after setting that unreasonable market perspective of what a AAA adventure game "should" be, they died. Even today most of the controversy with the "nostalgic kickstarters" is that a Kickstarter can't approximate (adjusting for inflation) even a tenth of Sierra's final few adventure game budgets (much less a quarter to a half of LucasArts' last few).

I don't know, look at what sells well: massively multiplayer games, and FPSes. As I mentioned in a previous comment, there are exceptions, but as a rule it seems if you're a game developer you're more likely to make a reaction-based shooter or real time thing, versus a subjectively-paced adventure game with point and click puzzles like Sierra or LucasArts games were.

It might be gaming culture changed as consoles got big and more people got interested.

It would be awesome to have the old Sierra games like King's Quest, Police Quest, Space Quest, etc. re-born as first-person adventures with photorealistic graphics.

Sure, if they retain the think-and-click feel versus becoming reaction-based hack and slash / shooters. In that case an emphatic yes.

I directly disagree for both King's Quest and Space Quest. So much of the worldbuilding and aesthetic value in those games was their animated styles.

King's Quest was about adventuring through fairy tales, and most of our cultural vocabulary around that has been built by Disney animated movies. I very much believe that KQVII hit nearly the epitome of the King's Quest "perfect" aesthetic with its hand drawn art (even if it went sometimes a bit too "Looney Tunes", and some of the embedded 3D effects did not age well) that evoked playing through a darker Disney or Bluth film. (That KQVIII exists right next to it as first-person and 3D stood even then as a stark contrast for why King's Quest is probably a terrible fit for first-person 3D, even if Roberta hadn't been kicked out of the project and it had tried for a better KQ storyline.)

Space Quest's aesthetic similarly had a lot of "Saturday morning sci-fi cartoon" in its DNA (such as Battle of the Planets, as one example to mind). Admittedly, part of Space Quest's aesthetic was all over the map if they could find a good joke for something they'd swap aesthetics on they fly for that joke (that's a big part of SQIV after all), but the tonality of the series very much never would fit with "photorealistic graphics" at least not for more than a joke or three. (Two Guys from Andromeda's SpaceVenture went 3D for cost reasons, but still seems to have settled on cell shading/cartoon styling over "photorealistic".)

Space Quest was a spoof on a bunch of shows - Buck Rogers comes to mind, but I'm probably older than you. Space Quest took itself a bit less seriously than KQ in that regard, with its many sci fi tropes.

Loved them both for different reasons. I thought Space Quest was really funny and intriguing as a kid. King's Quest V along with Monkey Island II are the first games I owned when my parents bought me a 386 SX with a VGA card. At some point later I got a Sound Blaster and suddenly had non-speaker-beeping music.

No it sounds like we're in a relatively close cohort age-wise.

I specifically tried to mention cartoon references and skipped mentioning any live action influences/parodies to Space Quest as the point was specifically that Space Quest is as much a cartoon influenced aesthetic as it is influenced by live action or "photo realistic" works (of which there are very many, too many to list), because the point I was making was that specifically I don't think Space Quest itself would work the same in live action/3D/"photorealism", and you would lose a lot of the intentional aesthetic moving to it. In addition to parodying live action works, Space Quest was a cartoon, not just for technical reasons but for art reasons.

I don't know, man. You might be onto something with the image of a first person cartoon-ish world. That aesthetic might be very cool and interesting. The quest for the most real realism will get boring eventually, right?

The painted and cartoonish world of the 2D adventure games was very cool (in fact I'm playing the Leisure Suit series now, that while not great, fulfills that nostalgic itch), but who knows what comes next.

It's not a zero sum game, however, as players typically buy from a variety of genres (sometimes in the same purchase) and play a large variety of genres over their lives.

It's a bit like saying that Hollywood should never make another romcom because all the blockbusters are superhero movies. While there are some crazy enough in Hollywood to suggest exactly that sort of thing, romcoms aren't generally directly competing for superhero dollars (usually; there are some films that some suggest are superhero romcoms), and exist just fine alongside them. It's not likely for a romcom currently to be considered a blockbuster or to be budgeted or pitched as such, but it's also not impossible, and it certainly doesn't mean that the romcom as a genre is dead because it generally won't be a "summer tentpole blockbuster" any time soon (no matter how much clickbait editorials want to disagree on that).

It's probably unlikely for an adventure game to again be that "summer tentpole blockbuster", and I'm of the opinion that they were only "summer tentpole blockbusters" very briefly under the reign of Sierra in part because of the Williams' and Sierra's reign, because they managed to make it so, in budget and in attitude. Now that the blockbusters are FPSes and such, people are still disappointed and generate so much vocal controversy when kickstarters are merely aiming to build "romcoms on a romcom budget" adventure games and can't afford the summer blockbuster spectacle that Sierra did at its peak. That's what I think "killed" the genre and keeps it "dead", far more than the competition with other genres or some "shift in gaming culture".

(And yeah, I've seen and reject the arguments that gaming culture as it grew mainstream grew a lot less "intellectual" as the computer and consoles went from being niche things only owned by "smart" people to everyone could own one to everyone did own at least one. First of all, that's just terribly reductive and generally far too dismissive of the average game player. Second of all, there's plenty of evidence the other direction: Ask a hardcore "twitch" gamer some day about minutia in Destiny 2 or Dark Souls or WoW and be prepared for flow charts and long detailed narrative digressions and spreadsheets full of math and raid puzzle solving. Talk to the gamers still pouring hundreds of hours in lovingly complicated simulations like Civilization 6. The "intellectual pursuits" in games never went away; some of it dispersed and migrated and changed shape, a lot of it is still around almost unchanged in some genres like simulation that managed to successfully curb expectations and resize budgets as fashions shifted.)

Think of another company affected by this merger - Blizzard.

In what way? Sierra had its head cut off (with the ouster of both Williams), Blizzard did not. It's very hard to compare the outcomes of both companies, because the internal political battles were a Highlander-style rochambeau where only one was likely to come out a winner. The article here even details how Blizzard was a direct contributor to Sierra's murder (via their past CEO Davidson) and a part of how Sierra's head got cut off in the first place.

Almost everything is a FPS or multiplayer... I mean all the big budget releases. Cyberpunk and Wasteland III are exceptions, as is Divinity OS and games like that. My theory is people want reaction-time games versus think-and-do games.

Or maybe I'm old and don't like the reaction-based (and certainly not multiplayer) games anymore.

Stop looking at AAAs and get yourself some indies.

Current Halloween sales are a good time to get 10 titles for $50 or something like that. If you look at the descriptions/reviews you're likely to like at least 2-3 out of the 10.

Steam has so much volume, it's tough to pick the signal from the noise.

Is Cyberpunk really an exception though? Isn't it an FPS in an open-world environment just like most big budget releases? Like GTA, Watch Dogs, Tomb Raider, The Witcher, Assassins Creed, Red Dead Redemption, etc, but with a cyberpunk theme instead? All previews and gameplay bits I've seen are basically just like those games and with nothing really truly unique or new except for the cyberpunky environment. I'm hoping for maybe a fantastic one-of-a-kind story that will make it justice but with all the hype around it, if it doesn't end up becoming the best thing since sliced bread, I'm afraid it may end up being a big disappointment, although I hope I'm wrong.

It kind of boils down to whether a battle is reaction-based or turned-based (the 'shooter' part) for me. The idea of first-person open world is still lovely, but it doesn't mean that everything has to require adrenaline and concentration and reflexes. For example, Fallout. Then some try to retain a classic feel with a top-down like Baldur's Gate 2 and D:OS and could one day be first-person.

> I'm old and don't like the reaction-based (and certainly not multiplayer) games anymore.

I still like them, but I have no time to train myself every afternoon and evening any more, so they’re mostly exercises in getting shot and/or killed all the time.

I think it's interesting that the development team wanted to turn King's Quest VIII into an RPG, despite Roberta Williams' attempts to direct them back toward the adventure genre.

As much as I look back on the adventure genre with a lot of fondness, it's definitely looking back; it's a pretty tiny part of the market these days.

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