> It would never have been enough, not for Williams nor the board, for Sierra to have levelled out as, say, a boutique producer of high-quality adventure games.
Why not?!?
It seems like everyone in this story - Roberta, people who love games, (most especially) the employees who lost their savings, and even Ken - would be happier today if they had continued earning an honest profit doing what they did best. The scramble for more, more, MORE undid them all.
There's wisdom in the proverb "the love of money is the root of all evil". This story is a cautionary tale.
No. An unprecedent fraud undid them all. And nobody saw it coming. It took two insiders to roll over before anything came to light (ref: Cendant).
As many people point out, the CEO has some level of fiduciary duty to investors. If you refuse an offer with a 40% or so premium, you are going to be facing down lawsuits.
Finally, while Roberta was enjoying her position, Ken really wanted to quit all of the CEO crap. Finding a CEO to hand things over to is just as fraught as a buyout and probably more likely to bump into bad actors than a buyout.
Put it all together and there really was no good reason to refuse the buyout. If the purchasing company hadn't been a fraud, we'd be lauding the decision to sell instead of castigating it.
> As many people point out, the CEO has some level of fiduciary duty to investors. If you refuse an offer with a 40% or so premium, you are going to be facing down lawsuits.
I think a simple way to avoid this is to ask for a all-cash offer. Naturally it will be either non-existant or much smaller value. If the offer is still good, it is not a problem to accept it.
The problem here was that the sellers were accepting stock as a payment, which was garbage.
I don't think that would tell them much. All-cash requires that the acquiring company either have that cash on hand, go into (further?) debt, or sell new shares to the public to raise the money. Legitimate M&A deals that are in part or even entirely in stock are very common. A refusal to accept anything but an all-cash deal would certainly weed out a fraudster like this one, but it would also eliminate a host of good deals, too.
> Put it all together and there really was no good reason to refuse the buyout.
He claimed he did it to secure Sierras financial future, but didn't see it as an issue when CUC refused to share its financial data.
It might be a hindsight thing, but it seems that at least nowadays larger companies spend a lot of time going over finances and other economic data before they agree to that kind of deal.
> If the purchasing company hadn't been a fraud
They could have been completely honest and still been in a state where the buyout itself would have been enough to break both. Wouldn't be the first time a company overextended itself.
re: Ken and the ceo -- Ken is desperate for people not to understand Ken is an idiot. The article even points out everyone at Sierra told him not to do it.
It’s hard to turn down the prospect of making your and all your employees/shareholders investments pay off. In fact, many of them would probably angry if they heard you did that. The potential for an exit is one reason they worked for you and not bigco who pays more. And you didn’t get whatever success you had by ignoring opportunities that presented themselves.
Was it F-you money for most employees, though? Sure, it was a 60% premium over the current stock price, in CUC stock which promptly dropped after the announcement.
So I suppose if you were sitting on 300k in equity it was now worth 480k, but it's not like going from illiquid paper wealth to a liquidity event...and given the company's growth trajectory it seemed likely at the time that it would get there in a year or two on its own, without a (risky) acquisition.
Dunno, doesn't seem like a slam-dunk case of F-you money to me.
Alright, but the founders here were already liquidly rich from their IPO? At lease one of the execs (Roberta) was super opposed.
They didn't do it for the personal money, they did it because they thought their shareholders would sue them, at least in part, for turning out a deal that was too good to be true.
He should just have asked for all-cash transaction. I think it is fair. If they don't want to sell the company stock and buy the company with cash, or at least make an offer, then there is likelihood that there is some kind of fraud going on.
Easy to say in hindsight, but using stock to pay for a merger is common. Most companies are not carrying a big chunk of their value in cash (it’s not capital-efficient). Therefore buying anything sizable for cash will require the combined company to take on debt. So a stock-for-stock merger can result in a combined company that has a safer balance sheet. If the acquiree believes the merger is a good idea, they might consider owning stock in the merged entity to be a good thing. If nobody is offering them a competitive offer in cash, they don’t have much leverage to ask for it anyway. Even if you value the stock offer with some discount for risk, it can still be attractive.
It need not be a pure debt transaction, the combined company can sell stock to the public rather than the shareholders of the old company who may suddenly feel the need to liquidate.
This is why with my personal companies, I've always avoided issuing shares or giving equity to employees. It handcuffs you.
Note that I'm not saying that others who don't avoid those things are wrong -- they're not at all. They just have different business goals and priorities than I.
You're taking the right angle with greed (1 Timothy 6:9-11). But I think it goes beyond that:
> Williams wasn’t a game designer, but a visionary who saw the company always moving forward, leading the market with other genres, other software, online worlds connecting every kind of person. That Sierra is instead remembered, basically entirely, for these 2D adventure games from the eighties and nineties is, he says, because the company was killed.
With respect to Ken, I think his ambition outstripped his ability. He prided his company on being something it wasn't, and himself being something he wasn't either. Sierra had to be something big, he had to be something big; his favored fraudster knew exactly how to exploit that self-illusion. In reality, Ken's own wife hints that Ken was struggling as CEO even before selling, e.g. failing to see through people, over-relying on lieutenants when making decisions, etc.
For all the talk of murdering Sierra, I find it interesting Ken doesn't name the culprit. Not the fraudster or his cronies. I think that's because Ken is the one who let them in his house.
Maybe you've also read his self-published autobiography, but his character flaws are front and centre. He's explicit about his vanity and overconfidence, painfully honest about personal snubs from Gates etc. He comes across as a permanent outsider, just one of those people who never acts on any feedback. So I think he knows.
If you loved the company, it's a very interesting book.
> He prided his company on being something it wasn't
To be fair to Sierra, some of their final acts were publishing Half Life, Homeworld, and an expansion for Diablo. They may well have become an enormous publisher if not for the CUC mess.
Re: homeworld, it was one of the greatest games of the 1990s and I remain delighted that it received sequels and a refresh. I have nothing but fond memories of the series and still play it regularly
It's a pretty amazing combination of greed and stupidity.
> “They hated it,” he remembers of the board’s reaction. “Because we were on a roll. We were unstoppable at that point.” If it was an acquisition where Sierra would retain control, that’d be one thing, but a merger with three major developers under a parent with no software experience? "It was beyond bad inside Sierra."
Fundamentally, dude took stock. Which, unlike cash, made him and the shareholders dependent on ongoing competent execution, from a coupon company that was going to merge multiple software companies and magically continue shipping excellent software. When people asked what expertise does a coupon company have at shipping multiple types of software, it turns out the real answer was their expertise was selling to greedy fools. Pretty good expertise!
Ken ambitions killed Sierra, Ken wanted that G5. This https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr9_GfeoCjk [Tropic Thunder Tom Cruise Dancing to Flo Rida Low] is an accurate reenactment of how Walter Forbes lured Ken Williams into selling
Or, to combine your and the OPs points: if you take your company public, you will have to live by the rules of "the love of money". It's also the love of money that ultimately led to Sierra (the more creative company) being killed in favor of Davidson/Blizzard (the more business-savvy company) while they were owned by CUC and then Vivendi.
Seems like it depends on which translation of the Bible you're using. I personally prefer 'the root of all evil', which looks like it's the King James version (and perhaps others)[1].
"Scripture" can be proverb. There's a whole bit of the Christian Bible helpfully labeled "Proverbs", is there not?
I was intrigued by the idea (elsewhere in the thread) that the root difference is translation from the vulgate vs translation from Greek, though I don't have the background to evaluate the claim. Regardless, absent really good reasoning I'll defer to the KJV, for reasons of historical importance and literary quality. So many phrases in the NIV (and other modern versions) set my teeth on edge.
Thanks for that. It's been decades since I took Biblical Greek, but I still recognize a couple of words! I don't see the justification for the NIV's addition of "all kinds".
The translation process would have gone:
1) root of all evil is greed [eliminate non-English articles]
2) greed is root of all evil [swap to SVO syntax]
3) greed is the root of all evil [add required English article]
4) The love of money is the root of all evil ["translate" the vocabulary word into simpler terms]
There simply isn't any more faithful way to render that thought. You could stop at step three, but the KJV's genius lies in what a small vocabulary it uses. (I just checked: "greed" appears nowhere in the KJV, so the word was on the hit list.) The goal was to make the text understandable to the broadest audience possible - the vast majority of whom, at the time, were uneducated. That the translators were able to maintain that constraint while also creating something of incredible literary power is awe inspiring.
If you want to break it down a bit further, the phrasing in step three puts two stressed syllables ("greed is") together, which can be awkward, while the final version puts the verse into an iambic pattern (unstressed syllable preceding a stressed syllable), which rolls off the tongue much easier. The word "evil" then reverses that, which breaks the rhythm and calls attention to the end of the thought. (And, maybe, if you want to get especially literary or theological about it, provides a subtle commentary on the nature of evil.) It's so good.
It's a reference to Ecclesiastes (5:10) and Diogenes (Lives of Eminent Philosophers, VI.2 stanza 50), both probably well known by Timothy and the jews he was evangelising among. I'm not sure whether Diogenes used the word philargyria and can't be bothered to try and dig it up, but I think it's a rather literal translation of Ecclesiastes which has something like 'o-heb kesep', 'he who loves silver'.
Hebrew and aramaic doesn't have a word that directly translates to greed, but the meaning of philargyria is related to money rather than the metal and Ecclesiastes obviously describes 'love of silver' as a form of addiction and that's what Paul (or whoever actually wrote the epistle) had in mind when he wrote to Timothy and the jews he hung around with.
Thanks. I knew about the Old Testament reference, but not the Diogenes one. New Testament references to extra-scriptural texts are fascinating, and (in my experience, at least) mostly ignored in exegeses by biblical scholars within religious traditions.
Great products loved by customers don't seem to be what the free market rewards. It's almost looks like customer passion is an inefficiency which the market tends to eliminate and not as an accident but rather as a general rule.
Customers love your product? Great, here's a very attractive offer, we buy the company and make it "efficient" which somehow tends to make the product shitty and the customers unhappy.
I think one way to phrase this in a way that reflects how the market works is that sellers often very much under-value the worth of the brand itself, and buyers know this. If you can buy a brand for X and exploit the customers who trust that brand for 2*X, then it's worth it even if it destroys the brand that was truly worth 10*X in the process. The trouble comes when X is large enough to buy (almost) literally anyone out -- "F-You Money" -- and the seller don't care what the true value of the brand is because it's yacht time, baby. And the employees & customers get screwed.
If this is a problem we want to solve, the answer IMO is stuff like employee-ownership & unions.
I think that having corporate charter/bylaws include things like company long term health as a guiding principal over short term gains may do it. Along with explicit limitations on the money an executive can take in any given fiscal year.
> It's too abstracted from externalities - from slash and burn asset sweating, to environmental damage to abusive employment practices offshored or put at arms length through contractors
None of this is intrinsic to corporations, and all of it can be legislated away without changing what it means to be a "corporation". This is just thinly-veiled advocacy for communism.
Hard disagree - communism and under-regulated financialised free-market capitalism are not the only alternatives available. Numerous potential political and economic systems, and combinations of those systems have and will likely exist in the future. There's literally nothing inevitable about the particular mixture of state backed shareholder corporate structures that currently hold sway.
The international order as it stands today radically differ in substance and practice to the corporate, legal, tax and intellectual property laws of even a half century ago. Although of course the idea of a corporation dates back at least to the sixteenth century - when they were explicitly created as vehicles of colonization - East India Company, Virginia Company etc.
I'd go so far as to suggest we literally cannot continue as a functioning civilisation under the current international order. We likely agree on one point though, we're more likely to fail as a society than change it without violence.
I love Sierra games growing up, but I've come to understand that they were not great games and often quite user hostile, but benefited more from being early movers in an underserved market. They rightfully deserved all of the success they had at the time, but as the market shifted, they eventually just fell to those changes as most privately funded companies do. Not enough capital to pivot, and not enough capital to improve their core technologies through sufficient R&D.
Ken Williams tried to innovate into new underserved markets (e.g. dial-up gaming services pre-Internet), and "buy R&D" by acquiring other companies, which worked for a while. But his core founding game designers had been surpassed in the industry, and their location made it very hard to recruit new talent. The shift to higher resolutions and 3D obsoleted their core technology and the technical talent they had just couldn't keep up. (source: there's a few very good long-form interviews with Ken Williams on these business realities).
Sierra was not going to make it as a software house, the writing was on the wall for a while. They tried to switch to using their established sales channels and turned to distributing and did really well for a few titles like Half-Life and Homeworld, but then those companies went elsewhere with the market. By the "end" Sierra itself was mostly making card games, and then blowing most of their budget on buggy, late to market, and underperforming 3D versions of their main series.
Selling the company was really the only alternative for them, but once you do that you give up vision and control.
It's sad how they ended up, and I'm thankful for the memories, but things move on.
I love Sierra games growing up, but I've
come to understand that they were not great
games and often quite user hostile, but
benefited more from being early movers in an
underserved market.
Harsh, but so true.
(And I'm somebody who was absolutely enthralled by about a half dozen of their adventure games back in the day)
Even if Ken and Roberta hadn't lost control of the company, I'm not sure what Sierra would have offered the world creatively at that point.
They were eclipsed by LuscasArts in the world of point-and-click adventures, and it's not really clear they had another core competency on the game development side of things. If Phantasmagoria was any indication, they seemed to want to go in the direction of "Digiwood" games with FMV but that whole genre of games turned out to be a massive dead-end for the industry and is not particularly fondly remembered.
I still celebrate Sierra, though. They absolutely moved the industry forward, and were at the pinnacle of the industry for a decade or more. Few have achieved as much, or entertained as many! Roberta in particular is a bit of a hero of mine and on a personal note I love that her and Ken are still together after all these years.
I think there is truth to what you said but you also have to be careful not to judge 1980s games by 2020s standards.
All the games were user hostile back then. You could play a sierra game with hostile user input parsing and really nice graphics for the day. Or you could play another game that was even more hostile but had no graphics or vastly worse graphics, and often with next to no story. Often you had to be a huge nerd to even get the games to run at all. You probably needed to learn a lot about DOS config or how to write .bat files to get sound to work or your graphics to work right. A typical non-nerd consumer would probably never have figured out how to get it to run unless maybe Tech Support was excellent back then. My Dad was an engineer.. no way we'd have ever gotten them to run without his knowledge.
A lot of the negative stuff happened at the very end before they were acquired and then after they were acquired. But even in the early 1990s they had some mega hits.. they just weren't in the original lineup of adventure games. IMO the adventure games never really worked once they started using the mouse. They were less hostile but just seemed dumb. In the early 1990s the Dynamix games Sierra published were great though, those were/are some of my most favorite games from my childhood. What was hostile about those was getting them functioning in Dos though. I remember Metal Tech Earthsiege being a real huge effort with config.sys and autoexec.bat to get the whole game to function.
I wanted to play a lot of these games bad enough to learn more about the computer worked, the hostility probably contributed to me going down the path of studying CS.
I think the point about hostility was not necessarily the operating environment as much as the game dynamics, which were based on frustration and repeating an action many, many times until stumbling on the solution.
>Great products loved by customers don't seem to be what the free market rewards
Dunno, if I read the same text, but Williams retired early, and rich. Good reward if you ask me
>tends to make the product shitty and the customers unhappy.
Experimentation, and advancement makes one to step in the wrong direction more often than not, and it's absolutely fine. A product, or a brand may expire, and diminish, but gaming in general does pretty well, and offers more today compared to 90s
This is one aspect that Tencent has done very well on. They've put a lot of money into various (western) game companies and those game companies don't seem to have flourishef with it.
I can't really think of a western investor that does the same.
It's not even that kings used to have nice things and now more people do (certainly not everyone). It's that a lot of people in absolute terms and almost all people in the first world have nice things, and kings had comparatively awful things but at the time it was the best in the world.
The Soviet had a lot of nice things, including consumer electronics. Doesn't seem to be tied that hard to capital accumulation as the driving force behind production.
Europe has had several 'mixed' economies that worked rather well until they decided to become more capitalistic.
Btw, socialist camp (mostly Soviets, East Germans, and Bulgarians) practiced stealing R&D from the West to such an extent that we all really should praise capitalism for being development force for both sides of the Cold War.
There was a lot of homegrown research too, and they put people in space before the US managed it.
Comment above claimed that only under capitalism can we have nice things, which is a blatant lie. Arguably it's due to central planning and a high degree of enforced conformism that China manages to keep up with mass surveillance and production output.
Personally I'm not particularly fond of the state and very suspicious of the presumed necessity to have one.
There were a lot more homegrown research than even you believe, but socialism doesn't reward risk-taking, and it doesn't reward improvements in work culture (because both increase economic inequality), so most of it remained in dusty boxes forever. While everybody who took decisions preferred to rely on copying proven things capitalist countries already started to make. Up until the moment when ever increasing lag made it impossible even to re-create something even having full set of freshly stolen docs.
As for nice things - it seems to be somewhat poorly defined expression. You could have sex in USSR, or go to a forest to pick some mushrooms, and that were nice things I guess? But situation with consumer products, including food was abysmal compared to even worst examples of capitalist world.
Sure, when you're threatened by a state that has used nukes against a rather large population, as opposed to the 'testing' in the Pacific or Siberia, and apparently is run by insane genocidaires, you're going to become very, very paranoid and expect espionage everywhere.
Of course they copied what they could. Like we all do. Information is addictive and wants to be free. But the USSR had a very skewed view of life on the other side of the 'curtain'. It was also not as propped up by colonialist endeavours as the US, and if you'd have pulled that value out of the US economy the USSR might have 'won' the Cold War.
Yeah, there were rather neat suburbs and relatively well stocked shops in the US, but was it worth the genocide in Guatemala? The undermining of democracy in Europe? The return of heroin as a widely available drug of abuse?
Same goes for the UK, was the wealth on those islands worth the long line of southeast asian famines? The terror and exploitation in Kenya?
I'm no friend of soviet or chinese attempts at reaching communism, but the claim that they haven't achieved any nice things because they weren't capitalist is blatantly untrue. From this follows the conclusion that we likely could move on from capitalism and possibly achieve a global society that isn't centered around economic transactions, conflict, exploitation and surveillance. Some would say it's necessary due to the damage to our habitat industrialisation has caused.
I think the only consumer electronics we had in our family before 1991 was a small black and white TV that went through a dozen repairs and occasionally required a hard kick to function properly.
OK, I don't doubt that, when I grew up in Sweden I had friends that didn't come into contact with personal computers until the mid-nineties and had like phone on a copper cable and a CRT-style television with two or three channels and not much else. Pocket calculators were treated with suspicion in schools. My parents were relatively into new technology so they got me a used, cheap C64 pretty early, though.
It surely wasn't equally distributed but the USSR was quite deep into engineering and technology, the 'scientific socialism' thing, so they made their own multimeters and pocket calculators and radio equipment and whatnot.
Compare the average Soviet family to the average US family in the 60s-80s.
The standard of living is not even close.
Also, when did Europeans have a higher quality of life vs US postwar? Socialism creates general malaise and considerably lower growth.
Socialism has been proven to be an academic pipe dream that only somewhat works with small, culturally homogenous, high-trust populations. Scale it up and the inefficiencies/corruption grow exponentially. When resources are allocated inefficiently, everyone suffers.
The US is still a developing country that even lacks universal healthcare and needs uniquely high investment in state violence to protect itself from reform and competition.
The cool thing about capitalism is you can start competing companies to offer better products. At least so far as the industry is or isn't highly regulated.
I get you're probably being sarcastic and this was a throw away comment, but capitalism is also why we have all the nice things in the world that we do.
I'm still thinking capitalism used to be best during the Cold War, when there was a competing system in the eastern bloc - this led capitalist countries to try to prove that they can increase the standard of living for all, even the less better off. Since that alternative turned out not to be long-lived, capitalism has been growing more and more ruthless...
This is I think the root of the problem. Capitalism (perhaps unsurprisingly?) works best when it actually has to compete with another world view. It would be nice if there was a competing world view that didn't result in hundreds of millions of deaths over a handful of decades, though.
I don't think that there even needs to be competition (although that works best) - you can make do with two other things: motivated citizens, and a non-corrupt government.
Laissez-faire capitalism doesn't work - that's pretty much obvious to everyone, and most people then take the next mental step of realizing that things sufficiently close to laissez-faire capitalism don't work, either.
The next realization is then "well, how do you stop yourself from sliding into something "sufficiently close"?" and the easiest answer is through carefully-controlled government regulation motivated by an active populace and a non-corrupt government.
Communism advocates, as can be seen in this thread, strategically ignore the fact that the same reasons that we're seeing capitalism "failing" (as this failure is incomparably better than anything seen in communist countries like the USSR and China), which are apathetic citizens and a corrupt government, are necessary preconditions for a socialist/communist model to even have a chance at succeeding - because, of course, they are either shockingly ignorant of history, or they think that they'll be the ones to come out on top and be the leaders of the new authoritarian government.
An under-examined problem is that one of the most successful products of capitalism is capitalists. Those selected for 'leadership' by the market are rarely going to be vulnerable to long-termism and empathy, or more generously are going to be the best at rationalising their own self interest (see Effective Altruists).
> Stock options had long been a major part of the Sierra compensation package, so most employees and former employees were affected by the overnight collapse in Cendant’s share price, and its continued fall.
Stories like this one and my own experience are the reason why I refuse to accept contracts where stock options are part of compensation package. The agents/hiring managers are quite surprised when I tell them that stock options are just a way to make people work harder for less money. It is a sweet deal for the company and a crap deal for the employee.
Refusing seems like a weird thing, why not value them at $0 (i.e. pretend they aren't part of the comp). That's wise for anything not already public anyway.
That's generally my approach... I'd rather max out base salary, and if there are stock options, grants, etc.. it could be gravy, but I've never had that aspect work out personally.
> Stories like this one and my own experience are the reason why I refuse to accept contracts where stock options are part of compensation package.
I agree, except I don't refuse them. I just consider them to be without value when I'm totaling up the compensation offer. If the job isn't worth it without the stock/options, it's not worth it with them.
Microsoft owns the IP today. Would be nice to see them do something good with it. Space Quest, Police Quest, King's Quest, Quest for Glory, LSL, Gabriel Knight are all so good.
The King's Quest game from 2015 started out excellent with some great puzzles and felt like a modern King's Quest. Unfortunately the later chapters were much lighter in terms of puzzles.
For Quest of Glory, I'd recommend Hero U: Rogue to Redemption from the Coles, it has a similar feeling and is a load of fun. For me it's the best quest for glory clone since (better than Mage Initiation and Heroine's Quest).
There's been other games by Sierra alumni but they just don't have the same level of polish.
Oh yes, they've also done another game that's very much in the spirit of the old King's Quest. Order of the Thorne. The lead developer has chronic health problems unfortunately so that slows development by a lot. He has a patreon account to sponsor his development.
Probably will be the opposite. They are currently doubling down on Call of Duty above anything else.
The about to be closed Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks were institutions in gaming similar to Sierra. Their franchises probably relegated to the same place in essence.
Tango's most well known developers (Ikumi Nakamura and Shinji Mikami) left after Ghostwire and Hi-Fi Rush were completed respectively, so I don't know if it would've been that successful afterward.
Although they weren't closed for a good reason, just because the Xbox executives decided to spend the entire company's budget buying Blizzard and now finance is making them actually pay for that.
I tried Empire Earth (from 2001) and was impressed by its depth vs AoE. I've been thinking about installing it on Windows 11. But this is somewhat beside the point, I'm sure both would run on Wine. I guess AoE II was published by Microsoft, but it was made by Ensemble Studios before MS bought them. And Office can do one.
EE has depth? Then why is AoE2 played competitevly and noone plays EE?
AoE2 has a lot of micro depth:
- quick walling to trap enemy units in or out
- each arrow is a projectile that you can dodge
- ballistics helps to hit moving targets, still can be dodged by good players
The list goes on. Watch any modern caster for this game (MembTV or T90). There is a lot to enjoy.
What I dislike about Microsoft+AoE is the fact that they publish DLCs with less and less content for huge prices. And AoE mobile is obviously a joke.
It's hit or miss... As bad as Outlook has gotten since the backend shift to O365, it's still got better contact and calendar/meeting integrations than anything else I'm aware of.
I mean, Google's calendar is "good enough" for most things, but shifting a single instance of a meeting, or more interesting repeat cycles is a pain by comparison. Let alone 3rd party integrations.
If I ever came across F-U money, I'd build an open-source outlook+exchange replacement. Probably 3 versions, one for a single domain for easier deployment, one for mid-large companies with multiple backends, and something with more cloud integration/distribution.
I think if cloudflare had workers for TCP services, doing an email service on cloudflare could be awesome.
Conquest of the Longbow is a masterpiece. As a kid, I loved the fact that a lot of puzzles had multiple solutions. It was definitely not an easy adventure game though, I remember being stuck on some of the puzzles using gems and trees.
The first game I rage quit and then went looking for an overwrite tool to ensure that every last bit of it was gone off my hdd. I loved the premise - steampunk and magic! - but got stuck and web said I needed some random thing that I had discarded many game hours ago. Inventory management can make or break a game really.
That overwrite tool was handy later when my first C&C:Generals LAN game had my Supertank sniped and stolen.
I love it, but mainly for its atmosphere and roleplay, because the magic/tech choice every time you level up is a nonsense. The two sides do equivalent things, and stack together but degrade each other if mixed, so strategically you just have to pick one side or the other and stick to it. Also there's weird bits involving a graveyard full of zombies, or roaming the wilderness having random encounters, which basically beg you to grind for XP as much as you like: and a pet dog who can gain his own XP and rapidly becomes overpowered, getting all the first kills. Lovely game, terrible gameplay.
Yep, it's definitely an unbalanced mess -- an unfinished masterpiece, as is said.
What keeps me in love with the game is its world-building. Cities like Tarant feel alive in ways that are hard to explain.
That and the choices/consequence/reactivity. Playing as a dumb character and reading the newspaper article about your half-literate nincompoop's Zephyr crash is a true LOL moment.
The old Sierra was such an amazing part of early computer gaming, mainly because nobody knew what genres the industry would eventually end up in. Imagine a single company today that makes games in the following genres:
* Police Investigations
* High Fantasy
* Fairy Tale Fantasy
* Sci-Fi Comedy
* Adult Comedy
* Arcade Games
* Educational Games
* Card and Casino Games
* and then had a subsidiary pretty much devoted to 3d Simulation and Action games.
and did all of those, including multiple sequels, in the space of less than 15 years.
The lack of rules also bit Sierra later on as players encountered more games from other creators and we slowly realized how unplayable many of the Sierra games actually were. But for the period where they dominated, they were kind of a wonderland.
Memory: I basically learned how to type playing Police Quest and Space Quest II.
I (and many of my friends) basically learned how to read English playing LSL and the early Quest games. And yes memorising the answers to LSL 1 age verification questions taught us a lot about US culture (we learnt about the secret skip key much later).
> Memory: I basically learned how to type playing Police Quest and Space Quest II.
Same here. I recall playing Quest for Glory 2 and becoming very quick at typing "ask about ...". Pausing the game when the user brought up the typing window was such an innovation for me haha
The thing is, greed can be a very big motivator to make bad decisions.
I've come to believe that it's very hard for people to not listen to the voice of greed in their mind. I also believe that as people become more wealthy, they tend to become more greedy. It's a fight against human nature and I don't think many people are well enough in control of themselves in this regard. Maybe someone like Keanu Reaves (from what I've read), but people like him are very few I think ...
Mutual funds and 401k’s have almost completely divorced shareholders from the companies they own. Most of the supposed checks and balances of public companies are merely performative at this point.
the big thing that changed from Enron is Sarbanes Oxley act which requires that controls (processes) be understood and tested. This is a pretty big deal to all the auditor's "assurance" that they gain in an audit. It is much more than "performative" and it influences every number and disclosure on the financial statements.
SOX was implemented with COBIT 4, Control Objectives for IT. This introduced a lot of process and cost overhead, so COBIT 5 removed the control objectives -- it's just a list of IT topics. So now, corporations can now comply with SOX by doing nothing.
Partnerships are run more like guilds than public companies. Many years ago my friend was offered partnership track to a medium-sized accounting firm. It was something like a $1.5 million up front payment to join, but they had partner banks who would give you the loan with a long (30 year?) payoff like a mortgage, so every time a new partner was added it diluted the profits, but all of the existing partners got an immediate payoff. And there are tiers of partners, so a junior partner gets way less profits, like a pyramid (isn't everything like this?). I assume VCs, law firms, and similar partnerships operate the same.
So arresting the partners involved in this makes sense, as it is more like a group of individual rainmakers working under one brand rather than a traditional company.
And my friend didn't join, instead he switched to small firm where their employees were like strike-force mercenaries. He had a specialised skillset and was willing to move anywhere for a year at a time. Wound up going from ~$150k in 2008 money to over $400k with the insane travel sacrifice schedule, overtime, etc. He is still there but manages the young people doing that while working from home, and makes good money still.
I own a highly profitable small-ish business where I want longterm employees, but my incentive is staggering payments so your profits balloon after staying 5 years, but then you have to wait 7 more years to get all of your profits, so each year you get another 7 year profit vesting. So the handcuffs are very reinforced to prevent people leaving. Some people still leave though, but very small turnover at the VP / senior leadership level.
Lots of feelings seeing Sierra come up again. Lots of good memories playing Sierra games as a kid.
The story feels like it bears some similarity to the Dark Quiet Death episode from Mythic Quest. The video game industry, the husband-and-wife team, the rollercoaster of success and failure. Maybe just a coincidence. If you haven't seen it, it's a very good (and very sad) stand-alone episode. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10084334/
You're right, it wasn't just a coincidence: "Doc and Beans are inspired by Ken and Roberta Williams, a real-life couple who founded Sierra Entertainment, a video game company known for the King's Quest series that eventually sold to Activision."
Wow, yeah, back when I first saw that episode, it definitely evoked memories of Sierra for me. As the sibling points out, the IMDB page's trivia says that was intentional. I had no idea...
I'm trying to find games for my kids that would have the same influence. Fortnite etc is all so popular - but I feel that Police Quest, Hero Quest etc are a big part of my logical reasoning skills I have today...
I found a few good Android games for my kids (god it's hard to get through all the ad-ridden garbage)
* Monument Valley
* I Love Hue
* Battle of Polytopia
* Grand Mountain Adventure
* Tiny Bubbles
* Kingdom Rush
* Planes Control
* Human Resource Machine
No quests however, so I would also welcome suggestions here
For real, kids games are absolute garbage. I would pay for a curated list of games that are engaging, require some amount of thought, but that are not massively stuffed with ads.
Big sierra fan her. For almost 20 years i was absent from video games until i became a father an play zelda - breath of the wild. It felt as great as kings quest 1.
This story reminds me of how the original owners of the Highland Mint (they make the coin for the Super Bowl coin toss) were swindled out of their company.
Surprised I had to scroll down this far and not see it mentioned in any of the other threads. It was likewise a case of a company being bought out in an all stock offer where the stock turned out to be worthless because of an accounting scandal. And the IB that handled it for Dragon (Goldman) disavowed responsibility for advising they take the stock deal and fought Baker in court for years.
Holy cow. Trying to read an article on Vice is atrocious. I’m ok with you needing to publish ads, but when it makes the site bounce around like dog chasing squirrels, I give up.
You browse the web without an adblocker? How? On that first fresh OS install, it's always amazing how the web looks, in general, without ad blocking. And I even still see some ads!
If you played the old sierra adventures you could literally feel there is something wrong with their corporate culture. And the programmers seemed to have a laugh.
> On July 20, 2018, Walter Forbes was released from the Federal Correctional Institute, Otisville in New York, a medium-security prison later to be occupied by Michael Cohen, the Situation, and Fyre Festival’s Billy McFarland. Forbes was convicted in 2007—after two mistrials—on one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and two counts of making false statements, and sentenced to 151 months in prison and to make restitution in the order of $3.28 billion. The house he’d transferred to his wife was returned to him, by court order, to be divvied up between the government and Cendant.
> Kirk Shelton was sentenced to 10 years and the same amount in restitution.
How can someone destroy a company like Sierra Online that touched millions of lives and ever get out of prison?
A better system would be to standardize a number of dollars of fraud is equal to a day is jail, and then just do the math to determine the jail time.
I’m a big proponent we should apply the value of a life — about $10M.
Financial crimes should be scaled so the penalties for doing $10M in damage are equivalent to 1 dead person. Do a billion in damage? You’re going away forever, the same as someone who sets off a bomb killing a hundred people.
I think we’d solve a lot of our problems if we accepted money as life-equivalent in both directions, ie, not only as a value when a wrongful death occurs.
The government regularly has to calculate a baseline for saving lives; e.g. if you have to spend 3 trillion dollars to save one life, you could instead do many much cheaper things to save millions of lives.
For the US, preventing highway deaths is valued at roughly $13 Million[1], which is probably what GP is thinking of; the government has confidence that for every $13MM it spends on highway safety, it can save 1 life, on average, so a new safety measure that costs less than this per life saved is a win, and a new safety measure that costs more than this per life saved is a loss.
I'm sure in other contexts there are other numbers; there is no reason to think that safety interventions in e.g. mines or factories or hospitals should cost the same. Similarly if you've talked to a member of the Effective Altruism community for more than about 5 minutes you're likely to hear how you can save a life in Africa with mosquito nets for less than $10k.
Clearly money can buy lives, but GP needs to justify why they are using the USDOT numbers rather than some other number.
I think the crimes are categorically different, and you can't compare them in that manner.
There is no singular "the value of life". There are numbers which some people use in very specific circumstances. Prices for life are subjective. I would say mine is priceless, and might say yours is much cheaper.
When you take someones life, they don't have a chance to put a price to it.
Do any of those reasons weigh against measuring the seriousness of financial crimes in terms of actuarial lives? No problem with the objection that lives are priceless, but couldn’t the inverse still be a useful lens?
I dont think it is useful at all. They are categorically different. There is single plunishment for lives lost in the legal system either. It depends on many things like intent. A life lost could range from life in prison to no punishment at all. Same for financial crime, and each depend on like 10 factors.
I would say we take minimum number a person should go in jail for a day. Let's say 100 would be reasonable number to spend a day in jail. Now just divide sum by this number and you get days. Simple effective and entirely fair for everyone.
What would be the point. More time in jail doesn't fix anything.
Sentencing guidelines actually are based on the amount. I just don't think it is linear.
Last, in reality, it isn't just about the number, but the harm done. Stealing a penny from 300 million people is very different than stealing 3 million from one person in terms of impact.
> Walter Forbes was released from the Federal Correctional Institute, Otisville in New York, a medium-security prison later to be occupied by Michael Cohen, the Situation, and Fyre Festival’s Billy McFarland
I’m surprised that the BoP is so relaxed about prisoner privacy, also that there hasn’t been a reality TV show in this prison.
> I’m surprised that the BoP is so relaxed about prisoner privacy
There’s no such thing, at least not in terms of who is in what prison. Courts determine prison sentences, and since court records are public, prison records are public. If you know the name of an inmate you can find out what their sentence is, where they are incarcerated, expected release date, etc.
RPGs tend to be focused on leveling and battle systems (think Diablo, Final Fantasy). Adventure games like King's Quest rarely involved conflict and focused more on exploration and puzzle solving. King's Quest 8: Mask of Eternity, was the first 3D entry in the series but also departed substantially from the pure exploration and story-driven elements of the earlier entries. It was a very disappointing game for me, as a long time fan of King's Quest. It wasn't even a well-done RPG.
And of course the working people get screwed and bankrupted.
> Stock options had long been a major part of the Sierra compensation package, so most employees and former employees were affected by the overnight collapse in Cendant’s share price, and its continued fall. “I had a fair amount of my net worth at the time tied up in that stock,” says Mike Brochu. “Holy crap, it just plummeted to nothing.” Leslie Balfour, a writer and producer at Sierra until late 1997 saw her stock fall from $100,000 to $20,000. Al Lowe says he and his wife lost “the equivalent of a really nice home.”
...
> Less fortunate were the Sierra employees who’d borrowed on their stock options to buy houses, whose banks called in their loans when the stock fell and had to declare bankruptcy. “One of my employees,” Bowerman says, “went from being on paper a millionaire to being hundreds of thousands in debt with no way of payment. There were just dozens of horror stories like that.”
> “To this day,” he writes, “I am only 99% convinced that Walter was a crook. It remains unimaginable to me.”
Contrary to what you may have unwittingly assumed, @mentioning Dang doesn't summon him. Send an email to hn@ycombinator.com if you want something corrected.
I wouldn’t be shocked if Dan had a script/feature to let him quickly review comments where his handle is mentioned. But I thought the HN syntax was more often 'dang than @dang.
Sure, it's journalism, but just REALLY long. I read the first few sections, had no idea what the story was about, and had to ask the AI to summarize it. Then manually skimmed for the relevant sections.
A lot of journalism is written inverted pyramid style with the most important facts at the top. This piece was more like a long form investigative piece, which is fine, but without a very engaging hook at the start. It was a lot of fluff and exposition... I think I prefer bullet points for something like this, but to each their own.
Believe me I almost bowed out many times. It was a lot of unnecessary fluff and not exactly how I wanted to spend the last hour of my night before bed.
Putting the important part of the story after a wall of text is called burying the lede. I think it's possible to write an engaging long-form article without a thousand words before presenting a thesis, but that's not the fashion.
Don't sell, don't put untrustworthy people in key positions and remember machine learning 1st rule - NO FREE LUNCH anyone who says otherwise is a disaster waiting to happen.
Hmm, weird. I actually posted this a few days ago, but the article was under a different title then. It looks to me like maybe Vice was A/B testing titles, it somehow got a second chance on HN, but with the existing comments merged in and their timestamps changed too...?!
It's a lot clearer with the new title but it sure makes for some confusing threads.
wasn't this the company that famously started life by offering summer adventure game camps, but actually the helpless nerds were not allowed to leave and encouraged/seduced/coerced to write code 24x7 ? iir several participants years later had some trauma resurface about all that.. despite all that 'productivity'
They also have one of the first MMORPGs that hardly anyone knows about, and it's still around. The Realm (https://www.realmserver.com/)
I know this came after Meridian 59 and Everquest but I think it was before Ultima Online. Spent my elementary days playing it. I bet a lot of the players have passed on by now. I was (rule-breakingly) about 30+ years younger than everyone.
edit: Oh, 1996. I guess it was right when UOs alpha/beta came out. Wild. That definitely ate its lunch.
IIRC The Realm was a one time purchase whereas I needed my dads cc for UO... so that was limiting.
> It's about Sierra Entertainment (later Sierra On-Line)
It was originally founded as On-Line Systems, then Sierra On-Line in its heyday, then Sierra Entertainment after the dust settled.
I was a huge Sierra fan back in the day, and subscribed to their monthly magazine and constantly received promotional material from them. I never heard of any summer camp.
Why not?!?
It seems like everyone in this story - Roberta, people who love games, (most especially) the employees who lost their savings, and even Ken - would be happier today if they had continued earning an honest profit doing what they did best. The scramble for more, more, MORE undid them all.
There's wisdom in the proverb "the love of money is the root of all evil". This story is a cautionary tale.