| I'd highly recommend reading more of that blog. He's been publishing consistently for 7 years (!), tracking down obscure interviews and conducting a few of his own. I spent almost 2 hours this morning digging through his full history of Sierra. Some interesting nuggets: - Al Lowe basically invented beta testing at Sierra for Leisure Suit Larry. He wrote a program to capture user inputs that didn't work onto the floppy disk, which the beta testers then sent back to Sierra. They then updated the graphics, text, or parser to account for these confusing areas. - Ken Williams was quite a visionary on several things, including the rise of IBM compatibles, MS-DOS, and the early internet / social networks. - Lori Cole's vision for Quest for Glory, using a cardinal direction, a season, and an element as inspiration, was really fascinating to reflect on. (I have a soft spot for Quest for Glory IV's Eastern European mythology, which was very rare in the pre-Witcher days.) - There was a failed merger between Sierra and Broderbund (Carmen Sandiego, Print Shop, Prince of Persia) in the early 90s that could well have changed the face of the industry. Overall, was way better than the average internet rabbit hole! |