Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings
Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings | |
 | |
| Title | Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The rise and fall of Sierra On-Line as told by the ultimate insider |
| Author | |
| Publisher | Ken Williams |
| Release Date | July 24, 2020 |
| Genre | History |
| ISBN | 978-1716727368 |
| Format | Paperback |
| Country | United States of America |
| Language | English |
Description from the Back of the Book
Once Upon a Time...
In the time before Amazon, Ebay, or even Google, there was a consumer software company, started by a husband and wife team, that dominated the charts over a nearly twenty-year period.
Sierra On-Line should have lived forever.
This is the untold story of how Sierra was born and how it died. This fairy tale does indeed have a wizard and a princess. But it also has corruption, greed and frightening characters.
UNTIL EVIL INTERCEDED..
Not all evil is hiding in the dark.
Sometimes it lurks where you least expect it.
Ken Williams
Founder / CEO Sierra On-Line Inc
NOT ALL FAIRY TALES HAVE HAPPY ENDINGS
The Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Line
By Ken Williams
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 Ken Williams. All rights reserved.
Published by Ken Williams
ISBN 978-1-71672-736-8
VERSION 2020_09_24 v1
DISCLAIMER: This autobiographical book was written based on the author’s memories. Different people will remember events in different ways. Time has passed and memory has faded. If there are any events which have been recounted inaccurately, it was not intentional. All game related images are the property of the copyright owners and are included herein for historical purposes.
Prologue
I have three great loves in life: Roberta, computers and boats. That said, this is not a book about any of those things, although the first two of those are important to the story.
My hope in writing this book was that through giving others a front-row look at my journey through life, the mistakes I’ve made and the successes Roberta and I have had, that there might be some piece of it that helps others.
Many of you reading this book may be hoping that this is the ultimate behind-the-scenes tell-all look at Sierra On-Line, the company Roberta and I founded and ran for eighteen years. That’s both true and untrue. This is Sierra’s rise and fall as seen through my eyes. There are no interviews with the game designers. There are very few details about any of the games. There are no game hints. Instead, what you will find are the secrets behind what made Sierra so special. You’ll get a look at the strategies that infused Sierra with a specialness so profound that someone like you might pick up this book and invest time in reading it twenty-five years after Sierra’s untimely demise. You’ll also find that it has a lot of personal background on Roberta and me. As you will see, much of what Sierra was flowed directly from Roberta’s and my personality. You can’t really understand Sierra without a deep dive into how Roberta and I think.
I have thought for years about writing a book about the Sierra experience. My hope was that someone else would write a book and save me the trouble. There has, in fact, been a huge amount written, but I now realize that there are elements of the story that only I can tell. It’s too good a story to leave untold, and there is much to be learned from it. At a minimum, I can guarantee that it is an entertaining story. Whether or not I was able to get it down on paper: Well... you’ll need to be the judge of that.
Ken Williams, July 2020
Chapter 1: (1979) Happy Endings
"We believe that the boat is unsinkable"
- Philip Franklin, Vice-President of White Star Line, builders of the Titanic Cruise Ship
In 1979 my wife, Roberta, designed a computer game that I programmed. That game became the basis of Sierra On-Line, a company we raised from its infancy over a sixteen-year period. By 1996, Sierra was recognized worldwide as a leader in consumer software with one thousand employees producing hit products in education, productivity and entertainment software. From a start on our kitchen table, Roberta and I had built Sierra into a company that would be acquired for nearly one billion dollars.
Sadly, this fairy-tale story does not have a fairy-tale ending.
Instead, the story ends with corruption, lies, litigation, sadness, layoffs, bankruptcies, and prison.
They say that the best place to start a story is...
...at the beginning.
So, here we go (drum roll, please)!
Chapter 2: (1960-1970) Growing Up: TheYounger Years
"If you are born poor, it’s not your mistake. But if you die poor, it’s your mistake."
- Bill Gates
I don’t know the whole story, and don’t care enough to research it, but apparently my heritage is nothing to brag about.
My only memories of my grandfather, on my dad’s side, was of him dying. He was a scrawny little guy with a dark complexion and dark curly hair which didn’t seem to gray. He dragged around an oxygen tank and would sit smoking, drinking whiskey, and spitting into a coffee can.
I’ve been told that he was a colorful character in his prime. He grew up in the hills of Kentucky, sold illegal moonshine and is alleged to have spent time in jail for murder. There is no part of me that wishes we could have spent more time together.
My dad’s older brother was a chip off the old block. He also died of alcoholism.
Somehow, my dad came through what must have been a tough childhood to be a good guy. He was nineteen when he married my mom, who was only sixteen at the time. My mom was young, but this was the back country of Kentucky almost seventy years ago.
My mom’s family was certainly better than my dad’s, but she also came from a broken home.
In the years following marriage my parents had four children, of which I was the oldest. My dad had trouble finding work and loaded the family into a car for a move to California, which at the time was rumored to have plenty of employment and a growing economy.
Dad found work as a TV and appliance repairman for the retailer Sears Roebuck and Co. It wasn’t a great income, but they were able to purchase a small home in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Pomona CA.
At a very early age I developed an interest in reading. One of my earliest memories was reading the book Moby Dick. Maybe that book started me on the path of being interested in the sea? I don’t know. I was devouring full books at five years of age. It seems impossible, but that is my memory. I read every Superman comic. I read the complete series of books called Hardy Boys; 190 volumes of kids solving crimes. When those ran out I read a similar series called Nancy Drew. I was frequently busted by my mom for reading books, using a flashlight, under the covers late at night. It didn’t slow me down.
We couldn’t afford for me to own the books I was reading. As soon as I was old enough to ride a bike I started hanging out at the Pomona Public Library. I loved that library. Some of my fascination was the access to books, but it was also a place to hide from my home.
My mom and I didn’t get along. I have no recollection of what we fought about, but I know that we did and that I was always happier when away from home. I remember my dad as working all the time, returning only late at night. Looking back on it, I suspect his relationship with my mom wasn’t much better than my own and, like me, he sought refuge elsewhere.
Incredibly, I have very few memories of my childhood. A psychologist might be able to say if I’ve blocked them out somehow. I have no idea, but I don’t really want them back. I have only brief snippets of memory before turning eighteen.
Most of my childhood memories are not of playing. They are of time spent at the library, or at the nearby courthouse. In my early teens I started attending criminal trials. I loved entering courtrooms and sitting quietly in the back watching someone be tried for some offense against society. Murder trials were my favorite. I dreamed of being a lawyer someday. No one ever challenged me but I’m sure everyone wondered what a ten-year-old kid was doing wandering the halls of a courthouse, or why his parents weren’t watching him. I was what you might call a “strange kid.”
I do recall that I was a smart kid. However, this did not translate to good grades. I would quickly read through any textbook and decide I knew everything and then spend class time bored.
It wasn’t just my inattention in class that made me feel out of sync with other kids. I was born in late October and for some reason that allowed me to start Kindergarten at age four. This made me a year younger than most of my peers.
Perhaps it was another manifestation of not wanting to be home, but I was a “joiner” in school. I joined everything; the track team, the chess club, the marching band, the studio band, summer school, etc. It didn’t matter what it was; I wanted to do it.
I supplemented all my at-school activities with a paper route and by selling newspapers door to door in the evenings. I frequently sold more papers than anyone else and won innumerable trips to Disneyland. Somehow, despite my mediocre grades I racked up enough school time that at the end of my junior year, at just sixteen years of age, I was “graduated” from high school.
This was perfectly fine with me. Somewhere along the way I had developed an aggressive personality. All I could think about was getting into college, getting a job, and becoming rich. Note that I said “rich” not “employed” or “successful.” Amongst the few memories I have from that time is the constant thought of wanting to live a different life than the one I grew up in. I read books about business executives who owned yachts and jets, and who hung out with beautiful models in fancy mansions.
I knew that was my future and I couldn’t wait to claim it.
Chapter 3: (1971) Growing Up: Ken Goes to College
"Fat, Drunk, And Stupid Is No Way To Go Through Life, Son."
- Dean Wormer to John Belushi in the film Animal House
No child should enter college at sixteen years of age, but that didn’t stop me. I turned seventeen a month after starting college and that didn’t work much better. Neither my chronological age nor maturity were doing me any favors when I started college.
I was cocky, and it never occurred to me that I might not know everything. Physics was my major, with a minor in over confidence. My goal was to graduate quickly, so I immediately signed up for the advanced level classes.
My aggressive attempt at college was paired with an equally aggressive attempt at earning money. My work as a paperboy had taught me to sell newspaper subscriptions. Each evening I would set out with a group of ten other young men. A van would drop us off on a corner and we’d each go door to door peddling subscriptions. Most doors we would knock on already had a subscription to the paper. But, at least a couple times per block the door would be answered by someone who didn’t really want to have a newspaper delivered to their door. This would start me on my sales pitch.
If you want to win in life, find something to sell, and sell it. Learn to accept and even cherish rejection. Selling is a polite way of describing the humiliation of trying to talk someone into something that they probably don’t need or want and then trying to alter your pitch on the fly as your target plots how to slam the door in your face. Each time the door was slammed I’d learn a little about what I said wrong and what the turnoffs were in my sales pitch. I learned, one slammed door at a time, how to avoid falling into traps that would allow my potential customer to close the door. I had lines to use when they said they were rarely home, for when they said they didn’t like reading the paper, for when they said they were in the middle of cooking dinner. Most doors were closed almost immediately, either because they already took the newspaper or because they had no interest. I had only seconds to size up a person, engage them, charm them, and monetize them.
The newspaper had never seen anyone like me. I was a selling machine. I loved selling, and I especially loved making money. I claimed every sales award and couldn’t stop selling.
I was studying physics at college, but that isn’t how I learned to make a living. It was those nights hustling papers door to door that prepared me for life in the fast lane. In real life I’m incredibly boring and happiest when talking to no one. Most people are surprised when they meet me. Where’s the guy who writes all these books, or makes the games, or is the life of the party? The salesman we’ve heard about? All they see is frumpy old me, and that’s because they are meeting the me I am most of the time. But, give me a product to sell and the switch turns on. And, I do what salespeople do. I sell and I make money.
I mention what I’m like off the playing field because it is relevant. I wasn’t born with sales skills and I’m not naturally charming or persuasive. My ability to sell came through hard work and long hours. I earned my ability one door at a time, and it was an unwillingness to fail that caused me to go to that next door and not give up.
Anyway...
My first year in college was a disaster. It was a wake-up call. I was hustling papers by night and had been promoted to running and training a group of hungry kids who were knocking on doors to sell papers. I had joined a fraternity. I had signed up for courses that I’d thought would be easy but weren’t.
I was seventeen when I joined the college fraternity. I’m sure there are fraternities which are an essential part of obtaining a college education. However, the education I received at the frat house had more to do with alcohol and girls than it did books and studies.\
And, there were even more distractions…
Mike, my boss at the newspaper drove junk cars in a figure 8 race at a local racetrack. During the week he’d patch together a crappy car, and then on Saturday nights he would race the car on a track configured to ensure there would be collisions.
I became Mike’s pit crew, which gave me an interest in repairing cars. Between selling, partying, pit crewing and on rare occasions studying, I was constantly working on whatever car I owned at the time. It’s inconceivable to me now, but I would think nothing of rebuilding a carburetor, swapping a transmission or bleeding brake lines. These days I’m more a software guy than a hardware guy. But not back then. Engine repair came easy to me and I had no fear of taking things apart. I also had a limited supply of common sense and money. My car was constantly under repair and I was constantly broke. Such was the life of my seventeen-year-old self.
Which brings me to Roberta…
Chapter 4: (1971) Growing up: Ken Meets a Girl
"You know that look that women get when they want to have sex? Me neither."
- Steve Martin
I am an impatient person. If I want something, I want it now. When ordering anything on the internet, I automatically seek those things that can be shipped the fastest. This attribute of mine tends to make those around me crazy. This impatience exhibits itself in both good and bad ways. Sometimes very good, and sometimes very bad.
When I met Roberta, she had just graduated from high school. Like me, she was going through the same “having fun phase” that seems to afflict young college students. I was attending Cal Poly Pomona, a four-year university, and she was attending nearby Citrus junior college.
My relationship with Roberta was love at first sight, or to state it more accurately it was lust at first sight. I was seventeen and starting college. She was eighteen and dating a friend of mine while also starting college. We double-dated and I was stuck admiring her from the backseat while my friend drove us to a drive-in theater for a make-out session. I don’t remember much about that double-date other than guzzling an entire beer in one massive gulp, proving I could pee farther than my friend, and that Roberta wore pink underwear. College kids are not always paragons of maturity.
These days, I joke that I am Roberta’s boy toy, because she is a year older than I am, but at the time it wasn’t funny. When we first met, Roberta assumed that I was older than her. I was in college and had a car; all the trappings of someone who had achieved the ripe old age of nineteen or even twenty. However, I was only seventeen. Later, when Roberta found my true age it devastated her and almost broke us up.
When my friend who had been dating Roberta moved on to his next pursuit I asked for Roberta’s phone number. When I called her she had no recollection of our ever having met. It took my best sales skills just to keep her on the phone. Once she remembered who I was, she was unimpressed. She was a hot young Rapunzel, and I was no Prince Charming. I was a tall skinny kid from the south side of town, whereas not only was Roberta beautiful, she lived in the fancy part of town, on a hillside, in a house with a pool!
During our conversation I slowly moved Roberta from saying, “Ken who?” to “I kind of remember you,” to “No. I do not want to meet you,” to “OK. We can meet.” It was one of my tougher sales calls and my foot was bruised from the number of times she tried to slam the door, but ultimately, she agreed to a date.
Roberta at the time was dating guys who were rough around the edges. I was also doing dumb things, but some of my immaturity was layered onto a person who deep down was the perfect definition of a nerd. To try to give the appearance of being cool, I would roll up a pack of cigarettes in my short sleeve shirts. I only tried to smoke a cigarette a couple times, but had convinced myself that this was something that would impress women. Roberta is very good at seeing past outer façades. You can dress a loser up in a suit, or a winner in rags, and two sentences into a conversation she’ll know who is who. This magic ability of hers to size people up within minutes was to become very important later in life and is what really stopped her hanging up the phone when I made that first call.
Roberta’s dad, John, had high aspirations for her. From birth he wanted her to succeed in life. He had decided she should be an optometrist! Neither of us know how John arrived at the conclusion that optometry was the best possible career or her destiny.
Roberta was (and is) petite, and at the time her dresses were even shorter. Her dad was worried about her. She had taken up smoking and was dating guys of dubious character. When I arrived to pick up her for our first date her dad was waiting at the door and, while waiting for her to get ready, he gave me a grilling. I talked about being in college, that I was majoring in Physics and my quest for future success. I shared with him that I was planning to retire by the time I was thirty and expected to become rich and famous.
Did I mention that I know how to sell?
Being a starving seventeen-year-old, our first date was not particularly amazing. We went to a local Mexican restaurant and talked for hours. A couple weeks and a handful of dates later, I informed Roberta that we were to be married. She thought I was insane or joking, but that’s only because she didn’t know me. That was about to change.
Her dad became my strongest ally, and saw in me a chance to rescue his errant daughter. He pushed Roberta from his end, and threw roadblocks in the way of other suitors.
It took a few dates to sell Roberta on the idea of marriage but closing a sale is what I do best.
We had to wait until I turned eighteen to get married. Roberta was working as a ‘typist clerk’ for the County of Los Angeles Welfare Department, in Pomona CA. Her dad, who worked for the County of Los Angeles Agriculture Department helped her get the job. She was making a starvation salary but was living at home, with no bills, and able to save her paycheck each month.
During this time I convinced Roberta to buy a van. I wanted it so that I could transport the kids that I was taking around each evening to sell papers. Understandably, her parents were not excited when they discovered the van had a mattress in the back.
How could life get better? I had a hot fiancée. She had a van. I had a career transporting kids who sold newspapers. On weekends I was fixing and racing cars. I was going to college. I still wasn’t rich, but things were looking up!
Roberta and I were married five days after I turned eighteen. Roberta had achieved the advanced age of nineteen (but, I didn’t hold it against her).
Chapter 5: (1972-1973) Growing Up: Ken Gets an Education
"...I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves- you can get a complete education for no money..."
- Ray Bradbury, author
During my final year of high school our class took a field trip to UCLA (a Los Angeles-based university). The only part of the trip I remember is seeing my first computer.
It’s unimaginable now, because computers are so integral to all of our lives, but computers are a fairly recent phenomenon. At that time, I had never seen a computer. The whole world of modern computer technology was just spinning up. It would be years later, during my first year of college, before I would see my first hand-held calculator.
I have no idea if what I saw at UCLA was a computer, or if it was just a keyboard and monitor attached to some far away computer. All I remember is walking up to the keyboard and playing my first computer game. It was a text based game based on the TV show Star Trek.
"Star Trek is a text-based strategy video game based on the Star Trek television series in which the player, controlling the USS Enterprise starship, flies through the galaxy and hunts down Klingon warships within a time limit. The game starts with a short text description of the mission before allowing the player to enter commands. Each game starts with a different number of Klingons, friendly starbases, and stars spread throughout the galaxy. The galaxy is depicted as an 8-by-8 grid of “quadrants.” Each quadrant is further divided into an 8-by-8 grid of “sectors.” The number of stars, Klingons, and starbases in any one quadrant is set at the start of the game, but their exact position changes each time the player enters that quadrant."
- Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(1971_video_game)
I was fascinated by the experience! I had no idea computers existed or how they worked. I just knew that it was the most exciting thing I had ever seen. I can’t say that it made me want to build software, because I wouldn’t have known the word or the concept. I would have had no idea that computer programming was even a career, and it wasn’t at the time.
There were no computer majors in those days. Physics was selected because when I looked at the course list there seemed to be a lot of computer courses for Physics majors.
My schedule was loaded up with physics classes, calculus classes and computer programming classes.
For the first time in my life I met a challenge I couldn’t handle.
The calculus courses were beyond me. The classes in physics were fun but the advanced calculus courses involved solving differential equations. It isn’t that I didn’t study. I just didn’t "get it."
There was only one college course at which I truly excelled, and that was computer programming.
Coding was different in those days. I never saw the computer I was coding on. Instead, there was a room with several keypunch machines, and there was a window where you could place your deck of cards for processing by some unseen computer operator. There was also a basket into which any compiler errors or printout from your computer program, if it ran, would be placed.
To write code I needed to sit down at the keyboard and type out the computer program, one line at a time. Each line that I typed would fill one card.
A computer program consisted of a stack of punched cards; sometimes hundreds of them. Once I wrote a program I’d need to drive to the college, type my program onto a deck of cards, submit my deck of cards to a “card reader” and then come back in a few hours to see if my program ran successfully.
I was working evenings in addition to going to school. Each evening, often many times an evening, Roberta and I would drive out to the college just to see if my program had successfully executed. I would look through the basket of computer printouts, hoping to find one with my name on it. Sometimes Roberta and I would sit for hours waiting for my program to be run, only to see that I had made some small error and would need to replace some card in the deck and submit the deck again, triggering another long wait.
Sound primitive? It was. Coding was a 24 hours-per-day project. In order to debug my program I had to look at the print out I’d get back, hours after feeding my card deck into a card reader. I had various card boxes for various programs. Often, I would submit my program and after waiting four hours and driving back to the school, I’d find that I accidentally mistyped some obscure piece of computer jargon. This would mean making a quick fix and resubmitting the card deck. It also would mean several hours lost. I didn’t mind! This was the most fun I had ever had.
A brief side note: Years later, working as a young software engineer at Bekins Moving and Storage, another programmer brought back my box of cards from the computer room, but no printout. “Where’s my printout? Do I have a bug?,” I asked. He answered, “Yes.” and opened the box. Out crawled a cockroach. Programmer humor is not always funny to non-programmers.
Along with marriage came bills and responsibility. At the time of our marriage, I had completed only one year of college.
Roberta was still working, but to say we struggled financially would be an understatement. When Roberta talks about that job it is with great disgust. This was decades prior to the evolution of the #metoo movement.
“Mr. S[…], who was an oily fat ‘older’ man, probably in his forties or fifties, liked to have me climb up a ladder to file handfuls of folders. The ladder was positioned against a tall wall with shelves of folders all the way up to the ceiling. I was still wearing my ‘short dresses or skirts’ (as were most of the young ladies then!). So he would want me to climb the ladder to ‘file the folders’ in the ‘top shelf’ as he would stand at the bottom of the ladder and look up. He was always making comments of sexual innuendo…”
- Roberta Williams
Within a few months of marriage, Roberta became pregnant with our son DJ. That was the straw that finally broke the camel’s back. It was impossible for me to maintain multiple jobs and go to school full-time. In addition to running a crew that was selling papers door to door, and making pizzas at a local takeout place, I was working weekend nights cleaning up the mess left behind by cars at the local drive-in movie theater. This involved shoveling up dirty diapers, popcorn, and other items too gross to mention.
I had no choice but to quit school and seek a higher-paying full-time job. I quickly found a job sanding fiberglass in a factory. This meant wearing something resembling a space suit to protect myself from the fiberglass powder.
Nothing is duller than working on a factory production line. Not only was I bored, I was hot, sweaty and miserable inside the space suit. To keep myself sane, I started analyzing the processes and quickly came up with ideas to boost productivity. Within weeks, my section of the line was running at nearly double the pace. Instead of this meaning higher productivity it meant my group was stuck waiting for something to do while our output sat on the floor waiting for the next group on the production line to catch up with what we were feeding them. I went to my boss to ask if I could look at optimizing all of the line to reduce bottlenecks.
What my boss saw was a cocky eighteen-year-old kid who thought he knew everything, and who had created complaints from other groups. I explained that I was sure I could double the plant's output. My boss reacted by firing me. He said I was a square peg in a round hole and would be happier elsewhere. He was right. The problem was that we were broke. I was an unemployed college dropout with a pregnant wife. What now?
I had fond memories of my time in college spent learning about computers. It seemed to me like computers might become a real industry someday, and maybe I could find a job where all I did was work with computers. That would be a dream!
History was changed when I saw an advertisement for a computer programming school which promised BIG MONEY in the computer industry.
The school wasn’t cheap: Five thousand dollars! The good news was that I could qualify for a student loan with a government-backed bank loan and make payments of $47 per month. Payments wouldn’t begin until a year after graduation. They would continue for many years, but if I could get one of those BIG MONEY jobs, it would be fine. The only catch was that I would need someone to co-sign for the loan. They would be on the hook if I didn’t make the payments. My parents weren’t able to co-sign, but Roberta’s parents quickly said, “YES!”
Whereas to complete college I’d have needed another three years of going to school, Control Data Institute (CDI), promised to make me a computer programmer in just nine months.
It was too good to be true.
An excerpt from this ad: "As a computer programmer, a man or woman with two years' experience can earn as much as$8,000 to $10,000 a year"
CDI exceeded all expectations. I have never understood why trade schools aren’t far more accepted than they are. I dreamed of becoming a computer programmer and suddenly, I was in an environment surrounded by others with the same goal, a teacher focused on that goal, and direct access to the hardware needed to attain the goal.
I still had to drive around the kids selling papers at night in order to pay the rent, and supplemented our income by stuffing advertisements into newspapers and delivering papers on weekends. But now, my days were spent learning about and using a computer! Life doesn’t get much better.
It was a good time to be learning computers because I was able to essentially see the industry being born. The school wanted to take the students through the evolution of computers and after some text book learning about things like binary numbers; we were asked to program one of the earliest computers, the IBM 407 accounting machine. Programming was done by plugging wires into holes on a circuit board!
We graduated from the 407 to a small mainframe computer; the IBM 1401. Programming was now more like what I had been doing in college with programs written using punched cards.
This was my first taste of "real programming" in that we were learning machine language programming. This meant working with the computer at an intimate level. Most computer operating systems and computer languages try to hide the hardware from the programmer. In most cases this is a good thing and allows the programmer to focus on writing their program without worrying too much about the hardware the program will run on. But for real fun, as a computer programmer, you need to get down to the little bits and bytes that are the guts of a computer.
Finally, towards the end of the course, we moved up to a “modern” (in 1973) computer; the IBM System 3. I learned a real computer programming language, RPG II.
School was nine months of pure heaven. I had a knack for computers and quickly separated myself from the rest of the class. I moved at a faster pace than others and would complete class projects in minutes that took other students hours. This gave me virtually unlimited time on the computers to write code.
Unlike college, I was now a hero. I had found something I had a natural talent for and graduated at the top of my class.
It was now time to get serious about finding a job.
Chapter 6: (1973-1979) The Days Before Sierra
"The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity."
- Ayn Rand, Author
Our son DJ was born in November of 1973, roughly corresponding to the time when I was graduating from Control Data Institute.
My first job out of trade school was as a computer operator. In those days, computers were giant beasts that filled entire rooms.
These large computers generated enough heat that they had to be cooled by giant, noisy, air conditioning units which circulated air through the room via holes in the floor and ceiling panels. My first job in computers consisted of hanging tapes. Entire databases, such a customer list for a large corporation, were stored on magnetic tape. Sometimes there would be so much data that multiple tapes would be required. My job would be to wait patiently for a light to blink, triggering me into action to load a new tape onto a tape drive. It wasn’t very exciting, but I saw it as the first step into my new career.
We were living near Los Angeles at the time, and the computer industry was growing rapidly. From the day I started my first job, I sent out résumés seeking a better job. Not only did I want more money, I wanted my shot at being a computer programmer. Within ninety days I was offered a job at a computer manufacturer, Burroughs Corporation. I would have to start as a computer operator, but was promised they would move me into a job programming computers within a year. It was also a chance to work with disk drives instead of tape drives. Burroughs’s disk drives were cutting edge technology. They held an awe-inspiring 250 mb of data on a disk only about four feet in diameter! That is less capacity than even the dumbest of today’s "smart" phones.
That part of my life is a blur. Burroughs gave me my shot at software development within a couple months. As soon as I was able to put the words "computer programmer" onto a résumé, I was back in action looking for my next job.
In those days software jobs were not only easy to find, recruiters would call constantly with promises of a better job and more money. Within weeks of taking each software engineering job, I started looking for my next job. I remember needing to fudge how long I had been at each job, and leave out companies I had worked at, in order to minimize the number of companies for which I worked.
By changing jobs frequently I had learned a wide variety of technologies and programming languages. When seeking a new job I sought two things: More money, and experience that would look good on my résumé.
I confess to having exaggerated my skills on my résumé. If there was a particular skill set I wanted to learn, a technology or programming language, I would claim to be an expert, and if given an interview I would binge study all night prior to the interview and then charm my way into the job.
This is a time in my life when looking back I’d say I crossed over from simple over-confidence into arrogance. This bit me once when I left a well-paying job programming in one language to take another higher-paid job as an assembly language programmer on an IBM mainframe. I studied enough to get the job, but a watchful programming manager quickly discovered I had been fibbing about my experience. I was fired immediately, but had learned enough that I picked up a different job making even more money, coding in IBM assembler, within a couple weeks.
If there is a lesson to be learned from this time, it is that I was always focused on two things: My résumé and my checking account. I wanted a résumé that would give me the flexibility to work for anyone. I studied help-wanted ads seeking the technologies most in demand that paid the most. I knew that if I stayed working for one company, even as a superstar programmer, I’d be locked into 5 to 10% annual pay increases and a promotion every 2 to 5 years. That wasn’t going to get me where I wanted to go.
You, dear reader, should take away from this time in my life that you must always be thinking about how marketable you are. I was right about that. If you have only one skill and the market for that skill is limited, your upside is limited and your downside is wide open. If you get lucky, your company will never have a layoff. If you wait long enough, you’ll get a raise or promotion. If you are good, work hard, and work for the right company, this is a viable strategy. But it’s not one that will give you true job security or allow you to skip steps as you climb the career ladder.
Just a few of the many companies I worked for in the short five-year period before starting Sierra: Bekins Moving and Storage, Burroughs Corporation, Groman’s mortuary, McDonnell Douglas, Fredericks of Hollywood, Sterling Computer Systems, Financial Decision Systems, Informatics, Aratek Services, Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, Chaffey Junior College, the State of Illinois, Warner Brothers Studios, Atlantic Records.
Not only was I working a full-time day job, I also started working various contract programming jobs by night and on weekends. Roberta was kept busy with DJ, our older son, and five years later, Chris, our second son.
It was during this time that Roberta and I evolved a system that stuck with us for decades. I would work late into the night Monday through Friday, and even until noon on Saturdays. We would spend the day, on Saturday, and into the evening, dining out or doing something while the kids were at home with a babysitter. This was Ken and Roberta time and no one or no thing could interfere. Then on Sunday, I could work early in the morning, but by the time the kids were up and around, it became their day. We spent the whole day and into the evening focused just on them.
At the ripe old age of twenty, we purchased our first home. And, guess what, as soon as we thought we could sell it at a profit, we sold it and bought another home. And once we had a profit, that home too was put up for sale. We became very good at packing and sometimes would move from a home before we even had time to unpack our boxes.
By 1979, when I first discovered personal computers, I had amassed quite a career, and we were well on our way to financial success.
Chapter 7: (1979) Roberta Has An Excellent Idea
“Destiny is a name often given in retrospect to choices that had dramatic consequences.”
- J. K. Rowling, Author
Roberta’s role in the start of Sierra is legendary. But there is more to the story.
Years before Sierra, while I was busy building my career as a computer programmer, Roberta also worked in computers.
Working was not Roberta’s idea.
I wanted Roberta to work, and she wanted to be at home with our children. The reason I wanted her to work is simple. I felt we could earn more money if Roberta got a job. I also thought she would enjoy working with computers. I loved what I was doing and thought that if she got a taste of it she’d experience the same joy.
The problem was that she had no education in computers, had no experience in computers, and knew little about them. We were living in Springfield, Il. at the time, where I was doing some software development for the State of Illinois.
“It’s true that I knew little about computers, but my exposure had been more than listening to Ken talk about computers. I had spent a lot of time in computer rooms with Ken, not only when he was in college at Cal Poly University but also at Control Data Institute when he attended there, and then at his first computer operator job. Ken would often ask me to change the tape drive and then later the hard disk drives at the various places that he worked. One reason was that he was studying his ‘programming’ and didn’t want to be interrupted by having to change a tape or disk drive. So, I had spent quite a bit of time ‘computer operating’ while Ken and I were ‘waiting’ in the computer rooms. This is how I was able to get a job as a computer operator and do it easily without having to be trained to do it (at Lincoln Land Junior College.) I wasn’t just ‘sitting around playing with babies.’ I was also learning.”
- Roberta Williams (her response after reading what I wrote above)
Roberta did very well as a computer operator, although she had to break in her new boss right from the beginning. On her first day, he asked that she take over responsibility for making coffee for his two programmers and himself. She declined, saying that she didn’t know how to make coffee, which was true -- but also that she didn’t want to learn! A few days later Roberta's boss asked her to type a letter. She immediately said, “I don’t know how to type”, which was a lie, but she didn’t care. She was a computer operator, NOT a secretary!
We lasted under six months in Illinois. I wasn’t making enough money at the time to rent a home with a garage. Instead, we had a carport and each day would start with me hoping the car would start in the freezing weather, shoveling snow out of the driveway and scraping ice off the windshield.
That was our cue to return to the warmth of California.
Roberta’s dad, who has since passed away, worked for Los Angeles County as an Agricultural Inspector. He had a great job with good pay and amazing benefits. John would lecture about the benefits of working for the government.
This gave me an idea. If working for the government was a good thing, perhaps that’s where Roberta should work? The county advertised their jobs, and I was able to see there were many entry level computer positions. However, even though no experience was required, testing was used to see who had the knowledge and aptitude to qualify. In an effort to be fair, interviewing for positions was secondary to test scores.
Roberta is a smart lady. I knew she would do well at any test, but wanted to remove all doubt. So... I devised an idea. I would apply for an entry level computer job and take the test. This would tell me the kinds of questions that were on the test, and I could use that knowledge to help Roberta prepare.
I took the test and, of course, aced it. I could have deliberately given wrong answers, but it was more honest to answer the questions to the best of my ability.
I rationalized my actions by telling myself:
- I was not writing anything down
- I answered the questions honestly
- If the County called and offered me a great job with lots of money, I’d take it
- I would not be giving Roberta answers, I would be telling her what to study
- Roberta would be tested on her knowledge, and she would have that knowledge before she took her turn with the test
Was it cheating? Certainly that could be argued, but form your own opinion. The outcome of my taking the test was that I spent many hours of effort tutoring Roberta in the subject matter that would be tested. Most of the questions were about binary arithmetic, hexadecimal numbers and basic computer terminology. Roberta's a fast learner and a good student. There were two people with the last name Williams who had perfect scores that month.
I received several job offers from the County but was never tempted. Roberta also received multiple offers and began her new life as a computer operator, hanging tapes for the County of Los Angeles.
Her job didn’t last long. Six months? It has been so long that neither of us remembers. Of course, almost immediately after she started working, I wanted her moving up the ladder. Roberta, who had been unenthusiastic about working, was even less so about my idea that she should seek employment as a computer programmer.
Roberta thought I was crazy to insist that she could be hired as a programmer. I talked her into taking a college course in COBOL programming, which happened to be the language I was coding in at the time. I then supplemented her class-learning with personal tutoring and twisting her arm to send out résumés. She grumbled through all of this.
Finding a job for her wasn’t a tough challenge. In the mid-70s, your chances of finding an elephant wandering the streets of Los Angeles were far higher than finding a female computer programmer. I can imagine the look on faces when a résumé crossed their desk from a young aspiring computer programmer named “Roberta.” How could it be? Roberta was snapped up immediately to work as a programmer, coding in COBOL, by Lawry’s Foods of Los Angeles.
Roberta's official title was “COBOL Trainee Programmer.” She was good but had little motivation to really dig in. Also: She was assigned a project working on Lawry’s accounting system, but knew nothing about accounting.
None of this put her job at risk. Who would possibly fire a female computer programmer in the mid-70s? It wouldn’t happen. And, the truth is that she was very good at her job. She would struggle by day with her assignments, then return home where I would tutor her, and fix her code. Her work was always done, and done correctly. My guess is that Lawry’s knew something was unusual about how Roberta was working, but it was a win-win for all.
Roberta's time at Lawry’s didn’t last too long. It was a combination of her not liking programming, our son needing more attention, and my rarely being home.
One constant theme in Roberta's and my discussions was that we wanted out of Los Angeles. There were plenty of reasons; but mostly it boiled down to our saying, “Wouldn’t it be nice to live in the woods?” Our second son, Chris, was born in May of 1979 and our eldest, DJ, would soon be six years old. Did we want him growing up in Los Angeles schools, where we worried about drugs and violence? Plus, the drive time was killing me. I was spending multiple hours a day sitting in Los Angeles traffic.
Unfortunately, as a software developer there weren’t many jobs in small towns. If I wanted to work as a computer programmer, I had to be where I could find work.
We found our solution when I was offered a job at Boeing, the aircraft manufacturer, in Seattle. Today, Seattle is a hub of the computer industry, home to Microsoft, Expedia, Amazon, Zillow and many others. However, none of those companies had yet been born. Boeing was really the only game in town. Seattle wasn’t a small town, but neither was it a big town.
To accept the job offer in Seattle, we would need to sell our home in Burbank, Ca. We listed our home for sale, and it sold quickly, with a 90 day escrow. Boeing agreed to wait for me, but our sale collapsed days from when we thought we’d be moving. We were packed and emotionally we were already in Seattle. It was very disappointing. We wanted out of Los Angeles and Seattle had been our only hope. Boeing withdrew my job offer.
My last full-time job was at a company called Informatics. It was a dream job giving me incredible experience. I was working with the latest technology on the latest systems. It’s tough to imagine now, but at the time IBM dominated the market. There was a saying that everyone knew, “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” IBM’s computers cost the most but were also the best solution, with the best and fastest hardware, the best sales team and the dominant market share. I made it my top priority to study everything IBM related.
Informatics produced a computer language and database system called Mark IV that was very popular on IBM computers. I had always wanted to work on the creation of a programming language or database and saw it as the best job a programmer could have. I was also surrounded by incredible talent. Informatics paid well and hired well. Every day was a learning experience.
However, none of this was as important as the fact that we wanted to move out of Los Angeles. And unfortunately, the only chance of doing so would be to create my own opportunity. I needed to start some company that could be run from home while living in the woods.
Another engineer at Informatics, Bob Leff, and I would have lunch together each day and bounce ideas on companies we could start.
As part of my quest to form some entrepreneurial venture, I noticed that Tandy Corporation (aka Radio Shack) had released a personal computer, at roughly the same time Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were introducing the Apple II.
I saw that a tiny company called Microsoft had put a programming language called “BASIC” onto the TRS 80. It came to me that there might be a market for other programming languages on these personal computers and Bob and I started talking about programming Fortran (another computer language) for the TRS 80.
As I was planning my next step, Roberta surprised me with an Apple II computer as my Christmas present. The Apple II was much more powerful than the TRS 80 and could even load programs from standard audio cassettes!
I knew immediately that the Apple II would be our future. It had an incredible amount of memory (16k) and a powerful processor (the 6502).
My friend Bob Leff and I started working to implement Fortran on the Apple II computer. Microsoft was offering the BASIC programming language for the Apple II and I was convinced we could leapfrog them with the much more powerful Fortran programming language.
As I was getting started on the Fortran compiler, I was still working for Informatics as well as several other companies.
My work at one of those companies required that I take home a teletype, allowing me to write code for some unseen remote computer. I think it may have been Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles that provided me the teletype, but that piece of trivia is now lost forever.
I was no stranger to working with devices that were hooked to remote mainframe (large) computers. In fact, my consulting practice, the name under which I did contract programming for many Los Angeles businesses, was: “On-Line Systems.” I had become an expert in working with computers that were accessed via remote terminals. Specifically, I was specializing in technologies called IMS and CICS, and with the IMS-DB system of databases.
There was no such thing as “the internet” in those days. In fact, there was nothing even remotely similar to the internet. There were remote terminals connected to mainframe computers, but they were wired directly to the computers. Not all terminals were clunky like the teletype I brought home. Most of the terminals I was working with had CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) screens and used a system to display pages of data which was not unlike the modern system that the internet uses to display web pages today (HTML).
To use the teletype, I had to load a program from paper tape, then use an acoustic modem to connect to a remote computer. The modem was a little gadget that would transmit data as sound. The sounds were a little like morse code in that seemingly random beeps and boops would represent data being sent as audible sound over a phone line.
This modem was a “110 baud modem,” which is the technical way of saying “incomprehensibly slow." "How slow?." you might ask. Well... Most pictures I take with my iPhone are around 2 megabytes. To transmit 2 megabytes of data at 110 baud would take at least forty-five hours, if the connection would last long enough to ever complete. Suffice it to say that no one was sending pictures via an acoustic modem.
It is possible that I just brought home the teletype to play with. At least, that’s the only purpose I can remember the teletype serving. I somehow was able to dial into MIT via the teletype and play games.
There weren’t a lot of games to play, and I couldn’t find the original Star Trek game that originated my interest in computers.
What I did find was a game called "Colossal Cave Adventure."
Curious what it was I ran the program and to my surprise I was greeted by these words...
Huh? Now what? What was I supposed to do? There didn’t seem to be any instructions.
All I could think of was to type: “HELP”
Interesting! I experimented, typing various sentences that didn’t seem to get me anywhere, until I typed the simple phrase “GO BUILDING.”
This was getting very interesting. Roberta was nearby in the kitchen, so I called her over to the computer. She read over my shoulder and then pushed me aside. She wanted to try. I was not happy! I had just gotten rolling and she took away my toy.
I was not able to get anywhere near the teletype for the rest of the evening. Roberta was ignoring the world around her. She stayed that way for hours. I recall her staying up all night to finish the game, but her recollection is that the effort spanned several weeks to a month.
My Fortran compiler was moving along and had been made much easier by Apple introducing a floppy disk drive. Audio cassettes were slow and unreliable whereas the floppy disks held approximately 110,000 bytes (characters) of information. They were still miserably slow, but at least they were more reliable.
Meanwhile, Roberta was sad that she had completed the Colossal Cave and wanted something similar to play.
I ordered her some games on audio cassette from a Florida company called "Adventure International." They were created by Scott Adams and followed the same basic style of play as the Colossal Cave. The player would use type written commands to explore a world that was described via text. Roberta raced through the games, and then started thinking about if she could build a game of her own...
She tried to show me what she was working on a few times but I was busy and never really focused on it. I was keeping busy working on my compiler in addition to working both a full-time and several part-time jobs.
And then, one Saturday night, our lives took a dramatic turn when Roberta said she wanted to take me to dinner and had a surprise for me. I had no idea what the surprise could be. We made reservations at a fancy steakhouse (The Plank House) and arranged a babysitter.
Whatever it was she wanted, it seemed to be important to Roberta.
At dinner, Roberta laid out her idea for an Adventure Game of her own. Roberta was envisioning a game, to be called Mystery House, which would be loosely derived from a combination of Agatha Christie’s novel, "And Then There Were None" and the board game "Clue." In Mystery House there would be eight people, locked in a house, and murdered one by one. As Roberta was describing the killings, I was trying to hide under the table. Roberta was using words that are not typical during a romantic dinner, like: “kill,” “murder,” “gun,” “knife,” “blood,” and “strangle.” The couple at the table next to us was overhearing pieces of the conversation and could see Roberta across the table animatedly and loudly saying things like, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could give him an icepick in the eye?”
Roberta continued the discussion when we returned home, spreading across our kitchen table a large piece of paper filled with hand-drawn bubbles and connecting lines. The bubbles were labeled with descriptions like “The Porch,” “The Graveyard” and “Attic.”
As Roberta was talking I was listening closely. She had finally captured my interest! I started thinking about how such a game could be programmed. It seemed like it might be a trivial programming effort and something I could whip out in an afternoon that might make Roberta happy. This was obviously something she was passionate about.
Thinking out loud, I asked Roberta, "I wonder if it would be possible to have pictures of some of the places in the game?" Roberta asked if it would be possible and I said, “I don’t think so, but it would be fun to try.” If I was going to sidetrack from my compiler for a few days it should be for something fun, and I had already started wondering if pictures were possible on the Apple II.
As soon as I had suggested graphics, I started backpedaling. It might be fun to experiment, but was almost certainly impossible. Pictures are data intensive. It would take a stack of floppies to display just one picture.
Roberta was excited! She had no doubt I could figure something out, and she wanted me to immediately quit screwing around with the Fortran compiler and build her a game.
Roberta was a woman on a mission. And, when Roberta wants something, the only thing to do is to get out of her way.
Chapter 8: (1980) Roberta Gives Birth (And, It’s a Game AND a Company!)
"I’m tough, ambitious and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, Okay."
– Madonna, Recording Artist
Roberta was not going to rest until I figured out how to build her a game. The actual game itself seemed easy to code. But, she had thirty or forty little bubbles on her diagram, each representing a different game location. It would be impossible to portray even one of those locations graphically on an Apple II computer. I believed Roberta was wasting her time, but I also couldn’t stop thinking about how it could be done.
Roberta was so confident that I’d figure it out that she started sketching the locations. Watching her draw, I had an idea.
While visiting one of the very few computer stores in California I saw something called a "VersaWriter." It was being used to trace pictures into computers.
My "big idea" was to use the VersaWriter to mark end points of lines into the computer rather than storing the picture pixel by pixel. To understand what I was thinking, imagine a simple rectangle placed on a grid. It could be represented by a series of numbers; for example 10,20,30,40. This could mean something like: Start 10 pixels (dots) from the left and 20 pixels from the top, and draw a rectangle that has its lower right corner at 30 pixels from the left and 40 pixels down. A line could be drawn the same way using the same four bytes (numbers). This seems brain-dead obvious today, but was unheard of at that time. By using this approach, a line, or a rectangle, or even a circle, could be described in a tiny amount of data.
The VersaWriter came with software, but I’d need to write my own software which would allow Roberta to "trace" her hand drawings into the computer one point at a time. The local computer store connected me with the creator of the VersaWriter who thought it was a cool idea and he supplied me with the technical information I needed to write the utility Roberta needed.
Roberta taped her hand-drawn picture to the tablet of the VersaWriter. Using the arms of the tablet, she started marking end points of lines. As she hit the end of each line she would press ENTER on the Apple II keyboard. Within minutes the picture was on the screen! The opening picture of the house took only about 150 bytes to display! More detailed pictures might take a few more bytes, but suddenly her game was looking possible. Even if pictures expanded to 200 bytes, seventy pictures would only consume about 14,000 bytes, or 1/5th of a floppy disk!
I had to advise Roberta not to put too much detail into her pictures. The 80,000 bytes possible on a floppy isn’t much storage. Somehow that tiny amount of disk storage was going to need to hold both the pictures and the game program.
I was still thinking about my Fortran compiler, and Roberta's game was interfering. Not good. I knew that I needed to somehow get Roberta what she needed to build her game or I’d never get any work done on the compiler.
She needed a utility that would let her build the game without bugging me, and that would compile the game to be small enough to fit on a floppy. To understand the problem, grab a loaf of bread and try to squeeze it to fit into a shot glass. It’s possible if you squeeze hard enough, but it may never taste the same again.
There were multiple problems that needed to be solved simultaneously:
- I would need to write a utility for Roberta to produce the art.
- Her art would need to be stored (digitized) to fit in a tiny space.
- Roberta would need one or more utilities that would allow her to script the game.
- She would need some compiler that would assemble the pieces of her game and somehow fit them onto a disk, and into the limited memory of the Apple II computer.
No problem!
Ultimately, I came up with a very simplistic table-driven approach to the game which was based on a series of simple text files. I forget exactly what I did, but my recollection is that the files were Rooms, Objects, Messages, Verbs, Nouns and Actions.
My top priority, when writing the code that drove the game, was multi-tasking (in the human sense). I wanted Roberta to be able to develop the game while I sorted out the technology. To accomplish this, I split the game logic from the actual code that would produce the game.
Roberta wound up “coding” the game on a series of plain old paper pages. These were then typed into simple text files, which were then encoded to take up the least possible space on the floppy disk.
She described each location in the game as follows:
| ROOM # | DESCRIPTION |
|---|---|
| 1 | You are in the front yard of a large abandoned Victorian house. Stone steps lead up to a wide porch. |
| 2 | You are in an entry hall. Doorways go East, West and South. A stairway goes up. |
Objects would have been described using the same approach:
| OBJECT # | NAME | DESCRIPTION |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | KNIFE | A sharp and pointy knife |
| 2 | CANDLESTICK | A beautiful silver candlestick |
Verbs:
| VERB # | SYNONYMS |
|---|---|
| 1 | GET, GRAB, TAKE |
| 2 | PUT, DROP |
Nouns:
| NOUN # | SYNONYMS |
|---|---|
| 1 | DOOR, OPENING, DOORKNOB |
| 2 | HOUSE, HOME, BUILDING |
| 3 | KNIFE, KNIVE |
| 4 | CANDLESTICK, CANDLE STICK, CANDLE |
Messages:
| MESSAGE # | DESCRIPTION |
|---|---|
| 1 | You can’t |
| 2 | If you did that you would die |
| 3 | You pick it up |
Where it got a bit more interesting was on Actions. I needed to give Roberta a way to write code. Roberta did have some programming experience, but had limited programming skills. I would be writing the real code (an “interpreter”) in assembly language. My interpreter would read her series of tables and decide what to put on screen.
The Actions table was where the action would happen. To describe it in a table, Roberta needed to indicate the room the action would take place in, what conditions needed to be met for an action to occur, and what would happen if the action were met.
| ACTION # | INPUT | CONDITIONS | ROOM | ACTION |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | HAS Knife | HAS OBJ KNIFE | 1 | DROP OBJ KNIFE GOTO ROOM 2 EXIT |
| 2 | HAS Knife | 1 | DISPLAY MSG 1 |
It has been forty years and I have long forgotten exactly what the code looked like, but I do remember that Roberta quickly caught on and was able to produce the action table without my involvement.
While Roberta was busy filling reams of paper with her game design, I was busy coding a series of utilities:
- She needed some simple data entry screen that would allow her to type in her design and create the text files that I’d be compiling.
- She needed a compiler that would take her text files and compile them to a series of numbers.
- She needed a run-time interpreter that would display the game according to her compiled design.
To put all this into perspective, you need to remember that there were no tools at the time. All of the animation and source editing/debugging tools that exist today weren’t available then. I somehow was able to code in machine language (aka assembler), but I don’t remember how I did it. Perhaps Apple itself had some utilities, but they weren’t available to me. My guess is that whatever I did, it was very primitive and miserably slow and painful. And, don’t forget, I was working a full-time job, plus several part-time jobs at the time. Squeezing out hours to work on Roberta’s project was not easy.
That said, I do believe I was displaying Roberta’s pictures within a week or two, and that within a month I had built enough of the data entry tools, compiler, and interpreter that she could start debugging her game.
I had been making regular visits to the local computer store where we purchased my Apple II to see what new peripherals or software might be available. At the time there weren’t many computer stores to be found, probably no more than two or three in the entire Los Angeles area. During visits I would talk about my upcoming Fortran compiler and how it was going to revolutionize software development for the Apple II.
On one such visit I showed off an early copy of Roberta’s game. It was a showstopper. Everyone in the store gathered around the computer and watched. They all wanted to type. I didn’t want them anywhere near the computer because I knew how fragile the game was. Type the wrong thing and the game would crash. Unfortunately, I couldn’t hold people back. Everyone wanted to try typing into the game.
The store owners, Vivienne and Gene, asked when they could buy copies to sell in their store. I was shocked and couldn’t wait to get home and tell Roberta. Her little project, that I considered a distraction, seemed like it might actually be something!
What seemed like a long game development cycle wasn’t long at all. Roberta bought the Apple II computer for Christmas of 1979. Mystery House was released in May of 1980.
Roberta designed the packaging for Mystery House (which was nothing more than one printed page stuffed into a Ziploc bag along with a floppy disk.
"What is an adventure game? According to the dictionary, an adventure is a hazardous or daring enterprise; to risk, hazard, to venture on. One who goes on an adventure is a venturer. A seeker of fortune in daring enterprises, a speculator. In essence, an adventure game is a fantasy world where you are transported, via your own computer. You are the key character of the fantasy as you travel through a land the likes of which you will find in books that take you, through your imagination, to the world it is creating.
Through the use of over a hundred hi-res pictures, you play and see your adventure. You communicate with HI-RES ADVENTURE in plain English (it understands over 300 words!) All rooms of this spooky old house appear in full hi-res graphics complete with object you can get, carry, throw, drop or ? ..."
- From the Mystery House packaging
There was no such thing as desktop publishing software in those days. We had to produce the "packaging" by going to the computer store to use their printer, and then hand taping the words onto a piece of paper, and then Xerox the pages for the packaging one at a time. The game consumed more memory than intended and some early purchasers could not get it to run. As you can see in this picture, after retailers identified the problem, I updated our packaging by handwriting the memory requirement onto the package: Retailers didn’t complain. They happily sold a lot of memory upgrades for Apple II computers.
Roberta’s game was an instant hit!!!!!
- INTERLUDE -
(A brief pause in the story, so I can wedge something in)
Chapter 9: Let's Talk About Letters
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."
- Thomas Edison
NOTE: As you read this book, you will see chapters that are labeled "Interlude," like this one. In some cases these chapters are extraneous to the story. For example, there is an interlude where I provide some tips for software developers. There are also interludes that are critical to understanding Sierra, but span the entire Sierra experience, and couldn’t be pinned down in time, such as where I talk about Sierra’s marketing and product strategies. Some advance readers of the book suggested I move these to the back of the book, but I like it better with them sprinkled throughout the book. Do not fear; enjoy the sidetracking, just keep reading and the story will continue.
Before I talk more about Sierra I want to digress and talk about how I have always graded myself and those around me. Feel free to skip this chapter, but those of you puzzling over how I think will find some insight here.
You may have heard the expression, “She’s (or, He’s) an A player.” It’s a form of ranking people within an organization.
There aren’t a lot of A players.
"A players attract A players. B players attract C players"
- Steve Jobs
Ranking is not a popular notion. In today’s world there is a push against grades. Schools are trending towards passing everyone. IQ tests, SAT tests, College Entrance exams, etc. are under assault. I will not speculate on if that is right or wrong. Form your own opinion on what you think the world should look like and how it should run.
What I can tell you is how I mentally class people and why I think it is important. And, regardless of what they may say, even those people who fight the hardest against grading systems hope to find an A player when it comes time to get their refrigerator repaired.
I will start by defining the categories starting at the bottom.
F players do everything to avoid working. They find reasons why they can’t work. If they do work they tend to show up late, count sick days and then exaggerate the slightest pain in order to go on disability.
D players are marginally better. They work, but only to the extent needed to get a paycheck. D players are perfect for factory jobs. They will usually show up on time. They will put in their time. And, they will go home.
C players are good solid workers. They are well prepared for their jobs and can be counted on.
B players are the standouts around the company. They do their jobs better than those around them. If the business hits the skids and two-thirds of everyone has to be laid off, B players, and above, are the ones you keep. If you call a B player at night or on a weekend, they will happily respond and show up at the office if needed.
A players are true heroes. Give them a project and it will be completed ahead of schedule. A players don’t make excuses. They accept blame when they make mistakes and they never play "point the finger" games. They will take a project you thought would take a month and complete it ahead of schedule with higher quality than expected. They not only "know their stuff" they have a sense of the bigger picture and have potential well beyond the job they are doing. A players don’t usually need to be called at night or on weekends because they are the ones doing the calling. A players know about problems before they occur. Waking them up is always ok because, if there is work to be done, they probably aren’t sleeping anyhow.
Triple-A Players. Your chances of hiring one of these is slim. They have a broad knowledge base and don’t really have a life outside work. You don’t need to call them at home on nights and weekends because they are already at work. And, if something goes wrong, they don’t need to call anyone. They just fix the problem. Or, more often, they plan way ahead so that problems don’t occur. Even one of these in an organization will kick things into gear.
My personal goal has always been to be a Triple-A player. I can’t honestly say that I have ever achieved that goal. If I’m awake I’m usually either working or thinking about working. If I’m reading it is usually some sort of self-help book.
This topic is critical if your goal in life is to climb the ladder of economic success. I’m not saying that D and F players never get promoted. In fact, if you’ve ever dealt with really large companies or government bureaucracies, you will find plenty of them. I do not mean to imply that Ds and Fs are bad people. They are often family oriented, perfect parents, highly intelligent, and charming. But in their lives, climbing the ladder is far less important than coaching their kid’s soccer team. Speaking from a management perspective: If my goal is to run a business efficiently, and to thrash the competition, I’m not going to get there with D and F players.
If you want to win big in life, decide early that you want to be a Triple-A player. Recognize you may not be, but get as close as you can, and then do one more thing: Surround yourself with B or better players. Be hardworking and smart. Surround yourself with smart hardworking people. In fact, if you are a B player or above, you will not succeed in an organization full of C and lower players. Cs only hire and promote Ds or Fs, whereas B and above seeks the elusive Triple-A player. If you are an A player working for a C player, you can expect to be fired or demoted. Count on it and don’t be surprised. Complain about your boss, or work harder than those around you, and you will not last long.
If you think the above system is unfair, don’t agonize over it, and don’t try to change it. The system is what it is, and doesn’t care what you think. If you are an A player, you are going to climb the ladder quickly if you are in the right company. If you are an A player and seem stuck in your position, change jobs. Don’t wait long or stay and whine. Just move to a new company. When you resign, if your employer recognizes you as an A player they will pay you more to stay, or offer you that long sought-after promotion. And, if they don’t, you are making the right decision to leave.
The main thing is to not lock yourself in. Always think about your résumé and how it appears, and make sure you have the kind of experience that allows you to move freely from company to company. Part of being an A player is to be “in demand” by the right kinds of employers. If your résumé only qualifies you for one particular position in one particular city, you are doomed to mediocrity or less. That’s fine if your career is subordinate to your personal life. And, don’t get me wrong. Being an A player is not for everyone. There are many people, probably most people, who could be an A player if they thought it was important to do so. But... is money all there is to life? All I can say is that, if your goal is to "win the game" financially, you need to take it seriously.
Chapter 10: (1980) A Brief Flirtation with Software Distribution
"If a window of opportunity appears, don’t pull down the shade."
- Tom Peters
Roberta and I were amazed by Mystery House’s success. I took a few dozen copies to the local computer store and they sold out immediately.
In 1979, there weren’t many computer stores in the country. I called them and they immediately asked for copies. Word spread quickly about the game and suddenly computer stores were calling me begging for copies.
In this ad, which ran while the company name was still On-Line Systems, Mystery House was promoted as a Hi-Res Adventure, indicating that Roberta and I already had more adventure games in mind. The address shown was our home, and the phone number was our home phone. No cell phones in those days!
I was suddenly speaking with every computer store in the nation and saw this as an opportunity to make money. I called Scott Adams, who had made the Adventure games that Roberta played, and asked if I could help sell his products. My new idea was to not only sell Roberta’s game, but to become a distributer for other software companies. There weren’t many companies selling Apple software, and I called them all.
Within days I had become the West Coast Distributer for several software companies. They sent me copies of their software via UPS and then I delivered them to retail stores up and down the West Coast.
My younger brother, John, who was still in high school, was tapped to help with distribution. Here is a brief description he wrote of his time peddling Sierra products in Chicago:
"...It was May of 1980 and I was living in a small bedroom community an hours’ train ride from Chicago. I received a box via UPS from my big brother in California.
I had no idea what was inside and when I opened the box, things didn’t get much clearer.
The box was filled with close to 100 Ziplock plastic bags with a piece of light cardboard and a square piece of plastic inside. The cardboard inserts were printed in black on blue or brown with simple graphic images and a few lines of text. In the upper corner of each was a price- $19.95 to $24.95.
I talked to my mom and realized that Ken had been trying to call me for a few days. (I had just graduated from high school and hadn’t been home much. I had a 3rd shift at a payroll company and an active social life.) I gave him a call and discovered that what he had sent me were computer games.
His proposition was simple. "Go to the local computer stores and show them what you have. I’ll give you 25% of everything you can sell."
I had played computer games before at Ken and Roberta’s house. They had a Radio Shack TRS-80 and games for the computer were loaded from cassette tapes. Ken explained those little square wafer things were like cassettes but faster and that the computer store would understand what they were.
I was perhaps just too young to be intimidated by the idea of trying to sell something I had never used, couldn’t explain and didn’t understand. They say blessed are fools and children, and I had a foot in both camps, I guess. (This was to be a common theme in the early days of the rise of Sierra- Ken gave a chance to a lot of people like myself who had absolutely no reason to deserve one. We often had success just because we were too naïve to understand what we were up against.)
I checked the phone book and discovered seven "computer stores" in the greater Chicagoland area. Three were downtown- a place my dad had said I wasn’t allowed to drive to or he’d stop paying my car insurance- but I found an address for one in a suburb up north that sounded like it was findable. I loaded up my '72 Pinto with that box of games, and I was on my way the next day. No appointment or anything. I just went.
It was a weekend, and when I got to the store mid-day it was packed with customers who seemed in no hurry to buy, but were eager to talk to each other and the clerks about technical things using words I had never heard and did not understand. I finally found a clerk who would talk to me long enough to hear my story about the mysterious items that my brother had sent me. He was as curious as I was about what these disks contained, but customers came first, and it was another hour or so before he had a chance to unpackage a “diskette” and “boot” it into the computer.
When the first screen of Mystery House appeared on the primitive green screen computer monitor, the constant din of the computer enthusiasts who had been crowding the store dropped just a bit. The screen was small, but the crowd quickly surrounded it as best they could.
The clerk seemed to understand immediately what the game was about and started trying to figure out the text commands. Soon enough the crowd behind them was shouting suggestions and seemed enthralled as the story moved from scene to scene.
At some point an hour or so later, the manager of the store, surprised to see me still in the store after the business was done, pulled me aside. After chastising me for daring to come into his store on a Saturday to attempt to do business, he bought 10 copies of the game that his customers were seeing on screen.
An hour later he was surprised to still see me in the crowd and bought 20 more as he’d sold out. He also bought 5 each of the other 2 games I had, sight unseen. The computer store manager's purchase was over $500 – and he paid cash from the register. I’d never held so much cash money in my life.
I remember that I had to go next door to a drugstore to buy a receipt book. He wanted a receipt before I could take his cash. (Who knew they would expect that?) He asked me for my number so he could re-order. (I didn’t know to volunteer it.) Looking back, I probably should have been laughed out of the store, but as I’d find out quickly, pretty much everyone involved in personal computing was pretty green then. That store manager was patient with me and even a bit fatherly. I wish I could remember his name, but it’s lost to history.
My "cut" from the afternoon in that computer store was about the same as I’d made the week before working my "real job." I visited the other stores in the area- three threw me out as they were "serious computer stores" and had no patience for games- but I had similar results at other stores. Within a week I had made about a month’s wages from my real job. I made the rounds of the four stores once a week and quickly found others I could drive to without my parents realizing how far away I had driven.
To this day I don’t think my parents knew how much money I was making as I sold software out of the back of my Pinto wagon. To be honest, I don’t think I did either. I wasn’t good with math and I was worse with money. I just knew I could suddenly pay for concerts I wanted to go to, pay for gas, buy weed, and all the White Castle burgers I could eat. Before the summer was over, I’d visit places like St. Louis, Denver, Las Vegas and more selling Kenny’s games.
This, I thought, is what it must feel like to be an adult. To have it made. I was so young and so naïve. The next few years would show me what it was to be an adult, to have it made and to lose it all.
It was a fun roller coaster ride. One that a lot of people who knew Ken took a ride on. A lot of people went very far, very fast. Others lost their grip and ended up falling a very long way. Those of us who held on too long experienced a bit of both. No matter what the end, pretty much everyone agreed it was a hell of a ride.
Quickly, it became apparent that there were two different businesses I was now in: Software development and software distribution.
My friend and coworker Bob Leff and I talked about him buying the software distribution business.
In what must have been an unimaginable leap of faith, we both quit our jobs at Informatics in order to focus on this new emerging industry of selling software for personal computers.
Bob bought the distribution business from me for $1,300 and then a couple weeks later sold half of the business to another friend, David Wagman, for $10,000. I thought Bob had overcharged David and gave him a hard time, but it turned out to be a very good investment.
I will never forget the day I sold the business to Bob. We transferred all the inventory into the back of his car. It was a hatchback, and I recall it as a Ford Pinto (which it may have been). Bob drove off, headed to San Francisco, to deliver his first batch of software to a computer store. It was a hot day, and the inventory melted during the drive.
Bob’s new business was off to a rocky start. His luck did improve...
"Robert Leff co-founded the computer software distribution company Softsel in 1980, and developed the venture into a $5 billion, multi-national computer products distributor now named Merisel. Softsel (originally called Robwin Computing) initially grew out of a distribution company Leff bought from Sierra On-Line co-founder Ken Williams.
- Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Leff
It’s funny, in that once Bob got rolling on distribution and I buried myself in software development, we drifted apart. I never followed how he did with his company and hadn’t thought about our launching our businesses together in decades.
In researching this book, I found the information above. Good for him!
Chapter 11: (1980) Wouldn’t It Be Cool to Live in The Mountains?
"The coniferous forests of the Yosemite Park, and of the Sierras in general, surpass all others of their kind in America, or indeed the world, not only in the size and beauty of the trees, but in the number of species assembled together, and the grandeur of the mountains they are growing on."
- John Muir
While Roberta and I were busy launching a software business, Roberta's dad retired from his position as an agricultural inspector for LA County and moved to Oakhurst CA. He and Nova, Roberta's mom, purchased twenty acres of land where they planned to raise apples.
Oakhurst is a small, somewhat touristy, town located just outside Yosemite National Park. The nearest "real" city is Fresno, CA, forty miles down a mountain road. Wikipedia states the population in 2000 as only 2,829.
Yosemite National Park is home to some of the world’s best hiking and is near beautiful Bass Lake.
Almost overnight Roberta and I saw our chance to escape Los Angeles and followed Roberta’s parents to Oakhurst.
Technically speaking, we actually moved to a nearby town, Coarsegold CA, which was a suburb of bustling Oakhurst. Coarsegold has grown since those days and reports having 1,840 people on Wikipedia.
Amusingly, as I was researching this book, I saw that Wikipedia still lists Oakhurst as the birthplace of Sierra On-Line. Given that we sold the company nearly twenty-five years ago, it gives you a sense that not a lot of big news has happened in Oakhurst since that time.
The above home is located where Roberta and I first moved “to the woods.” Our home was similar but burned down while we were living there (more on that later). Many early games from Sierra listed this address for the company (36575 Mudge Ranch Road), and our home phone number for support calls.
The company was only based at our home for a couple of months before it became obvious that this was a bad idea. With each day that passed the number of phone calls from dealers, distributors, magazines, and above all- Customers, would increase. It seemed that all I had time for anymore was answering the phone.
Roberta and I couldn’t keep up with copying the floppy disks and bagging them. I remember going to the local grocery store and completely cleaning them out of Ziploc bags. First, I hired a local woman to come to our house and answer the phone (and, take orders!) Next, I hired a couple of local kids to come to our house each day to copy disks and place them in the Ziploc bags.
Copies of the games started finding their way overseas, which meant the calls that were welcomed at first, suddenly started waking us in the middle of the night, at which time it became clear that we needed an office.
And, we needed a new phone number.
A local printer, Cleon Jones, had been busily producing the sheets of paper we called “packaging” that accompanied each floppy disk sold. Overnight we had grown from asking to use his Xerox machine to suddenly keeping his giant press busy.
Cleon was a bright guy and offered us cheap rent on some space upstairs behind his print shop.
Chapter 12: (1980) Color Makes It Better
"You know, I’ve been playing with my hair color ever since I was nine."
- Cyndi Lauper, Recording Artist
During Sierra’s first eighteen months, the company released ten new games. Half of those were based on the original game engine I had developed for Mystery House.
Mystery House had been well received but both Roberta and I knew that its graphics were terrible. I wanted Roberta to immediately start on another game, but she dug in her heels and said, "Not unless you can figure out how to make the pictures look better."
As I studied Mystery House I noticed a couple of things.
- Roberta was not a great artist.
- Whenever there was a single dot, in a row, on the screen it would take on a bit of a color.
I was intrigued by the purple and green dots and became curious whether or not other colors might be possible. I was experimenting at the machine language level, talking directly to the hardware, and discovered some tricks that were making purple and green dots possible, and that were also providing a way to trick the machine into producing orange and blue dots.
I wrote a book about graphics on the Apple II that was “THE” book for people wanting to do games at the time.
Unfortunately, the gimmick I was using to produce color was incredibly clunky. It had never been done before and those who saw it were impressed, but it was a long way from beautiful.
That said, it was all that was possible on the Apple II and Roberta needed something for her game.
The pictures above are from Roberta’s second game; The Wizard and the Princess. As you can see, there is color!
There were severe limitations I had to deal with. I was still dealing with the tiny floppy disk size, and for Wizard and the Princess Roberta wanted even more locations (background locations, or rooms). To get around this I had Roberta produce her pictures the same way she had for Mystery House, but then click anywhere within any outlined part of the picture and specify a color. It was essentially the same process a child might use with a coloring book, but with far more limitations. The good news was that coloring the pictures using this technique added virtually nothing to their size but enhanced their appearance considerably. All I had to store on the floppy disk were three bytes (numbers); the row and column location where Roberta indicated she wanted a color, and then one number representing the color she wanted. Once I had a point inside of something that was outlined I could start spreading color outwards until I bumped into something. For example, Roberta would use the Versawriter to draw a tree trunk, then click somewhere within it, and choose the color brown. As long as the tree trunk were drawn fully enclosed I’d algorithmically color the entire trunk.
Unfortunately, there were other challenges that proved insurmountable. As you can see in the previous picture I was fighting limitations as to which colors could be near other colors. Within a single byte of computer memory I was locked into only having purple or green, or orange and blue. When Roberta needed a green tree, surrounded by a blue sky, bad things happened.
The second problem I needed to solve was that, no matter what I did, the Apple II could only produce six colors: black, white, orange, blue, green and purple.
To get around this, I blended colors together to give the impression of more colors. It would have been a great idea if the resolution were higher but the Apple II screen only had 280 horizontal dots (us geeks call them pixels) and 192 vertical dots. And, it gets worse. In order to produce color, I was only able to use half the dots. To give you a sense of comparison, the Apple ][ had only 53,760 dots total, whereas my cell phone (an iPhone) has 2,740,500 dots, any of which can be any of millions of colors.
The front of the Wizard and the Princess packaging boasts proudly, “BY FAR THE MOST AMBITIOUS GRAPHIC GAME EVER WRITTEN FOR THE APPLE.” We weren’t fibbing, but... oh well. I can’t say that I’m super proud of the result.
Customers loved the use of color! I quickly realized Roberta had struck gold and it was time to do some serious mining.
Several other adventure games were immediately launched into development.
Roberta was at best a beginning software developer. Yet, she had virtually single handedly created a #1 computer game hit. She was busy working on The Wizard and the Princess and quickly followed it with another game: Mission: Asteroid. Roberta was pedaling as fast as she could but there are only so many hours in a day.
Maybe there was someone else who could build an adventure game?
We had hired people to sit in front of computers and copy disks, one of whom , Bob Davis, approached me and said he had an idea for a game called "Ulysses and the Golden Fleece."
I turned him loose and soon had another game to sell. Great!
- INTERLUDE -
(A brief pause in the story, so I can wedge something in)
Chapter 13: How To Be A Software Engineer
"A clever person solves a problem. A wise person AVOIDS it.”
- Albert Einstein
NOTE: This chapter is intended for engineers or engineering managers. The rest of you may (or, may not) want to skip to the next chapter.
There is one book that I’d recommend to anyone seeking a career as a software engineer, or who wants to go boating, or just about anything else: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. My career as a software developer and decades later as a boat captain was heavily influenced by this book.
That said, I can’t really claim to have read the book. I attempted several times and did read all the words, but never fully understood all I was reading. The author, Robert Pirsig, was a college professor and wrote like one. His novel is autobiographical and reads like a blog entry of a cross-country motorcycle trip he took with his son, Chris. As the author himself says, the book has little to do with Zen or Motorcycle Maintenance. Instead, the book focuses on his personal struggles with relating to the world around him.
I think in terms of “takeaways” and for me it wasn’t as important what the book was really about as what I took away from the experience of reading it.
My "takeaways" from the book:
- How to analyze a problem.
- How to break a large problem into smaller pieces.
- How to decide what is really important.
My philosophy of software development grew out of my reading Pirsig’s books (He wrote a second book, Lila, that was somewhat a sequel in which he talks about boats and cruising). Specifically, the book started me on the path of thinking of an engine, or even a software product, as a series of subsystems, each of which has a specific function or goal.
For example, when I think of a diesel engine, instead of thinking of it as simply “propulsion,” I try to think of it as: A fuel system, an air intake system, a cooling system, a lubrication system, an exhaust system, etc. If you can look at something and think of it as comprised as a series of subsystems, then it becomes easier to diagnose problems, and to understand the individual components.
This led to my #1 rule of software development:
"The smaller you can make something, the simpler it is."
- Ken Williams
Step 1 in analyzing any problem is to break it into a series of smaller parts.
There are not many people who have been around as much software as I have. I’ve been associated with hundreds of software products and have been developing software continuously for over forty years.
The smaller and simpler you can make something, the more likely you are to get it right on the first try. Many engineers pride themselves on finding complex solutions to problems. I’ve seen them agonize over a piece of code for hours, making it run faster or consume fewer bytes. They seem to like code that shows off their programming prowess.
Sadly, there are some organizations in which these kinds of heroics are indeed rewarded. But, I see it differently.
Before I get into that, let’s back up for a second.
Any task should be begun by thinking about what the goal really is. If you are developing new code, think about how often it will be executed. Think about whether the code is for internal use or for use by customers. Think about how often maintenance will need to be performed on the code. Think about the amount of data to be processed, etc. Try to envision how the code plays into the overall product.
An example: I have seen engineers agonize for days to optimize a piece of code that will be run only a couple of times a week. Does it really matter if the code takes 10 milliseconds or 10 seconds to run? In some cases, yes, but usually, no. It may be that by writing the code “sloppily” it is easier to read and maintain, plus you can get in and get out faster.
Often, the goal is going to be to impress your boss, so take what I say with a grain of salt, and do what it takes to make your boss happy. Your boss is responsible for your career advancement, not me. That said, it is good you know that speed of execution, and that tight code is not the holy grail they may have told you it was in college.
If you are an engineer or an engineering manager, and take away only one thought from reading this book, here’s what I suggest it should be:
One hour projects take one hour to complete. Four hour projects take a day. One day projects take a week. One week projects take a couple of months. And, six month or longer projects tend to never complete."
- Ken Williams
Write that one down. It is the one most important lesson in software development.
The smaller you can make the pieces that form the completed project, the faster it will complete.
So, if given a large project, you must begin by breaking it into a series of smaller projects. Divide and conquer. If you can break the effort into a series of small projects, it will finish on time and on budget. And, if you can’t, it won’t. You’ll need excuses to bail yourself out. You can survive for years with good excuses, so it isn’t the end of the world. But, there’s also nothing wrong with winning.
If you are an engineering manager, force your engineers to describe their approach to coding. Don’t let them get started until they have broken the project into small bites. Demand a list of tasks.
Prepare yourself to hear this phrase, "This is not my first rodeo. I do not need to be micromanaged." I am well acquainted with getting this answer, and not just from engineering departments. There is some truth in this. Great engineers do not need to be micromanaged. That said, great engineers will have a plan worked out and will have broken the project into small pieces. If this hasn’t been done, then you may want to question their greatness.
Another popular line you’ll often hear: “I don’t know how long it is going to take. I am working on it.” I find this response unacceptable. Better would be to say, "I’m going to take a couple days to study the code, and then build an action plan. At that point, I’ll be able to give you a detailed schedule."
There are exceptions to every rule, but I assign more priority to code reliability, readability and maintainability than I do to execution speed or "tightness." And, magically, if you write code constantly trying to see it through the eyes of an engineer two years down the line who has to make a change to it, you will find that the code completes on time and on budget. It will debug faster and be more reliable in production.
And as always, this begins by "making it simple." The best code looks brain-dead simple.
I usually start coding by working out my method (subroutine) names. I like routines with names that clearly say what the routine does; names like: "get_input_from_customer" or "put_record_to_database." I try to keep the functionality of a routine to what the method name says it does. In other words, in a method called "validate_customer_number" you should not be doing anything other than validating the customer number. If as part of that you need to do some other work, call some other method to do it. Try to keep the method to no more than about twenty lines of code. If validating the customer number requires doing things like checking to see if the customer account is active, then call a method called "check_customer_account_active." Don’t put the code into the same method. Why do that if it is only four or five lines of code? The answer is that most engineers can write a few lines of code and have it work on the first try, whereas a 25 line method takes exponentially longer to debug than a 20 line piece of code. Trust me. Keep it brain dead simple. Use annoyingly long variable names. And, you will finish faster than the “whiz kid” at the next table.
Some other things to think about...
Beware the "not" Boolean expression. Always imagine that the engineer who will be maintaining the code will be a rookie who needs your help. Most rookies will get confused by constructs like: "if (not customer_number is null)..." If you go way out of your way to keep things positive the code will read easier, even for yourself. Perhaps think about adding a method to validate the customer number. The construct: "if (isValid(customer_number))..." will be easier for future coders to read.
As an example of how going slow can speed things up, I’ll explain how I approach large complex maintenance projects:
- Before changing any code, I single step through the code to get a feel for the data and what the code is doing.
- I then refactor the code. I tend to spend a day converting the code by breaking large methods into lots of smaller methods. I look for "not" statements and reverse the code. I look for code that is indented more than one or at most two levels and convert it to being methods. I look for long methods doing ten different things and split them to ten separate methods. I look for redundant code and consolidate it to a single method or class. (Note: When doing this you should add comments for anything that might help out future engineers and yourself.)
- I then confirm the code still does what it used to do.
The refactoring of the code lets me "get inside" the code and really understand what it is doing. This step feels like the project isn’t moving or is moving backwards. But, when it completes, I'm usually in a position to know how long the project will take and will have a code base that I can work with. More importantly, I’ll have a code base that the next engineer can use without going through the pain I just went through.
A few more "rules" of software development, most of which are common sense and painfully obvious, but I’ll include them here anyhow:
- Use self-explanatory variable and method names. This is like programming 101, but you’d be amazed how many engineers need to be reminded. Avoid using variable names like "foo" or "x." Names like "customer_number" are better.
- Don’t use two different variable names for the same thing. If in one place in the code you have "cust_num" and in another place the same data is "customer_number" there will be confusion. If you need to, qualify the name rather than spelling it differently. Eg. db.customer_number and input.customer_number.
- Keep the end user busy. This is a design philosophy, not a coding standard, but it’s certainly worth thinking about as you code. End users (people using the software) have attention spans that are very short. I always had a "seven second" rule. Anyone sitting in front of a computer needs to be engaged in some way every seven seconds. Preferably a seventh of a second, but... in the worse case I would tolerate seven seconds. Even if it just means asking the user to "press enter," you need to keep them busy. Don’t let them get bored.
- The user interface gets exponentially more confusing with each extra question on the page. If you are designing a data entry screen, keep it simple. Don’t worry about the fact that the user might need to press enter twenty different times, or the screen refreshed several times. Nothing bothers end users more than confusion. Remember the mantra: Keep it brain-dead simple.
- The only reality that counts is the one the user sees. When we first started making multiplayer flight simulators, we had to deal with incredibly slow data speeds. Packets of information would arrive seconds after they were transmitted, or in the wrong sequence. Or often, not at all. We spent weeks trying to get the communications code reliable and then hit a wall. Given the technology at the time, fast reliable communications was not possible. The solution came from having the code on each client machine make the decision. If my airplane, on my computer, thinks it was shot down, then it was, and a message can be sent to everyone else in the universe that my plane is shot down.
- Every method should stand on its own. Don’t access variables that weren’t passed into the method. Avoid "global" variables. My favorite methods have a name that says what they do. You call them, give them the data they need, and they give you back an answer. A perfect method should be able to be tested by using generated test data. If you have to wait for all of the code to be complete to test the method, something is wrong.
- Don’t do magic numbers. Have you ever seen something like this in code? "total = sales * 1.06." My guess would be that the 1.06 is there to represent a 6% sales tax. But, why should I have to guess? Why not use a variable (or, a constant) called SALES_TAX_RATE? The code will read easier. Or, better yet, pass in the sales tax rate to the method as a parameter. You will hear engineers argue that it is silly to pass in something like this as a parameter. It uses more memory and makes the code larger. All I can say is: There may be some cases where a few bytes and a few milliseconds makes a difference, but the majority of the time no one will ever know, and the benefits in debugging, reliability and maintenance offset any loss of speed or memory.
- Figure out what the coding standards are at your company and stick to them. It is annoying to code to a standard you don’t like or think makes sense. Feel free to speak to the engineering manager and argue for change, but when it comes time to code, you need to adhere to whatever the prevailing standards are.
- Get something running early. Focus on writing small amounts of code and then debugging it. Start thinking about how much code you can write that is bug-free on the first try. Any piece of code more than 30 or 40 lines long is likely to have at least one bug. The sooner you find it the faster your project will complete. I’m over-generalizing, but the key concept is that you should be alternating coding and debugging about every 20 to 40 lines of code. At most you should be debugging after writing (or altering) two or three methods. The reason: Debugging time rises exponentially with the amount of un-debugged code. If twenty lines of code takes five minutes to debug, forty lines will take twenty minutes, and four hundred lines of code will take days. Keep it small. Keep it simple. You will deliver clean code to Quality Assurance (QA- the bug finding group) and build a reputation.
- Do your own debugging. This goes with my previous point. Find your own errors before QA does. No matter what you do QA will always find things, but the cleaner the code is when it hits them the better.
- Tell QA how to beat your code. You wrote the code, or at least you’re the one who altered it. Never just hand it off to the QA group. Instead, give them some documentation on how to break it. Tell them what testing you did and what testing you think could be used to break the code. Say things like: "I was only able to test with a limited amount of data. I think the code will be fine with real data but I’d encourage you to stress test it with thousands of transactions." Anything you can do to guide QA towards breaking the code is a good thing.
- Start with the hard part. I’ve seen this rule violated hundreds of times in various ways. An engineer will start a project and quickly report that they are 90% done. Then, they suddenly hit a wall, and it turns out that the first 90% of the project only took 10% of the time. What always happens is that engineers will look at a project and want to start with the part that they know how to do. If there is some pioneering to be done they’ll focus on the user interface to show visible progress. They convince themselves that the hard part will be easy, but that it is better to save it for later. A good question to ask engineers up front is, "What do you see as the trickiest part of this project?" Once you figure out what it is, start there. Always. Never save the tough part for last. Do the scary part first.
- Never let anyone except you stand on your critical path. Triple-A software engineers never say, "My part of the code is done, but I am waiting on the API group to get their code written so I can test." Or, "I think there is a bug in Microsoft’s code. I’m waiting for an answer from their support group." If someone else has code you are supposed to integrate with, and it isn’t working, write your own code that pretends to be their code and use this new "stubbed out code" to test your code. Do not sit and wait. If it is some function of Microsoft's (or Facebook's or whomever's) that isn't working as documented, find an alternate way of doing whatever it is you want to do. Keep moving and get the job done. Right from the beginning, you want to be thinking about how to remove dependencies on others. If you fail, it should be because you couldn’t deliver, not because someone else couldn’t deliver.
A man goes to the doctor. He holds his arm extended away from his body and rotates the arm 90 degrees. "Doctor Doctor" he says, "It hurts when I do that. Can you help me?." “Yes,” replies the Doctor. "Don’t do that!"
- Old not very funny joke (but, some truth in it!)
- Take responsibility. If your code is failing, say, "I have a bug. I’m on it." Do not try to sweep bugs under the carpet. Accept that you goofed, admit that you goofed, and focus on getting a fix asap. If you get fired for the mistake, learn from your mistake and move on. But, do not hide. Bugs happen and the best engineers are going to make mistakes. The truly great engineers take responsibility for their mistakes and won’t sleep until they fix them. If you’re an engineering manager and a programmer always has good excuses for why someone else is slowing them down, or why bugs are always "the other guy’s fault," send them to a competitor. They’ll be happier.
- Don’t screw around. Surfing the internet at work or chatting with coworkers is for losers. Return phone calls at lunch unless they are truly urgent. If you want to win you have to act like a winner.
- Test by scaling back the code to something that works, and then come forward until it breaks. Let’s say you have an application with several thousand lines of code. You are writing the method that calls some API of Twitter’s. For some reason you are crashing on the call. If I’m your manager and you come to me and say, "Twitter is causing my code to crash," the first thing I am going to say is, "Let me see your test case." If it is more than about 20 lines of code I am going to send you back to your desk. Almost always, the best way to find a bug is to reduce the amount of code involved. Typically, this means writing new code that will surround (exercise) the broken code. Engineers always fight this. They do not want to sidetrack to spend four hours writing some sort of framework to surround the broken method. Virtually all of the time when I kick these things back and force the engineer to lift the broken code out of the full application, the suspected-broken code works, or the bug is quickly found. A bug lost amongst thousands of lines of code is virtually impossible to find. But, when you reduce it to 50 to 100 lines of code, the bug will be found in minutes. Do not fear sidetracking for a few hours to create a "test bed" (framework) for solving a stubborn bug. It is a solution that works 99% of the time.
- Avoid writing code that is tied to performance times. Sometimes you will run into code that is based on a time interval. The most egregious example, and the one I see most often, is code that waits for half a second for some other task to complete, and then assumes it has. The code invariably works on the engineer’s machine, but then blows up out in the field when the internet connection is slower or the user's computer is an antique. The only thing worse than code with a bug is "code with a bug that only shows up under certain conditions." These kinds of bugs are a nightmare to find and tie back to code that was written assuming a certain set of operating conditions. Proper code knows that some machines are horribly slow and some are lightning fast. Sometimes the internet speed is reliable and sometimes it is slow or the internet connection drops out randomly. Triple-A engineers use events rather than timers (like: Execute this when the i/o completes). When it is relevant, they will write automated stress test code to test what happens with worst case conditions. The goal isn’t just to pass QA on the first pass, it is to have code that is bullet-proof when customers start using it. QA is never going to know your code and how to break it as well as you do. Be ahead of the game.
- Is the feature really needed? If there is a particular feature of a product that is adding a huge amount of complexity, raise the issue and suggest an alternative way of getting the job done. If the feature must be there, it must be there, but that isn’t always the case. No one will fault you for saying, "I think if we kill this feature, or do it in this other way, the code will complete faster and the final code should be more reliable." Later, if it turns out you were right and the feature you spoke about becomes Pandora’s Box, you’ll be remembered as the person who argued for an alternate simpler approach. Even though you are "just" the coder, don’t be shy about questioning the design. That said, don’t be annoying. Raise issues you see, and make sure you really understand what the code you are writing is trying to accomplish. But ultimately, once it comes time to get to work, put your head down and code.
- Under promise, over deliver. Don’t be shy about giving a completion date. In fact, you should come up with two dates, the date you are going to finish, and a later date, which is the date you give to others. Once you give a date, you need to do what it takes to hit the date. If you have to sleep on your desk and never go home, do so. It will teach you to be smarter about the dates you give next time. Your boss may not like the date you give, but if you build a reputation for being someone who does what they say they will, when they say they will do it, you’ll find that your efforts will be noticed.
- Give people something to try as quickly as possible. Inevitably, what people ask for is different than what they want. If there will be changes to the code you are writing, the sooner you know it, the faster the changes can be made. Think from the beginning of the project how to build a working prototype.
- There is more than one way to skin a cat. If you are banging your head against the wall trying to get something to work that should work but isn’t: Find an alternate approach. Some battles aren’t worth fighting. Just do it the way that works and move on to the next battle. The goal is to win the war, not to win a particular battle.
- Rules are meant to be broken. Nothing I put here is cast in iron. These are general guidelines and every situation is different. So... break rules and do what gets the job done when you need to.
- And, always keep in mind: Nothing is more important than figuring out what your boss wants and giving it to them. If your boss wants you to do something stupid, do the stupid thing better than s/he ever imagined possible. Even when you are going the wrong direction, if it's the direction your boss wants to lead you, that’s the direction you must go. Feel free to argue why you think something is wrong, but when it comes time to get to work, do not ignore the wishes of your boss and do it your way anyhow. If you do, you may get the job done, but you will have alienated your boss and will not get promoted. Bosses are not always right and will sometimes ask you to do things that don’t make sense. If after talking to them they insist on moving a certain direction you don’t like, you have two options: Get on the train or get off the train. Up to you. But, fight the system at your own peril.
I’ll finish this chapter with a parable that was given to me and attributed to Edsger Dijkstra, an early computer scientist. I’ve found no evidence that this parable has any factual basis, or anything to do with Mr. Dijkstra. But, I liked the story and if you ever worked for me in quality assurance, you’ve already heard this story WAY too many times.
Back in the days before general purpose computers, a gentleman named Dijkstra built a machine that multiplies numbers. The Danish government wanted to buy the machine but needed certainty that it could be trusted. A Quality Assurance (QA) team was assigned to "test" the machine. The QA team started multiplying numbers and after two weeks of: 1x2=2, 1x3=3,... 2x3=6, etc they had gotten to 120x12= 1,440 when the government agents lost patience. The QA team shrugged and said, "What else are we to do?" And, Dijkstra started sweating. This was a big sale for him, and he needed the money. He begged the government to complete the sale, but, no luck. Finally, weeks later, as the team was just getting started on multiplying four-digit numbers by single digit numbers, and Dijkstra’s wife had barred him from their shared bed, Dijkstra decided it was time for him to dig deeper for a way to speed up the testing.
This is when he had an important revelation.
"There are an infinite number of numbers. You can’t get there from here by multiplying all of the numbers. The project would take an infinite amount of time," said Dijkstra. He knew the QA team was on the wrong track. He spent some time thinking about how to help the team, knowing his marriage depended on it. What about randomly generating numbers? Perhaps if the team randomly generated 1,000 numbers, and the machine correctly produced the result, could it be said definitively that the numbers in between would also be correct? "Maybe," responded the government.
Finally, after a bit more thought, he came up with the following test:
- Multiply 0 by a randomly selected positive number
- Multiply 0 by 0
- Multiply a randomly selected negative number by 0
- Multiply two randomly selected negative numbers
- Multiply two very small randomly selected (like .00000000000123) positive numbers
- Multiply two insanely large randomly selected (like -123937983416125371) negative numbers
- Multiply a very small randomly selected negative number by a very large randomly selected positive number
- Multiply two whole randomly selected numbers
This test took about 5 minutes, and Dijkstra was able to explain mathematically to the government why an "absolutely positive certification of correctness" was physically impossible, but that this simple test was VERY much more likely to spot problems than six more months of randomly selecting values.
The government bought the machine, and Dijkstra was happy, as was Mrs. Dijkstra.
They soon had a son.
Chapter 14: (1981) Crazy Times, Lawyers, Hackers and a Hot Tub
"Where I live in Oklahoma, it’s all ranchers. My friends are all cowboys and pretty rough guys. If I had a hot tub back there, I may as well have Richard Simmons come over and live with me."
- Blake Shelton
I’m a paranoid person. From the first day I quit my job to start Sierra, I worried about having a long-term stream of money rolling in. It never felt like the company could last forever on adventure games alone. We needed a broad revenue base.
There were also opportunistic reasons for having a broad revenue base. I had an open distribution channel begging for product, and knew that if I didn’t fill that demand, someone else would.
One of Sierra’s first action games was developed by Jay Sullivan, an engineer I had worked with at Informatics. It was a simple, but addictive little action game called Crossfire that Sierra updated a few times over the years.
I ran an ad in a computer publication seeking products. All I had to do was open the mail each day and there would be more products to sell! It doesn’t get much easier.
One submission was a nearly perfect clone of the quarter arcade game, Pac-Man. I don’t remember ever thinking about whether or not I should publish the game. The author, Olaf Lubeck, sent it to me. I sent him a contract and we started selling it.
It didn’t take long for me to get a nasty letter from Atari’s attorneys insisting that I remove the product from the market immediately. But, Gobbler was a hit and I didn’t want to lose the revenue.
I had already started one of our programmers, John Harris, working on an Atari conversion of Gobbler.
This is when my brother, John Williams, had a clever idea. Atari was claiming copyright infringement, citing that they owned the ghost characters. John said, "What if we were to replace the ghosts with happy faces, and have a set of teeth chasing them through the maze?" As different levels were completed we could do cute animations with a toothbrush appearing to clean the teeth and set them off on a new round of chomping.
I spoke to the lawyers who agreed with the idea. I went back to Olaf and had him swap the graphics and create new mazes that were not copies of Pac-Man.
Atari did sue, and it was an interesting case. Did Atari have the right to copyright game play? My lawyers said they didn’t, and I was young enough and stupid enough to be willing to fight a large corporation in court. It was the ultimate David vs Goliath lawsuit; some kids in the mountains being sued by Atari which was a (comparatively) giant corporation at the time.
The case worked its way through the courts with Sierra winning at the state supreme court level. Despite our victory I pulled the game off the market and went on record as saying that I wouldn't want anyone to come as close to one of our games as we had come to Pac-Man.
Prior to release of this book, I sent my manuscript to ex Sierra employees, many of which have gone on to work at various other game companies. One of them sent me an interesting comment on the court case:
"...the lawsuit with Atari. You give this just a few short paragraphs without touching on the importance of the lawsuit. But in my recollection. it was not just a look and feel lawsuit, but a ruling that set in stone forever that a play mechanic could not be copyrighted.
I believe this changed the video/computer games industry forever and quite possibly set the stage for the industry crash a year later. After you beat Atari, many companies were free to make derivative products with the same play-mechanic as hits which created the "same thing different graphics" glut and consumer fatigue that diminished demand. Atari’s ET game gets far too much credit/blame for crashing the industry..."
- Ken A, August 2020
The Atari litigation and this entire incident was documented in detail by Steven Levy, who wrote a book called "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution."
I’ll digress for a few minutes to talk about Steven’s book.
Prior to writing Hackers, Steven, who continues to be a very successful journalist, wrote for Rolling Stone. Steven had identified what he called "The Hacker Ethic" which involved coders creating, and sharing, free software just for the thrill of accomplishing something new and cool. Steven was way ahead of his time in identifying this trend. Today, there are many thousands of engineers who contribute their time, without a goal of making money, in order to participate in the development of products. In Steven’s mind, I was a villain. I wanted to harness all this creative output and make money off it.
A third of Steven's book is devoted to the early days of Sierra and is very compelling reading.
I was hiring very young engineers, mostly ranging from seventeen to twenty-one. Programming videogames in those days had never been a career that programmers thought about. No experienced software developer would quit a steady job working for a "real" company to move to the woods to work for an upstart game company. To house the programmers that I hired, I rented one large house and loaded it up with super-intelligent young kids.
Try to envision what happens when you take a group of college-age males, sprinkle in lots of money, and have them live together in a small well-off-the-grid town. Or, save yourself the effort and watch reruns of the movie, "Animal House." Steven moved to Oakhurst during the time he was writing the book and even lived at the Sierra "frat house" along with the programmers.
I suppose that I could deny having been a part of the fun, but then you’d read Hackers and know the truth. There are parts of Steven’s book that I would quibble with, but overall, he got it right.
When Steven’s book was released, my dad rushed to buy a copy. I should have been embarrassed, and to some extent I was. But, like I told my dad, "Who wasn’t a dumb kid at some point? I just had the misfortune of having my childhood documented for the ages."
And, actually it wasn’t a misfortune. As Miley Cyrus or the Kardashians might tell you, in the entertainment industry there is no such thing as bad press. Write anything you want about me. Just don’t misspell my name. Advertising is expensive and inefficient, whereas press is free. I quickly grasped that concept and like any farmer who sees an attractive cow, I understood the benefits of milking it.
Speaking of which...
There was a game which had come in the mail that was a plain old text adventure game, with racy content, called "Softporn."
But, it wasn’t a TV show or movie. It was a game for the Apple computer and it was unlike anything that had gone before. I knew instantly that it was something that would quickly catch lots of free "Word of Mouth" and media attention.
I agonized over whether or not to publish the game. And, after 30 or 40 seconds of heavy agonizing I had an idea.
"What if I put pictures of some sexy ladies on the cover?" We had a redwood hot tub at our house and it was quite photogenic. I had the idea of taking pictures in the hot tub for the product packaging and the advertising. When I mentioned it to people at the company several women immediately agreed; among them the wife of our production manager (Diane), one of our game designer’s wives (Susan) and my own wife! (Roberta).
I wanted to capture the fun of Softporn and suggested a waiter named Rick at a local fancy restaurant, The Broken Bit. Rick had a distinguished look, and dressing him up in his work clothes, serving drinks to the girls in the hot tub, would make an incredible ad! I called the local newspaper and spoke with their photographer who agreed to come over to our house to shoot the picture.
During an interview Roberta was asked, "How did Ken talk you into participating?" Her answer was interesting, "What makes you think it wasn't my idea?" Roberta is not naive. She understands quite well that there is a correlation between getting free press coverage and revenue.
The ad and the product were an instant hit! We received millions of dollars of free advertising.
The name was a bit of a problem, as was the lack of graphics. Some retailers would not stock a product named "Softporn" no matter how much I argued that the content was mostly PG rated. And, of course it seemed wrong that a company which had been started with a graphic adventure game was selling an adventure game without graphics.
Despite the name and behind-the-times technology, Softporn sold for several years.
Years after Softporn's release, someone had the idea to re-release Softporn as a graphic adventure. My brother John says it was his idea, and he may be right. John and Al Lowe, who ultimately redesigned and upgraded Softporn each claim credit for coming up with a new name for the game.
Al Lowe is the genius comedian who converted Softporn into probably the best known game series Sierra ever launched. Even now, when I tell people I used to have a game company, and they ask what games we did, the name most likely to get recognition is:
Leisure Suit Larry in The Land of the Lounge Lizards.
Of all the games Sierra ever produced, Leisure Suit Larry was always my favorite.
I took a special interest in the Leisure Suit Larry series, and even did some programming on the series over the years.
Unlike movies, there was no rating system for games. I’ve always thought children should be protected from adult content. One day I came up with the idea of putting a quiz at the start of the games. The idea was that the game could ask questions drawn from the headlines and if the player couldn’t answer the questions the game would refuse to load. The trivia game itself became something fun to do, but we goofed and forgot that these games would have a long life. I remember that one of the questions asked the name of Senator Gary Hart's boat (a major headline at the time, as he overnighted on his boat, Monkey Business, with his alleged girlfriend). At the time, everyone over 18 years of age knew the answer. Today, you’d need to be over 65 and have good memory.
Even before the phrase #metoo became a household word, there was sensitivity around Leisure Suit Larry. My guess is that if you agonize over every line of dialog in a Leisure Suit Larry game you can find some line, probably several, that can be interpreted as sexist. The same is probably true with every risqué comedy movie or TV series ever made. My thinking was always that Larry was funny, and that both Al Lowe and I had incredibly strong wives. Sierra certainly had no lack of women in powerful positions, and the whole joke in the games was that Larry was a lovable loser who could only dream of catching a sexy member of the opposite sex. The joke was on Larry, not the women. I’d also point out that I watched and spoke with many women who played the game and none seemed offended. And, ultimately, Larry could easily be compared to movies like Ferris Bueller's Day Off. If I were making films would I have made that film? Would you? Of course! Audiences loved it, and no one crammed it down their throats.
In fact, it had never occurred to me that anyone might be offended by Leisure Suit Larry until one day something happened that made me realize that Larry might be a problem for some people.
Roberta and I were at a local Thai food restaurant on Mercer Island, near Sierra's offices. We were sitting in a booth enjoying our lunch when we overhead some ladies talking in the booth behind us. We kept hearing Sierra mentioned and their voices rose as they started talking about Leisure Suit Larry. One of the ladies was clearly unhappy. She was saying that she had been assigned this disgusting game and wanted to quickly get off the assignment and on to something better. We quickly understood that this was a group who represented the ad agency working on promoting the Leisure Suit Larry game.
Roberta and I were embarrassed but did not say anything or identify ourselves. I thought about saying something and was positive that the ladies didn’t "get it" as to the game. I was convinced that if they would sit down and play the game they would realize that it was just good clean (but racy) humor. Instead, I took the cowards way out and returned to the office to complain to our Marketing VP. If someone wasn’t passionate about the Larry game, how could they possibly generate excitement amongst its customers? I never heard what happened, but assume the agency was fired.
In the years since, there have been several attempts to create sequels to the series, and other than the games Al Lowe developed personally, I believe they have mostly disappointed. It's a tough balancing act to produce a game which understands the distinctions between risqué, sexy, raunchy and sexist. Al nailed it, and why he hasn’t been tapped to carry on the series I do not know. Whatever happens, I hope someone some day figures it out. I miss the old games!
I will close out this chapter with a fun memory from those days...
I had always wanted a Porsche. I tend to drive like a 100-year-old person who is loaded up with sleeping pills. A fast car is wasted on me, but I wanted one anyhow. Why not? The company was doing well!
I loved our hot red Porsche but noticed that every time I drove through town, or made the long drive to nearby Fresno, I’d quickly be followed by a policeman. I felt secure I wasn’t doing anything wrong, so it didn’t bother me, but I didn’t understand the interest. This continued until finally one day I briefly, and accidentally, drove five miles over the speed limit. I was ticketed immediately. I then heard the rumor that my ticket was a cause for celebration at the local police station. One of them had won money! The cops had each pitched money into a pool to see who could write me the first ticket. When I heard this I decided to fight the ticket! I explained what happened to the judge. He asked the officer if there had indeed been a bet.
Sheepishly, the officer fessed up and my ticket was forgiven.
- INTERLUDE -
(A brief pause in the story, so I can wedge something in)
Chapter 15: Sierra's Unique Marketing Strategy
"Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends."
- Walt Disney, Co-Founder of The Walt Disney Company
When most people think about Sierra's past they remember us as an “Adventure Game Company.”
I’m not opposed to that, but it’s not at all how I remember the company.
To me, Sierra was a marketing company. Lots of people can design products, code products, advertise products, and sell products. But, what really lifted Sierra above the pack, and the reason you are reading this book twenty-five or more years past when the Sierra I knew died, was our marketing.
As we talk about Sierra's marketing strategy, I should preface this by saying that it may or may not match the traditional college definition. I dropped out of college and never took a class in marketing.
I knew that I was young and uneducated, and in over my head. It really was "on-the-job training." To compensate, I read entire shelves of books at bookstores that were filled with self-help books, much to the frustration of those who reported to me. There are a lot of books that talk about how to run a business. I especially liked the ones written by corporate CEOs who had run rapidly growing businesses. The thing that my team didn't like was that I tended to manage according to the book I read most recently. I was often accused of giving them whiplash as I'd argue one way this week and another the following week.
My early sales training helped, as did all those accounting books I read as a teen. It also helped that I had worked for some of the early direct marketers (such as Frederick’s of Hollywood, a catalog-based retailer of lingerie) organizing their mailing lists.
Early on, I picked two companies as Sierra’s role models: Microsoft and Disney. I read every book written about these two companies and studied their every move.
Microsoft as a role model
Microsoft was a different company in the early days. They were far more personality driven. The Bill Gates who is today a wealthy, caring philanthropist was a much different person. We've only interacted a few times, so I make no promise that anything I say about him is accurate, but my perception was that Microsoft was heavily driven by Bill’s personality. Bill was a hardball player who played to win. He was ruthless and intense.
Bill, in those days, was not "politically correct" and it was a style I tried to emulate. If he walked past a programmer's screen and saw code that looked like crap, he did not work through the chain of command, he said, "That looks like crap!," or "I could write that in BASIC in a weekend!" If something pissed him off, he said so. And, Bill was smart AND technical. He wasn’t just an MBA business guy who ruled from a distant ivory tower.
One major idea I tried to emulate from Microsoft was to identify proven businesses and then launch products into them, making a long-term commitment. If Microsoft came after you, their release 1.0 of a product might be horrible, but you could bet there’d be a release 1.1, then a 1.5, and a 2.0 and somewhere along the line you’d discover that you were losing marketshare and that Microsoft was eating your lunch. Microsoft was competitive and ferocious. It certainly helped that they were there at the beginning, but have no doubt, Microsoft "won" because they outsmarted the competition.
"Microsoft, where quality is priority 1.1"
- A software developer’s idea of a joke
Amusingly, in those days, Microsoft developed a kind of evil empire reputation. The "cool" people thought Microsoft was not "nice" like Google (who promised to do no evil) or Netscape (who believed in free code).
Times have changed.
From Microsoft I took several ideas:
- Pick your categories and work through continual improvement to own them over time.
- Business is war.
- There is benefit in having people skilled in technology at the top of an organization.
- It’s ok for the CEO to have strong opinions.
Disney as a role model
During my teen years, I won many trips to Disneyland by selling papers. Today, I think of Disneyland as a theme park that costs money and has "rides." But, not then. I was completely bought into Disneyland as a magical place. Once you were inside the park there was a special feeling. The world felt brighter.
Much of Sierra’s marketing strategy came from my emotional ties to Disney. Their image has been a bit tarnished since then, or at a minimum, "diffused." Or, maybe I’ve just gotten older.
Back then, when people would hear the name Disney it had real meaning. There were the characters, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Pluto, Winnie the Pooh, etc. But, as important as those were, was the reputation for quality. If something had the Disney name on the front you didn’t need to open the box to see what was inside. You just knew that it would be good.
I wanted people to think of Sierra with that kind of passion. This feeling of brand identification was important to me, and formed the basis of everything we did.
From Disney I took several ideas...
I remember reading about Mike Eisner, the CEO of Disney being compulsive about reviewing everything that customers would see. I once read that Eisner had a chandelier, from a Disney cruise ship, sitting in his office during an interview. He demanded to see the lighting fixtures personally before the public did.
All Sierra packaging had to be approved by me personally. I looked at every line of copy on every box. I looked at the instruction manuals. I read all of the mailings that were sent to customers. If a customer was going to see something, I wanted to see it first, and it drove people in the company crazy. I was frequently on the road and in those days you couldn’t email PDFs around like you can today. Marketing was frequently stuck waiting for me.
I also insisted on seeing everything with my name on it. We were frequently asked for quotes by journalists and marketing would write quotes for me that sounded "corporate." It was important to me that customers knew there were real people behind our products, and most importantly that Sierra was comprised of real people, with a real passion for the product, not some corporate machine.
There were articles at the time about Disney putting content into their films that would appeal to both children and adults, so that both could watch, and so that parents wouldn’t be bored taking their children to a Disney film. I tried to infuse this into our products wherever it made sense. For example, Roberta borrowed this idea for her King's Quest series.
The biggest idea that we "borrowed" was the concept of creating characters and then leveraging those characters. People know Winnie the Pooh. If you launch a Winnie the Pooh product, be it a stuffed animal, a movie, or a video game, it has an extra responsibility to be good. Established brands make the marketing battle easier. Customers are out there know what the product is, know that they like it, and are eager for the next product.
Marketing at Sierra was all about building a reputation with customers that would cause them to look forward to the next product.
This was a multi-pronged attack.
I wanted the customers to identify with the values of the company. This was part of why it was so important for me to read every instruction manual, every package and every ad. I wanted customers to feel like they were part of a club that cared about them. And, in fact, we were. I sought people who were passionate about the products they were producing and who were gamers themselves. For customer support, I sought people who seemed passionate about having happy customers. I empowered them to give a customer their money back regardless of whose fault it was. One rule we had at Sierra was that all customers have to be happy. If we sold a game into distribution for $25, and the local retailer paid $30 for it, and the customer paid $50, and thought the game wasn't up to their expectations, even though they finished it, we bought it back for $50 plus gave them a rebate coupon for their next game. At Sierra, our reputation for quality and customer happiness was everything. We protected our customers and they took care of us.
Part of our special relationship with our customers was giving them a backstage look at what we were doing. Not only did we publish a magazine (called InterAction) at enormous cost that went to our customers (no email in those days!), we had tour guides on staff who would guide customers through our offices. We put the tag line on our products, "...part of the Sierra family," and we weren’t joking.
We were running a giant fan club in which we listened to what customers want, found people who were passionate about it to build the product, and then delivered it to our friends (the customers).
We have to either look like we are IBM or not be there.
- Ken Williams
It's funny that I used to refer to IBM in our marketing, but what I wanted to convey to our marketing group was my belief was that we either had to "go big or go home". If we were going to run an ad in a magazine it had to be in a preferred position; the inside front cover, or the back cover. When the back cover was already taken and couldn’t be bought, I would run consecutive quarter page ads on a series of pages. It was important to break out of the pack and look special. Similarly, if we were going to be at a trade show, we had to look like a huge company, or not appear at all. After an industry show (eg.. CES) no one remembers the companies that weren't there, but if we were at the show with a tiny booth looking like losers, then they would remember that! It was a theme that ran through everything we did. We had to look like the winners we were, and if for some reason we couldn’t do so, we wouldn’t appear at all.
Sierra’s designers were not selected based on their college degrees, their track records, their sex, their dynamic personalities, their ability to write, their technical expertise, etc. None of the traditional values that might be perceived as important.
At Sierra there was only one requirement to be a game designer: You had to convince me that you lived and breathed the product you were making. You had to be the target customer with a vision for how it could be done better. I remember visiting a company called "Papyrus" in Boston who was making race car games. It was a small group who was 100% focused on car racing simulators. As I wandered around their offices, I saw tires from race cars in the developer’s offices. There were driving simulators, that they had painstakingly built by hand, spaced around the office. These machines had physical steering wheels, foot pedals, gauges. After work the entire company would stay into the evenings to race against each other. It was the kind of passion I knew would build great games for race fans. I bought the company.
The analogy I always used was the book industry. I had a list of favorite authors and I would read everything from those authors. If you are a Stephen King fan, you sit and wait for the next book from Stephen King. I knew that our designers were passionate about the products they were producing and that the target audiences for the products would relate to the designers. I wanted the designers to be a "brand" unto themselves. I knew that if I could put the designers in front of the fans, that the fans would be excited. They would see themselves in the designers and see someone who cared about the subject matter.
My designers were not "perfect" by traditional standards. Rather, they were "perfect" by Sierra standards, which are quite different. It's a tricky concept to convey, so I’ll use an analogy from music. There are musicians who can play any music exactly as it is written. There are musicians who are technically flawless. But, the ones who make it big are not necessarily the ones who can "stay on beat" or "hit the highest note" or "move their fingers the fastest." Music is an art. It's a relationship between the creator and the listener that touches some emotion in the listener.
My philosophy of game design was that customers will forgive about anything if they believe the person who created the game took it seriously. You can have misspellings. The game can crash. But, when it comes to nailing the subject matter, you can’t screw it up. I used to describe playing a game as being like "having lunch with the designer."
It may sound funny that I am talking about game design philosophy in a chapter about marketing strategy, but … the #1 marketing strategy at Sierra was to find the right designers, and empower them to produce their games, without muddying their vision.
That last bit of that last paragraph is more important than the three words imply, "...muddying their vision..." This was a battle I fought every day and was the piece of the puzzle over which I was the most protective. My goal was to empower people who were passionate about a product to bring it to market with as little interference as possible.
If we were producing a cribbage game, I didn't want some artist figuring out what the cribbage board looked like. I wanted my designer, who had to live and breathe cribbage, putting their personal mark on the product. Every detail, every piece of art, every game challenge, every piece of music, had to flow from the designer. If the music they picked was dumb and off key, it was their right and their design. This was a key reason that I pushed our having a tools group. I wanted non-technical people to be able to build a product. It was important to remove the technological wall between content creators and content consumers.
I wanted a designer who was passionate about something to be able to make their vision a reality with the least interference possible. I was into empowering an individual designer, not into producing a product that was a team effort. I constantly argued that if you were to take the two greatest book authors in the world and have them collaborate on a book, the result would not be as strong as their producing two independent books. Teams muddle products.
Another prong in my multi-pronged approach was "the series."
Sierra started with Mystery House and followed it with The Wizard and the Princess. I quickly realized that people were buying The Wizard and the Princess because they had liked Mystery House. I somehow needed to tie them together so that we could make it easy for the customer to recognize that the two products were linked. Thus, I created the Hi-Res Adventure branding. Each new game in the adventure game series would be launched as Hi-Res Adventure #2, Hi-Res Adventure #3, etc.
Later, as we started vertically targeting the games, I realized that the buyer for Leisure Suit Larry and King's Quest were different, and instead started calling them King's Quest I, King's Quest II, etc.
The important concept was that Sierra would spend a lot of money to launch a brand, and be willing to lose money on the brand, but then if the brand succeeded we could eat off of it for a long time to come.
When asked what my goal for Sierra was, I had a consistent answer, "I want to create a company that will be producing products for my great grandchildren." My goal was to create brands that were so entrenched that they became a part of the world culture. I wanted King Graham (a character in our King's Quest games) to live forever, much as Mickey Mouse does.
That’s the saddest part of Sierra's demise for me. This chapter about marketing is probably boring for many of you reading the book because it all seems like primitive concepts, most of which any Sierra fan could tell you. Our strategy was not a carefully guarded secret. Everyone knew it and if they didn’t I would tell them.
Yet, somehow, when the company was sold, and I was transferred away from Sierra, no one thought to ask what the secret sauce was that made Sierra so successful. There was never a moment when the new owners said, "Talk to me about what is important or what the product strategy is." The result was a disaster of epic proportions.
But, more about that later.
Chapter 16: (1982) Venture Capital and The Board Meeting From Hell
"You don’t need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ."
- Warren Buffett, Wall Street Investor
Sierra's first two years were a blur of activity. We moved, we hired, we produced games, we marketed and we sold. We built a following and we had a lot of fun.
Our success was noticed both by customers, retailers and... the financial world.
One day in 1982 I received a call from Jackie Morby, from a company called TA Associates, saying she was a venture capitalist and she wanted to visit the company.
I had no idea what a venture capitalist was or why I might want to talk to one, but she was a good salesman, and I was always open to new ideas.
After a tour of the "company" (a bunch of poorly dressed and disheveled college dropouts) in a big room upstairs behind a print shop, Jackie offered to buy me lunch.
Almost immediately when we sat down, the elegant lady and the hippie (me), she presented a term sheet. Apparently the decision had been made before she even reached Oakhurst.
Her proposal: She would give me a million dollars and I would give her 20% of the company.
I asked lots of questions because it just didn’t make sense. She would have stock in a company that was effectively worthless. With only 20% of the company, she wouldn’t be able to call the shots. She didn’t want to have an office at the company. There was no requirement that we pay back the money. She asked that we establish a board and put her on it. I could put both Roberta and I on the board, which meant that she would be outvoted two to one if there was ever a decision to be made.
I asked for time to think about it and discussed the idea with Roberta. She was extremely skeptical and had a long list of questions for me. I relayed those questions to Ms. Morby and put her and Roberta on the phone.
It really did seem too good to be true. The only bad part was that the company really didn’t need the money. We were pulling in lots of money. So, what would we do with more?
Roberta never did jump on the "venture capital" bandwagon. She remains dubious about its value to this day, and I have no doubt that if I were to ask her whether or not she would take venture capital, if we could go back and do it all again, she would say "No way!"
I, on the other hand, thought that it would be good for us. There was a side of me that knew that, for the company to realize whatever potential it had, it would need to stop just being "kids behind a print shop" and take steps to become a real company. Also, Ms. Morby was promising something I dearly needed; someone to talk to about business. I would be free to pick her brain and to speak with the heads of the other companies she invested in.
I can’t say that Sierra or I always did smart things, but I can say that I usually had a good sense of what we should do and would try to point the company that direction. Venture Capital felt like a steppingstone towards becoming a real company.
So, we took the money.
As part of taking the money, Ms. Morby asked that we take some steps towards becoming a more professional company. At the time of her visit, there really was no corporation for her to invest in. We had been running out of our checking account. I had a "DBA" (Doing Business As) for my consulting business, called On-Line Systems, and that name was on our personal checks.
We needed to form a real corporation for her to buy part of, transfer ownership of all the games into the corporation, and then sell her some stock. With the help of lawyers she referred us to, all of that was quickly accomplished.
Unfortunately, during this process I discovered that there was already a large company that had our company name, "On-Line Systems." I was very proud of my background dealing with networks and knew, even at the time, that networking would someday be key to Sierra’s future. I wanted to keep the "on-line" part of the business name. Renaming the company did not require a lot of creativity. We were located near Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada mountains, near the famous landmark Half Dome. So, overnight we became Sierra On-Line, with Half Dome as our logo.
Once we had accepted venture capital, it became like any other drug. No one stops after the first hit.
In the year after we took in venture capital, we did grow. The actual numbers are long lost to history but my recollection is that we more than doubled our revenue.
We brought in a second round of venture capital. I don’t remember why, or how much, but it was more money at a significantly higher valuation.
We sold a tiny portion of our company to bring in a great deal of money, allowing us even faster growth.
One would think that we were growing fast enough, and that we were doing quite well, but our board, which was now loaded up with several venture capitalists, wanted even more.
If the emerging computer industry were a highway to success, we were traveling in the slow lane. To our left were game companies that were passing us like we were standing still.
We were achieving dominance in the computer entertainment industry, but it was like being a big fish in a tiny swimming pool. The real action was happening in video games. Whereas tens of thousands of home computers were being sold, millions of video game systems were entering homes.
In just a couple of years the market for home videogame cartridges had exploded into a three billion dollar industry! By comparison, the market for games on personal computers was probably no larger than thirty or forty million dollars at the time.
Sierra’s investors had bet on the wrong horse.
We were growing and profitable, but their perception was that we’d never be more than a cute little boutique company with no way of ever pulling their money out. At our board meetings the message from the venture capitalists was clear: If we wanted to continue their support, and if we ever wanted to be a major player, we needed to stop farting around with making games for Apple computers and retarget our software development efforts at videogame cartridges.
Roberta and I had concerns about diverting our efforts into videogames, especially Roberta, who had counseled me not to do it, but I was swayed by the inescapable logic of the venture capitalists. We had a good gig going. But the numbers were unarguable, and the computer game market looked doomed.
Who would want to play a game on a computer when video game systems were more fun?
Video game systems were better set up for games. They had sound. They had color graphics. They had custom hardware which could handle the graphics, allowing faster animation. They came with joysticks and were easy to operate. They cost less. The games loaded faster. Videogames were quickly taking over the world! We had missed the boat.
The list of reasons why videogame systems were good was not quite as long as the list of reasons why I thought they were the wrong direction for Sierra.
- No one at Sierra had the vaguest idea how to program a videogame system.
- We were not set up as a developer with any of the companies making videogame systems.
- Videogame systems used cartridges to hold the games. The cartridges had to be bought from the manufacturers of the hardware at a very high price, and in large quantities. Whereas with a floppy disk based game we could ship it to the public the same day it was complete, cartridges needed to be ordered months in advance. And, whereas floppies cost $1.10 and could be duplicated based on demand, we needed to order many thousands of cartridges at a time costing $10 to $15 each. Ouch! It was a big money business in every sense of the word.
- Our games didn’t really lend themselves to the target market. Adventure games were large and difficult to put onto a cartridge. They were played over multiple sessions and really required a way to “save game.” On a computer there was a way to write to disk the player’s game position, but not so with a game cartridge.
- We were legends in the computer market, and an unknown in the videogame world. No one in the “mass market” had heard of us. Instead of being Sierra with a capital “S” we were “sierra”
with no recognition whatsoever competing against well funded companies that were already known to customers.
- And, the reason that hurt the most: We had built a company that was defined by the passion of those who were building games. Our developers liked what they were doing and the machines they were working on. They would do anything I asked, but their heart wasn’t in building videogames. Why should they learn new hardware and programming languages to target a new machine they didn’t know?
With 20/20 hindsight, I should have stuck to what we knew. Or maybe I shouldn’t have. I just looked it up, and as I write this, in the year 2020, the videogame market is a 112 BILLION dollar business. That’s serious money. Had Sierra grabbed a piece of that business, it would have been amazing.
What can I say? I was young and dumb and easily swayed by our venture capitalists. We raised another round of venture capital in order to fund a shift from personal computers to video games, shut down projects that were focused on building new games for computers, and got to work.
And, then this happened:
The video game crash of 1983 (known as the Atari shock in Japan) was a large-scale recession in the video game industry that occurred from 1983 to 1985, primarily in the United States. The crash was attributed to several factors, including market saturation in the number of game consoles and available games, and waning interest in console games in favor of personal computers. Revenues peaked at around $3.2 billion in 1983, then fell to around $100 million by 1985 (a drop of almost 97 percent). The crash abruptly ended what is retrospectively considered the second generation of console video gaming in North America.
Lasting about two years, the crash shook the then-booming industry, and led to the bankruptcy of several companies producing home computers and video game consoles in the region. Analysts of the time expressed doubts about the long-term viability of video game consoles and software.
- Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
The world ended. Overnight, videogames stopped selling. Atari, who had been on top of the world, had spent a fortune to bring to market a videogame based on the hottest franchise at the time, E.T., and wound up burying millions of cartridges in the desert.
Sierra was left with worthless videogame cartridges, no new games for the computer industry, no money in the bank, and no hope. And with all the rounds of venture capital, Roberta’s and my ownership had plummeted. We went overnight from being a hot young startup to being deader than Superman caught swimming in a pool of Kryptonite.
By every definition, it was "game over."
The venture capitalists proposed a solution: Since their dream of [[Sierra] becoming a big company had blown up, perhaps they could sell it or merge Sierra with another of their investments.
At the board's request we spoke to several companies, including Mindscape and Activision, about merging. Our board's favorite idea was to merge Sierra with another company of theirs; Spinnaker Software. Sierra had a good reputation as a game company amongst buyers of personal computers and Spinnaker was in educational software. Spinnaker was losing big money in the personal computer marketplace at the time, and Sierra had diversified away from our core business and needed a restart.
Remember how in the early chapters of this book I described my heritage as coming from hillbillies and moonshiners in Kentucky? My vocabulary and accent reflected that heritage. I didn’t realize that "ain’t" and "cain’t" weren’t real words until well into my twenties. Add to this that living in the mountains had added a distinct hippie-ish element to my look.
When times are good, eccentricities are thought of as "special." When Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, was heard on Joe Rogen’s radio program, high and smoking dope, investors frowned but pushed the stock even higher. They did it not because they liked Elon-the-druggie, but because Tesla was perceived as the next big thing in automobiles. His personal peccadilloes aside, Elon was creating something revolutionary and Tesla was growing. Investors will forgive anything in that scenario.
Sierra had a party reputation fueled by the book Hackers. With the crash of the video game market, our reputation was suddenly a dominant issue.
Spinnaker, on the other hand, oozed professionalism. Their founders, Bill Bowman and David Seuss, were Harvard Business School graduates. If I wore a suit, I would look silly. They wore a suit and looked like an ad for GQ magazine. It's probably also worth noting that they were Boston based. There is a big difference between the east and west coast of America. Oakhurst represented a third culture that fit with neither.
Roberta and I knew that our next board meeting after the crash was going to be nothing short of a mugging. The Spinnaker guys had been invited to the meeting to present a pitch on how great they were.
It wasn't really a David vs Goliath situation. Spinnaker and Sierra were each disasters in our own way. It was more David vs David. Or, as someone said at the time, "If you put two turds in a bowl, does it really smell any better than with just one?"
Spinnaker’s reputation at the time was as a company that was trying to do everything perfectly. They hired the best ad agencies. Their management team prized itself on the number of MBAs. They ran ads in mainstream media at enormous cost. Their educational products were designed using focus groups of educators. All of this required big money and they had the silver tongues that brought in the big venture capital.
Whereas the Boston culture played well with the venture capitalists, within the industry Spinnaker was not well respected. Computer games were a small business and education was a smaller business, and somehow, even with all the testing they were doing, they forgot that the software had to be fun when it reached the customer.
The two companies were Yin and Yang. The venture capitalists had lost their money on both companies, and yet they did seem bought into the concept of multi-turd bowls.
Our board meeting was to be in San Francisco at a fancy hotel. The meeting was at 10am and I was there at 9:45 wearing my poorly fitting suit. The Spinnaker guys were in the hallway, looking important talking to the venture capitalists, while I was at the other end of the room feeling a beaten man.
Before I left the hotel room Roberta had already made it clear that she did not want to meet with Spinnaker. She refused to come to the meeting and stayed behind.
I apologized for Roberta’s absence and we started the meeting with a formal presentation by Spinnaker. As one would expect, their slides were perfect. An ad agency had obviously been used to put them together. I watched and wondered how much they paid, as I prepared to bend over and grab my ankles.
Around 10:45, as they were wrapping up their presentation, Roberta made her entrance.
Before I describe Roberta’s entrance, I’ll set the scene she was walking into. We were all sitting at a boardroom table. There were five male wall-street type investors, all in suits, Jackie Morby our original investor in her powerful-business-woman-from-Boston business suit, the two fancy Harvard Business School guys from Spinnaker, me in a suit and a projector on a table.
Into the room sauntered Roberta, wearing classic game designer attire; a black blouse, designer jeans and designer boots. Roberta said loudly, "Good morning!" in a cheery voice. Then, "Where’s the coffee?," and after being welcomed to the room she moseyed over to a coffee pot at the back of the room and poured herself a cup of coffee, slowly mixing in sugar and cream, as people in the room waited politely.
Finally, Roberta turned to the room and asked, "What are we talking about?" She knew what we were talking about but wanted someone to say it. I bit the bullet and said, "The management team from Spinnaker is here to talk about their company and see if there is anything we should be doing together."
Roberta answered bluntly, "That would be a waste of time to discuss. These guys are a joke. No one in the industry respects them. Can't we talk about something productive?" I was mortified. The board was in shock. The Spinnaker guys were embarrassed. Had I thought of hiding under the table, I would have done so.
Instead, I tried to defuse the situation and said, "Spinnaker is almost done with their presentation. Let's let them finish and then talk." The guys quickly rushed through their slides. When they finished, I spoke a little about Sierra and our history. I don't remember what I said, or what people thought. No one was listening. All eyes were on Roberta.
At the end of the presentation, the venture capitalists, several of them, I don't remember exactly which, turned to Roberta and tried to get her to listen and 'understand', but she felt they were talking to her like she was a 'stupid girl' who needed to be 'educated.' It didn’t matter because she knew what she was going to do, and was just waiting for the right time.
Finally, Roberta said, "Well, we’re not selling our company and we’re definitely not merging with Spinnaker." And she said it forcibly, followed by, "Ken and Roberta Williams I still own more than 50% of the company and you need BOTH of our signatures and I'm not signing!" And then she stood up and said, "We’re leaving." She looked directly at me and Bob Schneider, our company lawyer. She didn't know if I would stand up and walk out with her, but I did, without a word.
As Roberta had said, we had all the power and could tell the venture capitalists to pound sand. That was the good news.
The bad news was that we were out of money and had a large payroll. We had grown to over 125 employees, all of whom were hoping for a steady paycheck. We were worse than broke. We had signed a big lease on a new office building. We had built a large home. I had a new Porsche. Etc.
No one expected the crash. It came suddenly and fiercely. We were ruined.
Roberta was right. Spinnaker would have been a disaster. There were other companies that might have been a better solution and have a greater chance of working, but we were out of time.
We had a pissed-off Board of Directors. Weeks before, they had been telling their investors how great we were. Now, our market had collapsed, and in their eyes, any hope of salvaging their investment was gone.
The board voted to remove me as the Chairman of the Board (they outvoted us on the board even though we held more than 50% of the stock). It really didn’t matter, in that they viewed Sierra as a complete write-off and wouldn't be wasting money on plane tickets for future board meetings.
I was a wreck because I knew what this meant for me. I had to go back and tell the majority of our one hundred and twenty-nine people that their jobs were gone. I had never laid anyone off. I had never failed. We had no money and not much revenue coming in from selling products.
Roberta and I talked about what to do, and over the weekend we built a plan.
That coming Monday Roberta and I started the process of borrowing against our credit cards, borrowing against our home, and I laid off one hundred employees.
A layoff in Oakhurst is not like a layoff in most cities. Sierra hired most employees from other distant cities and relocated them to Oakhurst. This meant they had moved their families, rented or purchased a home, and suddenly had no job, and no hopes of finding a job without moving to some big city. There were few, if any, other jobs for them in Oakhurst.
The layoff was a life changing disaster for Sierra's employees, and a wake-up call for me. It was the first time I realized that this wasn’t all fun and games. These people were not just employees, they were my friends and had bet their careers on me, and I had failed them.
Rather than meet with employees one by one, the layoff was done in a local movie theater. All employees were invited to the meeting, and I had to stand at the front of the room and explain that it was game over. I would be passing around envelopes with the employee’s names on them. One hundred of those envelopes were layoff notices along with a final check. Twenty-eight of those envelopes said, “See you tomorrow.” There was no severance pay, and within minutes the parking lot was filled with crying people. We kept only a skeleton crew of thirty people, including Roberta and I, and an unlikely hope that our Phoenix would rise from the ashes.
- INTERLUDE -
(A brief pause in the story, so I can wedge something in)
Chapter 17: Short Takes
"Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row."
- Ray Bradbury, Science Fiction Author
I am writing this book thirty years after most of the events in this book occurred.
One of the reasons I am writing the book now is that I am starting to forget Sierra. I remember the big things such as the strategies and the major hits, but when people ask me about specific games I often have to respond by saying, "Was that a Sierra product?" It's not that I’m losing my memory; my memory is as good as it ever was. It’s just that I don’t often think about Sierra and the old memories have been replaced by new ones. Most of my time these days is spent focusing on Roberta’s and my new life as world cruisers (we circumnavigated a small boat).
In this chapter you’ll find a random collection of memories from Sierra. The events here come directly from my memory and none of the memories are particularly strong, so if I have mixed up the facts, you have my apologies.
Here are a few short and random memories that didn’t seem to fit elsewhere...
Richard Kiel
There’s not much I have to say about this picture other than that is a very fun picture. Richard Kiel played the villain "Jaws" in the James Bond films and lived near Oakhurst. He did various commercials for Sierra in the early days.
I couldn’t resist including this picture in the book. Until now, I had never really focused on the picture caption that refers to Roberta as "Hot Tub" Williams. Funny!
The Girl In The Tower
Sierra did some wild and crazy things to promote our products, and some of them created more controversy than intended.
One promotion that caused me to get calls, threatening lawsuits, had to do with the launch of King's Quest VI and the game's theme song, The Girl in the Tower.
One of our house musicians and producers, Mark Seibert, composed the song and performed it with his wife. As I was listening to the song I thought, "This is good enough to be on the radio!" This gave me an idea. Why shouldn’t the song be on the radio? In those days radio stations had call-in lines where listeners could request songs. Mark's song deserved to be on the radio!
Our marketing department went to work compiling a list of the request line phone numbers for every music radio station in the United States. We sent them all copies of the song. We also put the phone number list into every box of King's Quest VI, along with a recommendation that they call the radio stations and ask that the song be played.
There were a lot of people who couldn't wait to get their hands on King's Quest VI. Imagine 400,000 copies being sold in the first week to a bunch of hard core Sierra fans. A large number of them did as they were requested and phoned the radio stations. Some of them called several or all of the stations.
We had hoped that this would push King's Quest VI to the top of the music charts. It did work, in that the song did get some airplay. I heard it on our local station driving into work and cheered! However, it also angered a lot of people. Request lines were jammed across the country. Some of the phone numbers were the main number for the radio station, effectively shutting down all incoming calls. I received calls from lawyers insisting that I immediately tell our customers to stop calling. I couldn’t do that. The best I could do was to stop inserting the list of phone numbers. And, what could they sue me for? The stations played music. Didn’t listeners have a right to call and request the music they wanted to hear?
We stopped putting the phone numbers into boxes. We never got sued. The song was played. It was just another day at Sierra.
We did our best to never be boring!
Expansion to Japan
In the mid-80's Sierra expanded to Japan. I was interested, because the best arcade games seemed to be coming from there. I also hoped we could open up a new market for our games and that we could license games to sell into the United States.
I don’t remember how the connection was made, but we hired a representative in Japan, Ed Nagano. I remember that we paid him a monthly fee to open an office for us in Japan. We always referred to Ed as "Nagano-san," the respectful way to address someone in Japan. His English was decent but not perfect, and he had a somewhat annoying habit, which was rooted in Japanese culture, of avoiding tough questions. It was my first introduction to doing business in a foreign country and I had a lot to learn.
Nagano-san introduced us to a small Japanese developer, Game-arts who had released a game called Thexder for the NEC computer.
"In 1987, Sierra ported the game to multiple platforms, including the IBM PC, Tandy Color Computer 3, Apple II, Apple IIGS, Apple Macintosh, and Tandy 1000 computer and became the company’s best-selling title of 1987"
- Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thexder
I don’t remember Thexder as our top seller, but I do remember it quite fondly. It was a big winner for us! Thexder was a fairly standard scrolling action game with nothing too special about it, except for the most important thing of all: It was enormously fun to play and very addictive. Its Japanese origin gave it a coin-op game feel that was unique in the American marketplace.
Thexder was followed by a second game from Game-Arts that was also a hit for us, called Silpheed. Overall though, the entire Japanese expansion was a bust.
The Japanese market, at the time, was much more fragmented than the US market. Whereas in the US buyers were unlikely to buy a game machine that didn’t have a large number of titles available, in Japan if a game platform (machine) had even one good title, it would find customers. I wanted to sell Sierra's games in Japan and tried for a decade, but never discovered a machine we could target that had a large enough installed base to justify the effort. Our development technologies were set up to make translation to other languages simple, but Japanese uses a character set that didn’t fit neatly into our games. If we had hired a team of Japanese developers who were based in Oakhurst, I suspect we would have figured it out. It would have taken significant spending though. My hope was that Apple, or some Windows-based computer would catch on in Japan, and that just didn’t happen.
My most enduring memory of Japan...
On our first trip to Japan, Nagano-san set up a series of meetings for us with a wide range of Japanese software and hardware companies as well as software distributors. When he arrived at the hotel to pick us up for our meetings, he was shocked to see Roberta. He took me aside and explained that it would be a long hot day, and that Roberta would be much happier if she could relax in the room. I explained that Roberta was my partner and would be an important part of the meetings. I quickly figured out that women were not welcome, or at least that Nagano-san did not believe they would be. I asked Roberta what she wanted to do and she said something which I could not repeat in polite company, the result of which was that Roberta attended the day's meetings.
Nagano-san had been right. It was a hot, miserable, grueling day. None of the companies we met with seemed to have air conditioning or elevators. The subways were crowded, followed by long walks to the meetings. He had also been right that Roberta did not seem welcome at the meetings. Questions were always directed to me, not her, and when she did speak, her comments seemed to be ignored. At the end of the day, back at our hotel, Roberta was inconsolable. She had never been treated so poorly. I explained, "Their country, their rules," and that there were probably many things about the US that the Japanese find to be just as crazy, when they do business in America. Cultural differences are to be expected and our job was to find common ground, not quibble about the differences.
Roberta never again accompanied me to business meetings in Japan.
That said, this story does have a happy ending. Roberta's and my personal connection to Japan extended well beyond Sierra!
After a somewhat rocky start, Roberta and I went on to have a long happy relationship with Japan and the Japanese people. Our son, who did not speak Japanese, ventured to Japan after high school where he learned Japanese, attended and graduated from college, and even worked in the Japanese tech industry for several years before returning to America.
After Roberta and I retired, we ventured back to Japan with our own boat (the right-most boat in this photo. We spent two years in Japan exploring so much of Japan that I would joke that there were probably no Japanese who had seen as much of Japan as we had. I may have been right.
We loved our time in Japan, and our trip was the trip of a lifetime.
Johnny Castaway
Sierra shipped a game that was developed by our Dynamix subsidiary that was an unexpected hit. It's one I’ve thought about over the years, because it was inexpensive to produce and I can think of plenty of ways it could be brought up to date to be a very cool product.
What was it you might ask? Johnny Castaway, which was nothing more than a simplistic screensaver!
Back in the '80s, monitors used a different technology than they do today. If your computer were left sitting for hours with one image on the screen (or a document or spreadsheet), the image would become burned into the monitor. Modern monitors do not do this, or at least are much less susceptible to it. But, in those days screensavers were a big deal. Most of the time they were simple pictures of flowers, landscapes, flying toasters or pets.
Our Dynamix subsidiary in Oregon had a better idea. Why not make a screensaver that was somewhat like our adventure games? I loved the idea from when I first heard it. The concept was to have a screensaver that was based on a castaway on a small island. We would make the game sensitive to the calendar and clock, such that he would do different things at different times. In the mornings he might have coffee and at night he would sleep. He would surprise from time to time by having a visitor to the island, or catching a fish. Holidays were a special treat. We packed a lot of surprises into the game and added more over time. People would leave Johnny Castaway running on their computers for weeks at a time waiting for him to do something new.
Imagine how Johnny Castaway could be done today with constant updates coming in from the internet? Very cool.
I remember pushing internally for an idea of mine that everyone thought was dumb. Maybe they were right? We never did anything with the idea. But, I thought we should do a screensaver that was an aquarium. Given that everyone’s aquarium would be linked by the internet, occasionally a fish from my tank might swim into someone else’s tank. Fish could have attributes (colors, breed, facial features, and even personalities). Mating could merge the fish based on the combination of attributes. How an owner feeds their fish could also influence the personality of the fish. The "game" (or, screensaver, or whatever it would be called) would be open ended and no one would know what to expect, us included! Would the fish mate? Or, kill? Or steal food? I thought we could influence (not control) the action from our end and spin it different directions. Perhaps it would have been a dumb idea. We’ll never know.
Sound Cards
I always thought Sierra should be in hardware. I still remember when I saw the first iPod (a predecessor to the iPhone that did nothing but store and play music). My first reaction was, "Awesome!" My second thought was, "It should have been a Sierra product. How did we miss that opportunity?"
Early computers had no ability to play music. We did coax some sound out of early Apple computers and even the IBM PCs, but I wouldn’t call it music. If you try hard enough, you might be able to fry an egg in a toaster, but it’s not going to be easy and it’s not likely to taste very good. We did what we could, but it wasn’t enough.
Music and sound effects are critical in generating an emotional response in a player.
A competitor of Sierra’s, Electronic Arts, ran an ad that I thought was one of the best ever done. They intended it to promote Electronic Arts' products, but I used it as our company mantra. That ad is what pushed Sierra's focus on trying to lead the industry in music, and would later play a role in our game Phantasmagoria.
Sierra turned Electronic Arts' advertising against them when we promoted King's Quest IV, with this ad:
When King's Quest IV debuted in front of a live audience, the face of computer entertainment was changed forever. The scene began with a soul-stirring orchestration, lifted to a triumphant chorus, and then elevated to the heralded announcement of trumpets. [...] the revered silence was broken by gasps of shock around the room as King Graham suddenly slumped to the floor. [...] When the lights came up, one could see the mist that yet lingered in the spectator's eyes. Even more startling, tears were found streaming down the face of a woman in the third row. ...
- King's Quest Ad Copy
Our ad was no exaggeration. We set up an enclosed booth at a computer show (CES in Las Vegas) and invited in the public to watch the King's Quest IV opening cartoon. People really were brought to tears. We had delivered on our promise.
At the same time as the release of King's Quest IV, Sierra introduced an external box, called the MT-32, built by Roland, that was a professional quality synthesizer that could easily be attached to any Windows based computer. We also started distributing a Sierra-branded music card called the Ad-lib.
Hardware can be a tough business. Apple might disagree, given the success they’ve had. But for Sierra to tackle inventorying $200 to $650 music add-on devices for personal computers was a very risky proposition. We offered absolute customer satisfaction. If we had to take back a $650 music device, it hurt. If all of the devices in our inventory became obsolete because technology moved forward, it hurt even more.
There are those who would argue that we lost money on the hardware business. I would argue the opposite. We may have lost a few dollars, but we made millions on the leadership position it gave us.
We had once again proven that anyone who wanted a vision of the future needed only look to Sierra.
Memories about Dynamix:
Dynamix was Sierra's first acquisition, and it turned out spectacularly. I’m struggling to remember what product it was that I saw that brought them to my attention. I think it may have been Red Baron.
Aces Over the Pacific, its sequel Aces Over Europe, and Red Baron, were incredible products. I’m sure they look prehistoric by today's standards, but it's sad that they weren’t continually enhanced and kept current. The manuals that came with these games alone justified the price. I don’t remember my print cost on the manuals, but I’m guessing I had $5 or more just into each manual printed. More importantly, the manuals were a reflection of the effort Dynamix put into the games to assure their authenticity.
I badly wanted into the flight simulator category, and Dynamix had a great 3D engine that I felt I could leverage into other products. From the moment I saw Red Baron and first saw Dynamix's 3D capabilities, I started thinking about what a true 3D adventure game could look like. I also was thinking ahead to doing something online sooner or later and knew that flight simulators should be a part of that vision.
And then, there were the people. I was blown away by the extreme level of talent. Damon Slye who was the genius behind the flight simulators was off the top of the charts brilliant. I needed him on my team. Tony Reyneke who ran the operation was from an accounting background and seemed to be running things smoothly. Overall, it seemed too good to be true and was a perfect deal.
I remember the first working prototype I saw for Incredible Machine. I was shocked! I’m still amazed by that product. It was like a Rube Goldberg construction set. If anyone reading this has not seen the Incredible Machine, google it. You will find sites where the game can be played online. A very cool product and one of Sierra’s (via Dynamix) proudest accomplishments.
Jeff Tunnell was the creative force behind many of Dynamix’s products. I forget why but remember that he wanted to set up his own studio away from Dynamix’s offices. Like me, he thought that true creativity could only happen within a small organization.
Jeff put together one product for me that bombed but should have, and could have, been a hit.
Towards the end of my time at Sierra I was focused on perennial products. I wanted to invest heavily in products that I felt could be updated from year to year and made better with each iteration. It costs a lot of money to produce a new product and create brand awareness.
There are somewhere around four million driving tests given each year. Some percentage of those people would like to learn on a simulator where they can be placed into real-world situations and also study for the testing. Even if someone had a "real-world" instructor, I felt our simulator was a valuable supplement and that training by computer would be a good head-start for behind-the-wheel training. It wasn’t a glamorous, or huge category, but it was one we could own and easily produce profitable revenue from, year after year after year. As always, Dynamix did an amazing job and although we didn't do well with the product, I’m confident that if we’d stuck with it and executed the plan over time, we’d have had a nice profitable niche product. I also believed it was a chance to do something that really could have saved lives.
And, then there are the Dynamix pinball games. Once again- incredible! I'm not a gamer but I spent many hours on Dynamix 3D Ultra Pinball (and, its various sequels). It was the perfect way to pass the time on a long flight.
A very sad memory: On December 8, 1995, one of the genius engineers behind 3D Pinball, as well as many other Dynamix products, tragically passed away. It was a horrible event and devastating to everyone at Dynamix, and was a loss that I have never forgotten.
Memories of Impressions:
While I’m speaking about small niches... I can talk about my memories of acquiring the company, Impressions.
My recollection is that I acquired Impressions partially as an answer to the game SimCity, which was a huge hit at the time. Caesar by Impressions was in the same city building category, but different enough that no one was going to consider it a cheaply made clone.
The team at Impressions were focused on building serious games, more like board games than action games. It was a small niche, but another that I felt Sierra could own. I didn't need a product category to be large, I just needed it to be profitable, growing and steady.
John Travolta
Once upon a time, a very long time ago, John Travolta was one of the hottest names in Hollywood. His movie Saturday Night Fever had been a smash hit.
I was always looking outside the computer industry to decide what consumers were into. Jane Fonda had pioneered exercise videos that were selling incredibly well. She also had a top selling exercise book.
I happened to see a picture of John Travolta, who had gotten buffed out for the sequel to Saturday Night Fever, called Staying Alive. I contacted his agent and asked if John would be interested in launching a computer-based exercise program. It would be a first. If people would exercise in front of a VHS tape playing on a TV, why not in front of their computer?
Roberta and I were invited to visit Mr. Travolta at his ranch in Santa Barbara. To prepare I had the engineers at Sierra prepare an interactive example showing an animated John Travolta exercising. The program would log time spent and produce graphs plus offer advice on workouts.
Roberta was very excited to be meeting John Travolta! We flew to Santa Barbara, where he had his chauffeur pick us up at the airport for the trip to his ranch. Once there, he was as charming and casual as you might think.
John Travolta asked Roberta if she wanted a tour of the house while I was setting up the computer for our demonstration. Roberta later said that she couldn’t believe it when they entered John Travolta’s bedroom! I suppose I should have been jealous, but I was too busy setting up the computer.
I ran the demo, which really didn’t consist of much more than a pixelated stick figure doing jumping jacks. Travolta said he was impressed, which I seriously doubt. Graphics in those days were not something that should have impressed anyone, but our hands were tied by the state of the art at the time.
While setting up the demo Mr. Travolta saw that I had Microsoft Flight Simulator on the machine. He had a strong interest in flying but hadn’t tried flying on a computer. We wound up flying planes while Roberta looked on, bored.
Back home in Oakhurst we heard that our home had been surrounded by persons hoping to get a glimpse of John Travolta. Somehow the word had leaked that we were working on a deal. He never came to Oakhurst, and no deal was ever put together. His agent wanted a large royalty guarantee, and I wasn’t convinced that the product would sell well enough to earn out the guarantee. The product was abandoned.
Whenever I see modern exercise machines, that are internet connected, like the Peloton bikes, my first thought is: I should probably buy one of those and use it. My second thought is: Had I stayed in the industry, the whole category of connected machines would have been a natural fit as a Sierra product. I never saw Sierra as a "game company," or an "adventure game company." We were a consumer products company.
A “fish who got away”
I loved the books by Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy) and knew that they would be a hit with Sierra’s customers. Infocom published an adventure game based on Hitchhiker's Guide which was an excellent game, but all text. I wanted to do a version with graphics. If the Infocom agreement precluded it there were other books of Douglas' to work with. I would run into him frequently at various industry events and always make my argument. He listened and I always thought a deal would come together. I was willing to do about anything. Whatever it took. But, nothing ever came together. Frustrating!
Richard Garriott and Ultima
Speaking of fish who got away...
I have a simple negotiation style. I usually try to figure out what a deal looks like that is fair to both sides and that's my first and last offer. I will spend how ever long it takes to educate someone on why a deal that I’ve proposed is the "right deal" and should be accepted. But as a rule, I do not raise what I am offering.
"I never want to be the high bidder on any deal”
- Ken Williams
There is an old saying, that I disagree with, that says, "No deal is done until both sides feel pain." The theory of this is that the deal isn’t done until both sides have negotiated to get everything from the deal that they can. My preference is always to find a deal that makes the other side happy and profitable. If they are making money off of our relationship, then we should have a long-lasting stress free relationship. I never want anyone bound to me that isn’t excited about being there.
I mention this in the context of Richard Garriott because he was one of the few people I ever dealt with who beat me in a negotiation.
Richard Garriott is one of the sharpest and most creative people I’ve ever met. Typically, people fit into one of two categories: They are either creative or they are a businessperson. Richard is that rare beast who is a superstar in both categories.
Typically, I would never market a product where Sierra didn't own the brand name. That was a non-starter for Richard. Somehow he talked me into a larger royalty than I was willing to pay. He also negotiated that we would put a printed cloth map into each box, and even negotiated the quality and thickness of the material.
Ultimately (no pun intended), Richard decided to cut ties to Sierra and formed his own publishing company, called Origin. I’m not complaining. We had a very successful relationship and each of us has gone on to do well. I was just sad that Sierra couldn't have stayed his publisher forever.
Sierra Source Code
Al Lowe kept copies of the source code to all his games.
The source isn’t "normal" source code. It is source code written in one of the two proprietary programming languages that Sierra used to produce our games, AGI (Adventure Game Interpreter) or SCI (Sierra Creative Interpreter). These are languages we developed internally, that produced not only our adventure games, but also many of our educational products (such as Dr. Brain and the Disney products).
Having our own language gave Sierra a significant competitive advantage. Similar concepts exist in the industry today, and very few games are built without some sort of "engine," similar to what Sierra did with our interpreter in the early days. At the time, no one else had anything like it. AGI was used on our games up until about 1985 and then we used SCI which was probably the first ever object-oriented programming language to be widely used on commercial products EVER.
Over the past couple of decades, various people around the world have attempted to reverse engineer the Sierra games, some with good success. There are programming manuals on the internet for both of the languages.
Anyway...
Al Lowe, designer of Leisure Suit Larry found the old source code to his early games and decided to sell it on eBay. To my knowledge it would have been the first time that anyone had "leaked" the full source code to a Sierra game publicly.
In reality, there's nothing anyone could do with the old source code and I’m not sure why they would want it. History? Memorabilia?
Bidding went crazy almost immediately. Lots of people wanted it!
Within a couple days the price for the old floppies had jumped to over ten thousand dollars!!!
Al was amazed!
As he was counting his new found wealth, he suddenly received a letter from Activision's legal department advising him to immediately shut down the auction. They consider the source code to be theirs and to be a trade secret. Darn!
Poor Al...
Chapter 18: (1983) King’s Quest and the PCJr
Any disaster is a learning process.
- Julia Child
(CONTINUATION OF THE STORY FROM CHAPTER 16)
After the videogame crash, and Sierra's layoff, some employees were offered the chance to work without pay while we attempted to bring the company back to life. Only a few took us up on that offer.
The company had no cash and couldn’t pay our bills. To survive, Roberta and I applied for a loan on our home. Given our company's poor prospects, and the fact that our home was so overbuilt for the area, it’s amazing we were able to borrow. Had the loan not come through, the company probably wouldn't have made it. We supplemented this with borrowing on our credit cards.
We had fired our accounting department, and the bills were still rolling in. Revenue from selling games was no more than a trickle. We had shut down most computer game development and there was no money to be had from our videogame cartridges.
I needed to find a way to get money flowing and asked Roberta to take over the role of Purchasing Agent, which had previously been part of our now-defunct Accounting Department. She immediately started calling our creditors working out payment plans and renegotiating all the money we owed. All of us during this very trying time had to take on multiple roles. It’s how we survived.
Our biggest bill, other than payroll, was to the developers of a brand-new office building that had been built just for us. It had been built to provide for the exponential growth we expected as a result of our expansion into the videogame market. Instead of filling the parking lot, a few of us were huddled into one corner.
In an attempt to negotiate out of the $25,000 monthly lease payments, we offered 10% of our worthless company to the building’s owners in exchange for a free year of rent. They refused and charged exorbitant late fees as our debt increased.
Roberta was successful in keeping the dogs away from the door and the company afloat. Over the months that followed, our finances started to stabilize, but it really just meant we were dying more slowly. We couldn’t afford to build new products and were just hanging on by a thread.
Meanwhile...
IBM launches a personal computer
Today, IBM is rarely discussed when talking about personal computers.
As IBM entered the '80s they were dominant, some even said a monopoly, in business computing. Virtually all large corporations with serious data centers had filled them with IBM mainframe computers.
Apple's success in the personal computer market caught IBM's attention and IBM wanted into the category, but was late to the party.
Philip Don Estridge, who is considered the father of the IBM PC, said of his effort to compete with Apple, "If you want to compete with kids in a garage you need to start by building a garage." And, that’s effectively what he did. He created a renegade group within IBM, and within a month had a prototype computer to show. Within a year of that presentation, the IBM PC was born.
To save time, he licensed the operating system from some kids who were making software for the Apple II. They had formed a company called Microsoft.
This rush to produce a computer turned out to be a huge success, as well as a disastrous mistake.
At the time the IBM PC was launched, in 1981, IBM was so dominant within the computer industry that the US government had sued to break up the company on anti-trust grounds. The legal war between the US government and IBM had dragged for over a decade.
"After thousands of hours of testimony (testimony of over 950 witnesses, 87 in court, the remainder by deposition), and the submission of tens of thousands of exhibits, on January 8, 1982 the anti-trust case U.S. v. IBM was withdrawn on the grounds that the case was without merit.
30,000,000 pages of documents were generated in the course of this anti-trust case."
Jeremy Norman's Historyofinformation.com
IBM was shaken by their near-brush with being ripped apart by the government.
The climate of fear inside IBM affected how IBM did business and indirectly became the best thing that ever happened to Sierra, and coincidentally to Microsoft.
The IBM PC was an immediate hit in the business world. A few were sold to home users, but the PCs were really built with Word Processing and Spreadsheets in mind.
IBM wanted into the home and educational markets but was struggling to succeed. They even came to Sierra asking that we build games for the IBM PC and licensed a version of Wizard and the Princess that they renamed as "Adventure in Serenia" (for some unknown reason.)
IBM's boring packaging for Wizard and the Princess gives an indication of why IBM was struggling to enter the home market. The same professional packaging that worked for spreadsheets wasn't a winner on games.
I remember they launched Adventure in Serenia as part of their big launch of a new graphics card for the PC (the EGA card) that extended the graphic capabilities. Our version of Adventure in Serenia for the IBM PC supported the basic CGA card that came with the PC, using the same clunky six color graphics as on the Apple II. But, using the EGA card the game ran at higher resolution and used real colors instead of the polka-dot approach we were using to simulate more colors. I wouldn’t say that the extra hardware made the game look great, but it definitely looked much better.
After all of the work by Sierra to support the new graphics card, IBM blew the Sierra-related ad that was meant to launch the card. Their ad campaign included back-cover ads on the top computer magazines, featuring Adventures in Serenia. I did not see the advertising until after the magazines were printed. They announced their fancy new EGA cards, featuring a picture of a PC that was running the un-enhanced clunky (CGA) ugly-looking version of our game. I don’t know how much they spent on the ads, but I doubt it helped them sell cards. Both of us came out looking bad. Oops.
IBM was afraid to license anything exclusively due to their paranoia about being broken up. I found their contracts almost comical at the time. I never saw Microsoft's contract for DOS (the IBM PC operating system) but assume it was similar to the one we signed. In their contract IBM made us promise that we wouldn't license them anything that we weren't making available to other companies! IBM owned the world at that time. They could easily have pushed around Sierra or Microsoft, but instead chose to overcompensate by insisting that nothing be given exclusively to IBM.
Microsoft licensed the DOS operating system to IBM and then also licensed it to other companies wanting to compete with IBM.
When Sierra did the big layoff we focused efforts on an important project
The reason that Roberta had the confidence to refuse any consideration of selling the company was that she had a project in development that was looking incredible.
Several months before the videogame crash, Sierra had been contacted by IBM saying they had a top secret project they wanted to talk to us about. We met with a team of suited executives who flew all the way from Florida to Oakhurst, and signed their extensive secrecy agreements.
The IBM representatives said that IBM was planning to enter the home computer market and compete with Apple, by launching a new computer called the Peanut.
IBM said that the Peanut would be based on the same DOS operating system as the IBM PC, but have 16 color graphics and the ability to play music. It would also come with both a floppy disk drive and the ability to take game cartridges.
In particular, they wanted to know if we could enhance Adventure in Serenia to take advantage of the Peanut and maybe put it on a cartridge. They asked if Roberta would personally think about the new hardware and give some ideas for what she could do with it.
Working with IBM was "interesting."
As part of the contract, we were to maintain absolute secrecy. IBM even mandated that we never refer to their company or their employees by their company name: IBM. Instead, we were asked to use a code name. When IBM asked what code name we wanted to use, I thought about how in the book "2001: A Space Odyssey" IBM had been hinted at by the acronym HAL (a slight derivation of IBM, by using the prior letter from the alphabet for each character). I wanted something equally creative and came up with: BFC. All correspondence from that era uses the code name BFC to refer to IBM. From time to time IBM’s employees would smile and say that they had figured out how we arrived at the code name. We never let them in on the secret. However, if I were ever asked if the “B” were short for Big and the C for Company, I suspect I might have to refuse to answer. 
Periodically during development, a team from IBM would show up to see how we were doing. IBM representatives were expected to dress in suits. In Silicon Valley or New York they might have blended into the crowd, but not in Oakhurst. Whenever a group of them would arrive in town, carrying their briefcases, rumors would fly around town. Was it the secret service? Spies? What were those crazy kids at Sierra up to now??
Instead of just doing a revved up version of Wizard and Princess, Roberta had started a new game, to be called King's Quest. IBM was giving us upfront money, as royalty advances, to help fund the development of the game.
In hopes of bringing back some of the laid off employees, I flew to IBM and pitched them on additional games, and even a word processor! During that meeting I showed them the progress we were making on King's Quest and they were blown away. It was a great way to start the meeting!
IBM liked everything we presented, and contracts were issued for more products! I forget how much money Sierra received in aggregate but it was more than enough to get the company going again. Many of the employees that had been recently laid off were hired back and Sierra was reborn.
King’s Quest for the Peanut
Roberta was excited about the Peanut because it had the memory and processor speed to allow her to realize her vision of adding animation to her adventure games. The Apple II had been pushed as far as it could go. Roberta had asked many times, "When will I be able to do animation?" She had even started mapping out a game in which there was an on-screen character that was controlled by the game player.
Sierra was in a very good position to tackle a new machine.
The first adventure games had used a spreadsheet type approach to describe the game. It worked but was very limiting.
We needed something more robust to handle Roberta's vision of an animated adventure game. Thus, AGI (for Adventure Game Interpreter) was born. The idea was that we would build a programming language that was oriented towards animation in games. It would compile to an imaginary machine language that wasn’t tied to any one computer. We knew computers were evolving quickly and wanted to make it easy to adapt games to different computers. Even though the language was invented for King's Quest we already saw it as a language that would be used to build many different games on many different computers.
In addition to building a programming language, we needed to build custom tools to bring Roberta's creation to life. For example, we needed to build a tool that an artist could use to build an animated character and drop it into the game. We also needed to do a music editor.
Part of Roberta's vision was that the game's universe would be 3D. In other words, she wanted the player to be able to control a character (King Graham) who would move through the world under player control. He needed to be able to walk behind rocks, trees, buildings, other characters, etc.
As always, the technology team and I gave our classic answer, "No. It is impossible."
The Peanut was a step up from the Apple II, but it wasn’t an enormous leap. And, to be honest, no one working for Sierra at that time had the math skills to create a true 3D game. Perhaps with enough money and time we could have done something, but I doubt it. True 3D like you see in most games today is accomplished via offloading the math to specialized hardware that does the majority of the work.
We all wanted to please Roberta, and we wanted to give IBM a game that would make their computer look good.
Ultimately, we chose an approach that gave the impression of 3D by working with twelve 2-dimensional layers.\
From Roberta's game map, we would produce a pencil sketch of each of the game's locations.
The pencil sketch would then be divided into 15 equal horizontal bands, numbered from 0 to 14. By looking at which band the base of any object in the picture was located, we could quickly identify which objects were in front of other objects. For example, in the sketch above, you can see that the large tree extends all the way to the bottom of the screen, putting it on level 14. The tree to its left has its base on level 12. If an animated character in the game has its base on level 13, it would be drawn behind the level 14 tree, and in front of the level 12 tree.
King's Quest looked so good that IBM was easy to talk into additional products, each with its own set of royalty advances. These cash advances gave us the money we needed to hire people back and build products.
One of the products that IBM funded was the Homeword Word Processor. IBM liked my idea of using small pictures or icons to enter formatting commands rather than complicated keyboard commands. The word processing market at the time was dominated by Wordstar, which used obscure formatting commands, like ctrl-c to center text.
We also converted a couple of our existing games to the Peanut, now known by its official name, PC Jr (Crossfire and Mindshaft).
Our IBM relationship was a success! But, the money was not rolling in fast enough.
The money from IBM was based on milestones and was coming in slowly. We had hired back a lot of people in order to create the games for IBM, and there still wasn't enough revenue coming in. We were digging the hole a little deeper month by month.
Our relationship with the venture capitalists wasn't great, but it was improving day by day as we made progress. The IBM relationship and the possibility of our software being sold on millions of computers gave the venture capitalists hope that Sierra might survive. Furthermore, we had worked out a deal with Disney to launch a line of Disney branded products. It had also not gone unnoticed that the crash and layoffs had been good for us. The party atmosphere had been replaced by a renewed focus on building a real company.
All the momentum in the world does nothing to get the bills paid. There were milestone payments that would arrive sooner or later from IBM, but they weren't coming fast enough. We needed to bring in more money quickly.
The venture capitalists were willing to kick in some money, but it wasn’t much and it came with some hefty strings attached. I’ve long forgotten the details, but it was something like: They gave us $500,000 and we gave them 10% of the company. I think Roberta and I still retained over half the company, but there was another piece to the deal. Each share of stock they purchased had the right to buy several more shares at a slightly higher price. These were called Warrants and if exercised the company would bring in another million dollars, but Roberta and I would lose control. We had no choice. We needed to keep Sierra alive.
Finally, the day came and IBM launched the PC Jr! We were excited about our software and prepared to sell millions of copies.
Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia saying what happened:
"Despite widespread anticipation, the PCjr's launch was unsuccessful. IBM's inexperience with the consumer market led to unclear positioning, with analysts believing that IBM was unsuccessful at justifying the PCjr's higher cost in comparison to competitors such as the Commodore 64 and Apple II. It is only partially IBM compatible, so compatibility with existing PC software such as the killer app Lotus 1-2-3 was not guaranteed. The PCjr's chiclet keyboard was widely criticized for its poor quality, with critics stating that it was unsuitable for extended use such as word processing. The PCjr’s expandability is limited, and it was initially offered with up to 128 KB of RAM only, insufficient for many IBM PC programs [...] By January 1985, when the discounts ended, IBM had sold 250,000 PCjr computers, with 200,000 in the fourth quarter of 1984 alone. Unable to sell the computer without discounts, IBM abruptly discontinued the PCjr in March 1985..."
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr
More succinctly: The PC Jr bombed. IBM had been worried that the PC Jr might scavenge sales for the higher-priced IBM PC. The PC Jr launched with limited expansion abilities and a horrible laptop-style flat keyboard that was referred to as a "chiclet" keyboard.
On the day the PC Jr released I had rushed to the store to buy a "real" PC Jr. Prior to the release we had been using specially modified IBM PCs. Roberta, the kids, and I went to the movies on the way home from the store, and left the computer sitting on the car floor in the back seat. Returning to the car after the movie I discovered a smashed window and that the computer was gone. The bad reviews for the PC Jr arrived so fast that I replaced the car window, but not the computer.
No further income beyond the development funding we had already received would be coming.
All was not lost though! IBM could have asked for exclusive rights to the games, but they had made us sign contracts encouraging us to market them to others.
And, we did!
I flew to Texas to visit Radio Shack, who at the time was the world’s largest retailer of electronics with over 6,000 stores in the United States.
Radio Shack was working on a computer that had been intended to compete with the IBM PC Jr. I had several meetings with John Roach, Radio Shack’s CEO, and came away with an agreement that Radio Shack would sell versions of the same games we had developed for the IBM PC Jr on their new computer, the Tandy 1000.
The Tandy 1000 was a hit, and thanks to the software that Sierra had developed for the failed PC Jr, we were the first to support the enhanced graphics and sound that the Tandy 1000 had implemented in response to the IBM PC Jr.
"...Released in November 1984, the $1,200 Tandy 1000 offered the same functionality as the PCjr, but with an improved keyboard and better expandability and compatibility. "How could IBM have made that mistake with the PCjr?" an amazed Tandy executive said regarding its chiclet keyboard, and another claimed that the 1000 "is what the PCjr should have been"
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000
And, because Sierra had upgraded our proprietary development language (AGI) to support color graphics, sound and animation, we now had a huge headstart on producing more games.
Our Disney products leveraged the technology that had been built for King's Quest, and were also a hit in Radio Shack stores.
We rushed out a version of all the games for the Apple II. The games did not look nearly as good due to the limited graphic abilities of the Apple II, but revenue is revenue and we took it wherever we could get it.
Our venture capitalists were in shock. We had risen from the dead and were suddenly the bright spot in their software portfolios! The board voted to restore my title to Chairman of the Board.
Best of all, Tandy's success showed the benefits of having an IBM compatible computer with enhanced graphics and sound. All of the hardware companies wanted a piece of the action. IBM, rather than creating their own operating system had licensed it from Microsoft. Tandy also licensed the operating system from Microsoft, who went on to license many companies to make "IBM compatible" computers. For a decade computers, and software, were labeled as "IBM Compatible" but over time Microsoft replaced IBM on those labels. These days you’ll see those labels say, "Windows compatible" reflecting that the operating system comes from Microsoft, who like Sierra, owes their launch into the big leagues to IBM.
The turnaround was complete, and Sierra never had a losing quarter over the next fifteen years!
- INTERLUDE -
(A brief pause in the story, so I can wedge something in)
Chapter 19: Roberta and Licensed Properties
What I've realized recently is that the difference between me and Mickey Mouse is, there's not a man that can go and say, 'Look, can you get me in any faster? I'm Mickey Mouse.' Whereas I can go in and say, 'Look, could you get me a table faster? I’m Princess Leia.'
- Carrie Fisher
Roberta is the true founder of Sierra and was always Sierra's bestselling author.
Roberta should be the one writing this book. Believe me. I tried to convince her. After failing to get her to even consider the idea, I twisted her arm to write just one chapter. She also refused to do that. I do believe she will read and comment on the final manuscript for this book. And, probably the version you are reading is only legible because of her efforts.
Roberta's book about Ireland and why she doesn't do interviews
There are two reasons why Roberta can't be lured into writing a Sierra book, the first of which is that she has been busy for a decade working on a book of her own. Just to tease you, here’s a sneak peek at a preliminary version of her book cover.
Roberta is of Irish heritage and decided to trace the history of the Irish immigration to America, telling the story by tracing several generations of her own family's history. When Roberta does something, she does it "all the way," and the research she put into this book tells us much about Roberta. Before Roberta wrote the first word she had hired researchers who were producing thick research documents, while Roberta compiled binders full of research on her own.
Roberta spent several years on research prior to starting to write. And then the actual writing of the story took years, and then several more years to make pass after pass of editing. The final book had to work as a "good and entertaining read" but it also had to be historically accurate. She has spent the last six months just agonizing over the historical footnotes at the end of the book, with the first month spent just researching the proper ways to write footnotes.
America is a country shaped by immigration.
It is estimated that as many as 4.5 million Irish arrived in America during the 1800s and early 1900s. Between 1820 and 1860, the Irish constituted over one third of all immigrants to the United States.
Rather than an unimpassioned history lesson, Roberta shares the immigrant story through the eyes of her own Irish ancestors. To really understand the Irish experience you have to live it. Barring the invention of time travel, this is as close as you can get.
- Roberta Williams, on the back cover copy of her book about Ireland
The second reason Roberta hasn't written Sierra's history is simply that she doesn’t want to.
Roberta refuses all interview requests. Once in a very great while she will do one, but only as a result of my talking her into it. Usually I have to offer something in return as a part of the negotiation.
I can't completely explain Roberta's hesitancy to speak about Sierra. When asked about it, her usual answer is, "Why would I want to do that? No. I'm not interested."
It isn't that Roberta doesn't care about Sierra history or has bad feelings about the Sierra years. It's just that it would take some of her time, and there's only a certain number of hours in a day. Roberta likes to focus on where we are going, not on where we have been. Roberta knows that she could easily get sucked into spending endless hours talking about Sierra, and that nothing she says or does will bring Sierra back. She'd rather use her time doing something new and making some new history.
Even now, in our journeys around the world by boat, after each adventure I produce a blog entry. Along the way, I pumped out four books about boating. Roberta thinks of my blog as a waste of time and a loss of our privacy. She's right of course, as always. But, what can I say? I like writing the blog entries, whereas she sees no value in them.
Anyway...
The Dark Crystal
In 1982, Sierra was using a publicity firm based in New York to help promote our games. One of their other clients was Christopher Cerf, the son of Bennett Cerf, co-founder of Random House. In addition to being an author, Christopher was heavily tied in with Sesame Street and the Muppets and had written hundreds of Muppet-related songs.
Christopher knew that Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, was planning a movie, called the Dark Crystal, that was widely expected to be a major hit. I don't remember how the deal came together, but Christopher connected me with Jim Henson, and Sierra became the first company ever to launch a game as part of a movie's release.
Roberta agreed to design the game. It was our first exposure to a major film production and was an eye opener. The film was deep into production at the time and I remember being shocked at the number of binders full of drawings that provided the minute details behind the movie.
It was a wealth of ideas that Sierra could borrow for how we should be building games.
Every character had a character sheet providing a full description of the character, their back story, illustrations of how they would look in various clothes and animations, and even samples of how they might speak. Henson was creating a world that was bigger than just the one film. There were volumes of drawings and backstory for the world within which the characters lived. An entire universe had been created, including all of the characters that lived within it. The film, The Dark Crystal, represented one possible story that could take place within the universe they had created. There was plenty here for Roberta to draw on to create her game.
"In a way, it's better than the movie. Although beautifully produced, the Muppet-related movie, The Dark Crystal, left some of its audience wondering, "So what?" There wasn’t a lot of substance- at least, not that was developed. The adventure escapes such denigration by virtue of being a game. As puzzles, the tribulations of the gelflings Jen and Kira are challenging, and solving them is rewarding. That is the "so what." And, because graphic adventures are so often weak in plot, the thin story that failed to serve the movie well is comparatively top-drawer material in the game."
- Softline Magazine, 1983
Working with Disney on the Black Cauldron
We were approached by Disney in 1985 asking if Roberta would be willing to work with them to do a game based on a movie they would be releasing, called "The Black Cauldron."
As always, Roberta immediately said, "No." Roberta had worked with Disney previously, designing a game called "Mickey's Space Adventure." It hadn't been a bad experience, but neither was it a particularly pleasant experience.
There were many negatives and no positives from Roberta's perspective.
- The "royalties" (piece of the action) had to be split with Disney.
- The characters were already designed. Half of the fun is the creative side of creating new characters.
- Everything Roberta did would be scrutinized by teams of people, each with their own agendas.
- Getting true creative control over the project was impossible.
I valued the Disney logo on our products and wanted to do everything possible to tighten the relationship, so I groveled as best I could and ultimately Roberta said, "Yes," but only if she could have complete creative control of the game, and if Al Lowe could be engaged to do the vast majority of the work. Roberta was busy on another game and didn't want to get sidetracked.
Roberta also saw this as a way to spin up to speed a new adventure game designer for Sierra. Al had already done his own educational products as well as the Disney games, but Black Cauldron would be Al's first full-sized adventure game. Even though Roberta was never a salaried employee of Sierra (she received royalties on her games), I used her to champion other designers, including Jane Jenson who worked with her on King's Quest then went on to launch the Gabriel Knight series, and Lorelei Shannon who also worked with Roberta on King's Quest and then took over the Phantasmagoria series with Phantasmagoria II.
If you look around on-line you can find the credits for Black Cauldron. Interestingly, on many sites you will find several people credited with designing the game: Al Lowe, Elaine Boulay, Melissa Halderman, Nancy Casolero... and, finally, Roberta Williams. The number of names listed gives you some sense of the behind-the-scenes controversy that ensued.
Al and Roberta, working from the film's script, produced a design document and met with the Disney team to present their ideas.
The Disney team listened politely to Al and Roberta's ideas and returned home to their offices.
A week later Al and Roberta received back their design, with major portions of it removed. Many of the removals were because they had included things that "didn’t happen in the movie." For example, if there was a ladder in a room, and in the movie the central character never climbed the ladder, then Disney's representatives didn’t understand why they should be able to do it in the game.
The Disney team wasn't quite understanding the difference between an interactive story, and a movie. They were engaged and wanted to help but also perceived Roberta as adding elements to the story that simply didn't exist. Sierra was creating a story bigger than the 90 minute movie and they were confused about how, and why, she was doing that.
Roberta was busy at the time on another game and had agreed to get involved in the Black Cauldron game as a favor to me. From her perspective, her and Al were being asked to train a bunch of rookies, and none of it seemed consistent with my promise that she would have complete creative control.
Once again Roberta said, "No," leaving me in an awkward position. Disney had come to Sierra with what they thought was going to be a huge new franchise for them. Sierra's computer game was an important part of the movie's launch and they had specifically wanted Roberta to design the game.
Ultimately, Disney backed down, and we shipped the game our way. There was a bit of shouting along the way, but the game did not suffer. As planned, Al Lowe took over the project, with Roberta helping occasionally, and nailed the design. The resulting game was awesome!
Unfortunately, the movie bombed. Despite this, the game was a winner and inside Sierra we claimed that the game outsold the movie. It was an exaggeration, in that the movie grossed over $20 million, whereas our revenues were probably a quarter of that.
However, our game was immensely profitable, and Disney probably lost money.
Chapter 20: (1983) Cartoon Time
"...I’ve never canceled a subscription to a newspaper because of bad cartoons or editorials. If that were the case, I wouldn't have any newspapers or magazines to read.
- Richard M. Nixon
As a kid growing up in the '70s, I looked forward to each day's newspaper, especially the Sunday papers when the cartoons would be in color.
Among my favorite series were two by the same cartoonist, Johnny Hart: B.C. which followed the lives of some prehistoric cave dwellers, and the Wizard of Id, a series about a shabby medieval kingdom called Id.
I don't remember who came up with the idea of doing a game based on Johnny Hart's comic strips. Me? Maybe.
Whereas I may not remember whose idea it was, but I will never forget our extraordinary meeting with the cartoonist, Johnny Hart.
I had been reading the comic for as long as I'd been able to read. Here was my chance to meet a boyhood hero.
His home was in a small town called Nineveh, New York. When I spoke with him by phone about licensing his comics he invited Roberta and me to visit him at his home. I had never heard of Nineveh and asked where we should fly to. He said, "Take a commercial flight to JFK airport in New York and I'll have my plane bring you to Nineveh." This was too good to be true!
Roberta and I were greeted at the airport and were excited about traveling on Johnny Hart's airplane! I had envisioned something roughly the size of a 747, but instead what greeted us was a tiny prop plane.
We wedged into the plane behind the pilot. There was bad weather in the area and we sat for hours waiting to take off. Finally, we were cleared for departure and began our 200 mile flight to Nineveh.
I've flown a lot of miles in my life and seen a lot of bad weather. From the moment we took off, and until we landed, what seemed like two weeks later, we were in the worst weather I've ever experienced. We should have turned back, but instead flew through clouds, constantly slammed up and down, with lighting strikes surrounding us in every direction.
I'm a nervous flier and can always be counted on to grip with great force any arm rests or seat backs around me throughout the flight. Roberta is a calm flier, but not on this flight. I had never seen Roberta scared on a flight, prior to that flight, or since that flight. She was also thinking this might be the end. I will always believe that we barely escaped death, and I'm not even remotely kidding.
With the delayed departure and the slow flight, we arrived at Johnny's house late. He greeted us and we said "hi," but Roberta and I said we wanted to immediately head to bed and meet in the morning. We had traveled from Oakhurst, which involved driving three hours to San Francisco, waiting for our flight, flying across the country, waiting for our flight-from-hell, taking the flight-from-hell, and then driving to Johnny's house. It was a long day and we were beat.
We were led to a bedroom, where we immediately jumped into bed.
Minutes later we heard a crash, followed by a boom, a drum roll and a smash of a cymbal. We had now discovered that Johnny was a drummer and we would be getting a private concert. His drum set was probably in the next room, but I would have sworn he had somehow snuck it inside my pillow. We heard and felt every beat. In fact, the beating was relentless and continued all night. Apparently Johnny liked to practice at all hours. We were miserable. Roberta pleaded with me to ask him to stop, but I couldn't bring myself to do so. We were guests in his house.
The next morning Roberta and I rose early, despite not being able to sleep until it was almost daylight. We were eager for our meeting. As one might expect, Johnny decided to sleep in. Once he appeared, he was an incredibly gracious host and we were delighted to be able to speak with him about his craft and see where he did his drawings.
Johnny Hart passed away in 2007, sitting at his desk drawing a cartoon. His fifty year run is amazing, and the comics are still running today, with his grandchildren having taken over the series.
I will never forget one thing Johnny said during our meeting, which surprised me.
"I try to be really funny at least once a week. It is impossible to be funny in every cartoon."
- Johnny Hart
His comment hit home with me. I took a little comfort in knowing that even a creative genius couldn't nail it every time at bat. But the good news is that, if you score a win often enough, the customers will keep coming back.
We had to leave far too soon. The sun was shining and our ride home was much less exciting.
Most importantly, our goal had been accomplished. Sierra would be producing a series of games based on B.C. and The Wizard of Id.
Sierra always sought games that could push hardware. Computers and video game machines were starting to evolve that had hardware to handle background scrolling. Instead of the software having to repaint the entire screen for every frame of animation, one computer instruction could shift the entire screen. Animated characters on the screen could exist on their own hardware driven layer instead of the fake 3D that we had been doing.
Our first game using the B.C. license was Quest for Tires. The game design itself was not particularly innovative, but it showed off the hardware nicely and received great reviews. We followed Quest for Tires with a string of sequels and even launched a typing program using the Wizard of Id license.
- INTERLUDE -
(A brief pause in the story, so I can wedge something in)
Chapter 21: Product Strategy
"When the product is right, you don’t have to be a great Marketer”
- Lee Iacocca, CEO of Chrysler, Father of the Mustang
I debated whether Sierra's product strategy belonged in the Marketing chapter. Given the way I ran Sierra, it was never clear where the dividing line was between product and marketing strategy.
Most people think of Sierra as "The Adventure Game Company." However, behind the scenes, throughout Sierra's history I was always trying to reduce adventure games as a percentage of our revenue.
It wasn't that I didn’t like adventure games. They always treated us quite well. But, there were several problems with adventure games that neither Roberta or I knew how to fix.
Adventure games:
- Tend to either be too hard, or people run through them in a day.
- Don't lend themselves to being multi-player (and, I thought that was where the world was heading).
- Aren't "perennial." You can't enhance the game year after year and hope people buy it again, unlike a game like "Football" where you can just invest a few dollars each year and the fans will buy it again.
- Are expensive to make!
Ultimately, the biggest problem with adventure games was that they were only one slice of the overall market, and our success had generated plenty of competition. Some of our competitors were making games that were very good. LucasArts (George Lucas' company) turned out products like: Loom, Indiana Jones, and The Secret of Monkey Island. Infocom was producing text adventures, like Zork, that were a throwback to the original Colossal Cave Adventure, but done incredibly well. We were lucky that Infocom shifted from making games to targeting business software and failed. Had they continued to target us, we would have lost a huge amount of Adventure game revenue. Broderbund, another competitor, jumped into the fray with Myst, which was scary-good and a huge hit.
Bottom line: adventure games were only one small piece of the consumer software market and it was being carved into even tinier slices as competition moved in. To fight this I deliberately tried to target specific demographics with each of our adventure games. As you might imagine, Mickey’s Space Adventure targeted a different buyer than Leisure Suit Larry.
Our single biggest product strategy could be summarized as, "Do something we thought would be a hit, spend a lot of money making it, spend a lot of money promoting it, lose money on the game, but if it clicks leverage its success into future sequels." Effectively, we were in the business of creating brands and then dining off those brands. We expected the first game in every new series to be a loser. We were fine with that. The important thing was that once launched we could somehow create follow-on products with fewer development and/or marketing dollars.
After I left Sierra, one mistake the new owners made was that, rather than following with sequels to products that had a long-term plan, they looked at our lineup for any products that lost money and immediately killed them off. The new owners never "got" the idea of investment spending to launch a brand.
- Ken Williams, September 2020
And, of course, there was our series strategy. We followed King's Quest 1, with... you guessed it: King's Quest 2. Leisure Suit Larry 1 was followed by: Leisure Suit Larry 2. Etc.
One other reason I pushed so hard on non-adventure games was that for us to grow rapidly and profitably we needed to expand our market beyond just adventure games. We needed to reach new buyers. Some people were not going to buy an adventure game regardless of the content. Or, even if they loved adventure games, realistically they were only going to buy some finite number of them each year. If you looked at the bigger picture of what someone would do with a personal computer, gaming was only one slice of the pie.
Sierra envisioned customers splitting their total annual software budget a few ways. If someone were going to spend a couple hundred dollars on software, some of that would be on productivity software; products like word processing and spreadsheets. Microsoft dominated those categories and part of our strategy was to compete by hitting them where they weren't, rather than trying to take Microsoft head-on. Thus, we looked for other niches in productivity like "Design your own home" or "Design your landscaping" or "How to cook dinner."
Another major slice of the pie was: educational software. There was tough competition, but we knew we had what it took to win. By the time we sold the company we were doing amazingly well. We were #1 in education in Europe with products like Adi and Adibou (curriculum based educational products). And, in the U.S. we were doing incredibly well with our Dr. Brain series of semi-educational games.
My goal for the company, and we were on track to achieve it, was to have our revenues come a third, a third, and a third, from entertainment, education and productivity.
As to adventure games, I wanted all the revenue I could get from them, but realistically, I saw them falling to a small slice of the entertainment pie. Within entertainment, my focus was on the percentage of revenue that was perennial as opposed to the percentage of revenue that was non-perennial. To reach a place where we would have sustainable growth, not just growth, we needed to increase the number of products within entertainment that had "forever" lives. This meant seeking out and giving emphasis to games like our NASCAR racing product, our Bass Fishing product, Hoyle's Card Games and others that weren't hit oriented.
Product budgets were tied to the sales projection for each product. If we thought a product would sell 100,000 units, at $22 per unit, then our revenue projection would have been $2.2 million. We were willing to spend one dollar on development for each four dollars of revenue, so to get the development budget we would divide a product’s estimated revenue by four. In this case, the development budget would be $550,000. This isn't a lot of money, and in those days not many products sold 100,000 units. By today's standards these numbers are a laughably small. Plus, today, almost all product is downloaded over the internet. We had huge packaging and return costs, none of which exist today. If our costs were $4 to pay for a CD ROM, instruction manual, warranty card and box, then to produce 100,000 would cost us $400,000. Our products costs also had to allow for the fact that some percentage of everything sold would come back our direction. Sierra always gave retailers the option to return unsold inventory. These returns usually had to be thrown away or somehow creatively disposed of for a very low price.
I mention all of this only to explain that economics played a large role in our product strategy. All product ideas had to be vetted to confirm that the economics worked. There were times we would break the four to one rule, in order to launch a new series, but those occasions were rare. The sad thing is that most, virtually all, projects came in over budget, and light on the sales estimate. Without the occasional hit, we never could have made money. One hit game will cover a LOT of sins.
Chapter 22: (1987) Sierra Goes Public
I'm on the Business Roundtable, the CEOs of the largest 100-odd companies in the country. Most of these people wanted very much to be the CEO of a large public company but realize that it’s not exactly what they had anticipated, for lots of reasons.
- Henry Silverman, CEO of HFS (Avis, Century 21, Howard Johnsons, Ramada Inn, Coldwell Banker, etc)
From the day I was old enough to know what it meant, I dreamed about someday being the CEO of a public company. To me this would represent the pinnacle of success. Very few entrepreneurs ever succeed in receiving venture capital, and only a fraction of those ever "go public". Most fade away or are sold, but once in a while a rare company breaks out of the pack and crosses the threshold to have enough revenues and profits that they can offer shares in their company to the public.
From being essentially a dead company in 1983, by 1987 Sierra had made an amazing comeback. Products like King's Quest and Leisure Suit Larry were topping the industry bestseller charts. We had a Disney relationship that was moving us into the educational market.
We had launched our first flight simulator, which also broke new ground as the industry’s first multiplayer (via modem) flight simulation.
You've seen head-to-head sports simulations and head-to-head arcade games. But, never before has a computer program permitted head-to-head flight simulation competition... until now!
- From the back of the 3D Helicopter Simulator Box
We were on a roll!
In 1987, Sierra spoke with an investment banking firm about taking the company public.
To make a long story short, "Going Public" means that the company has met the criteria to offer shares of stock to virtually any investor. The US government has an agency, called the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) that establishes rules for, and monitors, public companies.
When a company goes public, it is a complicated process. The process of going public is called an Initial Public Offering, or IPO. Most stock in an IPO is purchased by mutual funds. In Sierra's case, for our IPO, most of the stock would be purchased by funds that specialize in investing in small, but promising and rapidly growing, technology companies.
For Sierra to perform an IPO we would need to work with a series of Investment Banking firms who would try to excite mutual funds around the country about purchasing Sierra's stock. My job as the CEO would be to travel to dozens of these mutual funds and explain to them why Sierra would be a company worth investing in. There is usually some stock purchased by individual investors during an IPO, but the mutual funds usually have the priority and stock is typically offered only to the favorite customers of the investment banks.
The amount of money raised by a company can vary during the IPO process. As an example: A company might decide to offer ten percent of their stock, and have a general sense that they might raise ten million dollars, but then when visiting mutual funds the deal could be perceived as "cold" and the company raise only seven or eight million, or it might be a "hot" deal and the company raise fifteen or more million. The actual price per share is not established until the end of the marketing process. After weeks of touring mutual funds, the company and the investment bankers meet for a "pricing meeting" at which the bankers talk about what price per share they think the company merits. At this point the bankers will have spoken to the mutual funds and determined their appetite for the stock. If the price is too high the mutual funds will pass on buying stock. In some cases, the price comes in at an unacceptable level and the deal is canceled. As they say, "No deal is done until the check is in the bank." I had not realized how true that was.
In the fall of 1987 Sierra launched our IPO and I spent weeks on the road visiting mutual fund after mutual fund. In those days, this was done by carrying around a circular slide tray. I would show up a meeting room, wearing a business suit, enter a meeting room, give my presentation to a mutual fund manager, answer a few questions, then head to my next meeting. By the time I had given the same presentation ten to twenty times I was on auto-pilot. I knew what the audience seemed to like, what humor got a laugh, and when to quit talking. The investment bankers who accompanied me on the roadshow had heard the pitch so many times they easily could have recited it line by line, with or without me.
I have a few memories, not all of them good, from these roadshows. On one trip, as I was leaving home I grabbed the bag holding my suit and drove the three hours to the San Francisco airport to head east for my meetings. The next morning as I opened the bag I was floored by a horrible odor! My suit smelled like cat pee! And, for a very good reason. Apparently one of our cats had somehow found a way to get inside the suit bag and used my suit as a litter box. I had to show up for several meetings in my travel clothes (jeans and a t-shirt). No mutual fund manager had ever seen someone show up dressed so casually before. On another occasion, I remember arriving in Florida for a meeting during a hurricane. We had the meeting in a skyscraper that was moving with the wind, while the mutual fund managers rushed me through the meeting, as we were hearing windows get blown out around the building.
On the positive side, I quickly realized that every wall-street related person in the country seemed to be a Leisure Suit Larry fan. As soon as I uttered Larry's name the mutual fund buyers would immediately start laughing and paying attention. Everywhere I went, I was greeted with open arms.
Finally in October of 1987, it was time for the pricing meeting. Our road trips had been a success!
As I was driving to San Francisco looking forward to getting the deal done and depositing a very large check, I received a call from the bankers saying that I should turn back and that it was a bad day to consummate the transaction. "We'll need to give it a few days and see if the market gets better," they said.
On October 19, 1987- known as Black Monday- the DJIA fell by 508 points, or by 22.6%. Up to this point in history, this was the largest percentage drop in one day. The crash sparked fears of extended economic instability around the world.
- Investopedia
The market had crashed and the deal was canceled. All of my travel had been for nothing.
A year later, we tried again. This time we did it without cat pee, hurricanes or even a stock market crash, and had a good result.
This was the long awaited, hard earned, and dreamed of, result:
- INTERLUDE -
(A brief pause in the story, so I can wedge something in)
Chapter 23: Memories of Meetings With Industry Titans
"I don't think I'll ever act again. I have so many wonderful memories, but those days are over."
- Sean Connery
Meeting Steve Wozniak
Apple was a little company during Sierra's early days. It was possible to call Apple and ask for Steve Wozniak or Steve Jobs and they would come onto the phone.
May 23, 1981
Dear ON-LINE-SYSTEMS (especially the Williamses),
I have had little time for games over the last couple of years even though I am a video game lover. Your HI-RES MYSTERY HOUSE series captivated me and gave me a much desired game-playing 'break'. It was such a thrill to see the first application of graphics (to that extent) in an 'ADVENTURE' game. You spent a lot of time doing something in a unique way, obviously because you wanted to do something 'good' and 'right' even though the success or value was unpredictable. That concept was extended with the color addition to THE WIZARD AND THE PRINCESS. To my knowledge, no-one has accomplished a similar feat yet (although, now that you have 'shown' the world, others WILL follow).
I had a (well publicized) airplane crash in February. Fortunately we are all doing well and I still enjoy flying. I have no memories of the crash or the 5 weeks following (total amnesia,) but have been told of the crash and hospital stay. Pictures show me in the hospital playing games on an Apple!
After the hospital stay I purchased a copy of your new game, SABOTAGE, which I have been totally unable to put down. People have told me that my plane crash began with a departure at an odd angle from the runway and that I almost collided with a large parked military helicopter. Perhaps subconsciously I have a strong desire to shoot those helicopters down! My scores are frequently in the four thousands and I would be interested in the top scores you know of.
I must say that I think SABOTAGE is the best game yet written for the Apple (with some close competition from SIRIUS, BUDGECO, others). In fact it is by far the closest application to that for which I really designed the computer--a good SPACEWAR (which has not appeared, probably due to the need for more analogue input). My notes from before the APPLE-II was shipped include HI-RES routines for manipulating up to 64 ships, projectiles, etc. at once. Unfortunately the need for allocating my time to more important company oriented goals prevented completion. I am so thankful that that direction is being followed by personal computer owners. I am especially glad that enough information about the guts of the APPLE-II was released to make it possible for USERS to be so creative. That statement describes an important difference between our computer and others. I hope that to the greatest extent possible the principle is applied to future Apple products.
Thank you so much for the happiness you have brought into my life. I hope that you find no bounds to your APPLE creativity.
Sincerely,
Steve (WOZ) Wozniak
The first time I met Wozniak, Roberta was with me and we were at Apple's headquarters in Sunnyvale. We were directed to Wozniak's desk, which had an ironing board sitting next to it. Wozniak was there, and was very excited. He said he had discovered a new way to duplicate disks that he wanted to show me. This would have been in the early '80s because I remember that we were still duplicating games on floppy disks.
Wozniak had one of our games and had slit the side of a floppy disk, removing the magnetic material (media) from the center. He then placed the media between two towels, followed by removing the media from another blank floppy and placed it directly onto the ironing board. Placing the game media on top of the blank media with a towel between them, and a towel above, he then applied a hot iron to the stack. A minute later he removed the blank media, put it back into its floppy disk sleeve, and proceeded to show that the freshly copied game would boot!
I'm sure it was a simple magic trick, but I was totally sucked in. Score one for the Woz (Wozniak’s nickname). He got me.
Steve Jobs was there that day and barely looked up from his computer. We shook hands when Wozniak introduced us but he looked like he had much better things to do than to be introduced to a shaggy looking software developer and his wife/game designer who had come down from the mountains.
Months later I received an invite to a birthday party at Wozniak's house.
Roberta and I attended and I only have a couple memories from that day. First, was that Woz had a swimming pool that extended from under his bedroom to the outside! I had never seen anything like that before. The second was that he was talking about doing a festival similar to Woodstock. He said he had studied Woodstock, and understood how things went wrong, and wanted to host a festival that would pack in the kinds of performers and audience of Woodstock but without being the logistical and financial disaster.
He went on to do two "US" festivals, and I don’t believe either fulfilled his expectations.
Our most interesting meeting occurred after a computer show in San Francisco. Woz went to dinner with Roberta, Dick Sunderland (who was President of Sierra at the time,) and me. I remember that I drank more than I should have and was feeling no pain when Roberta and I returned to our hotel afterwards. Soon after we went to bed, we were awakened by a phone call from Oakhurst. Our house was on fire!!!!! We had left our two young sons with a babysitter. I was groggy but the most important question was, "Are our sons ok?" The answer was that the babysitter had gotten them out and all was fine. The fire department was still there, trying to put out the fire.
Roberta and I rushed to our car and drove the three hours to Oakhurst. In those days there were no cell phones, so we worried all the way home. Were the kids really ok? How badly had the house burned? It was a very long three hours, although I am sure that I exceeded the speed limit and trimmed the time by 30 minutes or more.
When we reached the house, there was no house. Nothing was standing, not one board. The fire department was still there, hosing down the inch-tall pile of charcoal that had once been our home. Both children, and the babysitter, were standing nearby watching the action. The kids were in their pajamas. Nothing had been rescued. All of our photographs, videos, souvenirs, clothes, computers, furniture, basically everything we owned, had burned.
Amongst the items that burned was my Apple 1 computer. It had been personally made by Wozniak and Jobs, and was one of only about seventy that had ever been made.
Roberta and I went to a hotel that night with nothing but the clothes on our back, the two kids in their pajamas and the suitcase we had taken to San Francisco with one change of clothes. The next day was spent shopping and looking for a rental home.
Word spread quickly in the industry about our fire. Wozniak called saying he heard about the Apple 1 burning and would help me try to find another. Sure enough, a friend of his called me saying he had an Apple 1 he'd be willing to swap for some Sierra games. A great deal, and a wonderful piece of Apple's history that I will cherish forever.
Meeting Steve Jobs
I encountered Steve Jobs a few times over the years, but was always ignored by him. It didn't bother me. I was a nobody compared to what he was creating at Apple.
That said... We did bounce off of each other on two notable occasions.
One day, I was surprised by a call from Apple. I don’t remember who called, but it wasn't Jobs. The caller said that Apple was coming out with a new computer and Steve Jobs wanted to name it the "Lisa." At that time, Sierra was selling a programming language called Lisa. It was a 6502 assembler and wasn't selling many copies. I said I'd trade the rights to use the name Lisa for six pre-release Lisa computers. The Lisa was going to target the business market, and I had no idea what I would do with the machines, but thought they could possibly be used in product development. Who turns down free hardware? And, it was a favor for Steve Jobs! Maybe he’d remember my name someday. Best of all, we could continue to market our Lisa assembler, so there was no reason not to do the deal.
Years later, I heard the rest of the story: Jobs had a secret illegitimate daughter named Lisa that he wanted to name the computer after.
He [Jobs] claimed that the Apple Lisa was not named for her, and had his team come up with the phrase "Local Integrated Systems Architecture" as an alternative explanation for the project’s name. Decades later, Jobs admitted that "obviously, it was named for my daughter"
- Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa
When we were doing King's Quest VI, Jobs had left Apple, formed another computer company named NeXT, and gone on to purchase a graphics company from George Lucas that he renamed Pixar to make animated films. I wanted an exciting opening animated sequence for King's Quest VI.
I called Pixar, asking to speak with "Mr. Jobs," and identified myself. A minute later Jobs was on the phone. I was dumbfounded! I had never expected him to take the call. For some unknown reason, he was in a good mood. For at least the moment, I had crossed over from obscurity to being someone worth talking to. It wound up being a nearly 45 minute call where we talked about the industry, animation, his time at Apple, the cartoon called Toy Story he was working on, and more. He claimed to know exactly who Sierra was, and who I was. Whether he remembered the Lisa naming deal I did not know and was not about to ask. I was just happy to be talking to someone I considered a god. He said he'd love to do the cartoon for King's Quest VI but was bogged down on Toy Story and couldn't free anyone to work on the project. I wasn't surprised, but was disappointed. I will never know why he took the call. But, I will never forget it.
We never spoke again.
Meeting Jeff Bezos
When Sierra moved to Bellevue in 1993, one of the many reasons I was looking forward to being in Seattle was to have a peer group of other software executives to hang out with.
I searched and discovered that there was indeed a Washington Software Association with 500 members! I contacted them and asked about their membership. Specifically, I asked, "How many of your members have over 100 employees?" The answer came back: One. Microsoft. "What about 50 employees?" The answer was still: One. Microsoft. The bottom line became that the Association was comprised of not much more than a lot of ex Microsoft developers, many with money made exercising their Microsoft stock options. They had wishes and dreams of starting their own software company, but none of them had significant revenues.
I quickly lost interest and never joined the association.
Later though, when I retired in 1998, I noticed a budding software company called Amazon that was starting to get some attention. I couldn’t figure out what to do with my life and phoned their founder, a young man named Jeff Bezos to see if there was anything fun we could do together.
Jeff invited me to his office. There wasn’t much to it, and in those days he prided himself on being non-ostentatious, down to having an old door as his desk. We talked about what he was trying to create, and the work I had done on NetMarket (a pioneering on-line shopping system that I'll talk about later in this book). At that time, Jeff and his wife were going to the local Barnes and Noble bookstore to scan book jackets. He asked if there was something I could do to take over that piece of the puzzle. I had done plenty of projects with large databases, and taking over that function would be a natural fit.
But, it sounded boring. I wanted something that involved consumer entertainment. I wanted into movies or something exciting. Building the database for a bookseller didn't sound like it had enough sizzle. I thought he was on to something, but a few weeks later I sent him a Dear John letter passing on the opportunity.
"Jeff: Thanks for taking the time to meet with me, and for the meeting with VP Al Gore. I’ve finally decided what my next project is. I scrapped the idea to scan the book jackets. I do believe something like what I envisioned would be good for the industry, but my heart wasn’t really in it. My wife, Roberta, insisted that I should look for something I was passionate about and stop being so analytical in my quest.
Here's what I settled on... I’m starting an internet broadcasting company. My long-term vision is to create a major new network transmitting via the internet. I'm starting with Talk Radio, and plan to start with three channels of original programming (political, sports and 'other'). I've already rented office space in Bellevue and plan to be broadcasting by March. Listeners will hear the host and caller, as on the radio, but be able to chat amongst each other. Additionally, the host can instantly distribute multimedia materials or trigger instant surveys. It will be an ad-supported business model. My plan is to go after the top talk show hosts (Limbaugh, Art Bell, etc) to see if they will accept equity in return for hosting and PR duties. Thus far, indications are VERY positive. Thanks again for the meeting. I'll let you know when we're 'on the air'. Thanks! - Ken Williams"
- Email from Ken Williams to Jeff Bezos, January 1998
The response came back:
"Sounds interesting and cool. I think Roberta gave you good advice on picking something you're passionate about. Best of luck and stay in touch"
- Jeff Bezos, January 20, 1998
At the time I was "the big guy" at the table, and Amazon was a young growing software company. A couple months ago Roberta and I were at dinner in a downtown Seattle restaurant while Jeff and his girlfriend Lauren were at the next table. I don’t know if he ever glanced over and noticed us. If he had, it's unlikely he would have recognized Roberta or me. Times have changed, and I missed a VERY big opportunity. Oops. Instead, I went on to lose millions of my own, and investor's, money on a failed internet talk radio company.
Meeting Bill Gates
As mentioned elsewhere in the book, Bill Gates was always my hero and the person I most wanted to emulate.
As with Jeff Bezos, if we bumped into each other on a Seattle street I'm sure he wouldn’t recognize me. But, back in the day, we ran into each other a few times.
The first time we met was at a San Francisco press conference when Microsoft was launching Windows as a replacement for MS-DOS, a prehistoric text-based operating system. I was there to take a look at Windows and try to decide how Sierra was going to adapt our products to it.
Bill Gates was there in the flesh and after making the announcement was quickly surrounded by reporters eagerly asking questions.
I had a long series of questions about Windows that had not been answered during the presentation and I didn't want to return to Oakhurst without answers. I walked over to the circle of reporters seeking anyone with a Microsoft badge. I found someone and asked, "Is there anyone here who is a techie? I have questions." Bill himself shouted to me from where he was trapped with all the reporters, "I can help you." He looked very relieved to have an excuse to escape the reporters and we stepped outside the room where Bill proceeded to answer every question I could throw his direction. I had always thought he was a genius, but now I had proof.
Our next meeting was at a hotel in San Francisco where we were negotiating Microsoft's possible purchase of The Sierra Network. I talk about that in detail in another chapter, but I'll talk about a couple memories from our meeting here.
At one point I asked Bill directly why he wouldn’t acquire all of Sierra. I didn't really want to be acquired but Microsoft wasn't in the game business, and it seemed to me a natural category for them. Bill thought for a minute about his response and said that he really didn't like the games segment. It was too hit oriented. He cited the example of United Artists, a legendary film company, who was going through disastrous times. Bill said that when you are in a business that depends entirely on having a series of hits, it just a matter of time until you fail. You can't ship hits forever and sooner or later revenues will collapse. The industry is too volatile.
This made sense, and I often cited this conversation as part of why I was so insistent on diversifying Sierra out of "just games." I wanted to get to a position where our revenues were diversified across entertainment, education and productivity software. I saw it as our best hope for corporate immortality.
After our meeting, there was an incident I found funny. We met for several hours, with just the two of us, in a large meeting room at a hotel in San Francisco. As we were breaking up a hotel employee suddenly came into the room. "Who is Mr. Bill Gates?," he asked. I was astounded that there was someone who didn't recognize The Bill Gates. "Why?," asked Bill. "I have the bill for the food and drinks," came the reply. "What food and drinks?," asked Bill. The waiter pointed at some stale pastries sitting at the back of the room and a bowl of melted ice with some soft drinks floating in it. We had never noticed it. Bill was indignant and thought it was ridiculous. The hotel wanted $42 for service we hadn't ordered and didn't use. He refused to pay. The waiter was persistent, and was threatening to go seek his boss. I offered to pay. This got Bill to agree to pay, and he offered his credit card. I thought it was bizarre that we had been discussing tens of millions of dollars, and then the meeting ended in debate over a $42 bar tab.
Our last encounter came when I tried to buy Microsoft Flight Simulator directly from the author, Bruce Artwick. I negotiated a good price. I forget the details, but recall it as $50 million. The problem was that Microsoft had the exclusive publishing rights and was paying a royalty to Bruce Artwick. My feeling was that this was fine. I was happy to take the royalties being paid to Bruce Artwick and continue using Microsoft as the publisher. The income from Microsoft would be pure profit and fall straight to Sierra's bottom line.
I met with the marketing department at Microsoft headquarters to discuss the pending acquisition, and to my enormous surprise Bill himself came into the meeting. I had considered this to be many notches below his level and an infinitesimal piece of Microsoft's revenue. I explained my plan to acquire Microsoft Flight Simulator and gave my pledge that Sierra would honor the Microsoft publishing agreement. I meant it. Bill sat quietly as Microsoft's team asked what I foresaw when the agreement would come up for renewal. I said that I respected Microsoft and that, as proud as I was of Sierra's distribution ability, I felt Microsoft had us beat. I was happy to work with Microsoft and wanted to see the relationship continue.
Bill was not happy. He pointed out that he felt Microsoft would not want to publish a Sierra product and would have to ask whether or not they should continue to push Flight Simulator if Sierra were to acquire the product from Bruce Artwick. I was shell-shocked. It had never occurred to me that Microsoft would blow up what I thought was a done-deal. The meeting ended poorly. I was sure Gates was bluffing and that Microsoft would not stop selling Flight Simulator. He obviously had some personal interest in the product. It can't have been a material part of Microsoft's revenue and I wasn't planning to do anything other than to continue evolving the product with Microsoft still selling it.
I called for a Sierra board meeting and argued that we proceed with the purchase. The board wasn’t going for it. It was simply too much money. Microsoft held the exclusive rights to market the product and if they were to quit marketing the product, we'd have spent $50 million on nothing. That would be a tough one to explain to Sierra's shareholders!
Microsoft went on to purchase Flight Simulator for themselves.
Not one to give up lightly, I decided to fight fire with fire. Bruce Artwick had previously been partnered with Stu Moment to form a company called SubLogic. When the two of them split Stu had maintained the rights to sell and continue to evolve a copy of the code base. I put together a deal to market the code for SubLogic under the name Pro Pilot.
Dynamix, makers of Red Baron and Aces Over the Pacific took over the project. I knew that we would be starting with minimal market share but that with a little effort we could present a serious competitor to Flight Simulator within a few years. I had zero doubt that for a heck of a lot less than the $50 million I had been prepared to pay, Sierra could capture a large share of the flight simulator market.
We were committed to the product and planned to start with minimal market share, but add a few percent per year to our market share, forever. Competing with Microsoft head to head would not be easy, but Microsoft, at the time, was not focused on games. It was a chance to have a perennial product in a very large product category
NOTE: This book was written in 2020 and Microsoft has just launched a major upgrade to Flight Simulator. The visuals are so incredible that I've seen video captures on YouTube that look indistinguishable from reality. It's hard to imagine we could have done anything that amazing, but to be fair, it has been nearly 25 years, and had Sierra continually updated Pro Pilot for all that time... maybe. I'd like to think so.
Chapter 24: (1989) The Sierra Network
"When I was in college, I wanted to be involved in things that would change the world."
- Elon Musk
It hurts to think about Sierra. It pains me to think about the employees whose careers were sidetracked by Sierra's collapse, especially the employees who lived in Oakhurst and found themselves owning homes they could no longer afford and with no jobs in the surrounding area.
I also think about the companies that Sierra acquired. They were doing fine on their own, shipping awesome product and growing. They gave up their independence because I convinced them that they would be stronger with Sierra.
To this day, I've never really followed up to hear what happened. I know without asking. There were bankruptcies. There were promising game designers whose careers were shut down. There are products that will never happen. I was certain I had built a company that couldn't be destroyed, and I was wrong.
And, there’s the biggest sadness of them all:
The Sierra Network (aka TSN)
Later renamed as:
The ImagiNation Network (INN)
The list of "firsts" for Sierra is very long.
I always said that Sierra's place in the industry was to be a leader. I felt that it was our job to figure out where the industry was going and get there first. Leaders lead, and followers follow. Sierra was a leader.
Not only were we leaders, but we had a company name that spelled out clearly our ambitions. We were Sierra On-Line, and in 1989 there wasn't much online, and what there was, wasn't from us.
That had to change.
To put the year 1989 into context, the World Wide Web (aka "the internet") as we know it today, with web pages, wasn't introduced to the public until 1991. The internet existed only in colleges and was nothing like what exists today. Email wasn't yet in widespread usage, other than on local area networks running inside businesses. 1989 doesn’t seem like that long ago, but technologically speaking, it was the stone ages.
For some reason, I was thinking about my grandmother. She was getting older and once you pass a certain age your universe starts shrinking. It gets tougher to go places. Unless someone took her someplace, she was stuck sitting home with nothing to do.
I suddenly had an idea:
"What if I could invent something where my grandma could pick up a card game 24 hours a day 7 days a week?"
- Ken Williams, 1989
It wasn't just the idea of playing cards. I wanted the ability to create an on-line community where she could make friends, socialize, and just have fun without leaving her home.
My vision was broader than just seniors playing cards, but I knew it was a great place to start. In the back of my mind was to do things like multiplayer flight simulators, online gambling, etc.
I always believe in a crawl, walk, run strategy when pioneering.
To do multiplayer card games, with simultaneous chat, there would first need to be a way for computers to connect to each other, and in those days there was no high-speed two-way communication into homes. Dial-up modems did exist, but they ranged in speed from 300 baud to 2400 baud (in non-technical lingo: from impossibly slow to horribly slow).
The word "baud" is kind of a strange word. It means: bits per second. The average letter or number consumes 9 bits. Thus, a 2400 baud modem could transmit 260 numbers or letters, or a few sentences of text, in a second. In actual practice it is somewhat slower than that because you need to allow for bi-directional communication, but overall, for text-based communications it is more than adequate. To give a sense of how today’s data rates compare, if you have 100mb service, it can also be said to be 100 megabit, or 100 mega baud. That’s 100 MILLION bits per second. Data speeds have come a LONG way since 1989.
Anyway... back to the birth of The Sierra Network (TSN)...
Dial-up text-based services were coming online quickly in 1989. Sierra operated a dial-up text based bulletin board system that was very popular. If a customer had a question about a game (if they wanted a hint) they could use their computer and dial in to our offices where a server at our end would answer and then by navigating a long series of menus a hint would be given. We operated the BBS for many years, and it saved us a LOT of money. Instead of a human needing to take the calls, customers could look up game hints on their own.
The Sierra BBS wasn’t invented by us. I don’t remember who we licensed it from, but it was an “off the shelf” package. My recollection was that the software would handle multiple users simultaneously and that we could attach a dozen modems to a single computer.
If a standard PC compatible computer could handle multiple users simultaneously, then my multiplayer card game idea should be possible!
I've never been shy about picking up the phone and calling people. I started calling CEOs of computer hardware companies. I made up a picture of a small hardware device that looked about like a standard video game system and put the name on it, "The Constant Companion." The box would attach to the back of a television and have a built-in modem. I envisioned it as a simple device that would require nothing except power, to be connected to a phone line (similar to how you might attach an answering machine), and to be connected to the back of a TV. My pitch to the hardware companies was that they could sell the box into homes for a small price. I was hoping it could be delivered for $99, and then they (the hardware company), and we, could share in the monthly revenue as the device would be used to play games. I envisioned a razor and razor-blade strategy where the upfront purchase would pay for the hardware cost and the big money would be made on the monthly subscription fees, or hourly access fees.
To realize the vision, there was one more piece needed. I needed a communications partner. To handle tens of thousands of subscribers, we would need some way to converge all the phone lines into one common server facility. I needed both a hardware partner and a phone company.
Lastly, I needed the software. There were three major software components that Sierra would need to produce:
1) Server code to handle all the data flowing back and forth between Sierra and the customers.
2) An update to our proprietary programming language, SCI. This would allow games written in SCI to talk to the game server.
3) I needed the games!
My vision made sense to people, and everyone was happy to help. Sierra's board loved the idea, as did the big-company CEOs I was talking to.
To make a long story short, NEC Corporation, who was making IBM compatible computers at the time, and Sprint, who at the time was a major phone company, each came through to help. NEC donated dozens of PC computers to the project and Sprint provided all the phone lines we needed.
We would test the concept by installing computers in the homes of seniors (age 80 and over) and then, if the project were a success, NEC would look at building the hardware.
To house the development team, and all the servers, we rented a building, called "The Old Barn," which had once been a western themed restaurant.
I wish I could remember the names of the engineers who worked on the initial version of The Constant Companion (later renamed The Sierra Network). Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten most of them, but some of the names I do remember are: Jeff Stephenson, Bob Heitman, Matt George, David Slaybeck, Stephen Nichols and Al Lowe. I’m sure there were many more people, and all of them are pioneering heroes.
My time with Sierra was magical, and with good reason. Sierra was THE place to work. We were very picky about who we would hire, and because of our dominant position in the industry, reputation for leadership, and unique location, we had our choice of the industry's top players. Whereas most companies can only dream of hiring a Triple-A player, we had an entire stable, and now we even had a barn to put them in.
To design the card games, I turned to Al Lowe, designer of the Leisure Suit Larry series of games.
I don't remember if it was Al or I who came up with the idea of adding a "face maker" to The Sierra Network (later renamed The ImagiNation Network). Most games have something similar these days but it was a radically new idea then. We were even able to patent the idea! We borrowed the idea from a kid's game called "Mr. Potato Head." Together with the chat, it added a personal dimension to the card games.
Somehow, we were able to get into testing in under six months. Our team placed the computers into the senior's homes and did the training.
And... BOOM!
Our initial testing did not go well. At the very beginning, the system would not stay alive for more than a few minutes at a time. Within days it stabilized and would stay up without crashing for hours at a time. Inevitably though, the servers would overheat, or the system would just lock up. Our seniors, who weren't good at computers anyhow, had troubles completing games.
Our testers (seniors) were not people who had ever been around computers, and computers are MUCH friendlier now than they were in 1990. The project should have been doomed before it started, but to our complete surprise, our seniors stuck with us.
Some of it was because they knew they were doing something revolutionary that just might change the world. And, some of it was because they were having fun! For the first time in history people were meeting new people, making friends and playing games without leaving home. We were hearing stories of the seniors sitting for hours at the computers, dialing in again and again, waiting for our system to come back online after a crash.
We had work to do, but we had a hit!
Lightning had struck. We had a winner. I immediately knew we had something big. I hadn't figured out how we were going to make money, but it was clear there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I just had to find it.
We started talking to NEC about building the Constant Companion home game machine, but they lost interest in the project, and we decided that the bigger opportunity was to add more games and offer Constant Companion to anyone with a computer.
We thought the name Constant Companion was too limiting and renamed the product to The Sierra Network, or TSN.
My fondness for Disneyland became the inspiration for The Sierra Network. Disney had divided their theme park into vertically targeted lands each of which were themed differently. I imagined a virtual theme park with lands of our own. We would have a land with educational games, called “The Schoolhouse.” There would be card games in the “Clubhouse” and for young adults we would have “MedeviaLand” with fantasy role playing games, and for adults there would be "LarryLand" where they could play-gamble the night away.
SCI, our proprietary programming language, made it easy to write games. We were able to launch with a wide variety of games right from the beginning.
Changing the world isn't always easy. We had a winner with TSN, but we had trouble figuring out how to make money. There was no Internet in those days, and unlike today, there were no free long distance calls. We had to place modems locally in large cities in order for users to connect to the system without paying for a long-distance call. It was costing us more per hour to have customers on-line than we were getting in revenue. We repriced the system several times trying to find a price point that worked both for customers and for us.
Sierra was a public company, meaning people were buying and selling our stock based on their perception of our revenues, earnings and growth rate. TSN was becoming a big drain on earnings and starting to depress the stock. Worse yet, TSN was a drain on cash. With each user we added, the hole was being dug deeper.
To fund TSN we decided to do a "convertible debt offering" of stock. It sounds too good to be true, but the idea was that we would borrow money from investors, and at our option we could pay them back, or the money they borrowed would convert to Sierra's stock at some previously agreed upon price. Assuming that Sierra's stock price would rise, we’d never have to repay the loan.
To sell the idea I made up a slideshow talking about both Sierra and TSN, and went on the road. I traveled the country to met with portfolio managers for mutual funds. No one had ever seen anything like TSN, and our debt offering sold out easily.
We raised $50 million to fund the roll-out of TSN!
TSN was growing rapidly. We had reached 10,000 users and projections were for over 50,000 users within a year. We needed to quickly grow capacity and put people in place to support them.
Internally, TSN was becoming a distraction. It was new, cool and fun. And, unlike the rest of the company, TSN had no short-term need to make money.
I was unsure how to compensate our designers. For example, Al Lowe, who designed the initial version of TSN. For his Leisure Suit Larry games Al was receiving $2 or $3 for every copy sold. I did not want to burden TSN with royalties and was unsure how to compensate Al. I assured Al that I would sort it out, and probably paid him some fee for the design (or, hope I did!) but after a few months on TSN, Al dropped off the project wanting to go do something with a proven path to a payday.
My favorite idea was to use our computer games to drive subscribers to TSN. We actually did some of this. We produced a game called Yserbius which could be played single player, or if you were a TSN subscriber you could connect and play online.
Half of TSN users during the past year's trial run have engaged in "electronic cross-dressing," pretending to be a member of the opposite sex.
Jeffrey S. Leibowitz, director of marketing for TSN, says almost all TSN members experiment at some point with becoming a person other than themselves.
"It's simple curiosity about how the other half lives," Leibowitz says. "Being us, whoever we are, is tough work. It's nice sometimes to not be you."
TSN is even considering an advertising slogan adapted from the U.S. Army: "Be all that you can't be."
- Washington Post, November 9, 1992
TSN's customers were hooked on TSN. Within a couple months of TSN’s launch, we had two of our customers who met online get married. Regional clubs were forming of people who played TSN.
We even heard that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet had started playing Bridge each evening via TSN, which may be why Bill Gates personally called to ask if I would be willing to sell TSN to Microsoft.
I was flattered but had no interest in selling TSN. Instead I opened discussions with AT&T about forming a partnership.
TSN was losing money rapidly. Customers were using an incredible number of hours and the more they used, the more we lost. TSN was unbelievably addictive! We were confident that, as TSN grew in subscribers, the economics would change, but even rapid growth came with problems. Although customers who used TSN loved it, our cost of acquiring customers was high.
Having a partner like Microsoft or AT&T made sense, and we had strong interest at the top levels of both companies. A perfect deal would have included both companies, but I was unable to make that happen.
My preference was to go with Microsoft. Bill Gates and I met at an airport in San Francisco trying to make that happen. We worked out a deal where Microsoft would completely take over TSN and Sierra would become a content provider to the network. In other words, we would receive up-front funding and royalties for producing content (games), that would run over the TSN network, while Microsoft would take over running the network and acquiring customers. This had great appeal, in that it would allow Sierra to do what it did best: Make games. And, it would let Microsoft worry about the costs associated with running a network and acquiring customers.
The bad news though was that Microsoft would have completely owned and controlled TSN. Our shareholders, many of whom had just bought our debt offering, would not be happy if we sold off the thing they had just bought into. I also worried about dealing with Microsoft. Bill Gates has a reputation today as a benevolent philanthropist. But, that's not the Bill Gates or Microsoft I felt I was dealing with. In those days Microsoft had a reputation for playing hardball. I felt certain that Microsoft would ultimately cut off Sierra or minimize our involvement.
Both Microsoft and AT&T would have written a large check to purchase TSN, but that wasn't my goal. I wanted to think of TSN as a large distribution channel for our games and create a long-term revenue stream.
AT&T was willing to partner 50/50 with Sierra on the roll-out of TSN. The idea was that we would bring in a mutually agreeable person to run TSN. Sierra, jointly with AT&T, would fund and operate the new company. I forget the contract details, but somehow we were able to take most of TSN's losses off of Sierra's financial statements while receiving funding and future royalties for games Sierra would be putting on the Sierra Network.
After a search, we brought in Philip Monego to run TSN. Philip had been an engineering manager and seemed to have the right technical and marketing skills to run TSN.
Perhaps things would have been different if Philip had not been hired, or if we had not partnered with AT&T. I will always wonder, and I'll never know.
Things went south quickly.
I am a different person now than I was then, and I don't want to point fingers at anyone. Whether it was Philip's fault or my fault I cannot say, but the two of us did not get along.
We respected each other, but we had different goals and different ways of doing things. I'd add to it that I wasn't accustomed to working with someone who I couldn't manage. By this point in time, 1992, Sierra had several subsidiaries, each with their own President and I had a fantastic relationship with the heads of each of the subsidiaries. Some of this was because I gave them space to run their businesses, but also because they knew, and I knew, that ultimately Sierra was in charge and they had to conform to our way of doing things. We had a way of doing business and each subsidiary had to follow the corporate guidelines and fit into Sierra's culture.
Philip had two masters: AT&T and Sierra. His style was more consistent with AT&T's style than Sierra's, or, he liked them better, or disliked us more. My goal had been to avoid selling TSN, but suddenly it felt like I had lost control.
TSN was quickly renamed to "The ImagiNation Network," or INN, taking the word Sierra out of the name.
That really didn't bother me, although it just felt like a waste of money. Sierra had a strong following and we had spent millions promoting the name "The Sierra Network." But, I also understood that we were now partnered with AT&T and TSN had become its own company.
What bothered me most was that the pace of evolution at TSN, now INN, had slowed to a crawl. Instead of adding a new game or feature every week, big company bureaucracy was choking the company. AT&T was an enormous company that moved at a snail's pace, whereas Sierra was a scrappy young entrepreneurial company that sometimes lacked polish but knew how to move quickly. We were an extremely well-oiled machine that valued getting products out the door and into customer's hands above all else.
All that said, Philip was doing what he was brought in to do. I didn't like the pace, but I did like that my time had been freed up to focus on Sierra's core business and that TSN's losses were no longer dragging down Sierra's stock price.
I talk about it in another chapter, but our core business's rapid growth was starting to cause growth pains. The company was doing business worldwide, and I was spending most of my life riding on airplanes, as I visited our various operations. I did appreciate that Philip was running INN and keeping it growing.
From my side, I started forcing all of our groups to deal with the INN teams, to discuss how network game play could be a part of every game we produced. Some of the teams, such as the adventure game groups, had no idea what to do with a multi-player adventure or how that could work. Other groups, such as the racing simulators and flight simulators knew exactly what to do.
I started hearing that the INN team was being difficult to deal with. I also started getting push back from my own team that they weren't clear how they were going to get paid back for the effort flowing into INN game development. Developing games for INN was adding to project costs, but no money was flowing back to Sierra from INN.
The bottom line was that what had been a rapid-fire release of games slowed to "AT&T speed."
And, then the internet came onto the scene.
The internet was a game changer. With the internet, there was no need for INN to operate its own network. In the early days of the internet, most people connected to the network via a dial-up modem, and the speeds were slow, but at least INN wouldn’t need to build out our own network.
Unfortunately, Philip Monego and the team at INN, as well as the team at AT&T, wanted to find ways to move away from Sierra.
Having our own programming language was Sierra's not-so-secret strategy for being able to move quickly and maintain a level of platform independence. It wasn’t like I didn’t foresee something like the internet emerging, but I thought of it the same way I thought of building games that ran under DOS, Windows, Macintosh etc. From our Sierra-centric way of thinking, the internet was just another platform. It wouldn’t be easy to update Sierra’s technology for the internet, but neither would it be particularly hard. It would just be a typical Sierra project.
INN and AT&T did not see it that way. An "us versus them" attitude had developed between INN and Sierra. INN felt Sierra's proprietary programing language (SCI), and dependence on Sierra for games, was holding them back. A decision was made to abandon the existing code base and create a new set of code, and rewrite/redesign the core set of games in a standard programming language (called C++).
In prior chapters of this book I talked about my feelings on software development projects. Big projects never finish. INN stopped pushing the current version of INN in order to focus on starting over with a completely new code base.
I tried to encourage Philip and AT&T to think in terms of incremental changes with small and regular releases, and not try to "change the world" overnight, but my feedback fell on deaf ears.
I was not happy but was out gunned. My choices were limited to getting rid of Philip Monego, or hoping he knew what he was doing and supporting him. Getting rid of Philip wasn't going to happen. His team liked him, and AT&T liked him. I could see they were headed into a dark tunnel they'd never emerge from, but I also had no time or ability to solve the problem. I started mentally preparing myself for the end to the greatest, and most pioneering, project Sierra had ever done.
We invented the internet before the "other internet" became popular. And yet, it was a failure. We were too far ahead of our time.
I was sad, and will always be sad when remembering TSN, but it was what it was.
- INTERLUDE -
(A brief pause in the story, so I can wedge something in)
Chapter 25: Managing Growth
"Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.”
- Peter Drucker, Management Consultant
The first few years of Sierra could be described as total anarchy. It is easy to survive (and, thrive!) when you have no competition and your customer base is experiencing explosive growth. And, to be fair, at the very beginning, most of Sierra's employees were barely out of high school. The party atmosphere was probably appropriate to the time.
By 1982, it was obvious that the "free for all" craziness of Sierra was not going to work. We needed discipline. I was still in contact with my former boss, Dick Sunderland, at Informatics and had been impressed by him. Dick was a Triple-A engineering manager and had put together an amazing team. I asked Dick to join Sierra as our Chief Operating Officer reporting to me as CEO.
It did not work out with Dick. The relationship ended quickly and poorly. He lasted less than a year and I take full responsibility for the failure. Dick was trying to bring adult leadership to the company, and it was like standing in front of a train moving at full speed. It might stop but it isn't going to stop immediately. Once something has enough momentum, the brakes need to be applied gently. I was a big part of the problem. I was accustomed to treating the employees like friends. Dick felt caught in the middle and when he would try to bring discipline, instead of supporting him, I would side with the employees.
The Wall Street Journal happened to interview me about this time, and I was quoted as saying, "When I worked for Dick Sunderland he used to tell me I lacked management skills, and now he works for me and I tell him he lacks management skills." I'm embarrassed when I think about that now. Dick's feelings were quite appropriately hurt. It resulted in litigation and we settled the suit.
I may not always get things right, but I am a fast learner. I knew that Sierra needed discipline and started reading every book I could find on management. It was time for our little band of renegades to grow up.
An unsung hero of Sierra is a gentleman named Rick Cavin. I forget what job Rick was originally hired for, but for the last half of the '80s Rick was Sierra's General Manager. His résumé at the time might not have led you to believe he'd become a senior manager at Sierra, but such was the local hiring pool. He was a local Oakhurst resident, who came from a rural background, and would talk about castrating sheep with his teeth. He also had a nasty habit of wearing ripped shorts and not wearing underwear.
Rick was exactly the right person for Sierra. He had two critical attributes to succeed at Sierra: 1) He was absolutely loyal, and 2) He had no trouble being "the bad guy."
Rick was very good at getting people to work. There is a scene in one of the Space Quest games where a cartooned version of Rick can be seem wandering the halls with a whip. It was put there in jest, but like most good jokes was rooted in truth. Rick was a tough taskmaster.
Having Rick to manage the troops freed me to focus on product and marketing strategy.
Rick was a unique person, in that he could be fierce as a manager and fire someone, or force them to work through a holiday weekend, without showing a moment of hesitation. Rick did what needed to be done. At various times every department in the company reported to Rick, including Product Development and Sales. I would sometimes describe Rick as my hatchet man. Rick would do as I asked, whatever it was, no questions asked.
Despite Rick's reputation as a tough taskmaster, he also had a soft side. He cared about his people and was loved by them. He inspired tremendous loyalty. Everyone understood that, if Rick wanted something, there was a reason why it was important. He was like a general whose troops trusted him and would follow him into any battle. I trusted and respected Rick, and occasionally Rick would argue I was wrong about something, and when he did I would listen hard. Like Roberta, Rick had the gift of extreme common sense. He wasn't technical. He wasn't fancy. No one would confuse him with a Stanford MBA. Despite all of that, Rick was solid in every way that counted and was exactly what Sierra needed.
As Sierra grew, additional senior managers were added, but Rick's early role will never be forgotten.
Christmas
Life at Sierra revolved around Christmas. If a product didn’t "make Christmas" the sales projection could easily be cut in half.
And, that's only half the story.
Sierra's retailers would carefully plan what would be on their shelves at Christmas months in advance. The major retailers (eg. Walmart) would attempt to fund their Christmas advertising budget by asking companies like Sierra for money in return for granting us shelf space. It was a complex and risky negotiation. Sierra's sales force was tasked with obtaining for Sierra the maximum shelf space possible. We knew that special positioning for our products at retail would make a big difference in sales of a product. We would ask retailers to place entire wooden pallets stacked high with product, or to have our products on special end-of-aisle displays. In return, the retailers would ask for extra discounts or what we called "co-op advertising funds." The retailers would showcase our products in their ads, and give us the preferred locations on their shelves, in return for us giving away millions of dollars in discounts and co-op advertising dollars.
If a product was late being delivered to stores the shelf space, which was acquired at great expense, would be lost, perhaps even going to a competitor. All of our advertising dollars would be wasted. Slipping a product from December to January was certain death. After Christmas, retailers want to empty their stores of any left over inventory. Sierra's sales force would employ discounts and other strategies to keep inventory on shelves so that it had a chance to sell. Retailers had little interest in bringing in new inventory, and even our customers would be reluctant to buy new products. Most were busily playing all the new Sierra products that had been sitting under their Christmas trees.
I mention this in a discussion on management because, inevitably, from August to November, Sierra would find itself in a position of finding ourselves behind on products we had promised for Christmas. In order to deliver on time we would shut down other projects and double-team the higher revenue products that were delayed. Typically, adding bodies to the projects didn't solve the problem. Nine women can not make a baby in a month. In order to make deadlines we would force the developers to work extra hours and weekends.
Under labor law at the time, salaried employees did not receive overtime pay. There were long stretches where developers were forced to work twelve-hour days and through weekends with no extra compensation. I can't defend what we did other than to say that we did what we had to do. I would also add that I would handle the situation differently today.
Union Organizing
We overworked our developers, and this resulted in union organizing. This was a low point for morale around the company. I was personally devastated. From my perspective, I was doing whatever it took to provide jobs and grow the company. However, the employees felt the company was abusing them.
In fact, both sides were correct.
As soon as I received formal notice of the union organizing, I contacted a law firm which specialized in dealing with unions. Once the lawyers and the union were involved, my ability to deal directly with the employees, or even change anything in how we dealt with employees, became limited. Any change could be considered management interfering with the employees' right to organize. I'm a person who believes that the best thing to do in any legal situation is to listen to your lawyers and do exactly what they say. In this case, the lawyers advised that the best thing we could do would be to let the employees vote on unionization and stay away from direct involvement. It was a frustrating time where I agreed Sierra had indeed been in the wrong, but I also felt like I was being sabotaged by my own employees. Further complicating the situation, some of the people who had led the organizing effort were employees who had not been carrying their weight and were already at risk of being terminated. Once the organizing started they became untouchable.
Bizarrely, the union that was trying to organize Sierra was the International Association of Machinists. It made no sense that they were trying to unionize Sierra's software developers. I suspect they became involved because Sierra had made ourselves an easy target. If they could crack Sierra, then there was an entire rapidly growing industry they could expand into.
Surprisingly, support came from a completely unexpected direction; Sierra's production group, the group charged with duplicating and packaging our products. Several members of the group had worked in union shops previously and were not impressed by the unions. Sierra management was barred from attending the union organizing meetings, but at the meetings members of our production staff spoke passionately about their feelings that unionizing was a bad idea.
A vote was held, and the union lost. Had the union won, history may have been very different. It was a wake-up call for Sierra on employee relations and overall good for us.
"I have been accused of being a micro-manager, and to that charge I will plead guilty."
- Ken Williams
My goal throughout my time at Sierra was to try to focus my time on things that customers would see and try to extricate myself from everything else. I decided from the beginning that I wanted Sierra's customers to always think of Sierra as a class act. I was positive that if we took care of customers, they would respond by taking care of us. To me this meant agonizing over far more than just the products. I cared about things like our customer return policies, the look of the instruction manuals, the package designs, the envelopes for the CDs, the pricing, the way we answered the phones, etc. If customers were going to have contact with Sierra, I wanted to control the experience. Departments like Accounting received little of my time. Manufacturing didn't get much attention. Even our sales team received little attention. But, groups like Customer Support, Marketing, and Product Development received more of my attention than they ever wanted.
One person could not do all that I was doing. The stress and the overload was becoming a problem. Something needed to change.
I always get a laugh when I describe Sierra's early years’ Org Chart: Ken in a box on top and 100 lines coming down out of his box!
- Al Lowe, Game Designer
I was torn, in that on one hand I didn’t want to constrain Sierra's growth, but I also didn't want to give up control over what I saw as the soul of Sierra. I was constantly trying to find ways to squeeze more hours out of each day. I needed to be everywhere at the same time and yet, as the company grew, I couldn't be. Ultimately, a system evolved that would allow me to keep control, even with Sierra scattered to multiple locations around the world.
Sierra was split at the highest level into different groups:
- Finance (accounting).
- Manufacturing / Operations (duplicating product, packaging, shipping, accepting returns).
- Sales (Convincing retailers and distributors to stock Sierra’s products).
- Marketing (Advertising, demand creation, product packaging and materials).
- Product Development (Designers, Artists, Engineers).
Mentally, I thought of the first three of these (Finance, Manufacturing, Sales), as "behind the scenes" activities. They needed to be run perfectly, but no one was going to buy Sierra's products because our books balanced, or our cost of duplication was the lowest in the industry, or because we had charming salespeople. The last two groups (Development and Marketing) were the keys to Sierra's success. I knew that we needed great products and that we needed to excite customers about buying them. Those were the groups that could make a difference.
OK. I realize this is incredibly boring stuff, but it is key to understanding how Sierra worked internally, and why Sierra worked so well.
In order to create a structure that we could use to grow, I modified this structure slightly:
First, I'll explain the chart above. You’ll notice that on the right is all the "back office" stuff; those groups that I claim aren't what differentiated Sierra from its competitors. On the left side of the chart you see boxes labeled "Subsidiary President." These are the heads of the companies that Sierra acquired as well as Sierra's original development group in Oakhurst (Dynamix, Papyrus, Coktel Vision, etc). If you look closely on the chart, you'll see lots of marketing boxes, some of which report to the Subsidiary Presidents. And, one of which reports to Sierra's President/COO. Marketing was split into those things which spanned all of Sierra's subsidiaries (the corporate marketing group) and those functions which were product specific. For example, there were catalogs that spanned all of the subsidiaries. We also centralized all customer support and considered it as part of the corporate marketing group. Those things were best done at the corporate level, whereas writing copy for an individual product box, or developing advertising materials for a particular product were best done at the subsidiary level.
Probably the best hire I ever made was a gentleman named Mike Brochu. Very few customers ever heard Mike's name, but Mike was Sierra's secret weapon and brought much-needed skills to Sierra.
Mike came into Sierra as our VP of Finance and CFO but was quickly promoted to President and Chief Operating Officer. Mike allowed me to focus on the areas of the company where I could do the most good, specifically product development and marketing. Mike complemented me well, in that whereas I can be a pessimist at times, Mike was always an optimist. If Mike and I were ever stuck on a desert island (like Johnny Castaway), I'd be the one pounding my fists in the sand and screaming for help, while Mike would be smiling, singing and explaining to me that help would be here any minute. Mike is a Texan, with a Texan's swagger and ability to sweettalk anyone. He inspired confidence in everyone around him. Mike would be tough when needed, but could usually motivate people just by the sheer force of his personality. Some people with Mike's style are more sizzle than steak, but Mike was the real thing, and Sierra wouldn't have grown the way we did without him.
With Mike's help, Sierra was able to successfully acquire and integrate over a dozen companies, all of which fit into the organizational structure just described.
Sierra Acquisitions
To understand why a successful software company would be willing to sell to Sierra, you need to see the benefits through their eyes. You also need to remember that this was the nineties, not the world as we know it today. The internet was in its infancy. Software distribution via the internet was not what it is today. Social Media was not what it is today.
Selling software in those days was what I’ll call: "Messy."
Today, selling software has its own set of challenges, so I don't want to take anything away from the software merchants of today. But in Sierra's time, software was sold as physical objects with all of the surrounding headaches that someone selling toys, furniture or t-shirts might have to deal with. We had to make the software, duplicate the software, print and inventory the manuals and boxes, package the product, sell the product to distributors, ship them the product, provide customer support and then handle any unsold inventory returned from the field. And more.
Even the smallest of software companies had to have all of these functions. In a small software company, dealing with all of these things added tremendous cost, and could be a major headache.
My pitch to these companies was that they could continue doing the fun parts of the business while divesting themselves of all the crap that made publishing software miserable. My promise to them was that we would not destroy their culture. They could continue to build exciting products. They could produce the product packaging and instruction manuals. They could produce the marketing materials. Their products would be able to reach a much larger audience by leveraging Sierra's global distribution. We would manufacture the product, handle the returns and the customer support. And, it gets better. Very few software companies will ever reach the scale to "go public" (meaning have shares of stock publicly traded). Through acquisition by Sierra, a small software developer could suddenly have all the benefits of being a public company. The founders could swap their illiquid ownership for liquid stock that they could sell whenever they wanted. They could issue stock options to their employees.
The best ambassadors, when I wanted to acquire a new company, were the presidents and developers for the companies I had already acquired. They happily confirmed what I was saying.
It was an appealing pitch and one that resonated. I remember trying to explain our acquisition strategy to a Wall Street investment banker who just wasn’t "getting it." He felt we were overpaying for a company. He had a fancy spreadsheet which took the potential acquisition's profits and computed the correct valuation. I used a different formula that looked at the products the company was producing and looked at what incremental revenues would be possible by utilizing Sierra's manufacturing, distribution and back office. I also took into account the possible upside by leveraging Sierra's existing technologies and the sharing of new technology I was bringing into the Sierra family. The Wall Street guy argued that I'd be purchasing based on value that Sierra was bringing to the table. I was fine with that. He was focused on computing the value of the company being acquired, whereas I was focused on computing the value of the acquisition to Sierra and Sierra's shareholders. The important thing was that the overall company would be stronger and more successful, not the price I was paying.
Annual Strategy Meetings
Once a year we would have what I called "The Annual Strategy Meeting" at a resort somewhere in the world. There was usually some opportunity for fun and for bonding amongst the team, but generally they were dead serious meetings, held in a conference room, with intensive use of slides and chalk boards.
The meetings would be attended by approximately twenty people: Sierra's Vice Presidents, Subsidiary Presidents, and sometimes our Board members. The goal of these meetings was to talk about big picture issues for Sierra.
The meetings were tightly controlled and were broken into sessions like:
- What changes do we see in the industry over the next year?
- Hardware/Technology
- Competitors
- What businesses aren’t we in that we should expand into?
- Films, music, comic books, hardware, business software?
- How can we leverage our brand recognition and intellectual properties into new revenue streams? (licensing? partnerships?)
- What distribution channels aren’t we in that we should expand into?
- International expansion
- Retail channels
- Direct marketing
- What businesses and distribution channels should we consider pruning?
- A look at the products we see coming over the next year
- What do we think our hits will be?
- What products should we consider pulling the plug on?
- Divisional budgets (how much money does each of the divisions get, and what revenues do we want them to produce?)
All of this might sound good, and sometimes it was, but there were also serious problems that we had to work through every day.
Software development is tough to do on a budget. What percent of large software projects do you think come in on time and on budget? If you guessed any number larger than zero, you are probably wrong. Sierra was incredibly good at developing software, but if I told you we were perfect, or that projects didn't typically complete late and over-budget, I'd be fibbing.
At our annual strategy meeting we might decide a subsidiary, for example: Dynamix, would have a product development budget of $5 million. This development budget would also include a revenue forecast. As a general "rule of thumb" I liked to see four times the dollars of revenue than dollars spent on development. In this example, if Dynamix were to receive $5 million in development spending they would be expected to generate $20 million or more in revenue.
In addition to overall subsidiary budgets, we had individual product budgets. At a division like Dynamix there would probably be ten to twenty projects in various stages of completion at any given time. Some of the projects would be completely new games, some would be add-on packs to existing games, or minor modifications to an existing game in order to make it a new product, or even just a conversion of a game to a new platform (eg. from Windows to Mac). Each project would have an associated budget. The budgets might run from $25,000 to over $1,000,000 depending on the scale of the project. All development related costs were charged to the projects including art, programming, music, quality assurance, documentation writing, etc.
Sierra's divisional Presidents were tasked with keeping projects on time and on budget. Whereas cost overruns on projects were not good news, it was understood that they were unavoidable. And, ironically, cost overruns did not result in immediately higher expenses, they just meant delays in delivering the product, and a drop in the product's ultimate profitability.
Product Review Meetings
This is where I would get involved in the process. Once a quarter, I would fly to every subsidiary to look at the products in development. We called these visits the "Product Review Meetings" and they were an important part of my knowing what products were in the pipeline, how they were looking versus the budget, how they looked versus their market forecast, and when they might realistically ship to the public.
During a product review meeting, a succession of project managers would show their products one by one. Some products would have running code (a playable game) to see, whereas others might have nothing to see.
"Do you draw Mickey Mouse?" I had to admit I do not draw anymore. "Then you think of all the jokes and ideas?" 'No,' I said, 'I don’t do that.' Finally, he looked at me and said, "Mr. Disney, just what do you do?" 'Well,' I said, 'sometimes I think of myself as a little bee. I go from one area of the studio to another and gather pollen and sort of stimulate everybody. I guess that’s the job I do.'
Quote about Walt Disney, mounted on my wall, from which I took the inspiration for the Product Review Meetings
My goal was to learn all I could about the projects. Were they on track to hit their ship date? Did they look like a bigger hit than projected, or a dog that should be put out of its misery? Was there cool technology that should be shared with some other development group? Was there some code in another subsidiary that could be leveraged to cut development cost?
There were times when games would be played that didn't involve a computer. For example, cost overruns would be swept under the carpet by billing time spent on one project to a different project. We had projects that hadn’t been started that had massive billing against them. I tried to catch these kinds of shenanigans but, with only quarterly visits to the subsidiaries, it wasn’t easy.
The product review meetings were scattered across the world. I was endlessly on airplanes and needed help coordinating all of the various subsidiaries. To do this, I said I wanted "a smart MBA" who could help keep track of things. I found exactly that in Jerry Bowerman. He came into the company as my go-to guy, and wound up running one of the subsidiaries. Later, he was given responsibility for all of the subsidiaries as our VP of Product Development. Jerry was young, brash, and cocky. He wasn't technical, but he was brilliant and quickly captured the respect of everyone in the company.
Overall, Sierra's relationship with the subsidiary labels (Dynamix, Impressions, Papyrus, etc) were very good. But, there were occasional tensions. We had problems with finger-pointing between the subsidiaries and corporate. If a game bombed I would hear feedback that the corporate marketing group had not advertised the product, or the sales force hadn’t pushed the product.
Weekly Meetings
The monthly product review meetings were supplemented with regular Monday meetings. I held these early in the morning so that everyone would be fresh, and before most other people had arrived, so that there would be no distractions. At these meetings it would just be the VPs and not the heads of the various subsidiaries. I would share my feelings about the products and the proposed release dates.
Lastly...
I was friendly but firm in the various meetings, and I was not shy about saying what I thought. If I thought a product needed work, I would say so, and I wouldn't mince words. I've never been one to take an hour to accomplish what could be done in minutes. It was more efficient to see a product that should be shut down and say, "Let's kill this project" than to spend time agonizing over it in meetings.
I developed a reputation as a micro manager and was more popular outside the company than inside the company. All I can say in my own defense is, "Management isn't a popularity contest."
There's another expression that some would claim applied, but that I'll disagree with: "It's my way or the highway." I was very good about listening before making a decision. In general, my favorite decisions are unanimous group decisions. I would keep people debating a topic for hours until we had group consensus. If a meeting ended and one person was unhappy, it would bother me and I'd meet with them to make sure I understood their issue. On those rare occasions where unanimity just wasn't happening, I'd make the decision and that was it. The person with the dissenting view would need to jump on the train and support the decision. The train is only going one direction and everyone needs on board. There is a time for debate and a time for action. Once the action begins, anything that detracts from the goal is not permitted.
Virtually everyone I interacted with thought they could run Sierra much better than I. When Sierra would later be acquired, I have zero doubt that many people around the company were delighted to see me gone. This is the downside of hiring A and Triple-A players. Roberta and I would talk and she would say that she was amazed that it didn't bother me. It didn't, not for one second. Sierra had some very smart people and I've never argued there is only one way to skin a cat.
As disappointed as I am that Sierra fell apart after I left, and as bad as I feel about all the people who lost their jobs, there is a side of me that can't resist thinking, "I may have been unpopular with some employees, but maybe there were some things that I got right."
- INTERLUDE -
(A brief pause in the story, so I can wedge something in)
Chapter 26: (1991) Merging with Broderbund?
"The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger--but recognize the opportunity."
- John F. Kennedy
At the very beginning of the computer industry, the competitive environment was very different than it is today. Arguably there wasn't a competitive environment at all. The industry was expanding so fast, and was so hungry for product, that cooperation and teamwork felt more appropriate than competition. We were living the ultimate adventure!
Broderbund and Sierra were the two largest consumer software companies as the '80s were drawing to a close. Broderbund dominated the education and productivity categories with products like Print Shop and Where in the World is Carmen San Diego. Sierra was dominant in entertainment.
Doug Carlston, Broderbund's CEO, and I may have been in the same industry, but anyone meeting us would have trouble believing that we were specimens of the same species. Doug's background prior to starting Broderbund, on Wikipedia, reads as follows: "Doug Carlston received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1970 and also studied economics at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1975. Prior to founding Broderbund in 1980, he was an attorney."
Whereas, I was a college dropout who was running my company from the hills of California. Doug's a polished, refined, east-coast, multilingual, smart, Harvard educated kind of guy. I come from the side of town that has always assumed the initials M.B.A. stood for "Must Be an Asshole."
What made us friends, and kept us friends, was a shared enthusiasm for computers and changing the world through technology. We spoke often and always thought it possible that our companies could be joined together someday. We were chasing different corners of the market with very different business strategies.
We knew that if the two companies were together, we would own the consumer software market. We would form a company as dominant in the consumer market as Microsoft was in the business world.
Laine Nooney, a researcher who visited the Strong Museum, where Sierra's old documents are archived as well as Broderbund's, had this to say, "...I found more internal documentation about Sierra On-Line in the Brøderbund Collection than I did in the Ken and Roberta Williams'! Case in point, a most magnificent find: Sierra On-Line's October 1986 Company Profile and Business Plan, as well as a 1987 Company Profile related to their proposed IPO..."
Sierra and Broderbund were so tight in the early days that I would invite Doug Carlston to our annual product strategy meetings and we would share ideas on company strategy. It could be said that we served as phantom board members on each other's companies.
The problem was that neither of us wanted to retire, and we were smart enough to know that we'd have trouble co-existing within the same company.
Finally, in 1991, we worked out a deal to bring the two companies together. At the time, Sierra had gone public but Broderbund was still a private company. Our companies were comparable in size, but the fact that Sierra had liquidly tradeable stock gave Sierra an edge in the negotiations. Through acquisition by Sierra, Broderbund's shareholders and stock option holders would have a clear path to liquidity for their stock (they could convert their paper ownership to hard cash they could put in their pockets).
We agreed that post-merger Doug would become the consolidated company's chairman and I would become the CEO. As part of the deal I would move to San Rafael (north of San Francisco) and run the day to day operations as the President/CEO.
As a public company, Sierra needed to announce the deal as soon as the terms had been agreed upon. It was a very popular deal with Sierra's and Broderbund's shareholders, but much less so inside the two companies.
Storm clouds were brewing behind the scenes. I had no premonition at the time, but the forces that came to play would play a very significant role when Sierra itself would be acquired years later.
In any merger of relative equals, the management teams at both companies sweat their jobs. That is to be expected. Even when their jobs are assured, they sweat how their jobs might change. It's a fear of the unknown, and whereas most kids who fear the boogey man wake up safely the next morning, the same is not true for employees after a merger. Their worst fears sometimes turn out to have been overly optimistic.
Mergers usually come with consolidations. Do we need two HR departments? Two legal departments? Two VPs of engineerings? Two creative directors? Two manufacturing groups? Two accounting departments? If we consolidate to one, where will it be based? Who will stay and who will go?
Whereas Doug and I were excited about the potential for a combined company, our teams were stressing out. His team was worried about whether or not I'd be easy to work with. Would I be biased towards Sierra? Would I change Broderbund's product strategy? Broderbund was a leader in education. Sierra had a "reputation," fueled by the book Hackers, which trumpeted Sierra's wild and crazy early years. Did Broderbund's team want to be associated with the riffraff at Sierra? Meanwhile, from Sierra's side there were two primary concerns. 1) If Ken moved to San Rafael, did that mean corporate was moving to San Rafael? Would Sierra employees become second class citizens? And, 2) Doug was a serious force of nature and would be going on the board. Could the tables get turned post deal? Would Ken have a bad quarter at some point and Doug step back in to run the consolidated company? Was this just a sneaky attempt by Broderbund to acquire Sierra?
Doug and I were comfortable that this was all going to be fine. Our plan was to do the merger and then once the two companies were together start building a plan to go forward. We needed more good people, not fewer. 99% of the teams would be retained after the merger and both company's employees would find themselves part of a company that was growing faster than either of us could have done alone. True job security comes from winning, and together we would be unbeatable.
Ultimately, I believe I am the one who screwed up the deal, but it wasn't intentional. While waiting for the deal to be approved by Sierra's shareholders, I started talking to the senior people at Broderbund and said the wrong things. With 20/20 hindsight I should have been reassuring them that their lives, and jobs, wouldn't be changing. I needed to convince them that I'd be easy to work with and would listen to them. I'm better at having political skills now than I was then, although I’m still a long way from perfect. Instead, I spoke about things like my compulsion for wanting to review everything before the public would see it, and my wanting to be involved in every product decision.
Later, when Sierra was being acquired, I learned the hard way that acquiring companies need to say whatever it takes to get the deal done. All I can say is that: If those are the rules of the game, I don't want to play. My credibility is everything and I'm going to say the truth even when it hurts a deal.
Which it did... Doug Carlston called one day to say, "The deal is over." It was a public embarrassment for both companies. But, was what it was, and was probably for the better.
Both of our teams were happy to see the deal die.
- INTERLUDE -
(A brief pause in the story, so I can wedge something in)
Chapter 27: So, You Want to Be a Game Developer?
"Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about rock n’ roll."
- Shigeru Miyamoto, Designer of Mario Bros
I am constantly asked, "How do I get into the game industry?" The question comes from aspiring artists, musicians, writers, software developers and others.
The quick and probably most accurate answer is: "I don't know. I've been retired for over 25 years. I have no contacts in the game industry and other than perhaps for selling books, my name doesn’t mean much anymore."
That said, I do have opinions, and am happy to share them.
First off: Don’t expect it to be easy. Getting started in the game business, with zero experience, isn't impossible, but unless you are very lucky, you are going to need to make a serious effort.
You need two things: Talent, and to have your talent recognized.
One of our sons grew up saying he wanted to be a writer. My advice to him was:
Step 1 to becoming a writer is to "write." It sounds simple, but a lot of people don't figure it out. If you want to become a writer, then start writing and somehow get what you write out into the world. Start a blog. Write articles for newspapers. Write articles for magazines. Write short stories. Write scripts. Be prolific and get your name out there. Attract an audience. Start early and don’t expect overnight success. Climb the ladder rung by rung.
Similarly, if you want to prove you can create games, start by practicing your craft, whether it is writing code, doing animation, or making music. Practice every time you can, and get the fruits of your efforts in front of others.
If you want to develop games professionally, then you need to somehow get inside a company that produces games. Look for jobs writing manuals, game testing, anything that gets you through the front door.
As to education...
There are trade schools which specialize in game development. Some are horrible and some are exceptional. I'm not a believer in colleges, although there are some of the larger tech companies that only want to interview people with college degrees. Thus, I can’t argue with college degrees but neither do I personally consider them anywhere near as good as solid technical training.
My recommendation if you want to be a game developer and are considering college: Search on the internet for schools that offer training specifically in game development. Speak with their recruiting department and find what percentage of graduates were actually hired by a game company. If you can become a "top 5% graduate" of a school that is focused on games, and if the school has a good track record of placing graduates at game companies, you'll have done it.
The other option, and the one I'd be most likely to pursue, is to "build a game." Let's imagine that you are an artist. Games require more than just art. Most games require: a producer, writer, software engineers, music, sound effects, etc. Assemble a team. If you search around the internet, you will find that you are not alone. There are others who are working day jobs as accountants, teachers, janitors, or are sitting home waiting for their career to begin, who by night dream of building games. Assemble a group and start building a game.
With a small team, it is difficult to build a game that is worth playing. It is also hard to work with a team of unpaid talent. In assembling a team to build a game, you need to pick people who are serious about game development, and who are willing to stick with the game until the end. You need to develop something which has a reasonable shot at completion and success. A game that does not complete is not going to get you into the industry, and neither is a game that looks like crap. Choosing your first project is the most important thing you'll do. I always believe in a crawl, walk, run strategy. Pick something simple and complete it, then complete something bigger, preferably that leverages your first project. Perhaps this means that the first product is a simple card game, and that the sequel becomes multiplayer. Consider a niche with few products where a low-budget product might have a chance of being found. This could mean games for pre-schoolers, mobile devices, emerging platforms, watches, etc. Maybe even games for cats or dogs. I'm not sure where the holes in the market are in today's world, but I'm sure they exist. Large companies avoid niches which are small, but that just opens the door for you to perhaps sneak into the market.
Do not bite off more than you can chew! If you have a team of five people, and want to build a competitor to Warcraft or Half-Life, the project will not finish and you will have wasted your time.
I'd also encourage you to be very careful about how you form your team. If you have five people on your project you should expect that one or two will not deliver. They may mean well, but something will happen and they will "flake out." Negotiate the divorce before you get married. By this, I mean you should write an agreement. It doesn't need to be lawyer drafted, but it needs to say how the money and ownership is split if things go according to plan, and what happens when they don't. I’ve seen a lot of perfectly good projects die when one or more team members drop off a project and the ownership of the product becomes unclear.
One thing you could look at is to create an add-on pack for some existing hit game. Look to see if there is a game that offers add-on levels. I'm sure they exist. Some games are open-ended and allow you to design your own levels or characters. If you are an artist, design some amazing characters.
At the beginning, do not worry about money. If you can do something cool, beautiful and fun, AND make money, yay! But, if you have no experience and are looking to crack into the industry, then take what you can get. Just focus on proving yourself, building your résumé while your parents support you and your fan base develops, and experience on your résumé builds.
The bottom line: If you want into the games business, the good news is that it is possible. And, unlike other professions, you have an easy way to showcase your efforts. There are no barriers to entry. Free labor to assist you in building your game is plentiful, if you do some googling and push hard. Distribution of your game via the internet is easy. There are no barriers to entry, and if you produce something addictive all you need to do is get it to a few people and it will proliferate virally. In the worst case it will help get you a job, or prove your worth to a top game development school.
Nike says it best, "Just do it." If you have the talent, and are willing to put in the time, you will make it.
Chapter 28: (1992) Chief Daryl F. Gates and SWAT
"People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish… but that's only if it’s done properly."
- Banksy, Street Artist
As I'm sitting here typing this, in July of 2020, I am watching videos of Seattle protesters, only a few blocks away, who have taken over a part of the city including "capturing" a police station.
Because of the protests and riots, our old games, the Police Quest and SWAT series, originally by retired police officer Jim Walls and later by Daryl F. Gates, the former Chief of Police of Los Angeles, are suddenly getting a lot of attention. I was just looking at a series of one hundred thirteen messages on Facebook, many of which vilify me for having worked with Chief Gates.
Some of the messages accuse me of having exploited Gates' name recognition to help sell the product. There probably is some grain of truth to that, but it wasn't the reason I used Chief Gates.
I wanted our police games to transition into tactical simulations more than just being interactive stories. Chief Gates had knowledge of police procedures and tactics that were well beyond what any one field officer could bring to the table.
Were I making the decision today, I would not use Chief Gates. All of the reasons I did work with the Chief would still be valid, but the risk of a backlash by our customers and retailers would be too excessive. I will take free publicity when I can get it, but I'm not crazy.
For those who may not recall, Daryl Gates was a 42 year police officer who was Chief of Police to the over 8,000 officer Los Angeles police force for 14 years. He is credited as being the father of SWAT, a specialized unit and series of tactics, created to deal with hostage rescue and extreme situations involving armed and dangerous suspects. He is also credited with creating DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) which was designed to educate students and children about the dangers of drug abuse. DARE has become a worldwide organization, with programs in schools across the globe.
In the United States as of 2005, SWAT teams were deployed 50,000 times every year, almost 80% of the time to serve search warrants, most often for narcotics. SWAT teams are increasingly equipped with military-type hardware and trained to deploy against threats of terrorism, for crowd control, hostage taking, and in situations beyond the capabilities of ordinary law enforcement, sometimes deemed "high-risk."
- Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWAT
Daryl Gates was forced out of office after the Los Angeles police were accused of excessive force after a videotaped arrest of Rodney King, triggering massive riots and destruction in Los Angeles.
"By the time the riots ended, 63 people had been killed, 2,383 people had been injured, more than 12,000 had been arrested, and estimates of property damage were over $1 billion, much of which disproportionately affected Koreatown, Los Angeles in which the bulk of the unrest occurred. LAPD Chief of Police Daryl Gates, who had already announced his resignation by the time of the riots, was attributed with much of the blame for a lack of control, mismanagement of the situation, and failure of de-escalation and prevention."
- Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots
One more quote about Daryl Gates:
"Mr. Gates began his police career in 1949 as a Los Angeles patrolman. It ended when he was forced to resign in June 1992, after 14 years as chief, in the wake of riots that followed the acquittal of four police officers in the highly publicized beating of Rodney King.
The years in between were a raucous era in which Los Angeles almost doubled its population while becoming overwhelmed by drugs, gangs, guns and a tide of violent crime.
Mr. Gates, who embraced the tough, principled and inflexible strategy of his mentor, William H. Parker, the former Los Angeles police chief, responded to that climate by stressing discipline in the ranks of his 8,000-strong department, enlarging the police presence in the streets and developing new policing tools.
Mr. Gates pioneered the use of police helicopters to fight crime across the nearly 470 square miles of his city, and he helped develop the Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT, unit, made up of elite mobile teams of highly trained officers.
SWAT teams deployed sophisticated surveillance equipment, assault weapons and paramilitary skills to neutralize threats. Hundreds of police departments in the United States and around the world have since developed SWAT units. In Los Angeles, they had a prominent role in maintaining order during the 1984 Summer Olympic Games, a period widely regarded as the high point of Mr. Gates’s career."
New York Times, April 16, 2010
Since that time quotes have come out, by Chief Gates, that I was unaware of at the time, some of which would have impacted my decision to work with him. I have zero tolerance for anything that smacks of racism. Chief Gates convinced me he had the same intolerance. At the time, I believed he was being used as a scapegoat for the excessive force of a handful of his officers.
We had long talks about how he was perceived. He always argued that he was loved in the minority communities and that all communities want to feel safe sleeping at night. I remember walking through an airport with him in Los Angeles, afraid that we would be attacked. But everyone we passed, regardless of their skin color, wanted to high-five him or get their picture taken with him. I never tested him on this, but he insisted that we could drive into any neighborhood in Los Angeles and we'd find he had overwhelming support.
Overall, Chief Gates had a long and amazing career in law enforcement that went wrong at the end and forced his resignation. In today's world we tend to be judged on our most recent actions or words, and an entire career can be forgotten in minutes.
Anyway... My goal is not to defend Daryl Gates, or myself. I'm simply explaining what was in my mind at the time. As you read this, I would ask that you remember that 1992 was nearly thirty years ago, and I was nearly thirty years younger. Decisions then may not be the ones I'd make today.
The bottom line: Chief Gates brought a level of detail and realism to Sierra's games that was incredible. Whether you believe he was a good guy or a bad guy there are a few things which cannot be doubted:
1) Few people alive have ever run a larger police force, or can compare with his 42 years of experience as an officer
2) His SWAT and DARE programs were major innovations and are still in use today
3) His games were a hit with the people that purchased them, and for Sierra.
Chief Daryl F. Gates passed away in 2010 at the age of 83.
Chapter 29: How I Picked Sierra’s Designers
"I built my talents on the shoulders of someone else's talent.”
- Michael Jordan
I was designer-centric at Sierra and had a unique perspective on designers:
The person using the product must feel a 1 to 1 connection with the person who created the product. Great products are not created by committees. Perhaps it is different if you are Microsoft and building an operating system. In general one person should "own" a product and every feature in it. This belief would often put me at odds with my own engineering, art and music departments. If an artist on the project developed the world's coolest animation and the designer felt it didn't fit the product, I had to support the designer, and toss the animation, even if it killed me.
How I chose designers...
I wanted designers on products who were themselves the target audience. If someone wanted to design a computer simulation of the civil war, I would look to see if they were a natural historian and could talk for hours about various civil war battles. Did they play civil war board games? Did they have uniforms at home in their closets? In today’s world, I would be checking their social media and forum postings to see if they were plugged into the civil war community. This seems obvious, although there are plenty of indications that it is not understood. Consumers are not dumb. They know when you are "just" putting out a product, as compared to bringing a dream to life.
I always came back to a bookstore or movie analogy when defining Sierra's product strategy. I would constantly argue that Sierra's product strategy should mirror the shelves in a bookstore. If bookstores have entire rows of science fiction books, and a significant piece of bookstore revenues are science fiction, then I needed into the science fiction space, and needed to start watching for a designer who could get me there (Note: This led ultimately to our working with Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey)
To be clear: I had a vision from the beginning that the consumer marketplace for consumer software would ultimately mirror the book, film and music industries. Consumers are the same regardless of the media, and what they want in entertainment, education, music and productivity is well established. The computer industry, in the beginning, seemed to believe that software divided into games or productivity, whereas I thought from the beginning that computers would ultimately rule the world and that these other media were just dumbed down versions (no interactivity or ability to mold themselves to your wishes) of computer products. I simply had to identify the large content categories that weren’t being filled, find a designer who was passionate about the subject, and then give them the resources they needed to make it happen.
Chapter 30: (1992) Doomed
At the end of 1991 John Romero, of id Software, sent Roberta a copy of their game Commander Keen, episodes 4 and 5. She really loved it and wrote back inviting the guys at id to come visit Sierra.
Three guys from id, John Romero, John Carmack, and Tom Hall, visited Sierra in February 1992. John demonstrated their game Wolfenstein 3D and then I demonstrated for him our World War II online game, Red Baron.
Wolfenstein 3D was incredibly violent, but also incredibly fun. I was blown away by the smoothness of the animation. I've always opposed violence in games, worrying that kids might try to emulate in real life what they see on the screen. Thus, I both loved and hated Wolfenstein 3D. I could smell the greatness. It was the most awesome technical achievement I had seen and I was jealous that it wasn't Sierra's. I didn't like all the blood, but I also had no doubt that customers would love it.
id Software had stepped up the greatness to even higher levels. Plus, it was the first time I had heard of something new they were doing:
Shareware!
With shareware distribution, id was releasing an entire episode of their game for free, typically 9-10 levels- a huge value. Gamers had the option to send checks in the mail, or call a 1-800 order line, to buy the full three episodes of the game. It would then be mailed to them. People usually downloaded the free episode from a BBS, or they'd buy a shareware disk in a store.
These guys had discovered a formula that was generating cash with no effort. They were bringing in $50,000 a month! Nice!
I wanted to impress the guys and arranged dinner at the fanciest (and only) high-end restaurant in Oakhurst, The Elderberry House.
Before dinner, I decided that Sierra needed to acquire id Software. At the time, Sierra was already a public company and I could easily acquire them with stock.
Erna's Elderberry House was a destination tourist restaurant that attracted diners from many miles away to have a romantic luxury evening. It was dressy and wearing a suit was standard practice at dinner.
Roberta and I agreed to meet the guys at the restaurant. We arrived early, and were waiting at the table for the id guys to arrive, when Erna, the restaurant’s owner, came to the table to tell us that our guests had arrived and that there was a problem.
The id team (John Carmack, John Romero and Tom Hall) had driven across the country, and I had forgotten to warn them that Erna's had a formal dress code. Oops! They were wearing ripped jeans and frazzled t-shirts.
Erna would normally bar any such people from entering the restaurant, but I was a big customer and at the time we were discussing my investing with her on a Chateau that would be attached to the restaurant. After looking at me to see if I was really going to force her to accept these untidy guests, she had to lead us inside. We both knew I was going to owe a favor at some future time. Into the restaurant we went; me, dressed like a corporate "suit," Roberta in a dress looking elegant as always, and the three young out-of-towners.
Erna gave us our own private room with a fireplace and a very long table.
I was in awe, and still am. These guys were brilliant. I spent the meal trying to figure out what their hot buttons were. What button did I need to press to get them to consider teaming up with Sierra?
At the end of our dinner, I offered $2.5 million in stock. The guys wanted $100,000 in cash up front, but because of some obscure accounting rules, it would be difficult to pay them with both stock and cash. I said I'd try, but that it was probably impossible. The stock they would receive could easily be sold, so I didn't consider it a deal-breaker issue.
When they returned home, to Madison WI, John Romero called to say they would be interested in doing that deal, but needed the $100,000 upfront and a letter of intent. I said that the cash upfront as a deal killer, and that was the end of it.
With 20/20 hindsight, I should have done whatever it took to get the deal done. I remember wanting the deal, but I also had concerns about how the two companies would fit together. Their company was fairly new and fairly small. It really came down to just the guys we dined with. They were obviously talented but could they be counted on to generate a steady stream of product? Would a violent game fit with Sierra's product line? What would the chemistry be like between the two companies? They had (deservedly) big egos. I needed to believe we could work together for years to come.
I was convinced enough to want to do the deal, but not enough to fight for the deal.
From their perspective, they didn't need Sierra. Normally, the appeal of joining forces with Sierra would be that we could promote, manufacture and distribute the games worldwide. They were doing just fine on their own bypassing the normal distribution channels.
It doesn't surprise me that they went on to fame and fortune. They deserve it and more! It was an honor just to have met them, and I wish I had pushed harder.
id Software went on to ship products that would change the industry.
Oh well... You can’t win them all.
We met you again in 1993 at an awards ceremony after we had just won our first SPA award for Wolfenstein 3D. We walked up and you said, "I know, I know- I screwed up, and that wasn't the first time. Great job, guys!" You're a real class act. We were honored to have been able to meet you and Roberta in person, and to receive an offer to buy our company was the ultimate compliment.
- Email to Ken Williams, from John Romero, August 2020
Chapter 31: (1993) Sierra Moves To Seattle
"All I really had was a suitcase and my drums. So I took them up to Seattle and hoped it would work."
- Dave Grohl, Nirvana
Oakhurst was a beautiful place to live and run a company. But it was not an easy place from which to operate an international business.
I was constantly driving from Oakhurst to San Francisco to have a meeting or catch a plane. There was an airport only 40 miles away in Fresno, CA. but there were few direct flights from Fresno to places I wanted to go. Worse, I could never count on the Fresno airport being open. Fresno was prone to fogging up. San Francisco was only four hours drive-time away and it became a drive I made almost weekly.
