Sierra Entertainment


Sierra Entertainment, Inc. was an American video game developer and publisher. Founded in 1979 as On-Line Systems, by Ken and Roberta Williams, Sierra is known primarily for its graphic adventure game series such as King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, Gabriel Knight, Leisure Suit Larry, and Quest for Glory.
Sierra On-Line was acquired by CUC International in February 1996 and became part of CUC International's newly established CUC Software. In June 2004, after months of significant downsizing and restructuring at the company, Sierra Entertainment was disestablished as a company in August that year. Sierra continued to operate as a division of Vivendi Games through June 2008, when Vivendi Games merged with Activision and formed Activision Blizzard, with Sierra becoming part of Activision Blizzard's Activision subsidiary, though shut down later that year. The "Sierra" brand name was revived by Activision in 2014 to re-release former Sierra games and some independently developed games.

History

Founding

Sierra Entertainment was founded in 1979 as On-Line Systems in Simi Valley, California, by Ken and Roberta Williams. Ken Williams, a programmer for IBM, bought an Apple II microcomputer which he planned to use to develop a Fortran compiler for the Apple II. At the time, his wife Roberta Williams, was playing text adventures on the Apple II. Dissatisfied with the text-only format, she realized that the graphics display capability of the Apple II could enhance the adventure gaming experience. After initial success, On-Line Systems was renamed Sierra On-Line in 1982, and the company moved to Oakhurst, California. The "Sierra" name was taken from the Sierra Nevada that Oakhurst was located next to. By early 1984 InfoWorld estimated that Sierra was the world's 12th-largest microcomputer-software company, with $12.5 million in 1983 sales.

1980s

In 1980, On-Line Systems released the first game in its Hi-Res Adventure series, Mystery House. Roberta Williams wrote the script for the adventure game in three weeks; she then presented the script to Ken Williams and convinced him to help her develop the game in the evenings after work. Using an Apple II and a VersaWriter drawing tablet, she worked on the text and graphics and told Ken how to develop the game she wanted. The project took about three months and, on May 5, 1980, Mystery House was ready for shipment. It was an instant hit with about 15,000 copies sold, earning. It is the first computer adventure game to have graphics, although made with crude, static, monochrome line drawings.
The Hi-Res Adventure series continued with Mission Asteroid, which was released as Hi-Res Adventure #0 though being the second release. The next release, Wizard and the Princess, also known as Adventure in Serenia, is considered a prelude to the later King's Quest series in both story and concept. Through 1981 and 1982, more games were released in the series including Cranston Manor, Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, Time Zone, and The Dark Crystal. A simplified version of The Dark Crystal, intended for a younger audience, was written by Al Lowe and released as Gelfling Adventure.
The company weathered the video game crash of 1983 by seeing only a 20% increase in sales, after analysts in 1982 had predicted a doubling in 1983 of the entire software market. The company had spent much of 1983 developing for a Commodore machine and the TI-99/4A which were both obsolete by the end of the year. Ken Williams was reportedly described as "bewildered by the pace at which computers come into and fall out of favor", and Williams said, "I've learned my lesson. I'm not moving until I understand the market better."
Many of Sierra's most well known series began in the 1980s. In 1983, Sierra On-Line was contacted by IBM to create a game for the new PCjr. IBM offered to fund the entire development and marketing of the game, paying royalties. Ken and Roberta Williams accepted and started on the project. Roberta Williams created a story featuring classic fairy-tale elements. Her game concept includes animated color graphics, a pseudo 3D-perspective where the main character is visible on the screen, a more competent text parser that understands advanced commands from the player, and music playing in the background through the PCjr sound hardware. For the game, a complete development system called Adventure Game Interpreter was developed. In mid-1984, ' was released to much acclaim, beginning the King's Quest series.
While working to finish The Black Cauldron, programmers Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy began to plan for an adventure game of their own. After a simple demonstration to Ken Williams, he allowed them to start working on the full game, which was named '. The game was released in October 1986 as an instant success, spawning many sequels in the Space Quest series in the following years.
Al Lowe, who had been working at Sierra On-Line for many years, was asked by Ken Williams to write a modern version of Chuck Benton's Softporn Adventure from 1981, the only pure text adventure that the company had ever released. Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards was a great hit and won the Software Publishers Association's Best Adventure Game award of 1987. It can be deduced that the game first became famous as an early example of software piracy, as Sierra sold many more hintbooks than actual copies of the game. A series of Leisure Suit Larry games followed.
Ken Williams befriended a retired highway patrol officer named Jim Walls and asked him to produce an adventure series based on a police theme. Walls proceeded to create ', which was released in 1987. Several sequels followed, and the series was touted for adherence to police protocol, and presenting some real-life situations encountered by Walls during his career as an officer.
Quest for Glory is a series of hybrid adventure/role-playing video games designed by Corey and Lori Ann Cole. The first game in the series, ', was released in 1989. The series combines humor, puzzle elements, themes and characters borrowed from various legends, puns, and memorable characters, creating a five-part series of the Sierra stable. Although the series was originally titled Hero's Quest, Sierra failed to trademark the name. Milton Bradley successfully trademarked an electronic version of their unrelated joint Games Workshop board game, HeroQuest, which forced Sierra to change the series' title to Quest for Glory. This decision caused all future games in the series to switch over to the new name.
In 1987, Sierra On-Line started to publish its own gaming magazine, about its upcoming games and interviews with the developers. The magazine was initially named The Sierra Newsletter, The Sierra News Magazine, and The Sierra/Dynamix Newsmagazine. However, since Sierra Club already published a magazine called Sierra Magazine, the name of the magazine published by Sierra On-Line was changed to InterAction in 1991. It was discontinued in 1999.
Sierra's Adventure Game Interpreter engine, introduced with King's Quest, was replaced in 1988 with Sierra's Creative Interpreter in King's Quest IV. The game was released under both engines, so those who had newer computers could use the new engine and better rendering technology.

1990s

In 1990, Sierra released King's Quest V, the first Sierra On-Line game ever to have more than 500,000 copies sold and the highest selling game for five years. It won several awards, such as the Best Adventure Game of the Year from both the Software Publishers Association and Computer Gaming World magazine.
The ImagiNation Network, the first game-only online environment, began development in 1989. The game was launched on May 6, 1991, as the Sierra Network. Providing a "land-based" precursor to MMORPGs and internet chat rooms, each land theme for the type of content provided multi-player gaming and category based bulletin boards and chat rooms throughout the continental United States. AT&T took sole possession of the network on November 15, 1994, and as a result the name was changed to the ImagiNation Network. The network failed to find a mass audience.
In 1991, Sierra released the first game in the Dr. Brain series, Castle of Dr. Brain, a hybrid puzzle adventure education game, which has several sequels. In 1993, ' was released, beginning the Gabriel Knight series. The game and subsequent sequels were critically acclaimed in the mainstream press at the time.
Sierra and Broderbund ended merger discussions in March 1991.
Sierra needed a new building due to growth, and moved its headquarters to Bellevue, Washington. Sierra's original location in Oakhurst continued as an internal development studio for the company and was later renamed Yosemite Entertainment.
The company was now made up of five separate and largely autonomous development divisions: Sierra Publishing, Sierra Northwest, Dynamix, Bright Star Technology, and Coktel Vision, with each group working separately on product development but sharing manufacturing, distribution, and sales resources.
1995 was a successful year for the company. Sierra was the market-share leader in PC games for the year. With $83.4 million in sales from software-publishing, earnings improved by 19 percent, and a net income of $11.9 million. In June, Sierra and Pioneer Electric Corp. signed an agreement to create a joint venture that would develop, publish, manufacture, and market entertainment software for the Japanese software market. This joint venture created a new company called Sierra Venture'. With Sierra and Pioneer investing over $12 million, the new company immediately manufactured and shipped over twenty of Sierra's most popular products to Japan and created new titles for the Japanese market. 1995 also saw Sierra acquiring a number of development companies, both small home developers and larger companies.
Phantasmagoria'' was by far the largest project ever undertaken by Sierra. The anticipation for the game was high at release in late 1995. Although nearly one million copies were sold when the game was first released in August 1995, Sierra bestselling adventure game created, the game received mixed reviews from industry critics.

Sold to CUC

In February 1996, early e-commerce pioneer CUC International, seeking to expand into interactive entertainment, offered to buy Sierra at a price of about $1.5 billion. Walter Forbes, the CEO of CUC International, and a member of Sierra's own Board of Directors since 1991, surprised Ken Williams with the deal after a board meeting. After negotiating terms which Ken Williams believed would be in best interest for Sierra's future, the deal with CUC closed on July 24, 1996. Among the terms included that Ken Williams would be named a Vice-Chairman of CUC International, a Member of the Office of the President of CUC, and would remain responsible for Sierra's R&D as well as remaining Sierra's CEO. He also requested that a "software board" be created. The board consisted of him, Michael Brochu, Bob Davidson, and Forbes. It functioned as a governing body of what would become CUC Software, regulating major decisions and product lines.
In September 1996, CUC announced plans to consolidate some functions of their game companies into a single company called CUC Software Inc., headquartered in Torrance, California. Bob Davidson, founder and CEO of Davidson & Associates became the CEO for the publishing body. CUC Software consolidated manufacturing, distribution, and sales resources of all of divisions including what was to become Sierra, Davidson, Blizzard, Knowledge Adventure, and Gryphon Software.
CUC Software utilized their various labels' market specialties; for example, in October 1996, Sierra published Stay Tooned!, an adventure game developed by Funnybone Interactive as Sierra was more known as an adventure game publisher than Davidson.
In November 1996, Ken Williams met with the founders of Valve and negotiated Sierra's exclusive rights to publish Half-Life, which Ken Williams debuted at E3 in May 1997. In December 1996, Sierra released The Realm Online, an online fantasy role-playing game.
After the sale, Ken Williams remained within the software division so that he could provide strategic guidance to Sierra, although he began to grow disillusioned as he soon found that his new titles at CUC meant very little and the software board met only once. He also began to have disputes with Davidson over Davidson's conservative management style and his disdain for Sierra's more risque product lines such as Phantasmagoria and Leisure Suit Larry.
In January 1997, Davidson stepped down as CEO of CUC Software, and CUC Executive Chris MacLeod was named as his replacement. After this, Ken Williams shifted his focus work on CUC's online product distributor, NetMarket while remaining as CEO of Sierra in name only. In November, Ken Williams departed from CUC International, while Roberta Williams remained with Sierra until the release of in December 1998. Brochu, who had been hired in 1995 by Ken Williams, to handle the day-to-day business affairs of Sierra, replaced Ken Williams and remained as President of Sierra until October 1997, when he too departed the company.
In April 1997, to further expand upon their role in the edutainment business, Sierra. purchased Books That Work and CUC International purchased Berkeley Systems and transferred management of the studio to Sierra as an internal developer. In December 1997, in order to secure the rights to Return to Krondor, Sierra purchased PyroTechnix, who were developing the game.
On November 5, 1997, after the departure of Brochu in October, Sierra was split into three business units, all of which reported directly to MacLeod.

Cendant Corporation

In December 1997, CUC merged with HFS Incorporated. The two companies jointly formed the Cendant Corporation with more than 40,000 employees and operations in over 100 countries.
In 1998, Sierra divided into 5 sub-brands and corporate divisions:
On November 24, 1997, Sierra published , the official expansion pack for the widely popular game Diablo developed by Synergistic Software, a division of Sierra.
On November 19, 1998, Sierra published Half-Life for the PC, developed by Valve, widely considered to be one of the greatest games of all time.
In March 1998, massive accounting fraud at CUC was exposed. With the news, Cendant announced intention to sell the computer entertainment division, and on November 20, 1998, announced the sale of the consumer software division to Paris-based Havas S.A. Sierra became a part of Havas Interactive, the interactive entertainment division of the company.

Major layoffs

On February 22, 1999, Sierra announced a major reorganization of the company, resulting in the shutdown of several of their development studios, cutbacks on others and the relocation of key projects, and employees from those studios, to Bellevue. About 250 people in total lost their jobs. Development groups within Sierra such as PyroTechnix were shut down. Others such as Books That Work were relocated to Bellevue. Also shut down was Yosemite Entertainment, the division occupying the original headquarters of Sierra On-Line. The company sold the rights of Headgate Studios back to the original owner. With the exception of the warehouse and distribution department, the entire studio was shut down. Game designers Al Lowe and Scott Murphy were laid off. Lowe had just started work on Leisure Suit Larry 8. Murphy was involved in a Space Quest 7 project at the time. Layoffs continued on March 1, when Sierra terminated 30 employees at the previously unaffected Dynamix, or 15 percent of their workforce.
Despite the layoffs, Sierra continued to publish games for smaller development houses. In September 1999, they released Homeworld, a real-time space-combat strategy game developed by Relic Entertainment. The game design was revolutionary for the genre, and the game received great critical acclaim and many awards.

Yosemite Entertainment legacy

UK-based game developer and publisher Codemasters, in an effort to establish themselves in the United States, announced the launch a new development studio in Oakhurst, using the abandoned Sierra facilities and hiring much of the Yosemite Entertainment's laid-off staff in mid-September 1999. In early October, the company announced plans to take over management and maintenance of the online RPG The Realm and acquiring the complete yet previously canceled Navy SEALs. The company also reported they obtained the rights to continue using the name Yosemite Entertainment for the development house.

Reorganization

Meanwhile, Sierra announced another reorganization, this time into three business units: Core Games, Casual Entertainment, and Home Productivity. This reorganization resulted in even more layoffs, eliminating 105 additional jobs and a number of games in production. After 1999, Sierra almost entirely ceased to be a developer of games and, as time went on, instead became a publisher of games by independent developers.

2000s

At the end of June 2000, a strategic business alliance between Vivendi, Seagram, and Canal+ was announced, and Vivendi Universal, a leading global media and communications company, was formed after the merger with Seagram. Havas S.A. was renamed Vivendi Universal Publishing and became the publishing division of the new group, divided into five groups: games, education, literature, health, and information. The merger was followed by many more layoffs of Sierra employees.
In August 2001, Sierra announced a major reorganization, which included the closure of Dynamix as well as the layoffs of 148 employees located at the company headquarters in Bellevue.
On February 19, 2002, Sierra On-Line officially announced the name change to Sierra Entertainment, Inc.
In 2002, Sierra, working with High Voltage Software, announced the development of a new chapter in the Leisure Suit Larry franchise, titled . Released to mostly mixed to negative reviews; Larry's creator, Lowe, was not involved with the project.
The newly renamed Sierra Entertainment continued to develop mostly unsuccessful interactive entertainment products. However, hit Homeworld 2 once again cemented Sierra's reputation as a respectable publisher.
In 2003, Sierra Entertainment released the second video game adaptation of The Hobbit, as well as NASCAR Racing 2003 Season.

2004–2008

In the spring of 2004, cost-cutting measures were taken at Sierra's parent company Vivendi Universal Games due to financial troubles and because of Sierra's lack of profitability as a working developer. Sierra's last owned studios Impressions Games and the Papyrus Design Group were both shut down in the spring of 2004, losing 50 jobs in the process; 180 Sierra-related positions were also eliminated at Vivendi's Los Angeles offices; and by June 2004, Vivendi had completely shut down Sierra's Bellevue location, which cost over 100 people their jobs and dispersed Sierra's work to other VU Games divisions, and re-locating the remains of Sierra's assets to Vivendi's corporate headquarters in Fresno, California. In total, 350 people lost their jobs. Various titles that were retired in the process included Print Artist and titles like the Hoyle franchise were sold to other publishers or developers. Sierra by this point was simply a publishing label and brand name for Vivendi titles, being used in tandem with their own name for publishing. As a company, Sierra was disestablished on August 24, 2004. The business continued to operate as a division of Vivendi Games.
In late 2005, the Sierra brand was re-launched from Los Angeles. A new subsidiary called Sierra Online was also founded within this time, which focused on download games and online-only titles.
Throughout 2005 and 2006, Vivendi acquired several game development studios including Massive Entertainment, High Moon Studios, Radical Entertainment, Secret Lair Studios / Studio Ch'in and Swordfish Studios and integrated them into Sierra, alongside the creative licenses from other Vivendi divisions and from companies partnered with Vivendi and the copyrights of several notable intellectual properties, such as Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, ' and '. Vivendi also ceased publishing under their own name by this point after their name change, with all major titles being released under the Sierra brand name.
Caesar IV was published September 26, 2006 in North America, in partnership with Tilted Mill Entertainment.
In the summer of 2007, Sierra Online began launching Xbox Live Arcade titles for the Xbox 360. One of the first releases was the conversion of the successful "German-style" board game Carcassonne, which had been in development at Secret Lair Studios.
During Late 2007, Sierra released titles like the First-person shooter game TimeShift and the real-time tactical video game World in Conflict.
In 2008, Sierra Entertainment's parent company Vivendi Games merged with video game publisher Activision to form the Activision Blizzard holding company. Vivendi Games was absorbed into Activision after the merger and the ownership of Sierra properties went to Activision. Later that year, Sierra was closed down for possible future sale. Leading up to the merger, Activision's management was confident that Sierra would cease operations post-merger.
On July 29, 2008, Activision dropped several planned Sierra games due for release that weren't a strong fit with its long-term strategy. Upcoming titles like ', ' and Prototype were retained by Activision. Many of the former planned Vivendi/Sierra published games were sold on to other publishers. ' and ' were sold to Atari, Inc., Brütal Legend was sold to Electronic Arts, WET was sold to Bethesda Softworks, ' was sold to THQ and ' was sold to Ubisoft, who also acquired Massive Entertainment. Swordfish Studios was sold to Codemasters. Several Sierra-published games saw their online services shut down in October, and the division as a whole defunct the same year.

Brand name revival

On August 7, 2014, the website for Sierra, which previously redirected to Activision's website, was updated, showcasing a new logo, teasing: "More to be revealed at Gamescom 2014." Activision confirmed that the Sierra label will re-release some of their older games, re-imagining their older franchises, as well as collaborate with indie studios to create new "innovative, edgy and graphically unique" projects. Sierra will focus on publishing downloadable games through PlayStation Network, Steam for PC and Xbox Live. "We're very proud of what we created all those years ago with Sierra On-Line, and today's news about carrying Sierra forward as an indie-specific brand is very encouraging," said founder Ken in an official statement. "We look forward to seeing Sierra's independent spirit live on." On the same day, King's Quest and were announced; they were the first two games published under the revived Sierra brand. On December 5, 2014, they were awarded with the "Industry Icon" award during the 2014 The Game Awards, and they also introduced the first footage from the reboot of King's Quest.
In August 2018, TJX Companies acquired the domain sierra.com from Activision. TJX subsequently shortened the name of "Sierra Trading Post" to Sierra.

Subsidiaries

Development