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Alpha Centauri

20 Jun

This article tells part of the story of the Civilization series.

In the spring of 1996, Brian Reynolds and Jeff Briggs took a long, hard look around them and decided that they’d rather be somewhere else.

At that time, the two men were working for MicroProse Software, for whom they had just completed Civilization II, with Reynolds in the role of primary designer and programmer and Briggs in that of co-designer, producer, and soundtrack composer. They had brought the project in for well under $1 million, all that their bosses were willing to shell out for what they considered to be a game with only limited commercial potential. And yet the early sales were very strong indeed, proof that the pent-up demand for a modestly modernized successor to Sid Meier’s masterstroke that Reynolds and Briggs had identified had been very, very real. Which is not to say that they were being given much credit for having proved their managers wrong.

MicroProse’s executives were really Spectrum Holobyte’s executives, ever since the latter company had acquired the former in December of 1993, in a deal lubricated by oodles of heedless venture capital and unsustainable levels of debt. Everything about the transaction seemed off-kilter; while MicroProse had a long and rich history and product portfolio, Spectrum Holobyte was known for the Falcon series of ultra-realistic combat flight simulators, for the first version of Tetris to run on Western personal computers, and for not a whole lot else. Seeing the writing on the wall, “Wild Bill” Stealey, the partner in crime with whom Sid Meier had founded MicroProse back in 1982, walked out the door soon after the shark swallowed the whale. The conjoined company went on to lose a staggering $57.8 million in two years, despite such well-received, well-remembered, and reasonably if not extraordinarily popular games as XCOM, Transport Tycoon, and Colonization. By the spring of 1996, the two-headed beast, which was still publishing games under both the Spectrum Holobyte and MicroProse banners, was teetering on the brink of insolvency, with, in the words of its CEO Stephen M. Race, a “negative tangible net worth.” It would require a last-minute injection of foreign investment capital that June to save it from being de-listed from the NASDAQ stock exchange.

The unexpectedly strong sales of Civilization II — the game would eventually sell 3 million copies, enough to make it MicroProse’s best seller ever by a factor of three — were a rare smudge of black in this sea of red ink. Yet Reynolds and Briggs had no confidence in their managers’ ability to build on their success. They thought it was high time to get off the sinking ship, time to get away from a company that was no longer much fun to work at. They wanted to start their own little studio, to make the games they wanted to make their way.

But that, of course, was easier said than done. They had a proven track record inside the industry, but neither Brian Reynolds nor Jeff Briggs was a household name, even among hardcore gamers. Most of the latter still believed that Civilization II was the work of Sid Meier — an easy mistake to make, given how prominently Meier’s name was emblazoned on the box. Reynolds and Briggs needed investors, plus a publisher who would be willing to take a chance on them. Thankfully, the solution to their dilemma was quite literally staring them in the face every time they looked at that Civilization II box: they asked Sid Meier to abandon ship with them. After agonizing for a while about the prospect of leaving the company he had co-founded in the formative days of the American games industry, Meier agreed, largely for the same reason that Reynolds and Briggs had made their proposal to him in the first place: it just wasn’t any fun to be here anymore.

So, a delicate process of disentanglement began. Keenly aware of the legal peril in which their plans placed them, the three partners did everything in their power to make their departure as amicable and non-dramatic as possible. For instance, they staggered their resignations so as not to present an overly united front: Briggs left in May of 1996, Reynolds in June, and Meier in July. Even after officially resigning, Meier agreed to continue at MicroProse for some months more as a part-time consultant, long enough to see through his computerized version of the ultra-popular Magic: The Gathering collectible-card game. He didn’t even complain when, in an ironic reversal of the usual practice of putting Sid Meier’s name on things that he didn’t actually design, his old bosses made it clear that they intended to scrub him from the credits of this game, which he had spent the better part of two years of his life working on. In return for all of this and for a firm promise to stay in his own lane once he was gone, he was allowed to take with him all of the code he had written during the past decade and a half at MicroProse. “They didn’t want to be making detailed strategy titles any more than we wanted to be making Top Gun flight simulators,” writes Meier in his memoir. On the face of it, this was a strange attitude for his former employer to have, given that Civilization II was selling so much better than any of its other games. But Brian Reynolds, Jeff Briggs, and Sid Meier were certainly not inclined to look the gift horse in the mouth.

They decided to call their new company Firaxis Games, a name that had its origin in a piece of music that Briggs had been tinkering with, which he had dubbed “Fiery Axis.” Jason Coleman, a MicroProse programmer who had coded on Civilization II, quit his job there as well and joined them. Sid Meier’s current girlfriend and future second wife Susan Brookins became their office manager.

The first office she was given to manage was a cramped space at the back of Absolute Quality, a game-testing service located in Hunt Valley, Maryland, just a stone’s throw away from MicroProse’s offices. Their landlords/flatmates were, if nothing else, a daily reminder of the need to test, test, test when making games. Brian Reynolds (who writes of himself here in the third person):

CEO Jeff Briggs worked the phones to rustle up some funding and did all the hard work of actually putting a new company together. Sid Meier and Brian Reynolds worked to scrape together some playable prototype code, and Jason Coleman wrote the first lines of JACKAL, the engine which these days pretty much holds everything together. Office-manager Susan Brookins found us some office furniture and bought crates of Coke, Sprite, and Dr. Pepper to stash in a mini-fridge Brian had saved from his college days. We remembered that at some indeterminate point in the past we were considered world-class game designers, but our day-to-day lives weren’t providing us with a lot of positive reinforcement on that point. So, for the first nine months of our existence as a company, we clunked over railroad tracks in the morning, played Spy Hunter in the upstairs kitchen, and declared “work at home” days when Absolute Quality had competitors in the office.

Once the necessary financing was secured, the little gang of five moved into a proper office of their own and hired more of their former colleagues, many of whom had been laid off in a round of brutal cost-cutting that had taken place at MicroProse the same summer as the departure of the core trio. These folks bootstrapped Firaxis’s programming and art departments. Thanks to the cachet of the Sid Meier name/brand, the studio was already being seen as a potential force to be reckoned with. Publishers flew out to them instead of the other way around to pitch their services. In the end, Firaxis elected to sign on with Electronic Arts, the biggest publisher of them all.

The three founding fathers had come into the venture with a tacit understanding about the division of labor. Brian Reynolds would helm a sprawlingly ambitious but fundamentally iterative 4X strategy game, a “spiritual successor” to Civilization I and II. This was the project that had gotten Electronic Arts’s juices flowing; its box would, it went without saying, feature Sid Meier’s name prominently, no matter how much or how little Meier ultimately had to do with it. Meanwhile Meier himself would have free rein to pursue the quirkier, more esoteric ideas that he had been indulging in ever since finishing Civilization I. And Briggs would be the utility player, making sure the business side ran smoothly, writing the music, and pitching in wherever help was needed on either partner’s project.

Sid Meier has a well-earned reputation for working rapidly and efficiently. It’s therefore no surprise that he was the first Firaxis designer to finish a game, and by a wide margin at that. Called simply Gettysburg! — or rather Sid Meier’s Gettysburg! — it was based upon the battle that took place in that Pennsylvania city during the American Civil War. More expansively, it was an attempt to make a wargame that would be appealing to grognards but accessible enough to attract newcomers, by virtue of being real-time rather than turn-based, of being audiovisually attractive, and of offering a whole raft of difficulty levels and tutorials to ease the player into the experience. Upon its release in October of 1997, Computer Gaming World magazine called it “a landmark, a real-time-strategy game whose unique treatment of its subject matter points to a [new] direction for the whole genre.” For my own part, being neither a dedicated grognard nor someone who shares the fascination of so many Americans for the Civil War, I will defer to the contemporary journal of record. I’m sure that Gettysburg! does what it does very well, as almost all Sid Meier games do. On the broader question of whether it brought new faces into the grognard fold, the verdict is more mixed. Meier writes today that “it was a success,” but it was definitely not a hit on the scale of SSI’s Panzer General, the last wargame to break out of its ghetto in a big way.

To the hungry eyes of Electronic Arts, Gettysburg! was just the appetizer anyway. The main dish would be Alpha Centauri.

The idea for Alpha Centauri had been batted around intermittently as a possible “sequel to Civilization” ever since Sid Meier had made one of the two possible victory conditions of that game the dispatching of a spaceship to that distant star, an achievement what was taken as a proof that the nation so doing had reached the absolute pinnacle of terrestrial achievement. In the wake of the original Civilization’s release and success, Meier had gone so far as to prototype some approaches to what happens after humanity becomes a star-faring species, only to abandon them for other things. Now, though, the old idea was newly appealing to the principals at Firaxis, for commercial as much as creative reasons. They had left the rights to the Civilization franchise behind them at MicroProse, meaning that a Firaxis Civilization III was, at least for the time being, not in the cards. But if they made a game called Alpha Centauri that used many of the same rules, systems, and gameplay philosophies, and that sported the name of Sid Meier on the box… well, people would get the message pretty clearly, wouldn’t they? This would be a sequel to Civilization in all but its lack of a Roman numeral.

When he actually started to try to make it happen, however, Brian Reynolds learned pretty quickly why Sid Meier had abandoned the idea. What seemed like a no-brainer in the abstract proved beset with complications when you really engaged. The central drama of Civilization was the competition and conflict between civilizations — which is also, not coincidentally, the central drama of human history itself. But where would the drama come from for a single group of enlightened emissaries from an earthly Utopia settling an alien planet? Whom would they compete against? Just exploring and settling and building weren’t enough, Reynolds thought. There needed to be a source of tension. There needed to be an Other.

So, Brian Reynolds started to read — not history this time, as he had when working on Civilization II, but science fiction. The eventual manual for Alpha Centauri would list seven authors that Reynolds found particularly inspiring, but it seems safe to say that his lodestar was Frank Herbert, the first writer on the list. This meant not only the inevitable Dune, but also — and perhaps even more importantly — a more obscure Herbert novel called The Jesus Incident that wasn’t even still in print at the time. One of its author’s more polarizing creations, The Jesus Incident is an elliptical, intensely philosophical and even spiritual novel about the attempt of a group of humans to colonize a planet that begins to manifest a form of sentience of its own, and proves more than capable of expressing its displeasure at their presence on its surface. This same conceit would become the central plot hook of Alpha Centauri.

Yes, I just used the word “plot.” And make no mistake about its significance. Of the threads that have remained unbroken throughout Sid Meier’s long career in game design, one of the most prominent is this mild-mannered man’s deep-seated antipathy toward any sort of set-piece, pre-scripted storytelling in games. Such a thing is, he has always said, a betrayal of computer games’ defining attribute as a form of media, their interactivity. For it prevents the player from playing her way, having her own fun, writing her own personal story using the sandbox the designer has provided. Firaxis had never been intended as exclusively “Sid Meier’s company,” but it had been envisioned as a studio that would create, broadly speaking, his type of games. For Reynolds to suggest injecting strong narrative elements into the studio’s very first 4X title was akin to Deng Xiaoping suggesting to his politburo that what post-Cultural Revolution China could really use was a shot of capitalism.

And yet Meier and the others around Reynolds let him get away with it, just as those around Deng did. They did so because he had proven himself with Colonization and Civilization II, because they trusted him, and because Alpha Centauri was at the end of the day his project. They hadn’t gone to the trouble of founding Firaxis in order to second-guess one another.

Thus Reynolds found himself writing far more snippets of static text for his strategy game than he had ever expected to. He crafted a series of textual “interludes” — they’re described by that word in the game — in which the planet’s slowly dawning consciousness and its rising anger at the primates swarming over its once-pristine surface are depicted in ways that mere mechanics could not entirely capture. They appear when the player reaches certain milestones, being yet one more attempt in the annals of gaming history to negotiate the tricky terrain that lies between emergent and fixed narrative.

An early interlude, delivering some of the first hints that the planet on which you’ve landed may be more than it seems.

Walking alone through the corridors of Morgan Industries, you skim the security reports on recent attacks by the horrific native “mind worms.” Giant swarms, or “boils,” of these mottled 10cm nightmares have wriggled out of the fungal beds of late, and now threaten to overwhelm base perimeters in several sectors. Victims are paralyzed with psi-induced terror, and then experience an unimaginably excruciating death as the worms burrow into the brain to implant their ravenous larvae.

Only the most disciplined security squads can overcome their fear long enough to trigger the flame guns which can keep the worms at bay. Clearly you will have to tend carefully to the morale of the troops.

Furthermore, since terror and surprise increase human casualties dramatically in these encounters, it will be important to strike first when mind-worm boils are detected. You consider ordering some Former detachments to construct sensors near vulnerable bases to aid in such detection efforts.

Alpha Centauri became a darker game as it became more story-oriented, separating itself in the process from the sanguine tale of limitless human progress that is Civilization. Reynolds subverted Alpha Centauri’s original backstory about the perfect society that had finally advanced so far as to colonize the stars. In his new version, progress on Earth has not proved all it was cracked up to be. In fact, the planet his interstellar colonists left behind them was on its last legs, wracked by wars and environmental devastation. It’s strongly implied if not directly stated that earthly humanity is in all likelihood extinct by the time the colonists wake up from cryogenic sleep and look down upon the virgin new world that the game calls simply “Planet.”

Both the original Civilization and Alpha Centauri begin by paraphrasing the Book of Genesis, but the mood diverges quickly from there. The opening movie of Civilization is a self-satisfied paean to Progress…

…while that of Alpha Centauri is filled with disquieting images from a planet that may be discovering the limits of Progress.

Although the plot was destined to culminate in a reckoning with the consciousness of Planet itself, Brian Reynolds sensed that the game needed other, more grounded and immediate forms of conflict to give it urgency right from the beginning. He created these with another piece of backstory, one as contrived as could possibly be, but not ineffective in its context for all that. As told at length in a novella that Firaxis began publishing in installments on the game’s website more than six months before its release, mishaps and malevolence aboard the colony ship, which bore the sadly ironic name of Unity, led the colonists to split into seven feuding factions, each of whom inflexibly adhere to their own ideology about the best way to organize human society. The factions each made their way down to the surface of Planet separately, to become Alpha Centauri’s equivalent of Civilization’s nations. The player chooses one of them to guide.

So, in addition to the unusually strong plot, we have a heaping dose of political philosophy added to the mix; Alpha Centauri is an unapologetically heady game. Brian Reynolds had attended graduate school as a philosophy major in a previous life, and he drew from that background liberally. The factions’ viewpoints are fleshed out largely through a series of epigrams that appear as you research new technologies, that are attributed to whichever of the seven leaders would likely approve most of that development, with an occasional quote from Aristotle or Nietzsche dropped in for good measure.

Fossil fuels in the last century reached their extreme prices because of their inherent utility: they pack a great deal of potential energy into an extremely efficient package. If we can but sidestep the 100 million year production process, we can corner this market once again.

— CEO Nwabudike Morgan,
Strategy Session

The factions are:

  • Gaia’s Stepdaughters, staunch environmentalists who believe that humanity must learn to live in harmony with nature to avoid repeating the mistakes that led to the ruination of Earth.
  • The Human Hive, hardcore collectivists whose only complaint about Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution is that it didn’t go far enough.
  • Morgan Industries, hardcore capitalists whose only complaint about Ayn Rand is that she didn’t go far enough.
  • The University of Planet, STEM specialists who are convinced that scientific and technological progress alone would correct all that ails society if people would just let it run unfettered and go where it takes them.
  • The Lord’s Believers, a fundamentalist sect who are convinced that God will deliver humanity to paradise if we all just pray really hard and abide by a set of stringent, arbitrary dictates.
  • The Spartan Federation, who train their children from birth to be hardened, self-sacrificing warriors like the Spartans of old.
  • The Peacekeepers, the closest thing to pragmatists in this rogue’s gallery of ideologues; they value human rights, democracy, dialog, and consensus-building, and can sometimes seem just as wishy-washy and ineffectual in the face of militant extremism as the earthly United Nations that spawned them.

Unlike the nations that appear in Civilization I and II, each of the factions in Alpha Centauri has a very significant set of systemic advantages and disadvantages that to a large extent force even a human player to guide them in a certain direction. For example, the Human Hive is excellent at building heavy infrastructure and pumping out babies, but poor at research, and can never become a democracy; the University of Planet is crazily great at research, but its populace has little patience for extended wars and is vulnerable to espionage. Trying to play a faction against type is, if not completely impossible for the advanced player, not an exercise for the faint of heart.

There is a lot of food for thought in the backstory of a ruined Earth and the foreground story of an angry Planet, as there is in the factions themselves and their ideologies, and trust me when I say that plenty of people have eaten their fill. Even today, more than a quarter-century after Alpha Centauri’s release, YouTube is full of introspective think-pieces purporting to tell us What It All Means.

Indeed, if anything, the game’s themes and atmosphere resonate more strongly today than they did when it first came out in February of 1999, at which time the American economy was booming, our world was as peaceful and open as it has ever been, and the fantasy that liberal democracy had won the day and we had reached the end of history could be easily maintained by the optimistic and the complacent. Alas, today Alpha Centauri feels far more believable than Civilization and its sang-froid about the inevitability of perpetual progress. These days, Alpha Centauri’s depiction of bickering, bitterly entrenched factions warring over the very nature of truth, progressing not at all spiritually or morally even as their technology runs wild in a hundred different perilous directions, strikes many as the more accurate picture of the nature of our species. People play Alpha Centauri to engage with modern life; they play Civilization to escape from it.

The original Civilization was ahead of the curve on global warming, prompting accusations of “political correctness” from some gamers. Paying heed to the environment is even more important in Alpha Centauri, since failing to do so can only aggravate Planet’s innate hostility. The “Eco-Damage” statistic is key.

That said, we must also acknowledge that Alpha Centauri is disarmingly good at mirroring the beliefs of its players back at them. Many people like to read a strong environmentalist message in the game, and it’s not hard to see why. Your struggles with the hostile Planet, which is doing everything it can to protect itself against the alien parasites on its surface, is an extreme interpretation of the Gaia hypothesis about Earth, even as Alpha Centauri’s  “transcendence” victory — the equivalent of Civilization’s tech victory that got us here in the first place — sees humanity overcoming its estrangement from its surroundings to literally become one with Planet.

For what it’s worth, though, in his “Designer’s Notes” at the back of the Alpha Centauri manual, the one message that Brian Reynolds explicitly states that he wishes for the game to convey is a very different one: that we ought to be getting on with the space race. “Are we content to stew in our collective juices, to turn inward as our planet runs inexorably out of resources?” he asks. “The stars are waiting for us. We have only to decide that it’s worth the effort to go there.” Personally, although I have nothing against space exploration in the abstract, I must say that I find the idea of space colonization as the solution to the problem of a beleaguered Planet Earth shallow if not actively dangerous. Even in the best-case scenario, many, many generations will pass before a significant number of humans will be able to call another celestial object their permanent home. In the meantime, there is in fact nothing “inexorable” about polluting our own planet and bleeding it dry; we have the means to stop doing so. To steal a phrase from Reynolds, we have only to decide that it’s worth the effort.

But enough with the ideology and the politics, you might be saying — how does Alpha Centauri play as a game? Interestingly, Brian Reynolds himself is somewhat ambivalent on this subject. He recalls that he set aside a week just to play Civilization II after he pronounced that game done, so thrilled was he at the way it had come out. Yet he says that he could barely stand to look at Alpha Centauri after it was finished. He was very proud of the world-building, the atmosphere, the fiction. But he didn’t feel like he had quite gotten the gameplay mechanics sorted so that they fully supported the fiction. And I can kind of see what he means.

To state the obvious: the gameplay of Alpha Centauri is deeply indebted to Civilization. Like, really, really indebted. So indebted that, when you first start to play it, you might be tempted to see it as little more than a cosmetic reskin. The cities of Civilization are now “bases”; the “goody-hut” villages are now supply pods dropped by the Unity in its last hours of life; barbarian tribes are native “mind worms”; settler engineers are terraformers; money is “energy credits”; Wonders of the World are Secret Projects; etc., etc. It is true that, as you continue to play, some aspects will begin to separate themselves from their inspiration. For example, and perhaps most notably, the mind worms prove to be more than just the early-game annoyance that Civilization’s barbarians are; instead they steadily grow in power and quantity as Planet is angered more and more by your presence. Still, the apple never does roll all that far from the tree.

Very early in a game of Alpha Centauri, when only a tiny part of the map has been revealed. Of all the contrivances in the fiction, this idea that you could have looked down on Planet from outer space and still have no clue about the geography of the place might be the most absurd.

Where Alpha Centauri does innovate in terms of its mechanics, its innovations are iterative rather than transformative. The most welcome improvement might be the implementation of territorial borders for each faction, drawn automatically around each cluster of bases. To penetrate the borders of another faction with your own units is considered a hostile act. This eliminates the weirdness that dogged the first two iterations of Civilization, which essentially saw your empire as a linked network of city-states rather than a contiguous territorial holding. No longer do the computer players walk in and plop down a city… err, base right in the middle of five of your own; no longer do the infantry units of your alleged allies decide to entrench themselves on the choicest tile of your best base. Unsurprisingly given the increased verisimilitude they yielded, national borders would show up in every iteration of the main Civilization series after Alpha Centauri.

Other additions are of more dubious value. Brian Reynolds names as one of his biggest regrets his dogged determination to let you design your own units out of the raw materials — chassis, propulsion systems, weapons, armor, and so on — provided by your current state of progression up the tech tree, in the same way that galaxy-spanning 4X games like Master of Orion allowed. It proved a time-consuming nightmare to implement in this uni-planetary context. And, as Reynolds admits, it’s doubtful how much it really adds to the game. All that time and effort could likely have been better spent elsewhere.

When I look at it in a more holistic sense, it strikes me that Alpha Centauri got itself caught up in what had perchance become a self-defeating cycle for grand-strategy games by the end of the 1990s. Earlier games had had their scope and complexity strictly limited by the restrictions of the relatively primitive hardware on which they ran. Far from being a problem, these limits often served to keep the game manageable for the player. One thinks of 1990’s Railroad Tycoon, another Sid Meier classic, which only had memory enough for 35 trains and 35 stations; as a result, the growth of your railroad empire was stopped just before it started to become too unwieldy to micro-manage. Even the original Civilization was arguably more a beneficiary than a victim of similar constraints. By the time Brian Reynolds made Civilization II, however, strategy games could become a whole lot bigger and more complex, even as less progress had been made on finding ways to hide some of their complexity from the player who didn’t want to see it and to give her ways of automating the more routine tasks of empire management. Grand-strategy games became ever huger, more intricate machines, whose every valve and dial still had to be manipulated by hand. Some players love this sort of thing, and more power to them. But for a lot of them — a group that includes me — it becomes much, much too much.

To its credit, Alpha Centauri is aware of this problem, and does what it can to address it. If you start a new game at one of the two lowest of the six difficulty levels, it assumes you are probably new to the game as a whole, and takes you through a little tutorial when you access each screen for the first time. More thoroughgoingly, it gives you a suite of automation tools that at least nod in the direction of letting you set the high-level direction for your faction while your underlings sweat the details. You can decide whether each of your cities… err, bases should focus on “exploring,” “building,” “discovering,” or “conquering” and leave the rest to its “governor”; you can tell your terraforming units to just, well, terraform in whatever way they think best; you can even tell a unit just to go out and “explore” the blank spaces on your map.

Is the cure worse than the disease?

Sadly, though, these tools are more limited than they might first appear. The tutorials do a decent job of telling you what the different stuff on each screen is and does, but do almost nothing to explain the concepts that underlie them; that is to say, they tell you how to twiddle a variety of knobs, but don’t tell you why you might want to twiddle them. Meanwhile the automation functions are undermined by being abjectly stupid more often than not. Your governor will happily continue researching string theory while his rioting citizens are burning the place down around his ears. You can try to fine-tune his instructions, but there comes a point when you realize that it’s easier just to do everything yourself. The same applies to most of the automated unit functions. The supreme booby prize has to go to the aforementioned “explore” function. As far as I can determine, it just causes your unit to move in a random direction every turn, which tends to result in it chasing its tail like a dog that sat down in peanut butter rather than charging boldly into the unknown.

This, then, is the contradiction at the heart of Alpha Centauri, which is the same one that bothers me in Civilization II. A game that purports to be about Big Ideas demands that you spend most of your time engaged in the most fiddly sort of busywork. I hasten to state once again that this is not automatically a bad thing; again, some people enjoy that sort of micro-management very much. For my own part, I can get into it a bit at the outset, but once I have a dozen bases all demanding constant attention and 50 or 60 units pursuing their various objectives all over the map, I start to lose heart. For me, this problem is the bane of the 4X genre. I’m not enough of an expert on the field to know whether anyone has really come close to solving it; I look forward to finding out as we continue our journey through gaming history. As of this writing, though, my 4X gold standards remain Civilization I and Master of Orion I, because their core systems are simple enough that the late game never becomes completely overwhelming.

Speaking of Master of Orion: alongside the questionable idea of custom-built units, Alpha Centauri also lifts from that game the indubitably welcome one of a “diplomatic victory,” which eliminates the late-game tedium of having to hunt down every single enemy base and unit for a conquest victory that you know is going to be yours. If you can persuade or intimidate enough of the other factions to vote for you in the “Planetary Council” — or if you can amass such a large population of your own that you can swamp the vote — you can make an inevitability a reality by means of an election. Likewise, you can also win an “economic” victory by becoming crazy rich. These are smart additions that work as advertised. They may only nibble at the edges of the central problem I mentioned above, but, hey, credit where it’s due.

Aesthetically, Alpha Centauri is a marked improvement over Civilization II, which, trapped in the Windows 3.1 visual paradigm as it was, could feel a bit like “playing” a really advanced Excel spreadsheet. But Alpha Centauri also exhibits a cold — not to say sterile — personality, with none of the goofy humor that has always been one of Civilization’s most underrated qualities, serving to nip any pretentiousness in the bud by reminding us that the designers too know how silly a game that can pit Abraham Lincoln against Mahatma Gandhi in a nuclear-armed standoff ultimately is. There’s nothing like that understanding on display in Alpha Centauri — much less the campy troupe of live-action community-theater advisors who showed up to chew the scenery in Civilization II. The look and feel of Alpha Centauri is more William Gibson than Mel Brooks.

While the aesthetics of Alpha Centauri represent a departure from what came before, we’re back to the same old same old when it comes to the actual interface, just with more stuff packed into the menus and sub-menus. I’m sure that Brian Reynolds did what he could, but it will nevertheless come off as a convoluted mess to the uninitiated modern player. It’s heavily dependent on modes, a big no-no in GUI design since the days when the Apple Macintosh was a brand new product. If you’re anything like me, you’ll accidentally move a unit about ten times in any given evening of play because you thought you were in “view” mode when you were actually in “move” mode. And no, there is no undo function, a feature for which I’d happily trade the ability to design my own units.

The exit dialog is one of the few exceptions to Alpha Centauri as a humor-free zone. “Please don’t go,” says a passable imitation of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. “The drones need you.” Note that this is a game in which you click “OK” to cancel. Somewhere out there a human-factors interface consultant is shuddering in horror.

As so often happens in reviews like these, I find now that I’ve highlighted the negative here more than I really intended to. Alpha Centauri is by no means a bad game; on the contrary, for some players it is a genuinely great one. It is, however, a sharply bifurcated game, whose fiction and gameplay are rather at odds with one another. The former is thoughtful and bold, even disturbing in a way that Civilization never dared to be. The latter is pretty much what you would expect from a game that was promoted as “Civilization in space,” and, indeed, that was crafted by the same man who gave us Civilization II. A quick survey of YouTube reveals the two halves of the whole all too plainly. Alongside those earnest think-pieces about What It All Means, there are plenty of videos that offer tips on the minutiae of its systems and show off the host’s skill at beating it at superhuman difficulty levels, untroubled by any of its deeper themes or messages.

As you’ve probably gathered from the tone of this article, Alpha Centauri leaves me with mixed feelings. I’m already getting annoyed by the micro-management by the time I get into the mid-game, even as I miss a certain magic sauce that is part and parcel of Civilization. There’s something almost mythical or allegorical about going from inventing the wheel to sending a colony ship on its way out to the stars. Going from Biogenetics to the “Threshold of Transcendence” in Alpha Centauri is less relatable. And while the story and the additional philosophical textures that Alpha Centauri brings to the table are thought-provoking, they can only be fully appreciated once. After that, you’re mostly just clicking past the interludes and epigrams to get on to building the next thing you need for your extraterrestrial empire.

In fact, it seems to me that Alpha Centauri at the gameplay level favors the competitive player more than the experiential one; being firmly in the experiential camp myself, this may explain why it doesn’t completely agree with me. It’s a more fiercely zero-sum affair than Civilization. Those players most interested in the development side of things can’t ensure a long period of peaceful growth by choosing to play against only one or two rivals. All seven factions are always in this game, and they seem to me far more prone to conflict than those of Civilization, what with the collection of mutually antithetical ideologies that are such inseparable parts of their identities. Suffice to say that the other faction leaders are exactly the self-righteous jerks that rigid ideological extremists tend to be in real life. This does not lend itself to peace and harmony on Planet even before the mind worms start to rise up en masse. Even when playing as the Peacekeepers, I found myself spending a lot more time fighting wars in Alpha Centauri than I ever did in Civilization, where I was generally able to set up a peaceful, trustworthy democracy, forge strong diplomatic and trading links with my neighbors, and ride my strong economy and happy and prosperous citizenry to the stars. Playing Alpha Centauri, by contrast, is more like being one of seven piranhas in a fishbowl than a valued member of a community of nations. If you can find one reliable ally, you’re doing pretty darn well on the diplomatic front. Intervals of peace tend to be the disruption in the status quo of war rather than the other way around.

The other factions spend an inordinate amount of time trying to extort money out of you.

There was always an understanding at Firaxis that, for all that Alpha Centauri was the best card they had to play at that point in time from a commercial standpoint, its sales probably weren’t destined to rival those of Civilization II. For the Civilization franchise has always attracted a fair number of people from outside the core gaming demographics, even if it is doubtful how many of them really buckle down to play it.

Nonetheless, Alpha Centauri did about as well as one could possibly expect after its release in February of 1999. (Electronic Arts would surely have preferred to have the game a few months earlier, to hit the Christmas buying season, but one of the reasons Firaxis had been founded had been to avoid such compromises.) Sales of up to 1 million units have been claimed for it by some of the principals involved. Even if that figure is a little inflated, as I suspect it may be, the game likely sold well into the high hundreds of thousands.

By 1999, an expansion pack for a successful game like Alpha Centauri was almost obligatory. And indeed, it’s hard to get around the feeling that Alpha Centauri: Alien Crossfire, which shipped in October of that year, was created more out of obligation than passion. Neither the navel-gazers nor the zero-summers among the original game’s fan base seem all that hugely fond of it. Patched together by a committee of no fewer than eight designers, with the name of Brian Reynolds the very last one listed, it adds no fewer than seven new factions, which only serve to muddy the narrative and gameplay waters without adding much of positive interest to the equation; the two alien factions that appear out of nowhere seem particularly out of place. If you ask me, Alpha Centauri is best played in its original form — certainly when you first start out with it, and possibly forever.

Be that as it may, the end of the second millennium saw Firaxis now firmly established as a studio and a brand, both of which would prove very enduring. The company remains with us to this day, still one of the leading lights in the field of 4X strategy, the custodian of the beloved Civilization…

Yes, Civilization. For their next big trick, Firaxis was about to get the chance to make a game under the name that they thought they’d left behind forever when they said farewell to MicroProse.


Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: The book Sid Meier’s Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games by Sid Meier with Jennifer Lee Noonan. Computer Gaming World of August 1996, January 1998, September 1998, April 1999, and January 2000; Next Generation of July 1997; Retro Gamer 241. Also the Alpha Centauri manual, one of the last examples of such a luxuriously rambling 250-page tome that the games industry would produce.

Online sources include Soren Johnson’s interview of Brian Reynolds for his Designer’s Notes podcast and Reynolds’s appearance on the Three Moves Ahead podcast (also with Soren Johnson in attendance). The YouTube think-pieces I mentioned include ones by GaminGHD, Waypoint, Yaz Minsky, CairnBuilder, and Lorerunner.

Where to Get It: Alpha Centauri and its expansion Alien Crossfire are available as a single digital purchase at GOG.com.

 
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Posted by on June 20, 2025 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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It’s 1999 and I Feel Fine

19 Jun

Hi, folks! I have an update at this unusual time because, as of the last proper article, we’ve actually finished with our coverage of 1998, and I wanted to give you a preview of what’s coming for 1999. As usual, these subjects are more 1999-adjacent than pedantically bound to that year. And also as usual, what follows is a tentative plan only. Nonetheless, if you prefer for every article to be a complete surprise when it pops up in your browser, you might want to stop reading now.

Note that some of these subjects will be just one article, while some will spread out over two or more.

  • Alpha Centauri.
  • Everquest.
  • Heroes of Might and Magic III, Might and Magic VII, and the decline of New World Computing thereafter.
  • Rollercoaster Tycoon.
  • Discworld Noir.
  • Bullfrog Productions from 1996 on, with a particular focus on Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2.
  • Metal Gear Solid. This one is pretty far out of my wheelhouse, but several of you suggested that I look at it. So, I’m going to follow your advice, examining it mostly as a piece of interactive narrative.
  • Looking Glass Studios from 1996 on, with a particular focus on Thief I and II and System Shock 2. Just as is the case for Metal Gear Solid, I don’t feel all that well-equipped to do full justice to Looking Glass — as many of you have come to recognize, first-person 3D tends not to be my personal cup of tea — but I’ll do my best to honor some brave, uncompromising, visionary games.
  • Turn-based fantasy strategy. My love for the Heroes of Might and Magic series prompted me to try out some of the contemporaries of the third game in that series, specifically Warlords III: Darklords Rising, Disciples: Sacred Lands, and Age of Wonders. The results were mixed but interesting.
  • The final wave of commercially prominent space simulators, especially the Freespace games. Plus that so-bad-it’s-almost-good Wing Commander movie, because how can a writer resist a temptation like that?
  • For my interactive-fiction coverage this time, I want to review some really long games that came out between 1998 and 2000. Damaging as it may be to my literary bona fides, I must admit that a sprawling old-school game that I can keep up on one of my virtual desktops for weeks on end, poking at it during lunch breaks and other snatched moments, is still my personal Platonic ideal for the genre.
  • Homeworld.
  • Omikron: The Nomad Soul.
  • Ultima IX: Ascension.
  • Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. Because I’m me, I want to do a bit of a deep dive into the longstanding pseudo-historical cult that surrounds Gabriel Knight 3′s setting of Rennes-le-Château, France, out of which also sprang The Da Vinci Code just a few years after this game. But never fear, the infamous cat-hair-mustache puzzle will also get its due.
  • The Longest Journey.
  • Planescape: Torment.

As I said, these lists are always subject to change; those of you with long memories will notice that quite a lot of what was on the previous list wound up falling by the wayside. This is because some other tales grew in the telling, even as one tale — the story of Legend’s late adventures — got added, and I’m doggedly determined not to let one year of history take up more than one year of real time. Some topics that had been earmarked for the previous group, like Windows 98 and the Deer Hunter-driven phenomenon of “Wal Mart games,” will get folded into other articles in due course. Others, like my dream of doing a series on television game shows, are most likely simply a bridge too far for these histories as currently constituted. (I don’t think there’s a big appetite out there for The Digital Antiquarian turning into The Television Antiquarian for the six months or more it would take to even begin to do such a topic justice…)

There have been some specific reader requests that haven’t (yet?) come to fruition. I perhaps owe you a more complete explanation for these.

  • Some of you asked for Oddworld, and I did try. Really, I did. But those games are coming from so far outside of my frame of reference as a lifelong computer rather than console gamer, and are so off-puttingly difficult to boot, that I just don’t feel like I can provide the necessary context or enthusiasm.
  • Some of you asked me to look at the Laura Bow games. And I did fire up The Colonel’s Bequest, only to be killed without warning by three separate pieces of inexplicably collapsing architecture within the first fifteen minutes. I’m sorry, readers. I’m just so done with this kind of player-hostile design, and I’ve already taken Roberta Williams and her colleagues to task more than enough for it over the years.
  • Some of you would like to see articles about the Impressions city builders, and, indeed, I’ve done more than dabble with them in recent months. I desperately wanted to love Pharaoh, but certain design choices — such as the excruciating worker-recruitment system, the rote busywork of having to constantly schedule festivals to keep the gods from ruining your day, and the drawn-out, repetitive campaign that makes you build city after city from scratch — made it impossible for me to do so. But it looks like the city builder after Pharaoh, 2000’s Zeus: Master of Olympus, fixed all of these problems and more. I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to write the whole story when I get there, and end it on the sort of positive note I always prefer to go out on.
  • A similar logic applies to Her Interactive, for which I’ve been promising coverage for literally years now. The two Nancy Drew games that I’ve played to date have both been rather underwhelming, awkward affairs. But the good news is that each successive Her Interactive game that I’ve played — four of them in all now — has been a little better than the one before it. So, I remain optimistic that they’ll eventually figure it out, and I’ll be able to write the story I want to write about them as well. Stay tuned.
  • The return of Steve Jobs to Apple and the rebirth that followed is another subject that’s been lingering out there for a while. Again, it’s just a question of finding the right grace note. The launch of OS X in 2001 might be it. We’ll see.
  • On the flip side, some of you told me that Final Fantasy VIII was probably not the best choice for improving my fraught relationship with JRPGs, and after a brief investigation I’ve decided that I agree with you. But I haven’t given up on the genre. I may give 2000’s Grandia II a shot.

A couple of notes from the Department of Miscellanea:

It will mostly likely be a few months before I have 1998 ebooks for you, folks. The old system for creating them relies on a Python 2 software stack that is deprecated and all but broken by now. A good friend of mine whose coding skills have not atrophied as badly as my own is going to help me bring it up to date. But we’re in the midst of the all too short Danish summer right now, a time to be outside as much as possible; extracurricular programming projects are best reserved for other times of the year. Please bear with us.

I haven’t found a good place to mention this before today, but I actually switched from Windows 10 to Linux Mint as my primary operating system back in December; the end user in me was fed up with the creeping enshitification of the Windows 11 ecosystem, while my inner environmentalist and social-justice warriors were incensed by the arbitrary obsolescence Microsoft wishes to impose upon tens if not hundreds of millions of perfectly viable computers. I couldn’t be happier. I can recommend Linux as a fine everyday operating system for anyone who is reasonably technically proficient, or who has someone who is to call upon when the occasional lingering issue does crop up. It’s come a long, long way since the last time I tried to run it on the desktop, about 25 years ago. And with the aid of Lutris and/or Steam, Linux runs old Windows games better and more effortlessly than recent releases of Windows itself in many cases, whilst keeping them nicely sandboxed from the core operating system in a way that Windows does not. If you’re a retro-gamer or just a gamer in general who’s been contemplating giving Linux a try, by all means do so. What with Valve putting serious resources behind it, I expect that it will only continue to improve as a gaming platform.

Which reminds me: Linux is another story I should try to tell soon… Sigh.

Anyway, thank you for reading and supporting these histories for so many years! As always, feel free to suggest topics and games you’d really like to see in the next few years. Even when I can’t give them separate articles, I can sometimes shoehorn them in somewhere. And if you haven’t yet taken the Patreon plunge and have the means to do so, do give it some thought. It’s only thanks to readers just like you that I can afford to keep doing this.

I’ll see you tomorrow — yes, tomorrow already! — when we’ll get started on our bullet list for 1999. We’ve got our work cut out for us…


Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

 
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Posted by on June 19, 2025 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction, Modern Times

 

This Week on the Analog Antiquarian

13 Jun

The Voyage of Magellan, Chapter 31: Life and Death

 
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Posted by on June 13, 2025 in Uncategorized

 

The Last Adventures of Legend

06 Jun

The early days were the best. We had successes, we had fun, and we had a good business model. As the industry changed, everything became more complicated and harder.

— Bob Bates

This article tells part of the story of Legend Entertainment.

The history of Legend Entertainment can be divided into three periods. When Bob Bates and Mike Verdu first founded the company in 1989, close on the heels of Infocom’s shuttering, they explicitly envisioned it as the heir to the latter’s rich heritage. And indeed, Legend’s early games were at bottom parser-based text adventures, the last of their kind to be sold through conventional retail outlets. That said, they were a dramatic departure from the austerity of Zork: this textual lily was gilded with elaborate menus of verbs, nouns, and prepositions that made actual typing optional, along with an ever increasing quantity of illustrations, sound effects, music, eventually even cutscenes and graphical mini-games. At last, in 1993, the inevitable endpoint of all this creeping multimedia was reached. Between Gateway II: Homeworld and Companions of Xanth, the parser that had still been lurking behind it all disappeared. Thus ended the text-adventure phase of Legend’s existence and began the point-and-click-adventure phase.

Legend continued happily down that second road for a few years. Its games in this vein weren’t as flashy or as high-profile as those of Sierra or LucasArts, but a coterie of loyal fans appreciated them for their more understated aesthetic qualities and for their commitment to good, non-frustrating design — a commitment that even LucasArts proved unable or unwilling to match as the decade wore on. Legend’s games during this period were almost universally based on licensed literary properties, which, combined with in-gaming writing that remained a cut above the norm, still allowed the company to retain some vestige of being the heir to Infocom.

By 1996, however, another endpoint seemed to be looming. One of Legend’s two games of the year before had been the biggest, most expensive production they had yet dared to undertake, as well as a rare foray into non-licensed territory. Mission Critical had been made possible by a $2.5 million investment from the book-publishing giant Random House. The game was the brainchild and the special baby of founder Mike Verdu, a space opera into which he poured his heart and soul. It filled three CDs, the first of which was mostly devoted to a bravura live-action opening movie that starred Michael Dorn, well known to legions of science-fiction fans as the Klingon Lieutenant Worf on Star Trek: The Next Generation, here taking the helm of another starship that might just as well have been the USS Enterprise. But there was more to Mission Critical than surface flash and stunt casting. It was an astonishingly ambitious production in other ways as well: from the writing and world-building (Verdu created a detailed future history for humanity to serve as the game’s backstory) to the multi-variant gameplay itself (a remarkably sophisticated real-time-strategy game is embedded into the adventure). I for one feel no hesitation in calling Mission Critical one of the best things Legend ever did.

But when it was released into a marketplace that was already glutted with superficially similar if generally inferior “Siliwood” productions, Mission Critical got lost in the shuffle. The big hit in this space in 1995 — in fact, the very last hit “interactive movie” ever — was Sierra’s Phantasmagoria, which evinced nothing like the same care for its fiction but nevertheless sold 1 million copies on the back of its seven CDs worth of canned video footage. Mission Critical, on the other hand, struggled to sell 50,000 copies, numbers which were actually slightly worse than those of Shannara, Legend’s other game of 1995, a worthy but far more modest and traditionalist adventure. The consequences to the bottom line were devastating. After hovering around the break-even point for most of its existence, Legend posted a loss for 1995 of more than $2 million, on total revenues of less than $3 million. Random House, which despite its literary veneer was perfectly capable of being as ruthless as any other titan of Corporate America, decided that it wanted out of Legend — in fact, it wanted Legend to pay it back $1 million of its investment, a demand which the fine print in the contract allowed. (Random House was certainly not making any friends in the world of nerdy media at this time; it was holding TSR, the maker of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, over another barrel.)

Beset by existential threats, Legend managed in 1996 to put out only one game, an even more radical departure from the norm than Mission Critical had been. Star Control 3 had the fortune or perhaps misfortune of being the sequel to 1992’s Star Control II, an unusual and much-loved amalgamation of outer-space adventure, action, and CRPG that was created by the studio Toys for Bob and published by Accolade. As it happened, Accolade also served as Legend’s distributor from 1992 to 1994. (RandomSoft, the software arm of Random House, took up that role afterward.) It was through this relationship that the Star Control 3 deal — a licensing deal of a different stripe than that to which the company had grown accustomed — came to Legend, after Toys for Bob said that they weren’t interested in making another game in the series right away. Michael Lindner, a long-serving music composer, programmer, and designer at Legend who loved Star Control II, lobbied hard with his bosses to take on Star Control 3, and was duly appointed Lead Designer once the contract was signed. Being so different from anything Legend had attempted before, the game took a good two years to complete.

Again I have to save the galaxy? Even the box copy seemed determined to undermine Star Control 3.

Star Control 3 received good reviews from the professionals immediately after its release in September of 1996. Computer Gaming World magazine, for example, called it a “truly stellar experience” and “the ultimate space adventure,” while the website GameSpot deemed it “one of the best titles to come out this year.” It initially sold quite well on the strength of these reviews as well as its name; in fact, it became Legend’s best-selling game to date, their first to shift more than 100,000 units.

Yet once people had had some time to settle in and really play it, an ugly backlash that has never reversed itself set in. To this day, Star Control 3 remains about as popular as tuberculosis among the amazingly durable Star Control II fan base. In the eyes of many of them, it not only pales in comparison to its predecessor, but the non-involvement of the Toys for Bob crew makes it fundamentally illegitimate.

Whatever else it may be, Star Control 3 is not the purely cynical cash-grab it’s so often described as; on the contrary, it’s an earnest effort that if anything wants a little bit too badly to live up to the name on its box. And yet it’s hard to avoid the feeling when playing it that Legend has departed too much from their core competencies. The most significant addition to the Star Control II template is a new layer of colony management: you have to maintain a literal space empire in order to produce the fuel you need to send your starship out in search of the proverbial new life and new civilizations. Unfortunately, the colony game is more tedious than fun, a constant nagging distraction from what you really want to be doing. The other layers of the genre lasagna are better, but none of them is good enough to withstand a concerted comparison to Star Control II. The feel of the action-based starship combat — Legend’s first real attempt to implement a full-on action game — is subtly off, as is the interface in general. For example, a hopelessly convoluted 3D star map makes navigation ten times the chore it ought to be.

In the end, then, Star Control 3 is a case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Where it’s bold, it comes off as ill-considered: it represents the aliens you meet as digitized hand puppets, drawing mocking references to Sesame Street online. Where it plays it safe, it comes off as tepid: the writing — usually Legend’s greatest strength — reads like Star Control fan fiction. Still, Star Control 3 isn’t actively terrible by any means. It’s better than its rather horrendous modern reputation — but, then again, that’s not saying much, is it? There are better games out there that you could be playing, whether the date on your calendar is 1996 or 2025.

In its day, however, its strong early sales allowed Bob Bates and Mike Verdu to keep the lights on at Legend for a little while longer. A shovelware compilation of the early games called The Lost Adventures of Legend, whose name consciously echoed Activision’s surprisingly successful Lost Treasures of Infocom collections, brought in a bit more much-needed revenue for virtually no outlay.

Nevertheless, Bob Bates and Mike Verdu were by now coming to understand that securing Legend’s future in the longer term would likely require nothing less than a full-fledged reinvention of the company and its games — a far more radical overhaul than the move from a parser-based to a point-and-click interface. Everything about the games industry in the second half of the 1990s seemed to militate against a boutique studio and publisher like Legend. As the number of new games that appeared each year continued to increase, shelf space at retail was becoming ever harder to secure, even as digital distribution was at this point still a non-starter for games like those of Legend that filled hundreds of megabytes on CD. Meanwhile it was slowly becoming clear that the adventure genre had peaked in 1995 and was now sliding into a marked decline; there were no new million-selling adventure games like Phantasmagoria to be found in 1996. The games that sold best now were first-person shooters and real-time strategies, two genres that hadn’t existed back when Legend had been founded.

Mike Verdu, whose gaming palette was more diverse than that of the hardcore adventurer Bob Bates, hatched a plan to enter the 3D-shooter space. Three years on from the debut of DOOM, he sensed that John Carmack’s old formulation about the role of story in this sort of game — “Story in a game is like the story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” — no longer held completely true in the minds of at least some developers and players; he sensed that the world was ready for richer narratives and more coherent settings in its action games. His thinking was very much on trend: LucasArts was in the latter stages of making Jedi Knight at the time, and Valve had already embarked on Half-Life. Verdu believed that Legend might be able to apply their traditional strengths — writing, storytelling, aesthetic texture, perhaps even a smattering of adventure-style puzzle-solving — to the shooter genre with good results.

To do that, however, he and Bob Bates would need to drum up a new investor or investors, to stabilize the company’s rocky finances, pay Random House its $1 million ransom, and, last but by no means least, fund this leap into the three-dimensional unknown. As they wrote in their investor’s prospectus at this time, “Legend’s strengths in storytelling and world creation will be used to craft a unique game experience that combines combat, character interaction, exploration, and puzzle solving.” They had already secured what they thought was the perfect literary license for the experiment: the Wheel of Time novels by Robert Jordan, which were currently the best-selling epic-fantasy books in the world from an author not named J.R.R. Tolkien.

After months of beating the bushes, they found the partner they were seeking in GT Interactive, an outgrowth of a peddler of home-workout videos that had exploded onto the games industry in 1994 by publishing DOOM II exclusively to retail stores. (The original DOOM had been sold via the shareware model, with boxed distribution coming only later.) Now, GT was to be the publisher of Epic MegaGame’s Unreal, a shooter whose core technology was, so it was said, even better than id Software’s latest Quake engine. GT was able to secure the Unreal engine for Legend’s use long before the game that bore its name shipped. Even with that enormous leg-up, Legend would need every bit of their new publisher’s largess and patience; The Wheel of Time would prove a much bigger mouthful to swallow than Bob and Mike had ever anticipated, such that it wouldn’t be done until the end of 1999, more than two and a half years after the project was initiated.

As you’ve probably gathered, these events herald the beginning of the transition from the second to the third phase of Legend’s history, from Legend as a purveyor primarily of adventure games to a maker of 3D shooters that retain only scattered vestiges of the company’s past. Yet this transition wasn’t as clean or as abrupt as that from parser-driven to point-and-click adventures. While most of Legend was chasing reinvention in the last years of the 1990s, another, smaller part was sticking to what they had always done. There would come two more traditionalist adventure games before The Wheel of Time made it out the door to signal to the world that Legend Entertainment had become a very different sort of games studio.

So, we’ll save The Wheel of Time and what came after for a later article. I’d like to use the rest of this one to look at that those last two purist adventures from Legend.

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon is one of those games that I would love to love much more than I actually do. It’s warm-hearted and well-meaning and wants nothing more than to show me a good time. Unfortunately, it mostly just bores me. In all of these respects, it has much in common with its literary source material.

Said source is the Callahan’s series by the science-fiction journeyman Spider Robinson, the first volume of which shares its name with the game. Born in the 1970s as loosely linked short stories in the pages of Analog magazine, it’s written science fiction’s nearest equivalent to the television sitcom Cheers; the stories all revolve around a convivial bar where everybody knows your name, owned and operated by a fellow named Mike Callahan in lieu of Sam Malone. The tone is what we like to call hyggelig here in Denmark: cozy and welcoming, both for the patrons of the bar and for the reader. A sign that Mike Callahan keeps hanging on the wall behind his post says it all: “Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased.” The stories manage to qualify as science fiction — or maybe a better description is urban fantasy? — by including elements of the inexplicable and paranormal: aliens drop in for a drink, as do time travelers, a talking dog, and plenty of other freaks and oddities. If you read long enough, you will begin to realize that Mike Callahan himself is not quite what he appears to be. But never fear, he’s still a good guy for all that.

It’s very hard even for a curmudgeon like me to work up any active dislike for a series that so plainly just wants to make us feel good. And yet I must admit that I’ve never been able to work up the will to read beyond the first book either. Even when I first encountered Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon in the stacks of my local library at the ripe old age of twelve or so, it felt so slight and contrived that I couldn’t be bothered to finish it. When I picked the first book up again as part of my due diligence for writing this article, I wound up feeling precisely the same way, thus illustrating that I either had exceptionally good taste as a twelve-year-old or that I am a sad case of arrested development.  (The child is the father to the man, as they say.)

Still, none of this need be the kiss of death for the game. I’ve played a fair number of games, from Legend and others, that are based on books that I would never choose to read on my own, and enjoyed a surprising number of them. But, as I noted at the outset, the game of Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon isn’t in this group.

Callahan’s was the second Legend adventure game to be masterminded by a former Sierra designer, after Shannara, by Corey and Lori Ann Cole of Quest for Glory fame. This time up, we have Josh Mandel, a former standup comedian who had once been a regular on the same circuit as such future stars as David Letterman, Jay Leno, and Jerry Seinfeld. His own life took a very different course when a close encounter with Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards caused him to seek a job with the company that had made it. His design credits at Sierra included Pepper’s Adventures in Time, Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, and Space Quest 6: The Spinal Frontier. Having left Sierra in the middle of the Space Quest 6 project because he was unhappy with the company’s direction, he was available for Legend to sign to a design contract circa late 1995.

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon is a very well-made game by any objective standard. The graphics and sound, created by a stable of out-of-house free agents to whom Legend returned again and again, are attractive and polished and perfectly in tune with the personality of the books. If the overriding standard by which you judge this game is how well it evokes its source material, it can only be counted a rousing success. Hewing to the series’ roots as a collection of short stories rather than anything so ambitious as a novel, the game uses Callahan’s Bar as a jumping-off point for half a dozen largely self-contained vignettes, which take you everywhere from Manhattan to Brazil, from outer space to Transylvania. (Yes, there is a vampire.)

The worst objective complaint to be made about it is that, if you were to hazard a guess, you might assume it to be two or three years older than it actually is. Barring the addition of a 360-degree panning system, the interface and presentation of the game aren’t very far removed at all from what we were seeing at the beginning of the point-and-click phase of Legend’s existence in 1993. For example, there’s still no audible narrator guiding the show, just lots and lots of textual descriptions of the things you click on. (The characters you speak to in the game, on the other hand, are fully voice-acted.) Its dated presentation may have represented a marketing problem when Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon made its debut in the spring of 1997, but there’s no reason for it to bother tolerant retro-gamers like us unduly today.

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon was the last hurrah for Legend’s original adventure engine, which had been steadily improved since their very first game, 1990’s Spellcasting 101.

So much for objectivity. Subjectively, this is my least favorite point-and-click Legend adventure game, with the possible exception only of Companions of Xanth, for which my distaste is driven more by the pedophiliac overtones of the books on which it is based than by anything intrinsic to the game itself. I can’t accuse Spider Robinson of so serious an offense as that, only of a style of humor to which I just don’t respond. Alas for me, Josh Mandel chooses to ape that style of humor slavishly. This game is a hall of mirrors where every pane of glass hides a wretched pun or a groan-inducing dad joke or a pseudo-heart-warming “I feel you, man!” moment. It sets my teeth on edge.

And the thing is, you just can’t get away from it. Josh Mandel has chosen to implement every single thing you see in the scenery as a hot spot. And because this is a traditional adventure game, any one of those hot spots could hide the thing or the clue or the action you need to advance. So, you have to click them all. One by one. And it’s absolutely excruciating. The words just run on and on and on… so many words, vanishingly few of them funny or interesting, a pale imitation of a writer I don’t like very much in the first place. I get tired and fidgety just thinking about it. For me at least, Callahan’s is proof that it’s possible to over-implement an adventure game, with disastrous effects on its pacing — a problem that tended not to come up in the earlier years of the genre, when space constraints served as a natural editor.

Sigh…

But of course, it’s well known that comedy is notoriously subjective. You might respond very differently to this game, especially if Spider Robinson happens to be a writer you enjoy, or perhaps if the humor in Sierra’s comedy adventures is more to your taste than it is to mine. I’d be lying if I said I finished it — dear reader, there came a point when I just couldn’t take it anymore — but what I did see of it gave me no reason to doubt that it’s up to Legend’s usual standards of meticulous, scrupulous fairness.

Okay… every once in a while, a joke does kind of land.

Sadly for Legend, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon sold like a Popsicle in the Arctic. And small wonder: whatever its intrinsic merits or demerits, it’s hard to imagine a game more out of touch with the way the industry was trending in 1997. In light of this, that could very well have been that for Legend Entertainment as a maker of adventure games. Instead, the company ponied up for one last adventure while the drawn-out Wheel of Time project was still ongoing. It was permitted only a limited budget, but it seems like a minor miracle for ever having gotten made at all. Best of all, John Saul’s Blackstone Chronicles: An Adventure in Terror is really, really good.

This project was an unusual one for Legend, in that for once the author behind the literary work that was being borrowed from showed an active, ongoing interest in the game. John Saul was riding high at this point in his career, being arguably the most popular American horror writer not named Stephen King. He was also, as he said at the time, “an old computer gamer, going back to the days of Zork when the adventure was all in text.” He first began to speak with Bob Bates about some sort of collaboration as early as 1995. The two initially discussed a book and game that would be released at the same time, to serve as companion pieces to one another. When that became too logistically challenging — a book tends to be a lot faster to create than a game — they decided that the game could come out later, to serve as a sequel to the book. Even so, Bates was already sketching out a design at the same time that Saul was writing his manuscript.

In the midst of all this, the aforementioned Stephen King tried out a unique publication strategy for his story The Green Mile: in an echo of the way the Victorians used to do these things, it appeared as six thin, cheap paperbacks, one per month over the course of half a year. The experiment was a roaring commercial success, convincing John Saul that it would serve his own burgeoning Blackstone Chronicles equally well. Thus the latter too was published in six parts over the first half of 1997 (after which the inevitable omnibus volume which you can still buy today appeared).

The Blackstone Chronicles revolves around an old, now abandoned asylum that looms physically and psychically over the New Hampshire town of Blackstone. In each of the first five installments, a resident of the town receives a mysterious gift of some sort, an object that once belonged to one of the inmates of the asylum. Strange events ensue on each occasion, until it all culminates in a showdown between a dark past and a hopefully brighter future in the sixth installment. The Blackstone Chronicles isn’t revelatory — creepy asylums in bleak New England towns aren’t exactly the height of innovation in horror fiction — but I found it to be a very effective genre piece nonetheless, one that’s wise enough to understand that shadows in the mind are always scarier than blood on the page. It was also a commercial success in its day to rival its inspiration The Green Mile, with each of the installments reportedly selling in the neighborhood of 1 million copies.

Sales figures like that do much to explain why Legend decided to continue with their game of The Blackstone Chronicles despite the headwinds blowing against the adventure genre. The project marked the first time that Bob Bates had taken on the role of Lead Designer since Eric the Unready back in 1993. Designing games was what he had started Legend in order to do, but navigating the shifting winds of the industry had come to demand all of the time he could give it and then some. Now, though, the situation was a bit more settled, thanks to GT Interactive stepping in with a long-term commitment to The Wheel of Time. Not being an FPS gamer, Bates wasn’t sure how much he could contribute there. Meanwhile his loyal friend and partner Mike Verdu felt strongly that, if Bates wanted to take a modest budget and make an adventure game with John Saul’s help, he had earned that right. The way things were going for Legend and the industry as a whole, it might very well be the last such chance he would ever get.

Bob Bates looks back on the time he spent making this game about madness, sadism, and tragedy as a thoroughly happy period in his own life. The constant stress over how Legend was to make payroll from month to month had, at least for the time being, abated, allowing him to do what he had really wanted to be doing all along: designing an adventure game that he could be proud of. It was gratifying as well to be working with such a literary partner as John Saul, who was, if far from a constant presence around the office, genuinely interested in what he was doing and always available to answer questions or serve as a sounding board. The contrast with most of the authors Legend had worked with in the past was stark.

The game takes place several years after the last of John Saul’s novellas, casting you in the role of Oliver Metcalf, the son of Malcolm Metcalf, the Blackstone Asylum’s last and most infamous superintendent. With a plan to demolish the old building and erect a shopping center in its place having backfired in the books, the town council now wants to make a museum of psychiatric history out of it. Before the museum can open, however, Malcolm’s malevolent spirit kidnaps your — Oliver’s, that is to say — flesh-and-blood son and hides him somewhere in the building. You go there to rescue him, which is exactly what your father wants you to do, having hatched a special plan for your soul. It’s a classic haunted-house setup, no more original in the broad strokes than the premise of the books, but executed equally well. The museum conceit is indicative of the design’s subtle cleverness: the exhibits you find in each room fill in the backstory of what you’re seeing, making the game completely accessible and comprehensible whether you’ve read the books or not.

Instead of pulling out Legend’s standard third-person adventure engine for one more go-round, Bob Bates opted for a first-person perspective with node-based movement through a contiguous pre-rendered-3D space — i.e., the sturdy Myst model, which Legend had previously used only for Mission Critical. With most of the small company busy with The Wheel of Time, the majority of the graphics and much of the programming were outsourced to Presto Studios, who were just wrapping up their third and final Journeyman Project game and were all too eager for more projects to take on in these declining times for the adventure genre. The end result betrays that the budget was far from expansive, but the sense of constrained austerity winds up serving the fiction rather than detracting from it.

Indeed, the finished game is something of a masterclass in doing more with less. The digitized photographs that drift across the screen from time to time serve just as well or better than full-fledged expository movies might have. Then, too, The Blackstone Chronicles uses its sound stage as effectively as any adventure game I’ve ever played; when I think back on the experience, I remember what I heard better than what I saw. Artfully placed creaks and groans and grinds and drips keep you from ever feeling too comfortable as you roam, as does the soundtrack, all brooding minor chords that swell up from time to time into startling crescendos.

And then there are the disembodied voices you converse with as you explore the asylum, who are sometimes deeply unsettling, sometimes downright heart-wrenching. In the category of the former is an all-American boy who talks like a cast member of Leave It To Beaver, but who has found his true calling as the operator of the asylum’s basement torture chamber, where iron maidens are only the tip of a sadistic iceberg. (“When I was a teenager, I killed a few animals and skinned them. People got upset. They said something was wrong with me. I guess what tipped the balance was when I cut up my best friend and put him in my closet…”) In the category of the latter is a little boy who prefers to wear dresses. Following the theories of the real psychiatrist Henry Cotton that such “disorders” of the mind reside in an organ of the body, Malcolm Metcalf proceeded to dismantle the boy piece by piece, beginning by pulling out his teeth and proceeding on to liver, spleen, kidneys, eyes, ears, and finally limbs. Standing there in a bare little room, surrounded by the remnants of the boy in Mason jars, listening to him tell his story… well, I found it fairly shattering. I’m not scared of werewolves or vampires, but I can be scared by monsters who appear in the guise of ordinary humans.

The fact is that many of the horrors The Blackstone Chronicles unveils really did happen inside mental institutions, and not all that long ago. During Medieval and Renaissance times, convents were the places one used to hide away embarrassing or inconvenient family members — usually women. (When Hamlet tells Ophelia to “get thee to a nunnery,” it isn’t meant as a tribute to her religious devotion.) So-called “lunatic” asylums took over this role during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When in The Blackstone Chronicles you meet the spirit of an unmarried young woman who tells you she is pregnant, you don’t know whether to believe her own words or to believe her official admission record, which says that she is suffering from an “hysterical pregnancy.” You just know that your heart goes out to her.

The puzzles you encounter as you explore the asylum and engage with its inmates and their persecutors aren’t exceptionally memorable in and of themselves, but they do their job of guiding your progress through the drama; in an echo of the books, they’re mostly object-oriented affairs, with most of the objects being intimately connected to the people who once lived here. Every once in a while, Oliver gets tossed into a situation that led to the death of an inmate: he might get locked inside the “heat chamber,” get hooked up to an ECT (“electroconsulsive therapy”) machine, or find himself strapped down underneath a swinging pendulum straight out of Edgar Allan Poe. If you don’t escape in time, you die — but never fear, the game gives you a chance to try again, as many times as you need. These sequences are as minimalist as the rest of the game, doing much with a few still frames and the usual brilliant sound design. And once again, the end result is more unnerving than a hundred blood-drenched videogame zombies.

The Blackstone Chronicles definitely isn’t for everyone; some might find it traumatizing, while others might simply prefer to play something that’s a little bit more cheerful, and that’s perfectly okay. But if it does strike a chord with you, you’ll never forget it. It’s one of only a few games I’ve played in my life that I’m prepared to call haunting — not haunting in a jump-scare sort of way, but in the way that can keep you up at night, wondering what on earth is wrong with us that we can do the things we do to one another.


If anyone had thought that being tied to such a successful series of books would make the game of The Blackstone Chronicles a hit in its own right, they were destined to be disappointed. GT Interactive saw so little commercial potential in Legend’s side project that they didn’t even want to distribute the game. Released in November of 1998 under the auspices of Red Orb Entertainment, a division of Mindscape, it performed only slightly better than Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, offering up no justification whatsoever for Legend to continue to make adventure games even as a sideline to their new direction. The future of the studio founded as the heir to Infocom lay with first-person shooters.

What was there to be said about that? Only that it had been one hell of a transformative decade for Bob and Mike’s most-excellent adventure-game company, as it had been for gaming in general.


Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.


Sources: The books Masters of DOOM: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner, Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine by Andrew Scull, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson, and The Blackstone Chronicles by John Saul. Computer Gaming World of August 1996, December 1996, February 1997, September 1997, January 1999, and February 1999; Retro Gamer 180; PC Gamer of December 1995. and May 1996

Online sources include GameSpot’s vintage review of Star Control 3 and an old GA Source interview with Michel Kripalani of Presto Studios.

I also made extensive use of the materials held in the Legend archive at the Strong Museum of Play.

In addition to the above, much of this article is based on a series of conversations I’ve had with Bob Bates and Mike Verdu over the last ten years or so. My thanks go to both gentlemen for taking the time out of their still busy careers to talk to me.

Where to Get Them: Star Control 3 is available for digital purchase at GOG.com. Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon and The Blackstone Chronicles can be downloaded as ready-to-run packages from The Collection Chamber; doing so is not, strictly speaking, legal, but needs must.

 
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Posted by on June 6, 2025 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 4: Chainsaw Monday

23 May

This article tells part of the story of Sierra On-Line.

In 1825, in Paris, France, a man named Charles-Louis Havas set up an agency to translate foreign news reports into French for the benefit of local newspapers. At that time, his country along with the rest of the Western world stood on the cusp of far-reaching changes. Over the next few decades, the railroad and the telegraph remade travel and communications in their image. This led in turn to the rise of consumerism, as exemplified by the opening of Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche, the world’s first big-box department store, in Paris in 1852. And with consumerism came mass-market advertising, a practice which was to a large extent invented in France.

The Havas Agency rode this wave of change adroitly. Charles-Louis Havas’s two sons, who took over the company after their father’s death, reoriented it toward advertising, making it into the dominant power in the field in France. Havas went public in 1879. During the twentieth century, it expanded into tourism and magazine and book publishing, and eventually into cable television, via Canal+, by far the most popular paid television channel in France from 1984 until the arrival of Netflix in that market in 2014.

The creation of Canal+ marked the point where Havas first became intertwined with another many-tendriled French conglomerate: the Compagnie Générale des Eaux, or CGE. The name translates to “The General Water Company.” As it would imply, CGE had gotten its start when modern plumbing was first spreading across France, all the way back in 1853. It later expanded into other types of urban service, from garbage collection to parking to public transportation. Veering still further out of its original lane, CGE invested enough into Canal+ to be given a 15-percent stake in the nascent channel in 1983, marking the start of a new era for the formerly staid provider of utility services. Over the next fifteen years, its growth outstripped that of Havas dramatically, as it became a major player in cable television, in film and television production, in telecommunications and wired and cellular telephony.

By 1997, CGE had acquired a 29.3-percent stake in Havas as well. In May of the following year, it completed the process of absorption. The new entity abandoned the anachronistic reference to water and became known as Vivendi, a far catchier name that can be roughly translated as “Of Life” or “About Life.” Having expanded by now to the point that it was running out of obvious growth opportunities inside France, it looked beyond the borders of its homeland. In the next few years, it would buy up a wide cross-section of foreign media.

This impulse to grow put the software arm of Cendant Corporation on Vivendi’s hit list just as soon as Henry Silverman, that troubled American company’s boss, made it clear that said division was on the market. For, of all sectors of media, gaming seemed set for the most explosive growth of all, and Vivendi was eager to grab a chunk of that action. It was not alone in this: a deregulation of the French telecommunications industry that had been completed on January 1, 1998, was spawning a foreign feeding frenzy among actual and would-be French game publishers. Conglomerates like Ubisoft, Titus, and Infogrames would soon join Vivendi as new household words among American gamers. The days of the “French Touch” being the mark of games that were sometimes charmingly, sometimes infuriatingly off-kilter would fade into the past, as French publishers would come to stand behind some of the biggest mass-market hits in the field.

Seen through this prism, there can be no doubt about the main reason Vivendi chose to take Cendant’s games division off Henry Silverman’s hands: Blizzard Entertainment, whose games Warcraft 2, Diablo, and Starcraft had combined with the Battle.net matchmaking service to become a literal modus vivendi for millions of loyal acolytes. For its part, Sierra was on the verge of scoring a massive, long overdue hit of its own with Half-Life, but that had not yet come to pass as negotiations were taking place. As matters currently stood, Sierra was merely the additional baggage which Vivendi had to accept in order to get its hands on Blizzard.

The deal was done with remarkable speed. On November 20, 1998 — one day after the release of Half-Life, four days before the release of King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, and eighteen days before that of Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire — it was announced that the now-former Cendant software division had become a new subsidiary of the Vivendi empire, under the name of Havas Interactive. The price? A cool $1 billion in cash — cash that was, needless to say, much-needed by the beleaguered Cendant. The current Cendant software head David Grenewetzki, who as far as the French financiers could see had done a pretty good job so far of cutting fat and improving efficiency, would be allowed to continue to do so as the first boss of Havas Interactive.

The folks in Oakhurst had been through such a roller-coaster ride already that they were by now almost numb to further surprises. First had come the acquisition by CUC and the sidelining of Ken Williams, who looked a lot less like a soulless fat cat in comparison to what came after him. Then the merger with HFS, then the shock and horror of the revelations of accounting fraud and the plummeting share price, which had cost some staffers dearly — especially the ones who had signed onto the plan to replace some of their salary with Cendant stock. Al Lowe of Leisure Suit Larry fame, for example, says that almost overnight he and his wife lost “the equivalent of a really nice home.” So, the news of this latest sale, to yet another company that no one had ever heard of, was greeted mostly with resigned shrugs. Everyone had long since learned just to take it day by day, to hope for the best and to try to ignore the little voice inside that was telling them that they probably ought to be expecting the worst.

For three months, sanguinity seemed justified; not much changed. Then came February 22, 1999.

The first sign the Oakhurst employees encountered that something was out of the ordinary on that Monday morning were a few Pinkerton Security vans that they saw parked in front of the building as they arrived at work. Not knowing what else to do, they shrugged and went about their usual start-of-the-week routines. An all-hands meeting was scheduled for that morning at the movie theater next door, the latest installment in a longstanding quarterly tradition of same. If anyone felt a premonition of danger — the mass layoff of 1994 had been announced at another of these meetings, at the same theater — no one voiced their concerns. Instead everyone shuffled in in the standard fashion, swapping stories about the weekend just passed and other inter-office scuttlebutt, a little impatient as always with this corporate rigamarole, eager to get back to their desks and get back to work making games.

They soon learned that they would not be making games in Oakhurst, today or ever again. The instant they had all taken their places, the axe fell — or rather the chainsaw, as it would later be dubbed by Scott Murphy, a designer of Sierra’s Space Quest series. The Oakhurst office was closing, the staffers were told matter-of-factly. While they were still struggling to process this piece of information, they were each handed an envelope with their name on it. Inside was a short note, telling them whether they had just lost their job entirely or whether they were being offered the opportunity to relocate to the Bellevue office, to continue making games there.

As of February of 1999, Yosemite Entertainment had three major projects in development; in an indubitable sign of the changing times in gaming, none was an adventure game. One was a “space simulator” in the mold of Wing Commander and TIE Fighter, based in this case on the Babylon 5 television series; one was an MMORPG, a far more ambitious successor to The Realm that was to take place in J.R.R. Tolkien’s world of Middle-earth; and one was a shooter powered by the Unreal engine that was being created in consultation with a former Navy SEAL commander. The first two projects were to resume production in Bellevue; the last was cancelled outright.

When all of the support staff who are needed to run an office like this one were added to the chopping block, the number of people who lost their jobs that day came to almost 100 — almost two-thirds of the total number of Sierra employees remaining in Oakhurst. The ranks of the newly jobless also included a small team that had been working with Corey and Lori Ann Cole to make an expansion pack for Quest for Glory V, which was to add to the base game some form of the multiplayer support that had once been the whole thrust of the project as well as some new single-player content.

Sierra’s new management had left nothing to chance. While the meeting had been taking place at the theater, the Pinkerton hired guns had been changing the security codes that employees used to access the office building. The victims of the layoff were now led inside in small groups under armed guard, where they were permitted just a few minutes to clean their personal belongings out of their desks.

The shock of it all can hardly be overstated. No one had seen this coming; even Craig Alexander, the manager of Yosemite Entertainment, had been given no more than a few minutes warning on the morning of the layoff itself. With cataclysmic suddenness, the largest employer in Oakhurst had simply ceased to be. Come the day after Chainsaw Monday, the old office building and its previously bustling parking lot looked like a movie set after hours. The only people left to roam the halls were a few support personnel for The Realm, whose servers were to remain in Oakhurst for lack of anyplace better to put them while Havas Interactive sought a buyer for the building and if possible the MMORPG as well. (The Realm had just enough players that its new mother corporation hesitated to piss them off by shutting it down, but neither did Havas Interactive want to invest any real money in a virtual world built around the creaky old SCI engine.)

As an ironic capstone to the brutal proceedings in Oakhurst, both the Babylon 5 game and the Middle-earth MMORPG were themselves cancelled just six months later in Bellevue, as part of another round of “reorganizing.” The folks who had relocated to a big city 1000 miles further up the coast to continue these projects learned that the joke was on them, as they were left high and dry there in Seattle. The emerging new business model for Sierra was that of a publisher and distributor of games only, not an active developer of them. In other words, Sierra was deemed by Vivendi to be of further use only as a recognizable brand name, not as a coherent ongoing creative enterprise. Had he been paying attention, Henry Silverman, Wall Street’s king of outsourcing and branding, would surely have approved.

In the years that followed, surprisingly few of the prominent names who had built Sierra’s original brand, that of the biggest adventure-games studio on the planet, continued to work in the industry. What with the diminished state of the adventure game in general, the skill sets of people like them just weren’t so much in demand anymore.

Corey and Lori Ann Cole did find employment in the industry at least intermittently, but did so in roles that no longer got their names featured on box covers. Corey worked as a consultant on such unlikely projects as Barbie: Fashion Pack Games (to which he contributed a Space Invaders clone that replaced spaceships and laser guns with hearts and lipstick). Both Corey and Lori Ann worked on a virtual world called Explorati, which, had it ever come to fruition, might have been the missing link between Habitat and Second Life. Later, Corey worked on online-poker sites. Eventually, the Coles did come home again, to make Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, which is Quest for Glory VI in all but name, and the more modestly scaled but equally warm-hearted Summer Daze: Tilly’s Tale. Corey told me recently that he and Lori Ann have some other ideas in the pipeline that might come to fruition someday, but he also told me that they “are pushing 70, and spending more time on ourselves.” Which is more than fair enough, of course.

Embracing the spirit of the late 1990s, when you couldn’t toss a dead rat into the air without hitting five different dot.com startups, Ken Williams initially envisioned a second act for his career, as an Internet entrepreneur. He passed up a chance to get in on the ground floor with Jeff Bezos’s Amazon.com in favor of a venture of his own called TalkSpot, which aimed to bring talk radio online. Born, one senses, largely out of Ken’s longstanding infatuation with Rush Limbaugh, a hard-right AM-radio provocateur of the old school, TalkSpot can nevertheless be read as prescient if you squint at it just right, a harbinger of the podcasts that were still to come. But it was just a little bit too far out in front of the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure; almost everyone was still accessing the Internet over dial-up at the time, which made even audio-only streaming a well-nigh insurmountable challenge. An attempted pivot from being a public-facing provider of online talk radio to providing streaming services to other companies, under the name of WorldStream, couldn’t overcome this reality, and the company closed up shop — ironically, not all that long before the DSL lines that might have made it sustainable started to roll out across the country.

Then again, it may be that Ken Williams’s heart was never really in it. Realizing that he had achieved his lifelong dream of becoming rich — he had all the money that he, Roberta, and their children could ever possibly need — he didn’t become a third-time entrepreneur. Instead he and Roberta threw themselves into an active and enviable early retirement. They sailed a boat all over the world, blogging about their travels to a whole new audience who often knew nothing about their previous lives. “We somehow achieved a second fifteen minutes of fame as world cruisers and explorers,” writes Ken in his memoir, exaggerating only slightly.

In 2023, they made a belated return to game development, via a graphical remake of the game that had started it all, for them as for so many others: Will Crowther and Don Woods’s original Adventure. It struck many as an odd choice, given the rich well of beloved Sierra intellectual property from which they might have drawn instead, but it seemed that they wanted above all to pay tribute to the game that had first prompted them to create their seminal Mystery House all those years ago, and to create Sierra On-Line in order to sell it. Having accomplished that mission, they have no plans to make more games.

And as for little Oakhurst, California, the strangest place at which anyone ever decided to found a games company: it weathered the turbulence of Sierra’s departure surprisingly well in the end, as it had so many changes before. There was a brief flicker of hope that game development might again become a linchpin of the town’s economy when, about six months after Chainsaw Monday, the British publisher Codemasters bought Sierra’s old facility, along with The Realm and its servers and the rights to the Navy SEAL game that had been cancelled when the chainsaw fell. Codemasters tried to assemble a team in Oakhurst to complete the SEAL game, which would seem to have been as prescient as Ken Williams’s TalkSpot in its way, anticipating the craze for military-themed shooters that would be ignited by Medal of Honor: Allied Assault in 2002. But most of the people who had once worked on the project had already left town, and Codemasters had trouble attracting more to such a rural location. The winds of corporate politics are fickle; within barely six months, the SEAL game was cancelled a second and final time, the Realm servers were finally moved out, and the now-empty building was put up for sale once again. These events marked the definitive end of game development in Oakhurst, barring the contracting jobs that the Coles did out of their house.

The loss was a serious blow to the local economy in the short term. But, luckily for Oakhurst, Yosemite National Park abides. After a brief-lived dip, the town started to grow again, thanks to the tourists who were now streaming through the “Gateway to Yosemite” in greater numbers than ever. Oakhurst’s population as of the 2020 American census was just shy of 6000 souls — twice the number counted by the 2000 census, when the community was still reeling from Sierra’s departure.

Today, then, Sierra On-Line’s sixteen-year stay in Oakhurst has gone down in local lore as just one more anecdote involving the eccentric outsiders who have always been drawn to the place. Still, among the hordes of families and hardcore hikers who pass through, one can sometimes spot a different breed of middle-aged tourist, who arrives brimming with nostalgia for a second-hand past he or she knew only through the pictures and articles in Sierra’s newsletters. Such is the nature of time. What is passed but remembered, if only by a few, becomes history.

Oakhurst in 2022. Life goes on…

I’d like to share with you a eulogy for Sierra — one that you may very well have seen before, written by someone far closer to all of this than I am. Josh Mandel was a writer and designer who worked at Sierra for several years. Just three days after Chainsaw Monday, he wrote the following.

On Monday, the last vestige of the original Sierra On-Line was laid to rest in Oakhurst, California. That branch, renamed “Yosemite Entertainment,” was shuttered on February 22nd, putting most of its 125-plus employees out of work.

You may not care for what Sierra has become since the days when dozens of unpretentious parser-driven graphic adventures flowed, seemingly effortlessly, out of Oakhurst. But there’s no denying that, back then, Sierra On-Line was the life’s blood of the adventure-game industry.

Maybe the games were a little more rough-hewn than those of its competitors — not that there were many competitors at that point. But Sierra kept adventure gamers happy and fed, gamers who would’ve otherwise starved to death on the arguably more polished, but frustratingly infrequent, releases of Lucasfilm Games (as they were once called).

Sierra alone grew the industry in other ways, too. It was Ken Williams who, almost single-handedly, created the market for PC sound hardware by vigorously educating the public [on] the AdLib card and, shortly thereafter, the breathtaking Roland MT-32. He supported those cards in style while other publishers wanted nothing to do with them. It was Corey and Lori Cole who invented the first true hybrid, replayable adventure/RPG. It was Christy Marx’s lump-in-the-throat ending to Conquests of Camelot that reminded us that not every computer game had to have a group hug at the end. It was Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy who made us want to kill off our onscreen alter ego, to see what inventive, gooey death had been anticipated for us. It was Roberta, before anyone else, who invented strong female heroines. It was Al Lowe, bringing up the rear (literally and figuratively) by creating Leisure Suit Larry, the most popular, pirated game of its decade. We knew this because we sold far more Larry hint books than we sold of the actual software.

It was the Sierra News Magazine (later InterAction) that let us feel like we knew the people making these games, that they were a family-run business, staffed by people who lived an isolated life, surrounded by idyllic, ageless beauty and creating games that were a labor of love. That was, at least for a while, an accurate picture. This was a family we wanted to feel a part of, for good reason, and people came from thousands of miles away to take a tour and see how real it all was…

Some may argue that Sierra lives on in Bellevue, Washington, where Al Lowe, Jane Jensen, Roberta Williams, Mark Seibert, and a handful of [other] Oakhurst refugees still labor diligently on games side-by-side with scores of newer talent. But games like King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity and Leisure Suit Larry 7 have a distinctly different flavor than the seat-of-the-pants, funny, touching adventures that Oakhurst once produced. They are commercial.

Invariably, in a company that grows the way Sierra grew, innovation gives way to emulation. Whereas Sierra’s management once strove to make it solid, profitable, and yet fun, they now strive to dominate other companies, force annual growth in the double digits, and (like so many other companies) cut jobs mercilessly to improve the bottom line and thrill the stockholders. Yet the Ghost of Sierra Past still walked the halls in Oakhurst. The rooms were adorned with the art of glories past, the artists and programmers who helped to create those glories were, in fair measure, still living and working there. Now that spirit has been exorcised by scrubbed, glad-handing executives who don’t know, or don’t care, what those artists and programmers could do when they were motivated and well-managed.

People, living and working closely together in the pursuit of shared joy, were what made Sierra games great. Thank you, Ken, for creating something utterly unique, something warm, fun, and beautiful. Damn you, Ken, for allowing others to tear it down.

Whether you were a Sierra fan or not, we are all diminished by the loss of history, talent, and continuity within the gaming industry. Rest in peace, Sierra On-Line.

The skeptical historian in me hastens to state that this eulogy is very sentimentalized; whatever else they may have been, Sierra’s games were always at least trying to be deeply commercial, as Ken Williams will happily tell you today if you ask him. On the other hand, though, it’s rather in the nature of eulogies to be sentimental, isn’t it? This one is not without plenty of wise truths as well. And among its truths is its willingness to acknowledge that Sierra’s games “were a little more rough-hewn than those of its competitors.”

I, for one, have definitely spent more time over the years complaining about the rough edges in Sierra’s adventure games than I have praising their strong points. I’ve occasionally been accused of ungraciousness in this regard, even of having it in personally for Ken and Roberta Williams. The latter has never been the case, but, looking back, I can understand why it might have seemed that way sometimes, especially in the early years of this site.

Throughout most of the 1980s, the yin and yang of adventure gaming were Infocom and Sierra, each manifesting a contrasting philosophy. As Ken Williams himself has put it, Infocom was “literary,” while Sierra was “mass-market.” One Infocom game looked exactly the same as any other; they were all made up of nothing but text, after all. But Sierra’s games were, right from the very start, the products of Ken’s “ten-foot rule”: meaning that they had to be so audiovisually striking that a shopper would notice them running on a demo machine from ten feet away and rush over to find out more. (It may seem impossible to imagine today that a game with graphics as rudimentary as those of, say, The Wizard and the Princess could have such an effect on anyone, but trust me when I say that, in a time when no other adventure game had any graphics at all, these graphics were more exciting than any ultra-HD wonder is to a jaded modern soul.) Infocom had to prioritize design and writing, because design and writing were all they had. Sierra had other charms with which to beguile their customers. It’s no great wonder that today, when those other charms have ceased to be so beguiling, Infocom’s games tend to hold up much better.

But I’m not here to play the part of an old Infocom fanboy with a bad case of sour grapes. (Whatever we can say about their respective games today, there’s no doubt which company won the fight for hearts and minds in the 1980s…) I actually think a comparison between the two is useful in another way. Infocom was always a collective enterprise, an amalgamation of equals that came into being behind an appropriately round conference table in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Strong personalities though the principals may have been, one cannot say that Infocom was ever Al Vezza’s company or Joel Berez’s company, nor Dave Lebling’s or Marc Blank’s. From first to last, it was a choir of voices, if sometimes a discordant one. Compare this to Sierra: there wasn’t ever an inch of daylight between that company and Ken and Roberta Williams. Sierra’s personality was theirs. Sierra’s strengths were theirs. And, yes, Sierra’s weaknesses, the same ones I’ve documented at so much length over the years, were theirs as well.

I’ll get to their strengths — no, really, I will, I promise — but permit me to dwell on their weaknesses just a little bit longer before I do so. I think that these mostly come down to one simple fact: that neither Ken nor Roberta Williams was ever really a gamer. Ken has admitted that the only Sierra game he ever sat down and played to completion for himself, the way that his customers did it, was SoftPorn — presumably because it was so short and easy (not to mention it being so in tune with where Ken’s head was at in the early 1980s). In his memoir, Ken writes that “to me, Sierra was a marketing company. Lots of people can design products, advertise products, and sell products. But what really lifted Sierra above the pack was our marketing.” Here we see his blasé attitude toward design laid out in stark black and white: “lots of people” can do it. A talent for marketing, it seems, is rarer, and thus apparently more precious. (As for the rest of that sentence: I’m afraid you’ll have to ask Ken how “marketing” is different from “advertising” and “selling…”)

Roberta has not made so explicit a statement on the subject, but it does strike me as telling that, when she was given her choice of any project in the world recently, she chose to remake Crowther and Woods’s Adventure. That game was, it would seem, a once-in-a-lifetime obsession for her.

Needless to say, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with not being a gamer; there are plenty of other hobbies in this world that are equally healthy and stimulating and satisfying, or quite possibly more so. Yet not being a gamer can become an issue when one is running a games company or designing games for a living. At some very fundamental level, neither Ken nor Roberta had any idea what it was like to experience the products Sierra made. And because they didn’t know this, they also didn’t know how important design is to that experience — didn’t understand that, while the ten-foot rule applies for only a limited window of time, writing and puzzles and systems are timeless. Infocom scheduled weekly lunches for everyone who wished to attend to discuss the nature of good and bad design at sometimes heated length, drafted documents full of guidelines about same, made design the cornerstone of their culture. As far as I can tell, discussions of this nature never took place at Sierra. Later, after Infocom was shuttered, LucasArts picked up the torch, publicizing Ron Gilbert’s famous manifesto on “Why Adventure Games Suck” — by “adventure games,” of course, he largely meant “Sierra adventure games” — and including a short description of its design philosophy in every single game manual. Again, such a chapter is unimaginable in a Sierra manual.

For, like everything else associated with the company, Sierra’s games reflected the personalities of Ken and Roberta Williams. They were better at the big picture than they were at the details; they were flashy, audacious, and technologically cutting-edge on the surface, and all too often badly flawed underneath. Those Sierra designers who were determined to make good games, by seeking the input of outside testers and following other best practices, had to swim against the tide of the company’s culture in order to do so. Not that many of them were willing or able to put in the effort when push came to shove, although I have no doubt that everyone had the best of intentions. The games did start to become a bit less egregiously unfair in the 1990s, by which time LucasArts’s crusade for “no deaths and no dead ends” had become enough of a cause célèbre to shame Sierra’s designers as well into ceasing to abuse their players so flagrantly. Nevertheless, even at this late date, Sierra’s games still tended to combine grand concepts with poor-to-middling execution at the level of the granular details. If I’m hard on them, this is the reason why: because they frustrate me to no end with the way they could have been so great, if only Ken Williams had instilled a modicum of process at his company to make them so.

Having said that, though, I have to admit as well that Ken and Roberta Williams are probably deserving of more praise than I’ve given them over the fifteen years I’ve been writing these histories; it’s not as if they were the only people in games with blind spots. Contrary to popular belief, Roberta was not the first female adventure-game designer — that honor goes to Alexis Adams, wife of Scott Adams, who beat her to the punch by a year — but she was by far the most prominent woman in the field of game design in general for the better part of two decades, an inspiration to countless other girls and women, some of whom are making games today because of her. That alone is more than enough to ensure her a respected place in gaming history.

Meanwhile Sierra itself was a beacon of diversity in an industry that sometimes seemed close to a mono-culture, the sole purview of a certain stripe of nerdy young white man with a sharply circumscribed range of cultural interests. The people behind Sierra’s most iconic games came from everywhere but the places and backgrounds you might expect. Al Lowe was a music teacher; Gano Haine was a social-studies teacher; Christy Marx was a cartoon scriptwriter; Jim Walls was a police officer; Jane Jensen and Lorelei Shannon were aspiring novelists; Mark Crowe was a visual artist; Scott Murphy was a short-order cook; Corey and Lori Ann Cole were newsletter editors and publishers and tabletop-RPG designers; Josh Mandel was a standup comedian; Roberta Williams, of course, was a homemaker. At one point in the early 1990s, fully half of Sierra’s active game-development projects were helmed by women. You would be hard-pressed to find a single one at any other studio.

This was the positive side of Ken Williams’s mass-market vision — the one which said that games were for everyone, and that they could be about absolutely anything. There was no gatekeeping at Sierra, in any sense of the word. For all of LucasArts’s thoughtfulness about design, it seldom strayed far from its comfort zone of cartoon-comedy graphic adventures. Sierra, by contrast, dared to be bold, thematically and aesthetically as well as technologically. I may have a long list of niggly complaints about a game like, say, Jane Jensen’s Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within, but I’ll never forget it either. Despite all of its infelicities, it dares to engage with aspects of life that are raw and tragic and real, giving rise to emotions in this player at least that are the opposite of trite. How many of its contemporaries from companies other than Sierra can say the same?

And as went the production side of the business, so went the reception side. Perhaps ironically because he wasn’t a gamer himself, perhaps just because one doesn’t get to be Walt Disney by selling to a niche audience, Ken understood that computer games had to become more accessible if they were ever to make a sustained impact beyond the core demographic of technically proficient young men. He strove mightily on multiple fronts to make this happen. Very early in his time as the head of Sierra, he was instrumental in setting up distribution systems to ensure that computer games were readily available all over the United States, the way that a new form of consumer entertainment ought to be. (Few Sierra fans are aware that it was Ken who founded SoftSel, the dominant American consumer-software distributor of the 1980s and beyond, in order to ensure that Sierra’s games and those of others had a smoothly paved highway to retail stores. Doing so may have been his most important single contribution of all from a purely business perspective.) A little later, he put together easy-to-assemble “multimedia upgrade kits” for everyday computers, and made sure that Sierra’s software installers were the most user-friendly in the business, asking you for IRQ and DMA numbers only as a last resort. If some of his ideas about interactive movies as the future of mainstream entertainment proved a bit half-baked in the long run, other Sierra games like The Incredible Machine more directly anticipated the “Casual Revolution” to come. If his wide-angle vision of gaming seemed increasingly anachronistic in the latter 1990s, even if it was wrong-headed in a hundred particulars, the fact was that it would come roaring back and win the day in the broader strokes. His only real mistake was that of leaving the industry which he had done so much to build a little bit too early to be vindicated.

So, let us wave a fond farewell to Ken and Roberta Williams as they sail off into the sunset, and give them their full measure of absolution from the petty carping of critics like me as we do so. In every sense of the words, Ken and Roberta were pioneers and visionaries. Their absence from these histories will be keenly felt. Godspeed and bon voyage, you two. Your certainly made your presence felt while you were with us.


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Sources: The books Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Line by Ken Williams and Vivendi: A Key Player in Global Entertainment and Media by Philippe Bouquillion.

Online sources include “How Sierra was Captured, Then Killed, by a Massive Accounting Fraud” by Duncan Fyfe at Vice, “Chainsaw Monday (Sierra On-Line Shuts Down)” at Larry Laffer Dot Net, Ken Williams’s page of thoughts and rambles at Sierra Gamers, and an old TalkSpot interview with some of Sierra’s employees, done just after the second round of lay-offs hit Bellevue.

I also made use of the materials held in the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play. And once again I owe a debt of gratitude to Corey Cole for answering my questions about this period at his usual thoughtful length.

 
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Posted by on May 23, 2025 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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