[deckarep]

Also for anyone wanting to learn the history from the man himself Ken Williams recently wrote a book on Sierra’s rise and fall as one of the industry’s top gaming studios.

Obviously he wasn’t there for the tail end of things during the acquisitions and fraudulent period but what I found most interesting is how Sierra was bootstrapped in the first place.

Ken is a brilliant thinker and had the foresight to build a game engine that Roberta could plug and play her game content in because she admitted to not being a great coder.

Later Ken wanted his next generation games to be built as a virtual machine (The Sierra Creative Interpreter) which meant they only had to make the game once and build the VM for different architectures. Again a brilliant move.

Check his book out: https://kensbook.com/

[tfandango]

It's worth noting that he's also working on a new game.

https://kensgame.com/

[PhasmaFelis]

> Later Ken wanted his next generation games to be built as a virtual machine (The Sierra Creative Interpreter) which meant they only had to make the game once and build the VM for different architectures.

Like Infocom did from the beginning with their Z-Machine VM.

[LaundroMat]

And Lucasarts with SCUMM.

[JKCalhoun]

I read Ken's (self-published) book and was a bit underwhelmed. Maybe interesting to diehard fans though.

The chapter on Sierra in Steven Levy's "Hackers" was much more engaging (in fact probably made me want to become a published game author).

Ken only mentions the Levy chapter in passing which is too bad — Levy did a fantastic job of painting a picture of the adolescent coding Mecca that Sierra was at that time. All night D&D, 2-liter's of Coke, coding, hot tubs and gaming....