Tag Archives: Adventure

Sierra On-line Books

I read and listen to a lot of books related to computer and video games, and having just finished one such book, I figured I’d make a post devoted strictly to books about the history of one of the most fondly remembered classic game companies, Sierra On-line. Fondly enough for me to talk about three different books, at least!

I’ve posted several reviews of vintage computer games over the years, and often gone into my personal history of some of these games. Sierra On-line is one particularly big component of that, as during their heyday they were without question one of my favorite developers (and when you throw in another of my all time favorites, Dynamix, one of my favorite publishers too!) Sure, LucasArts is widely agreed upon to be the victor when it comes to the fanboy favorite argument of which of the two companies made the best adventure games, but in the 90s Sierra held much more territory in the diskette and CD-ROM boxes of my personal game collection; the Space Quest series in particular being an all time favorite.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Leary is surely one of my favorite non-fiction books; when I eventually stumbled upon it I honestly couldn’t believe I hadn’t read it much, much earlier in life. It covers a lot more than gaming, but of relevance here is the last third or so of the book which focuses on the shift of personal computer software development, while still somewhat rooted in enthusiast hacker culture, to a more commercial direction in the early 1980s. In particular, it mostly focuses on Ken Williams and Sierra On-line. Keeping in mind that this book was first published in 1984, this was a very contemporary look at what was then a fairly young version of Sierra, having only just released the original King’s Quest.

Of course the story of the founding of On-line Systems and the development of Mystery House is covered, but then Hackers moves into chapters devoted to Sierra’s close bonds with their peers, such as Brøderbund and Sirius Software, its “summer camp” like culture, and its gradual shift away from that and “hacker” ethics in general, along with all kinds of now legendary stories including the deal with IBM to develop for the PCjr, Richard Garriott joining Sierra, the noncompete lawsuit against Atari, and a whole lot more. The style of these later chapters is a bit different than those earlier in the book, feeling more like embedded journalism pieces than chapters in a book about computer history. Crucially, Hackers really provides a different take on who Ken Williams was and how he ran Sierra at the time than what I was familiar with. This is extremely fascinating stuff and absolutely essential for providing some eye opening accounts of those typically skimmed-over early years of the company.

I’m sure there had to be some, but I don’t know of anything else significant outside of blurbs posted in Sierra’s own manuals, guides, and magazine until 2018, when The Sierra Adventure was published. I was stoked. At long last someone put together a book about the history of the venerable Sierra On-line! The author, Shawn Mills, is a writer for Adventure Gamers and one of the founders of Infamous Quests, a throwback adventure game developer best known for Quest for Infamy and a couple of notable Sierra remakes. Respectable bonafides!

The Sierra Adventure isn’t quite the exhaustive chronicle of the history of the Sierra On-line and every last one of its products that many might be looking for in such a book. Instead, it attempts to approach the subject almost entirely from interviews with former employees. Quite a lot of notable people contributed the quotes that make up the bulk of the book’s content, though Ken and Roberta Williams themselves, still keeping a distance from all things Sierra at this point, are rarely quoted. Even still, there is enough here and I think the author put it together with enough love to make it a worthwhile read. I have to say, I was a bit annoyed with how the book starts, devoting its first chapter to flashing just a bit forward to talk about Sierra’s first couple brushes with death and how the company survived them before going back and starting at the beginning with On-line Systems and Mystery House in the next one. This kind of literary device often works quite well, but here it just came across like some kind of a bizarre editing snafu. A relatively minor gripe, I admit.

In 2020, founder and former CEO, Ken Williams himself, wrote and published Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings. Part autobiography, part industry insider insight, Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings is the story of Sierra On-line from the unique perspectives of Ken, and to a lesser extent, Roberta. While I did sometimes find the writing in need of a bit more editing (for example, Ken often repeats himself, especially from chapter to chapter) I quickly started to get in tune with Ken’s “voice” and ended up really enjoying his take. By the way, I originally listened to the audiobook version, and when I later got a printed book I was surprised to find it full of interesting full color pictures. Very much an upgrade!

Without a ton of detail, the book sometimes feels like just a bunch of strung together anecdotes, though it was all strung together reasonably well despite its numerous interludes. It certainly succeeded in satisfying my biggest hope for the book by filling in a lot of gaps about Ken and Roberta and the unique company culture that produced the games I loved so much. I was perhaps most intrigued by the conflict between Ken’s cold and detached approach to business: only wanting to work with “A players” and chasing monetary success, at times to the detriment of the company, with his more personable and generous side: hiring random locals to grow into very specialized positions and running the company like a big, fun family, and how that stuff all changed as he eventually ceded more of Sierra’s management and control to others as the company grew. I don’t know that Ken sees this as a “conflict” himself but, especially given Sierra’s eventual decline, it stood out to me. Speaking of which, this book gave me far more insight into the death of Sierra than anything else I’d read, with Ken providing a version of events that no one else has ever, or could ever, fully present around the CUC takeover and subsequent loss of control. It really is, as the title suggests, a bit of a cautionary tale.

Of course, Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings is all from Ken’s point of view but, despite the obvious inherent bias there, his accounts do come across as sincere to me. Regardless, I’d highly recommend reading the sometimes overlapping accounts in all three of these books for a more well-rounded perspective. I’d also recommend reading them in the order I covered here; Ken even references his chapters of Hackers in Not All Fairy Tales. When taken together, we finally have as close to a complete picture of the company as we’re likely to ever have.

There you have it! Needless to say, these are far from in-depth reviews and I’d recommend Evan Dickens’s reviews and comparison between The Sierra Adventure and Not All Fairy Tales over at Adventure Gamers if you want to dive a little deeper than I did here.

This article was actually taken from my other blog, originally posted in March of 2023. Given the subject matter, I meant for this to be more of a cross-post but, hey, I guess I got a little distracted. *shrug*

Adventure Break!

My partner and I decided to do a quick co-op play through one of the numerous FMV style games we’ve been seeing all over the Xbox Store for years now. Most of these games (titles like The Bunker and The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker) are put out by a publisher called Wales Interactive, though despite similarities, they’re actually developed by a variety of different studios. I guess Wales is trying to corner the market on modern FMV games? Regardless, the one we ended up picking was Late Shift.

Late Shift follows Matt, a 20 something working as an attendant on an overnight shift in a parking garage in London. Almost immediately events on this particular evening lead to Matt being caught up in a criminal plot and, well, to go much more into would spoil things. The story is all, honestly, pretty silly fun. It’s not over the top campy, and the excellent production values lend the whole thing a more serious tone than it probably deserves. That‘s the part where I was pleasantly surprised, actually. The production, direction, acting; they’re all surprisingly good. As a movie it might not win any Academy Awards but as a game? Maybe this comes from playing too many FMVs in the 90s, but I tend to expect a certain amount of grade-a terrible from my FMV games. I mean, that’s the main draw to people going back and replaying them these days, right? On the other hand, Late Shift feels like it actually had a budget. Pfft!

“Things go off the rails in Late Shift quite quickly.”

Another interesting thing about Late Shift (and from what I gather, most of these other Wales FMV games) is that they’re not what a lot of us old timers would think of when we think of FMV games. In the 90s most FMV games were simply games that used copious amounts of embedded video sequences and/or cutscenes, and maybe some digitized spites for good measure. Gameplay wise, while some were games of a distinct genre that got slapped with the label simply for featuring a lot of video, the majority of these games weren’t far off from the classic point and click adventure game formula, though the more they leaned on video the less interactive they tended to be.

Late Shift takes that to the extreme, being something more along the lines of an interactive movie; imagine a Telltale game with nothing but cutscenes and decisions, or Dragon’s Lair with all of the input relating to decisions rather than quick time event like action. This made me think a lot about a similar game I played before Late Shift, but one I never wrote about here due to it being presented as less of a game and more of an interactive movie. Netflix’s surprisingly high profile experiment Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. The idea of an interactive movie played with just a remote isn’t really anything new; there were various similar games released when DVD first started blowing up (including a version of the aforementioned Dragon’s Lair) and I suppose it makes even more sense with modern streaming technology.

“Your average Bandersnatch dilemma.”

Really, Bandersnatch is quite interesting in its own right. It’s about a budding game developer in the days of the UK’s storied early 1980s bedroom programming scene. This is a pretty damn esoteric subject to most Americans, but it’s one I happen to be into so I was sold on the premise alone. As you follow the main character Stefan through being offered a job at a game studio alongside one of his programming idols, Colin, you’re occasionally prompted to make decisions to progress the plot, and believe me this, it goes all over the place. Indeed, Bandersnatch is far from a straightforward experience. Fitting with Black Mirror’s overarching themes of the existential dark side of modern technological advancement, the fourth wall is broken in numerous ways throughout, and the game itself is all too happy to punish you for picking the obvious “right” choices, leading to dead ends and other unsatisfying endings which ultimately encourage or otherwise manipulate you to replay the game multiple times, exploring the branches of its decision tree ad nauseam. In some ways, this reminds me a lot of how old classic adventure games were intended to be played; by sinking endless hours into them to figure out solutions to every puzzle on your own through copious amounts of exploration and trial and error.

“Shit continues to escalate in Late Shift…”

Late Shift is far more traditional in this respect. It doesn’t try to play clever mind games with the player. You’re simply making decisions as presented to you and watching how those choices affect the events of the story until eventually reaching one conclusion or another. There’s no complicated decision structures that need to be charted to be understood, nor any trick options or any other elements of subversive design here. In fact, compare these flowcharts based on the choices for both games: Bandersnatch vs Late Shift. It should be noted that Late Shift features a lot more choices than shown here, though those not represented in this flowchart tend to lead to minor varations in scenes rather than major branches of the plot. Also, try not to pay too much attention to the details, as these charts are absolutely spoiler ridden!

That might sound (and look) like a mark against Late Shift, but to me, this made it a far smoother and overall, more digestible experience. The game is perfectly happy with you playing it once and never touching it again, and none of the endings felt overly abrupt or unsatisfying. If you do feel like playing through it again, choosing radically different decisions as some might do with, again, a Telltale game, the game does provide enough different scenarios and other variations to be satisfying to play through 2 or 3 times. While Bandersnatch may have failed in some respects, I immediately went out and added some of Wales Interactive’s other FMV games to my wishlist upon beating it. I’m just hoping I didn’t spoil myself by trying one of the better quality ones first. I suspect I might have.

“Tell Me Why’s scenery is as chill inducing as it is beautiful.”

Speaking of adventure games, we also played through the next of Dontnod’s games, 2020’s Tell Me Why. Tell Me Why tells the story of two college aged siblings reconnecting to clean up and sell off their childhood home, naturally leading to some tying up of other loose ends concerning their family’s dramatic past. Tell Me Why is also a transgender story, although these elements are handled with a subtly that ultimately makes sure they’re not the focus of the story, despite being pivotal to it. Instead, the most intriguing parts of the story are about our characters’ unusual relationship with their mother, an artist who seemed to embrace fantasy as much as if not more than her children, and as usual with Dontnod games, the compelling setting; this time it’s a picturesque small town in Alaska.

As you might have guessed, this is a much more personal story than any of the Life is Strange games, focusing more on the interpersonal and slice of life aspects of those games. While there are some bigger plot elements, the stakes don’t ever feel quite as high as stopping a serial killer or being on the run from the authorities for a murder you didn’t commit, to use two very specific examples. Part of that has to do with so much of the game being about the past; examining nearly forgotten childhood memories, trying to find answers to questions that had been bouncing around for most of the protagonists’ lives, that sort of thing. The lack of urgency is a bit of a tonal shift, and if, like my partner, you’re the type of person who doesn’t find a lot of value in obsessing on the past, you might even fail to connect to the story entirely like she did.

“Unpacking emotional baggage in Tell Me Why.”

Gameplay-wise, Tell Me Why feels very much like it could be a part of the Life is Strange series, so if you’ve played any of those games then you pretty much know what to expect. Of course, even between games in the LiS series there are numerous mechanical changes, and Tell Me Why is no different. One big one is that the journal is gone, replaced with a book of children’s stories which is occasionally (and rather obtusely) used to solve puzzles. As is always the case in those games, the supernatural power your characters possess is new and different too. And yes, “characters”; you play as both siblings at different parts of the story. A rather huge departure is that I feel like exploration is a bit less of a focus in Tell Me Why. While mechanically it’s just as present as in any of the previous Dontnod adventures, I rarely found any point to it. Descriptions of items were less interesting and insightful, and it was rare to find anything useful in the world. For that reason I didn’t really engage with the collectibles this time around, which is a first for me in these games.

Still, I really enjoyed Tell Me Why, though the particular story and some elements of its storytelling mean it’s less likely to stick with me than any of the previous Life is Strange games. Regardless, after playing this I’m even more curious to check out Dontnod’s next and seemingly least popular adventure game, Twin Mirror. Soon enough, but for now I better get back to Halo Fest…

The Black Mirror: Bandersnatch screenshot above was taken from a random image search result rather than my own Xbox. I found out the hard way that you apparently can’t screenshot the Netflix app. Shenanigans…

Before the Storm

After finally wrapping up Life is Strange we wasted little time before diving into the game’s follow-up prequel, Life is Strange: Before the Storm.

“Chloe and Rachel bonding.”

When I first heard about Before the Storm back in 2017 I was a little skeptical. First, it’s a prequel to a game that, back then, seemed unlikely to need one, a suspicion I can definitely confirm having finally beaten the game. A major concern for me, personally. Second, developer Dontnod wasn’t signed on for this one, with Square Enix instead passing the reins to Deck Nine, who had never worked on anything like Life is Strange as far as I can tell. Concern rising! Perhaps most controversially, due to a Screen Actors Guild strike several voice actors, including the voice actors for the two lead characters, Max and Chloe, wouldn’t be on board for this one. While it turns out that Max would barely be featured, BtS centers around the character of Chloe, whose excellent voice acting in the first game was an undeniably crucial component. Oh dear…

Working backwards through each of those concerns, the voice acting turned out not to be much of a problem at all. Deck Nine was able to find someone who was capable of sounding reasonably close to the original voice actor, Ashly Burch, for Chloe. I say “capable of” because, while for the longest time I had wondered if they had indeed managed to source the original talent, or if maybe they went back and re-recorded her lines after the strike was over, there definitely were some moments in the latter half other game where the illusion shattered, taking me out of the moment to ponder how unlike Chloe the impostor on the screen sounded on a specific line, or in a particular scene. Thankfully these moments were few, and replacement, Rhianna DeVries, mostly nailed it.

“In lieu of Max’s time powers BtS adds a new backtalk system to conversations.”

As for Deck Nine? While I’m about to go into more specific details in a bit, let me just sum it up by saying I was surprised at just how incredible of a job they did with this game. I’m not sure what they’re working on currently but I really hope that this wasn’t just some sort of a one time experiment for them and that they have more narrative games in their future. Amazing job!

The justification for Before the Storm’s existence as a prequel is probably a much more fundamental issue. Did the original Life is Strange need a prequel? Not at all. Is Life is Strange stronger with the existence of BtS? Surprisingly, I think so! As improbable as it is that shoehorning a new story into a timeline that was already somewhat established would be successful, it’s executed extremely well.

Before the Storm takes place during the often alluded to time in Chloe’s life after her father died and Max moved away, and after she’s already well on her way to becoming the rebellious Chloe we met in Life is Strange proper. An early scene in the first episode has Chloe sneaking out to see a band at a shady-ass club in the middle of nowhere. BtS shows us a Chloe who, at least from the new perspective of being inside her head, wrestles with how to handle the adversity she encounters and later muses about how she’s managed to pull off being such a badass. This is a different Chloe, one who is still developing the defiant confidence we saw in Life is Strange. I love this sort of subtle attention to detail, especially given that the events of this game are surely critical to that development.

“…and instead of snapping artsy photos, Chloe just vandalizes shit.”

Therein lies one of the real successes of Before the Storm. This time, lacking Max’s supernatural abilities and as much of a dramatic plot to deal with, BtS focuses more on the “slice of life” sections of the original game. While this makes it perhaps a little less exciting, the relationship between Max and Chloe was easily one of the best parts of Life is Strange and is echoed by the relationship between Chloe and the game’s other main character, the legendary Rachael Amber. I might argue that BtS is perhaps even more affecting given how much of a strong, passionate personality Rachel is, and for the record, not only does Rachel live up to the lofty reputation built up for her in the first game, but in some ways she even exceeds it.

Unlike the first game, the romantic undertones between Chloe and Rachel also seemed more obvious, and while we took the bait in our playthrough, despite the game seeming to want the choice to be more binary, we felt like it was more realistic for Chloe to respond apprehensively rather than leaping haphazardly into a relationship with someone whose signals weren’t always exceedingly clear. In any case, Chloe’s connection with Rachel goes on to justify many of the interpretations of her later relationship with Max. Was Chloe trying to reconnect with her old childhood friend, or was she actually trying to recapture her romance with Rachael? It’s even more interesting when you consider how Chloe takes on Rachel’s role as the fearlessly impulsive, assertive one. This is just one example of how Life is Strange feels stronger with the character development present in BtS, which culminates with the elephant in the room, the tragic events around Rachel Amber in the first game, being all that more disturbing after getting to know her here.

“Make sure you also play the bonus episode!”

It’s not all perfect of course. Any time you expand a story with a prequel like this you risk inconsistencies or full on retcons of earlier established events, and while the events of Before the Storm seem to be carefully considered, there are tons of issues with the changes to the already sloppy timeline of the first game. None of these issues felt problematic, if we even noticed them at all, but this is a complaint I ran across a lot online.

Another frequent complaint is how the course of the entire game seems to take place in just a few days, which feels like way too short of a time for numerous reasons, not the least of which is how quickly the bonds between Chloe and Rachel form. While I agree that the timeline feels compressed for no real reason, that’s one specific assertion that I don’t agree with at all. I believe that at that point in her life Chloe desperately needed someone in her life and Rachael came along at just the right time to catch her in this vulnerable state and knock her off of her feet. Simple as that! I’ve heard some people suggest that Rachael may have even sensed this in Chloe and actively exploited it, and while, erring on the side of optimism, I’m not necessarily prepared to pass that judgement, it does fit with the events fairly well.

I can’t say I’m exactly immune to these kinds of complaints though. I was bothered by the timeline of the bonus “Farewell” episode, which has you playing through one of Max and Chloe’s last days together as kids. Avoiding spoilers here, but that is a compressed timeline, folks! While I really enjoyed the episode, it definitely clashed harshly with my impression of the events as presented in the first game, even if those details are ultimately fairly inconsequential to the overall story.

Some people also hated the end, particularly the very end, and of course I understand the reasons why. For me, despite being incredibly sobering, it felt thematically totally appropriate and helped tie the stories between the two games together.

“The Tempest scene was truly memorable.”

I suppose I should stop there before getting into spoilers. To quickly run through a few remaining notes: the music is much more consistent and fits the tone better even if there are less standout tracks than the first game, the graphics are quite similar, though perhaps a bit more stylized this time around, and while the gameplay is mostly the same, we found ourselves feeling strangely pressured by no longer having Max’s ability to rewind time, having to live with the consequences of our decisions. God forbid!

While I’m not sure if BtS manages to surpass it or not, in some ways it’s probably superior to the first game and, in any case, I came away just as affected by Chloe and Rachel’s relationship which is a huge accomplishment all by itself. That said, the game seems to be quite divisive. I’d have thought if you liked the first game, BtS would be more of the same for the vast majority of people, but I suppose the people who loved Life is Strange loved it so much that of course they’re going to be super sensitive to any changes something like this inevitably brings. Regardless, I wouldn’t hesitate checking it out if you are a fan of the original Life is Strange.

Screenshots were take from various places on the Internet. Most of them are from the PC version rather than the Xbox One version but the difference isn’t huge, especially when reformatted for this blog.