Sierra Entertainment

But I will say one of the very first games, video games I played and got really hooked into was the King's Quest series when I was younger.

And that was developed by, oh my gosh, Roberta, is it Williams? She is famously part of the married duo of Sierra Online, I think is what it was.

Very original, like PC type games.

And I actually got to see her speak one time at a conference.

That's what I grew up on.

It says point and click adventure games, the Sierra games, right?

Like

King's Quest and Space Quest.

on honor mode, right?

No, Baldur's Gate at least made sense.

And look, this is from somebody who was a... huge fan of those games like that was my shit I played all of the King's Quest games I played all the Quest for Glory games I did all of them like I love the Sierra games but their item combination puzzles were absurd and I know that they were there simply to troll you as a player because they would literally laugh at you in the game like a little text box would come up and be like oh you thought that was going to work didn't you it's like dude you

know and people don't know i think back then you couldn't do multiple save files or could you i can't

Um, so yeah, no, I mean, I think there is some appeal, I think even with kids just to l- even if they aren't making progress in the game, to walk around and explore and tap things and see what happens.

But so yeah, I mean, I'm wondering, are there Sierra parser games that are friendly entry points? Like it's probably...

I mean, it's, Ben, is it the answer that we always come back to? Do you just hand that kid, uh, Hero's Quest I? Do you just give them Quest for Glory I with the parser and just say, "Have at it.

This, the, this is as good as it gets.

No, no Woodriffs, no The Schnibbles, none of it.

Um, and I will say, this is not by accident.

Every time I saw one of these games pop up in Interaction Magazine, in Sierra's in-house news magazine, I couldn't flip those pages quickly enough.

I was just like-

me.

This was a Sierra point-and-click adventure game.

And I don't know how we have not talked about this game before on the show, but as I was working on this...

Well, I

Grim Fandango is one of the first LucasArts games I played.

I would say it's one of the first adventure games I played after my kind of love of Sierra and growing up with Sierra games.

Sure.

I think this is one of the most beautiful and funny, extremely funny dialogue trees, but not in the zany way that Curse of Monkey Island is.

The parser comes into play where you say it's a very interrogative game so you mostly what you're going to be doing is talk to rudy ask about rudy ask rudy about lawrence like it's it's a it's it's kind of repetitive in that way but it is an inventory object puzzle as well uh you are getting clues you are getting evidence on the way and it is uh dictated by the parser It's a great game.

I think it's unique for the time.

I don't think anyone did anything like that besides Sierra, who did Mystery House prior.

It's great.

Like, there's one spin-off that made it 13 episodes, and then, like a, a, like a pilot that went nowhere.

And then of course Sierra's Babylon 5 game.

Yeah, there was that.

They even had, like, had the, the series composer, uh, make music for the Sierra- Like, that exists out there.

You can find it.

Um, but that's not why I brought up my incredible podcast.

The, the dynamics.

Yes, the dynamics

That framing wasn't just hypothetical for Valve.

Just a few months after the Steam announcement, in August of 2002, Valve ended up filing a lawsuit against its own publisher, that was Sierra, and Sierra's parent company, Vivendi Universal Games.

The dispute here was about royalties and the right to license Valve's games in cyber cafes.

But underneath that...

The very problem that they're fighting in courts for as they're continuing through the process.

So they're continuing to beta test and build Steam.

They're continuing to build Half-Life 2, which was a Sierra title.

And the whole time they are laying the groundwork for their future that basically isn't going to need them to fight in such a way.

Hmm.

Like it's not like they, you know, they didn't like come out of LucasArts or Sierra or-

No

... anything like that.

I-

Was it on a short list?

That's a Sierra game.

Wasn't it, um...