Sierra began with a haunted-house story told over a restaurant table. Roberta Williams had been playing Colossal Cave Adventure on a teletype at home, and she described to her husband Ken a game of her own: a spooky old house with several people locked in it for the night, who start “turning up dead” one by one. Ken, a programmer who wanted his new Apple II for a Fortran compiler he planned to sell, wrote her game first. They called it Mystery House, and it put pictures into an adventure game. Within ten years the company it launched was the biggest employer in its county, based in a small town in the foothills near Yosemite and turning out the King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry games on languages it had written for itself.
Fast facts
- Founded: early 1980, as On-Line Systems, by Ken and Roberta Williams.
- Renamed: Sierra On-Line, in use by 1982.
- Based: Coarsegold, California, from December 1980; Oakhurst from 1983; later Bellevue, Washington.
- Game languages: AGI (Adventure Game Interpreter) for the King’s Quest games from 1984; SCI (Sierra Creative Interpreter) from 1988.
- Sold: to CUC International in 1996; its home studio closed in 1999; the company closed by Activision Blizzard in 2008.
Mystery House
Ken Williams told the story in Sierra’s own magazine in 1990. At Christmas 1979 Roberta agreed to buy him a computer, and at a dealer in Northridge, California, he saw Apple’s new disk drive: “No more three minute load times for a 100 line program.” They bought an Apple II with a disk drive and 16K of memory for “just under three thousand dollars”. Roberta designed Mystery House, Ken programmed it, and it was finished “a couple of months later”. The publisher Programma International offered a 25 per cent royalty, but the Williamses decided to publish it themselves, selling to computer shops, in Ken’s words, “from the trunk of your car”. Mystery House came out in May 1980. Ken called it “the first adventure game with graphics”, and its successor, The Wizard and the Princess, “the first adventure game in color”.
Ken’s brother John became the company’s first distributor outside California, carrying disks round shops in Illinois although, as he admitted, he did not know how to boot one. In December 1980 he drove his Pinto station wagon to Coarsegold, a small town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada where Ken and Roberta had moved, and became On-Line Systems “Employee Number 0001”, working in a room ten feet square. The company hired its first real programmer, Warren Schwader, about six months later, and sealed its disks in plastic bags with a kitchen appliance. By 1982 it was trading as Sierra On-Line.
Arcade games and the crash
In its early years Sierra sold more than adventures. Its hits included Jawbreaker and home versions of Frogger, sold under its Sierravision label (see Konami). In 1982, John Williams wrote, Ken took “a few million bucks” of venture capital from TA Associates of Boston, and the company brought in managers, a factory and development for every new home computer: cassettes for the VIC-20 and Atari 400, cartridges for the Coleco Adam and the Commodore 64, and games for a Texas Instruments computer that was never finished before the market collapsed.
When the home computer market collapsed at the end of 1984, Sierra was left with “a few million dollars worth of inventory” it could sell “for 3 cents on the dollar”. It had also invested in games for IBM’s PCjr, which failed. Through lay-offs it went “from over 130 employees to less than 35 in a matter of weeks”. What saved it, in John Williams’s account, was Tandy. The Tandy 1000, launched in 1984 as a better PCjr, could run the games Sierra had written for IBM’s machine, and its “better than 8000” Radio Shack and Tandy shops gave King’s Quest a new market.
King’s Quest and AGI
King’s Quest was shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in early 1984, and K-Power called it “an amazing breakthrough in computer adventures because of its 3-D effects. Instead of just typing commands, you control your figure with the joystick. The man can swim, walk, run, and hide behind trees, and also bow to the king.” Electronic Games picked it as “the first in a new generation of adventures”. Sierra’s timeline dates King’s Quest II to April 1985 and King’s Quest III to November 1986.
Under the pictures was a language. Sierra had always built its games in a system of its own, “AGL (Adventure Game Language)” for Mystery House and The Wizard and the Princess, and then “a dozen different versions of AGI (Adventure Game Interpreter)” for King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry. The player still typed commands into a text parser while walking the character around the screen with the keys or a joystick.
The Quest years
On that engine Sierra built a set of series, each with a named designer. Roberta Williams wrote King’s Quest. Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy, who called themselves the Two Guys from Andromeda, made Space Quest, whose hero, Roger Wilco, is a janitor. Jim Walls, a veteran of 15 years with the California Highway Patrol, wrote Police Quest, and designed the first three games. Al Lowe’s Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards won a Software Publishers Association award in 1987. It came with a warning on the label and grew, according to PC Player, from Softporn Adventure, a text game written by Charles Benton that On-Line Systems had published for the Apple II. Lori and Corey Cole’s Hero’s Quest, later renamed Quest for Glory, mixed the adventure with a role-playing game.
The designers put themselves on the box and in the magazine. Sierra’s newsletter reported on the Two Guys’ latest schemes, and Larry’s numbering became a running joke: after Leisure Suit Larry III the next game was Leisure Suit Larry 5, whose advertising explained that Larry must deal with “the missing disks of Leisure Suit Larry IV”.
SCI
In the spring of 1988 Sierra finished a new language, the Sierra Creative Interpreter. Its magazine described SCI as “an object-oriented language similar to LISP”, written “in Assembler, C, and itself”. A programmer defined classes of objects: an Actor for anything that moves, such as the player’s character, a Prop for things that move on the spot, like a candle flame, and a View for things that do not animate.
King’s Quest IV was the first SCI game. Sierra showed its opening cartoon at the June 1988 Consumer Electronics Show in a private cinema, on a 386 PC with a Roland MT-32 sound module playing a full orchestral score. John Williams remembered a woman in the audience crying as King Graham collapsed, and said “it was then that we knew we had a winner”. Sierra also released an AGI version for older machines, which “paled by comparison”, and soon began converting its older games to SCI. SCI ran each game as a program for a virtual machine, so, as Roberta Williams explained to START in 1990, “it will work on any machine”: each computer had its own version of the interpreter, which could use that machine’s strengths, such as the Atari ST’s colour fades. In the early 1990s SCI games dropped the typed parser for icons the player clicked on, a change PC Player said many fans regretted.
Sierra’s first attempt to sell shares was set for 19 October 1987, the day the stock market crashed. It went public a year later, in October 1988, at $9 a share, and ended 1989 with 240 employees. It then bought other studios, starting with Dynamix in 1990 and going on to the French publisher Coktel Vision, Impressions and Papyrus.
Living or dying
Sierra’s adventures could kill the player, and its designers defended that. At the Computer Game Developers’ Conference in 1991, Lori Cole argued for “Death as a Dynamic Plot Element” against Ron Gilbert of Lucasfilm Games, who said “Death is Bad Drama”. Computer Gaming World reported her view that without the risk of death the player’s personal involvement goes missing and “the game becomes mere amusement”. The debate marks the main design difference between Sierra and LucasArts.
Video, CUC and the end
In the mid-1990s Sierra built a film studio and turned to full-motion video, starting with Roberta Williams’s Phantasmagoria and continuing with the second Gabriel Knight game. Jane Jensen’s Gabriel Knight series had begun in 1993, and ran to three games.
In 1996 CUC International, a membership-services company, bought Sierra in a deal GamePro valued at more than $1 billion. Sierra had been the market-share leader in PC games in 1995 and had “the largest in-house development group in the industry”. CUC then merged into Cendant, whose accounting problems halved its share price, and at the end of 1998 Cendant agreed to sell its software business, Sierra and Blizzard included, for up to $985 million to Havas, a French media group that was itself a division of Vivendi. According to PC Player, Ken Williams had left in 1998. One of the new management’s first acts was to lay off 130 staff and close Sierra’s home studio. Scott Murphy, who had been working on Space Quest 7, was among those let go, on a day he called “Chainsaw Monday”, and the game was never finished.
Sierra’s name lived on as a publisher. It had some of its biggest hits in these years, among them Valve’s Half-Life. Vivendi, which already owned it through Havas, made Sierra a division of its games business in 2004. After Vivendi Games merged with Activision in 2008 to form Activision Blizzard, Sierra was closed. Activision revived the name as a publishing label in August 2014 and announced a new King’s Quest the same month.
Sources
- Sierra News Magazine (InterAction) vol. 3 no. 2, Summer 1990, Sierra’s tenth-anniversary issue: Ken Williams, “President’s Corner”, pp. 4 and 35 (Adventure on the teletype, the Apple II at Christmas 1979, Mystery House, Programma’s offer, publishing from the car, Softsel, “the first adventure game with graphics” and “the first adventure game in color”); John Williams, “Ten years: history of Sierra On-Line, Inc.”, pp. 6–12 (the launch in early 1980, distributing Mystery House, Coarsegold and employee 0001, Warren Schwader, the venture capital, the 1984 losses and lay-offs, the PCjr and Tandy, the timeline of releases, awards and moves, the failed 1987 share offering and the 1988 flotation, AGL, AGI and SCI, King’s Quest IV at the 1988 CES, 240 employees).
- The Sierra Newsletter (InterAction) vol. 2 no. 1, Spring 1989, pp. 20–21: SCI as an object-oriented language “similar to LISP”; the Actor, Prop and View classes; AGI used for King’s Quest I–III.
- The Sierra Newsletter (InterAction) vol. 2 no. 1, Spring 1989 and vol. 2 no. 2, 1989: Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy as the Two Guys from Andromeda; Hero’s Quest designer Lori Cole.
- InterAction, Holiday 1993: Jim Walls as designer of Police Quest 1 to 3.
- Computer Gaming World issue 2, January 1982, industry news (On-Line Systems), and issue 6, September 1982 (Sierra On-Line).
- K-Power vol. 1 no. 3, April 1984: King’s Quest at CES.
- START vol. 4 no. 8, March 1990, interview with Roberta Williams: SCI as “a virtual machine language” with a version for each machine.
- Electronic Games, October 1984, p. 39: King’s Quest “the first in a new generation of adventures”.
- Computer Gaming World issue 46, April 1988: Police Quest and Jim Walls’s 15 years with the California Highway Patrol; the warning label on Leisure Suit Larry.
- PC Review issue 7, May 1992: Leisure Suit Larry 5 advertisement (“the missing disks of Leisure Suit Larry IV”).
- Computer Gaming World issue 83, June 1991, pp. 44–45, report on the Computer Game Developers’ Conference: Ron Gilbert and Lori Cole on death in adventure games.
- GamePro issue 92, May 1996: Sierra’s merger with CUC International.
- Computer Gaming World issue 141, April 1996: CUC’s purchase of Sierra, and Sierra’s purchases of Papyrus and Impressions.
- Computer Gaming World issue 175, February 1999: Cendant’s agreement to sell Cendant Software, with Sierra and Blizzard, to Havas for $800 million to $985 million; Havas “a division of Vivendi SA”.
- PC Player (Germany), July 2000, pp. 85–88, “Firmenhistorie: Sierra”: Softporn Adventure and its advertisement; Roger Wilco; the move from parser to icons; Dynamix, Coktel, Impressions, Papyrus and Sublogic; Phantasmagoria and Gabriel Knight; Cendant and Havas; Ken Williams leaving in 1998; the 130 lay-offs and the closed studio; Space Quest 7 and “Chainsaw Monday”; Half-Life.
- Sierra On-Line advertisements, PC Zone issue 83, December 1999 (Bellevue, Washington).
- Wikipedia, “Sierra Entertainment” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): Vivendi, the 2004 reorganisation, the 2008 merger and closure, and the revival of the brand and the King’s Quest announcement in August 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Entertainment