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The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 4: Chainsaw Monday

In 1825, in Paris, France, a man named Charles-Louis Havas set up an agency to translate foreign news reports into French for the benefit of local newspapers. At that time, his country along with the rest of the Western world stood on the cusp of far-reaching changes. Over the next few decades, the railroad and the telegraph remade travel and communications in their image. This led in turn to the rise of consumerism, as exemplified by the opening of Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche, the world’s first big-box department store, in Paris in 1852. And with consumerism came mass-market advertising, a practice which was to a large extent invented in France.

The Havas Agency rode this wave of change adroitly. Charles-Louis Havas’s two sons, who took over the company after their father’s death, reoriented it toward advertising, making it into the dominant power in the field in France. Havas went public in 1879. During the twentieth century, it expanded into tourism and magazine and book publishing, and eventually into cable television, via Canal+, by far the most popular paid television channel in France from 1984 until the arrival of Netflix in that market in 2014.

The creation of Canal+ marked the point where Havas first became intertwined with another many-tendriled French conglomerate: the Compagnie Générale des Eaux, or CGE. The name translates to “The General Water Company.” As it would imply, CGE had gotten its start when modern plumbing was first spreading across France, all the way back in 1853. It later expanded into other types of urban service, from garbage collection to parking to public transportation. Veering still further out of its original lane, CGE invested enough into Canal+ to be given a 15-percent stake in the nascent channel in 1983, marking the start of a new era for the formerly staid provider of utility services. Over the next fifteen years, its growth outstripped that of Havas dramatically, as it became a major player in cable television, in film and television production, in telecommunications and wired and cellular telephony.

By 1997, CGE had acquired a 29.3-percent stake in Havas as well. In May of the following year, it completed the process of absorption. The new entity abandoned the anachronistic reference to water and became known as Vivendi, a far catchier name that can be roughly translated as “Of Life” or “About Life.” Having expanded by now to the point that it was running out of obvious growth opportunities inside France, it looked beyond the borders of its homeland. In the next few years, it would buy up everything from the Canadian beverage producer Seagram to the television arm of the American Universal Studios.

The same impulse to grow put the software arm of Cendant Corporation on Vivendi’s hit list just as soon as Henry Silverman, that troubled American company’s boss, made it clear that said division was on the market. For, of all sectors of media, gaming seemed set for the most explosive growth of all, and many powerful interests in France were eager for the country to grab a big chunk of that action. Indeed, the national government had made the opportunities presented by gaming something of a strategic priority. Such direct state patronage is less unusual in France than in many Western liberal democracies; even Canal+ had been created largely at the behest of, and using capital sourced by, the government. After the millennium, in the realm of games, public and private interests would combine to give France an outsize role. The days of the “French Touch” being the mark of games that were sometimes charmingly, sometimes infuriatingly off-kilter would fade into the past, as French publishers would come to stand behind some of the biggest mass-market hits in the field.

Seen through this prism, there can be no doubt about the main reason Vivendi chose to take Cendant’s games division off Henry Silverman’s hands: Blizzard Entertainment, whose games Warcraft 2Diablo, and Starcraft had combined with the Battle.net matchmaking service to become a literal modus vivendi for millions of loyal acolytes. For its part, Sierra was on the verge of scoring a massive, long overdue hit of its own with Half-Life, but that had not yet come to pass as negotiations were taking place. As matters currently stood, Sierra was merely the additional baggage which Vivendi had to accept in order to get its hands on Blizzard.

The deal was done with remarkable speed. On November 20, 1998 — one day after the release of Half-Life, four days before the release of King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, and eighteen days before that of Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire — it was announced that the now-former Cendant software division had become a new subsidiary of the Vivendi empire, under the name of Havas Interactive. The price? A cool $1 billion in cash — cash that was, needless to say, much-needed by the beleaguered Cendant. The current Cendant software head David Grenewetzki, who as far as the French financiers could see had done a pretty good job so far of cutting fat and improving efficiency, would be allowed to continue to do so as the first boss of Havas Interactive.

The folks in Oakhurst had been through such a roller-coaster ride already that they were by now almost numb to further surprises. First had come the acquisition by CUC and the sidelining of Ken Williams, who looked a lot less like a soulless fat cat in comparison to what came after him. Then the merger with HFS, then the shock and horror of the revelations of accounting fraud and the plummeting share price, which had cost some staffers dearly — especially the ones who had signed onto the plan to replace some of their salary with Cendant stock. Al Lowe of Leisure Suit Larry fame, for example, says that almost overnight he and his wife lost “the equivalent of a really nice home.” So, the news of this latest sale, to yet another company that no one had ever heard of, was greeted mostly with resigned shrugs. Everyone had long since learned just to take it day by day, to hope for the best and to try to ignore the little voice inside that was telling them that they probably ought to be expecting the worst.

For three months, sanguinity seemed justified; not much changed. Then came February 22, 1999.

The first sign the Oakhurst employees encountered that something was out of the ordinary on that Monday morning were a few Pinkerton Security vans that they saw parked in front of the building as they arrived at work. Not knowing what else to do, they shrugged and went about their usual start-of-the-week routines. An all-hands meeting was scheduled for that morning at the movie theater next door, the latest installment in a longstanding quarterly tradition of same. If anyone felt a premonition of danger — the mass layoff of 1994 had been announced at another of these meetings, at the same theater — no one voiced their concerns. Instead everyone shuffled in in the standard fashion, swapping stories about the weekend just passed and other inter-office scuttlebutt, a little impatient as always with this corporate rigamarole, eager to get back to their desks and get back to work making games.

They soon learned that they would not be making games in Oakhurst, today or ever again. The instant they had all taken their places, the axe fell — or rather the chainsaw, as it would later be dubbed by Scott Murphy, a designer of Sierra’s Space Quest series. The Oakhurst office was closing, the staffers were told matter-of-factly. While they were still struggling to process this piece of information, they were each handed an envelope with their name on it. Inside was a short note, telling them whether they had just lost their job entirely or whether they were being offered the opportunity to relocate to the Bellevue office, to continue making games there.

As of February of 1999, Yosemite Entertainment had three major projects in development; in an indubitable sign of the changing times in gaming, none was an adventure game. One was a “space simulator” in the mold of Wing Commander and TIE Fighter, based in this case on the Babylon 5 television series; one was an MMORPG, a far more ambitious successor to The Realm that was to take place in J.R.R. Tolkien’s world of Middle-earth; and one was a “tactical shooter” powered by the Unreal engine that was being created in consultation with a former Navy SEAL commander. The first two projects were to resume production in Bellevue; the last was cancelled outright.

When all of the support staff who are needed to run an office like this one were added to the chopping block, the number of people who lost their jobs that day came to almost 100 — almost two-thirds of the total number of Sierra employees remaining in Oakhurst. The ranks of the newly jobless also included a small team that had been working with Corey and Lori Ann Cole to make an expansion pack for Quest for Glory V, which was to add to the base game some form of the multiplayer support that had once been the whole thrust of the project as well as some new single-player content.

Sierra’s new management had left nothing to chance. While the meeting had been taking place at the theater, the Pinkerton hired guns had been changing the security codes that employees used to access the office building. The victims of the layoff were now led inside in small groups under armed guard, where they were permitted just a few minutes to clean their personal belongings out of their desks.

The shock of it all can hardly be overstated. No one had seen this coming; even Craig Alexander, the manager of Yosemite Entertainment, had been given no more than a few minutes warning on the morning of the layoff itself. With cataclysmic suddenness, the largest employer in Oakhurst had simply ceased to be. Come the day after Chainsaw Monday, the old office building and its previously bustling parking lot looked like a movie set after hours. The only people left to roam the halls were a few support personnel for The Realm, whose servers were to remain in Oakhurst for lack of anyplace better to put them while Havas Interactive sought a buyer for the building and if possible the MMORPG as well. (The Realm had just enough players that its new mother corporation hesitated to piss them off by shutting it down, but neither did Havas Interactive want to invest any real money in a virtual world built around the creaky old SCI engine.)

As an ironic capstone to the brutal proceedings in Oakhurst, both the Babylon 5 game and the Middle-earth MMORPG were themselves cancelled just six months later in Bellevue, as part of another round of “reorganizing.” The folks who had relocated to a big city 1000 miles further up the coast to continue these projects learned that the joke was on them, as they were left high and dry there in Seattle. The emerging new business model for Sierra was that of a publisher and distributor of games only, not an active developer of them. In other words, Sierra was deemed by Vivendi to be of further use only as a recognizable brand name, not as a coherent ongoing creative enterprise. Had he been paying attention, Henry Silverman, Wall Street’s king of outsourcing and branding, would surely have approved.

In the years that followed, surprisingly few of the prominent names who had built Sierra’s original brand, that of the biggest adventure-games studio on the planet, continued to work in the industry. What with the diminished state of the adventure game in general, the skill sets of people like them just weren’t so much in demand anymore.

Corey and Lori Ann Cole did find employment in the industry at least intermittently, but did so in roles that no longer got their names featured on box covers. Corey worked as a consultant on such unlikely projects as Barbie: Fashion Pack Games (to which he contributed a Space Invaders clone that replaced spaceships and laser guns with hearts and lipstick). Both Corey and Lori Ann worked on a virtual world called Explorati, which, had it ever come to fruition, might have been the missing link between Habitat and Second Life. Later, Corey worked on online-poker sites. Eventually, the Coles did come home again, to make Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, which is Quest for Glory VI in all but name, and the more modestly scaled but equally warm-hearted Summer Daze: Tilly’s Tale. Corey told me recently that he and Lori Ann have some other ideas in the pipeline that might come to fruition someday, but he also told me that they “are pushing 70, and spending more time on ourselves.” Which is more than fair enough, of course.

Embracing the spirit of the late 1990s, when you couldn’t toss a dead rat into the air without hitting five different dot.com startups, Ken Williams initially envisioned a second act for his career, as an Internet entrepreneur. He passed up a chance to get in on the ground floor with Jeff Bezos’s Amazon.com in favor of a venture of his own called TalkSpot, which aimed to bring talk radio online. Born, one senses, largely out of Ken’s longstanding infatuation with Rush Limbaugh, a hard-right AM-radio provocateur of the old school, TalkSpot can nevertheless be read as prescient if you squint at it just right, a harbinger of the podcasts that were still to come. But it was just a little bit too far out in front of the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure; almost everyone was still accessing the Internet over dial-up at the time, which made even audio-only streaming a well-nigh insurmountable challenge. An attempted pivot from being a public-facing provider of online talk radio to providing streaming services to other companies, under the name of WorldStream, couldn’t overcome this reality, and the company closed up shop — ironically, not all that long before the DSL lines that might have made it sustainable started to roll out across the country.

Then again, it may be that Ken Williams’s heart was never really in it. Realizing that he had achieved his lifelong dream of becoming rich — he had all the money that he, Roberta, and their children could ever possibly need — he didn’t become a third-time entrepreneur. Instead he and Roberta threw themselves into an active and enviable early retirement. They sailed a boat all over the world, blogging about their travels to a whole new audience who often knew nothing about their previous lives. “We somehow achieved a second fifteen minutes of fame as world cruisers and explorers,” writes Ken in his memoir, exaggerating only slightly.

In 2023, they made a belated return to game development, via a graphical remake of the game that had started it all, for them as for so many others: Will Crowther and Don Woods’s original Adventure. It struck many as an odd choice, given the rich well of beloved Sierra intellectual property from which they might have drawn instead, but it seemed that they wanted above all to pay tribute to the game that had first prompted them to create their seminal Mystery House all those years ago, and to create Sierra On-Line in order to sell it. Having accomplished that mission, they have no plans to make more games.

And as for little Oakhurst, California, the strangest place at which anyone ever decided to found a games company: it weathered the turbulence of Sierra’s departure surprisingly well in the end, as it had so many changes before. There was a brief flicker of hope that game development might again become a linchpin of the town’s economy when, about six months after Chainsaw Monday, the British publisher Codemasters bought Sierra’s old facility, along with The Realm and its servers and the rights to the Navy SEAL game that had been cancelled when the chainsaw fell. Codemasters tried to assemble a team in Oakhurst to complete the SEAL game, which would seem to have been as prescient as Ken Williams’s TalkSpot in its way, anticipating the craze for semi-realistic “tactical” shooters that would be ignited by Medal of Honor: Allied Assault in 2002. But most of the people who had once worked on the project had already left town, and Codemasters had trouble attracting more to such a rural location. The winds of corporate politics are fickle; within barely six months, the SEAL game was cancelled a second and final time, the Realm servers were finally moved out, and the now-empty building was put up for sale once again. These events marked the definitive end of game development in Oakhurst, barring the contracting jobs that the Coles did out of their house.

The loss was a serious blow to the local economy in the short term. But, luckily for Oakhurst, Yosemite National Park abides. After a brief-lived dip, the town started to grow again, thanks to the tourists who were now streaming through the “Gateway to Yosemite” in greater numbers than ever. Oakhurst’s population as of the 2020 American census was just shy of 6000 souls — twice the number counted by the 2000 census, when the community was still reeling from Sierra’s departure.

Today, then, Sierra On-Line’s sixteen-year stay in Oakhurst has gone down in local lore as just one more anecdote involving the eccentric outsiders who have always been drawn to the place. Still, among the hordes of families and hardcore hikers who pass through, one can sometimes spot a different breed of middle-aged tourist, who arrives brimming with nostalgia for a second-hand past he or she knew only through the pictures and articles in Sierra’s newsletters. Such is the nature of time. What is passed but remembered, if only by a few, becomes history.

Oakhurst in 2022. Life goes on…

I’d like to share with you a eulogy for Sierra — one that you may very well have seen before, written by someone far closer to all of this than I am. Josh Mandel was a writer and designer who worked at Sierra for several years. Just three days after Chainsaw Monday, he wrote the following.

On Monday, the last vestige of the original Sierra On-Line was laid to rest in Oakhurst, California. That branch, renamed “Yosemite Entertainment,” was shuttered on February 22nd, putting most of its 125-plus employees out of work.

You may not care for what Sierra has become since the days when dozens of unpretentious parser-driven graphic adventures flowed, seemingly effortlessly, out of Oakhurst. But there’s no denying that, back then, Sierra On-Line was the life’s blood of the adventure-game industry.

Maybe the games were a little more rough-hewn than those of its competitors — not that there were many competitors at that point. But Sierra kept adventure gamers happy and fed, gamers who would’ve otherwise starved to death on the arguably more polished, but frustratingly infrequent, releases of Lucasfilm Games (as they were once called).

Sierra alone grew the industry in other ways, too. It was Ken Williams who, almost single-handedly, created the market for PC sound hardware by vigorously educating the public [on] the AdLib card and, shortly thereafter, the breathtaking Roland MT-32. He supported those cards in style while other publishers wanted nothing to do with them. It was Corey and Lori Cole who invented the first true hybrid, replayable adventure/RPG. It was Christy Marx’s lump-in-the-throat ending to Conquests of Camelot that reminded us that not every computer game had to have a group hug at the end. It was Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy who made us want to kill off our onscreen alter ego, to see what inventive, gooey death had been anticipated for us. It was Roberta, before anyone else, who invented strong female heroines. It was Al Lowe, bringing up the rear (literally and figuratively) by creating Leisure Suit Larry, the most popular, pirated game of its decade. We knew this because we sold far more Larry hint books than we sold of the actual software.

It was the Sierra News Magazine (later InterAction) that let us feel like we knew the people making these games, that they were a family-run business, staffed by people who lived an isolated life, surrounding by idyllic, ageless beauty and creating games that were a labor of love. That was, at least for a while, an accurate picture. This was a family we wanted to feel a part of, for good reason, and people came from thousands of miles away to take a tour and see how real it all was…

Some may argue that Sierra lives on in Bellevue, Washington, where Al Lowe, Jane Jensen, Roberta Williams, Mark Seibert, and a handful of [other] Oakhurst refugees still labor diligently on games side-by-side with scores of newer talent. But games like King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity and Leisure Suit Larry 7 have a distinctly different flavor than the seat-of-the-pants, funny, touching adventures that Oakhurst once produced. They are commercial.

Invariably, in a company that grows the way Sierra grew, innovation gives way to emulation. Whereas Sierra’s management once strove to make it solid, profitable, and yet fun, they now strive to dominate other companies, force annual growth in the double digits, and (like so many other companies) cut jobs mercilessly to improve the bottom line and thrill the stockholders. Yet the Ghost of Sierra Past still walked the halls in Oakhurst. The rooms were adorned with the art of glories past, the artists and programmers who helped to create those glories were, in fair measure, still living and working there. Now that spirit has been exorcised by scrubbed, glad-handing executives who don’t know, or don’t care, what those artists and programmers could do when they were motivated and well-managed.

People, living and working closely together in the pursuit of shared joy, were what made Sierra games great. Thank you, Ken, for creating something utterly unique, something warm, fun, and beautiful. Damn you, Ken, for allowing others to tear it down.

Whether you were a Sierra fan or not, we are all diminished by the loss of history, talent, and continuity within the gaming industry. Rest in peace, Sierra On-Line.

The skeptical historian in me hastens to state that this eulogy is very sentimentalized; whatever else they may have been, Sierra’s games were always at least trying to be deeply commercial, as Ken Williams will happily tell you today if you ask him. On the other hand, though, it’s rather in the nature of eulogies to be sentimental, isn’t it? This one is not without plenty of wise truths as well. And among its truths is its willingness to acknowledge that Sierra’s games “were a little more rough-hewn than those of its competitors.”

I, for one, have definitely spent more time over the years complaining about the rough edges in Sierra’s adventure games than I have praising their strong points. I’ve occasionally been accused of ungraciousness in this regard, even of having it in personally for Ken and Roberta Williams. The latter has never been the case, but, looking back, I can understand why it might have seemed that way sometimes, especially in the early years of this site.

Throughout most of the 1980s, the yin and yang of adventure gaming were Infocom and Sierra, each manifesting a contrasting philosophy. As Ken Williams himself has put it, Infocom was “literary,” while Sierra was “mass-market.” One Infocom game looked exactly the same as any other; they were all made up of nothing but text, after all. But Sierra’s games were, right from the very start, the products of Ken’s “ten-foot rule”: meaning that they had to be so audiovisually striking that a shopper would notice them running on a demo machine from ten feet away and rush over to find out more. (It may seem impossible to imagine today that a game with graphics as rudimentary as those of, say, The Wizard and the Princess could have such an effect on anyone, but trust me when I say that, in a time when no other adventure game had any graphics at all, these graphics were more exciting than any ultra-HD wonder is to a jaded modern soul.) Infocom had to prioritize design and writing, because design and writing were all they had. Sierra had other charms with which to beguile their customers. It’s no great wonder that today, when those other charms have ceased to be so beguiling, Infocom’s games tend to hold up much better.

But I’m not here to play the part of an old Infocom fanboy with a bad case of sour grapes. (Whatever we can say about their respective games today, there’s no doubt which company won the fight for hearts and minds in the 1980s…) I actually think a comparison between the two is useful in another way. Infocom was always a collective enterprise, an amalgamation of equals that came into being behind an appropriately round conference table in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Strong personalities though the principals may have been, one cannot say that Infocom was ever Al Vezza’s company or Joel Berez’s company, nor Dave Lebling’s or Marc Blank’s. From first to last, it was a choir of voices, if sometimes a discordant one. Compare this to Sierra: there wasn’t ever an inch of daylight between that company and Ken and Roberta Williams. Sierra’s personality was theirs. Sierra’s strengths were theirs. And, yes, Sierra’s weaknesses, the same ones I’ve documented at so much length over the years, were theirs as well.

I’ll get to their strengths — no, really, I will, I promise — but permit me to dwell on their weaknesses just a little bit longer before I do so. I think that these mostly come down to one simple fact: that neither Ken nor Roberta Williams was ever really a gamer. Ken has admitted that the only Sierra game he ever sat down and played to completion for himself, the way that his customers did it, was SoftPorn — presumably because it was so short and easy (not to mention it being so in tune with where Ken’s head was at in the early 1980s). In his memoir, Ken writes that “to me, Sierra was a marketing company. Lots of people can design products, advertise products, and sell products. But what really lifted Sierra above the pack was our marketing.” Here we see his blasé attitude toward design laid out in stark black and white: “lots of people” can do it. A talent for marketing, it seems, is rarer, and thus apparently more precious. (As for the rest of that sentence: I’m afraid you’ll have to ask Ken how “marketing” is different from “advertising” and “selling…”)

Roberta has not made so explicit a statement on the subject, but it does strike me as telling that, when she was given her choice of any project in the world recently, she chose to remake Crowther and Woods’s Adventure. That game was, it would seem, a once-in-a-lifetime obsession for her.

Needless to say, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with not being a gamer; there are plenty of other hobbies in this world that are equally healthy and stimulating and satisfying, or quite possibly more so. Yet not being a gamer can become an issue when one is running a games company or designing games for a living. At some very fundamental level, neither Ken nor Roberta had any idea what it was like to experience the products Sierra made. And because they didn’t know this, they also didn’t know how important design is to that experience — didn’t understand that, while the ten-foot rule applies for only a limited window of time, writing and puzzles and systems are timeless. Infocom scheduled weekly lunches for everyone who wished to attend to discuss the nature of good and bad design at sometimes heated length, drafted documents full of guidelines about same, made design the cornerstone of their culture. As far as I can tell, discussions of this nature never took place at Sierra. Later, after Infocom was shuttered, LucasArts picked up the torch, publicizing Ron Gilbert’s famous manifesto on “Why Adventure Games Suck” — by “adventure games,” of course, he largely meant “Sierra adventure games” — and including a short description of its design philosophy in every single game manual. Again, such a chapter is unimaginable in a Sierra manual.

For, like everything else associated with the company, Sierra’s games reflected the personalities of Ken and Roberta Williams. They were better at the big picture than they were at the details; they were flashy, audacious, and technologically cutting-edge on the surface, and all too often badly flawed underneath. Those Sierra designers who were determined to make good games, by seeking the input of outside testers and following other best practices, had to swim against the tide of the company’s culture in order to do so. Not that many of them were willing or able to put in the effort when push came to shove, although I have no doubt that everyone had the best of intentions. The games did start to become a bit less egregiously unfair in the 1990s, by which time LucasArts’s crusade for “no deaths and no dead ends” had become enough of a cause célèbre to shame Sierra’s designers as well into ceasing to abuse their players so flagrantly. Nevertheless, even at this late date, Sierra’s games still tended to combine grand concepts with poor-to-middling execution at the level of the granular details. If I’m hard on them, this is the reason why: because they frustrate me to no end with the way they could have been so great, if only Ken Williams had instilled a modicum of process at his company to make them so.

Having said that, though, I have to admit as well that Ken and Roberta Williams are probably deserving of more praise than I’ve given them over the fifteen years I’ve been writing these histories; it’s not as if they were the only people in games with blind spots. Contrary to popular belief, Roberta was not the first female adventure-game designer — that honor goes to Alexis Adams, wife of Scott Adams, who beat her to the punch by a year — but she was by far the most prominent woman in the field of game design in general for the better part of two decades, an inspiration to countless other girls and women, some of whom are making games today because of her. That alone is more than enough to ensure her a respected place in gaming history.

Meanwhile Sierra itself was a beacon of diversity in an industry that sometimes seemed close to a mono-culture, the sole purview of a certain stripe of nerdy young white man with a sharply circumscribed range of cultural interests. The people behind Sierra’s most iconic games came from everywhere but the places and backgrounds you might expect. Al Lowe was a music teacher; Gano Haine was a social-studies teacher; Christy Marx was a cartoon scriptwriter; Jim Walls was a police officer; Jane Jensen and Lorelei Shannon were aspiring novelists; Mark Crowe was a visual artist; Scott Murphy was a short-order cook; Corey and Lori Ann Cole were newsletter editors and publishers and tabletop-RPG designers; Josh Mandel was a standup comedian; Roberta Williams, of course, was a homemaker. At one point in the early 1990s, fully half of Sierra’s active game-development projects were helmed by women. You would be hard-pressed to find a single one at any other studio.

This was the positive side of Ken Williams’s mass-market vision — the one which said that games were for everyone, and that they could be about absolutely anything. There was no gatekeeping at Sierra, in any sense of the word. For all of LucasArts’s thoughtfulness about design, it seldom strayed far from its comfort zone of cartoon-comedy graphic adventures. Sierra, by contrast, dared to be bold, thematically and aesthetically as well as technologically. I may have a long list of niggly complaints about a game like, say, Jane Jensen’s Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within, but I’ll never forget it either. Despite all of its infelicities, it dares to engage with aspects of life that are raw and tragic and real, giving rise to emotions in this player at least that are the opposite of trite. How many of its contemporaries from companies other than Sierra can say the same?

And as went the production side of the business, so went the reception side. Perhaps ironically because he wasn’t a gamer himself, perhaps just because one doesn’t get to be Walt Disney by selling to a niche audience, Ken understood that computer games had to become more accessible if they were ever to make a sustained impact beyond the core demographic of technically proficient young men. He strove mightily on multiple fronts to make this happen. For example, he put together easy-to-assemble “multimedia upgrade kits” for everyday computers, and made sure that Sierra’s software installers were the most user-friendly in the business, asking you for IRQ and DMA numbers only as a last resort. If some of his ideas about interactive movies as the future of mainstream entertainment proved a bit half-baked in the long run, other Sierra games like The Incredible Machine more directly anticipated the “Casual Revolution” to come. If his wide-angle vision of gaming seemed increasingly anachronistic in the latter 1990s, even if it was wrong-headed in a hundred particulars, the fact was that it would come roaring back and win the day in the broader strokes. His only real mistake was that of leaving the industry a little bit too early to be vindicated.

So, let us wave a fond farewell to Ken and Roberta Williams as they sail off into the sunset, and give them their full measure of absolution from the petty carping of critics like me as we do so. In every sense of the words, Ken and Roberta were pioneers and visionaries. Their absence from these histories will be keenly felt. Godspeed and bon voyage, you two. Your certainly made your presence felt while you were with us.



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Sources: The books Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Line by Ken Williams and Vivendi: A Key Player in Global Entertainment and Media by Philippe Bouquillion.

Online sources include “How Sierra was Captured, Then Killed, by a Massive Accounting Fraud” by Duncan Fyfe at Vice, “Chainsaw Monday (Sierra On-Line Shuts Down)” at Larry Laffer Dot Net, Ken Williams’s page of thoughts and rambles at Sierra Gamers, and an old TalkSpot interview with some of Sierra’s employees, done just after the second round of lay-offs hit Bellevue.

I also made use of the materials held in the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play. And once again I owe a debt of gratitude to Corey Cole for answering my questions about this period at his usual thoughtful length.

 

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The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 2: The Scandal

That’s the challenge: giving the public a formula they know and feel comfortable with, but making it different from anything they’ve seen or experienced before.

— Roberta Williams

Although Ken Williams left his office at Sierra On-Line for the last time on November 1, 1997, his wife Roberta Williams stayed on for another year, working on the eighth entry in her iconic King’s Quest series. King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity turned into the most protracted and tortured project of her long career.

Roberta had long since fallen into a pattern of alternating new King’s Quest games with other, original creations. Thus after Phantasmagoria shipped in the summer of 1995, it was time for her to begin to sculpt a King’s Quest VIII. Yet she was unusually slow to get going in earnest this time around; perhaps she was feeling some of the same sense of exhaustion that her husband was struggling with in a very different professional context. She tinkered with ideas for the better part of a year, during which the fateful acquisition of Sierra by CUC came to pass. By the time a team was finally assembled around her to make King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity in mid-1996, Sierra’s day-to-day operations were teetering on the cusp of enormous changes, not the least of which would be Ken Williams’s dramatically circumscribed authority. To further punctuate the sense of a new era in the offing, Mask of Eternity was to be the first King’s Quest game ever not to be made in Oakhurst, California; this one would come out of the new offices in Bellevue, Washington. Most members of the team assigned to it were new as well, with the most prominent exception being producer Mark Seibert, who had filled the same role on the hugely successful King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride and Phantasmagoria.

By this point, the lack of any subsequent point-and-click adventure games that had sold in similar numbers to Phantasmagoria, from Sierra or anyone else, was sufficient to raise concerns about the genre’s health in any thoughtful observer of the state of the industry. Roberta Williams apparently was such an observer, for it was she herself who decided to make Mask of Eternity different from all of the King’s Quest games that had come before, in order to better meet the desires of contemporary gamers as she understood them. Using Mark Seibert, who had played a lot more of the recent popular non-adventure games than she had, as something of a spirit guide to the new normal, she conceived a King’s Quest that would run in a real-time 3D engine, combining her usual focus on storytelling and puzzle-solving with some action elements. The broader goal would be to create a dynamic living world full of emergent potential, rather than another collection of set-piece puzzles linked together by semi-interactive conversations and non-interactive cutscenes. “We didn’t want to make it so you go here and solve a puzzle, then go there to solve a puzzle, then go to a puzzle somewhere else,” she told an early journalist on the scene. “What we really wanted to bring was that sense of going on an adventure, of going on a quest. It’s not just a word in the title. We want you to feel like you’re really doing it.”

Taken in the abstract, her understanding of what she needed to do in order to keep King’s Quest relevant wasn’t by any means completely misguided. Yet circumstances almost immediately began to militate against it cohering into a solid, playable game. SCI, the venerable adventure engine that had powered the last four King’s Quest games and Phantasmagoria, along with dozens of other products from Sierra, was totally unsuited for this one. To replace it, the team wound up borrowing a 3D engine that had been developed by Sierra’s subsidiary Dynamix with flight simulators in mind. They never were able to fully wrestle it into a form suitable for this application; the finished game remains a festival of jank, sporting walls that you can literally walk right through if you hit them just right.

Roberta Williams felt her own authority being gradually undermined as the new order at Sierra, now merely one part of the software arm of CUC, became a fact of life. In the past, she had enjoyed privileges that were granted to none of Sierra’s other designers — such were the benefits of sleeping with the boss, as she herself sometimes joked. She had worked from home most days, emailing her design documents to the people entrusted with implementing them and then supervising their labor only loosely from afar. But she now found that her ability to set her own working hours and location and even to make fundamental decisions about her own game was waning in tandem with her husband’s fading star. “Suddenly finding that she was expected to build another bestselling King’s Quest game, but that the developers didn’t really have to do what she said, was something Roberta had never had to face,” writes Ken in his memoir. “There were days when she would come home crying.”

In the last week of 1996, Blizzard Entertainment, that rising star of the CUC software arm, shipped Diablo to instant, smashing success. A decree came down from above to make Mask of Eternity more like Diablo, by adding extensive monster-killing and other CRPG-like elements to the design. Roberta Williams was utterly out of her depth. Increasingly, she felt like a third wheel on her own bicycle. And yet there was no other confident and empowered voice and vision to replace hers, just a babble of opinions — hers among them, of course — trying to arrive at some sort of consensus on every new question that came up. Whatever his other faults as an administrator and organizer, Ken Williams had never allowed this to happen. His rule had always been that there was one lead designer on each project, and that person called the shots. If the lead designer “wanted something done, whether the team agreed or not, it didn’t matter. It’s her game and her career on the line.” Now, though, this philosophy no longer held sway at Sierra, even as there was no coherent alternative one to take its place.

So, the Mask of Eternity team bumbled along with no clear ship date in sight, more a mob of wayward peasants than a well-honed army. In the meantime, there were more big changes at the corporate level: as we learned in the last article, the merger of CUC with HFS was announced in May of 1997. It was to be consummated that December, with the conjoined corporation taking the name of “Cendant,” from the Latin root that has given us the verb “to ascend” in English. The name was chosen by Walter Forbes, reflecting the conceit of a culture-vulture sophisticate in which he so loved to cloak himself. For his part, Henry Silverman of HFS, who was all about facts and figures and bottom lines, thought one name was as good as another, as long as his marketing people told him it would pass muster on Wall Street.

Well before the merger was completed, there were signs that this shotgun marriage of opposites was going to be a more challenging relationship than either had anticipated. Silverman ran a tight, focused ship, while Forbes’s board of directors and senior managers were, as Ken Williams had experienced firsthand, more inclined to discuss their golf handicaps than matters of vital interest to the company. “They were like children playing at business,” says one of Silverman’s top lieutenants of his counterparts from CUC. Growing concerned about the overall competence level and work ethic of Forbes himself, Silverman suggested to him in November of 1997, before the merger was even completed, that it might be best if he, Silverman, stayed on a little longer as CEO instead of turning over that position on January 1, 2000, as stipulated in the merger contract.

This was not music to Forbes’s ears. He had already been complaining for a while about Silverman’s high-handed style — about the way he was treating CUC as if it was being bought rather than being an equal partner in a merger — and he didn’t even deign to reply to this latest proof of his allegations. The relationship between the two executives grew so poisonous that Silverman hired a private detective to investigate rumors of womanizing and sexual harassment on Forbes’s part, hoping to find some leverage to use against him. Much to his disappointment, the detective failed to dig up enough actionable dirt.

Again, it should be remembered that all of this jockeying was taking place before the merger had even come off. Given the warning signs that were blinking red everywhere by November, one does wonder why Henry Silverman went through with the deal. The best answer anyone has come up with is that he was a creature of the stock market right down to his bones, and both companies’ stock prices had been sent soaring by the news of the merger. To call it off now would cause the stock to crater just as quickly.

So, the marriage was consummated on schedule, with Henry Silverman as the first CEO of the new Cendant Corporation. By virtue of his job title, he ought to have had access to every aspect of the former CUC’s operations and finances. Yet he ran into a baffling resistance from Forbes’s middle managers whenever he tried to dig beneath the surface. When he called on Forbes directly to intercede and get him the numbers he wanted, Forbes said blithely that he would prefer to preserve the “financial-reporting autonomy” of his half of the company. Silverman, whose temper could be volcanic, had to expend great effort to keep it under control now. He explained to his new chairman of the board, as clearly and calmly as he could, that that wasn’t how a merger worked. Forbes seemed to accept this. And yet at the end of February, more than two months after the merger had ostensibly been effected, Silverman still had no clear figures on his desk. His accountants were now telling him that, if these didn’t surface soon, they would be unable to make a legally mandated filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Silverman would have to be a far less perceptive businessman than he was not to smell a rat of considerable proportions.

On March 6, 1998, he dispatched his chief accounting officer Scott Forbes — no relation to Walter — from Cendant’s new headquarters in Manhattan to CUC’s old ones in Stamford, Connecticut. The accountant’s orders were to get the numbers he needed by any means necessary, even if it required getting Silverman himself to come onto the speakerphone and threaten somebody’s job. He met with E. Kirk Shelton, Walter Forbes’s right-hand man. Caving at last, Shelton sheepishly explained that there was a little problem — only a little one, mind you — with the former CUC’s books. Its actual revenues during its last year had come in about $165 million under the figures it had reported. While Scott Forbes was still shaking his head at this piece of news, wondering if he had heard correctly, Shelton rushed to add that the problem was easily fixable, by reporting equity from the merger as operating revenue. “We want you to help us figure out how to creatively do this,” said Shelton, as if committing accounting fraud was just another day at the office — which to him it was, as would soon become all too clear.

Henry Silverman was predictably livid when Scott Forbes told him what had just transpired in Connecticut. He tried to contact Walter Forbes, but learned that that gentleman of leisure was on vacation in Hawaii and wasn’t receiving calls. Walter did eventually deign to send an email in response to the CEO’s increasingly furious queries, saying that they would get together and sort everything out when he came home in a few weeks. Like Shelton, he seemed to believe that the discovery of a $165 million shortfall was no big deal — or else he had made a strategic decision to act as if it was.

Not realizing that he would soon be wishing that $165 million was the full extent of the discrepancy in CUC’s books, Silverman said nothing publicly, hoping this could all still be swept under the rug as the mere teething problems that always accompany big mergers, even as he privately vowed to be rid of Walter Forbes by hook or by crook. “I can’t have people working with me that lie to me!” he raged.

Rather belying his own attempt to treat CUC’s accounting irregularities as No Big Deal, Walter Forbes, upon his return from Hawaii, refused to meet with Silverman at the headquarters of the company that they supposedly ran together. Instead he insisted that Silverman and his closest lieutenants talk with him and his on neutral ground, in a Manhattan hotel suite. This meeting took place on April 1, which must have struck Silverman as an appropriate date, seeing how Forbes had fooled him into merging their companies. Brushing off all of Forbes’s efforts at preliminary light conversation, Silverman got straight to the point — or rather to the ultimatum. He was prepared, he said, to look for a way to keep CUC’s shortfall from becoming public and placing Forbes in serious legal jeopardy. He would do this not for Forbes’s sake — for Forbes, he made it clear, he had nothing but contempt — but for that of Cendant’s employees and shareholders. As a condition, though, Forbes, Skelton, and the rest of the old CUC inner circle would have to open their books to him at long last — full transparency across the board. Then they would need to leave the company, just as soon as the necessary severance contracts and press releases could be crafted. According to most reports of the meeting, Forbes and his people agreed to this.

Having vented his rage on these eminently deserving targets, Silverman left the hotel suite feeling cautiously optimistic. The shortfall was ugly, but it shouldn’t be enough to sink the business as a whole. And the upshot of the whole affair was that he would get Walter Forbes and rest of the CUC amateurs out of his hair once and for all. Silverman ordered his accountants to conduct a thorough audit of CUC’s books, to provide him at last with that which he had been seeking for so long, the same thing that Ken Williams had sought much more lackadaisically before him: a proper picture of what exactly CUC did, how it did it, and where its money was coming from and going to. He gave them two weeks.

The day of reckoning was April 15, 1998. Silverman might have suspected the worst when he saw that his own people had brought two mid-level CUC accountants with them, and insisted that they give the presentation, as if afraid of becoming collateral damage of the CEO’s temper. Their fear was thoroughly understandable. For what was revealed on that day was a tale of fraud on a scale literally unprecedented in the history of American business. Over the past three years alone, CUC had conjured out of thin air more than half a billion dollars in revenue that had never actually existed in the real world. To Walter Forbes, business had been a shell game. Now you see it, now you don’t.

CUC’s long tradition of financial malfeasance had apparently begun, as these things so often do, with dubious short-term measures that were intended merely to grease the wheels of the company’s legitimate operations as they passed from a slow-moving present to a doubtless supersonic future. Already before the end of the 1980s, CUC had taken to booking pledged membership fees — fees that would be realized only if the members in question didn’t cancel, which they frequently did — as guaranteed revenues at the start of each fiscal year. More and more such schemes came into play as Walter Forbes and his cronies fell further and further down the slippery slope of fraud. When a new fiscal year began, they would figure out how much money they needed to have made during the last one to slightly outperform Wall Street’s expectations, then fiddle with the books appropriately. Jerry Bowerman of Sierra, in other words, had been onto something when he pointed out to Ken Williams how weirdly consistent CUC’s revenue growth had been for years and years. “That’s categorically impossible,” he had said. “Does not happen.”

Except, that is, in the case of fraud. The scope of the malfeasance was breathtaking, permeating every layer of the company, as later described by the forensic accountant Ron Rimkus.

According to later testimony by the company and the SEC, CUC managers would analyze the difference between actual financial results and the estimates put out by Wall Street analysts at the end of each quarter. They would then target specific aspects of the business to adjust in order to inflate earnings. After determining the best areas to change, the managers would then instruct others in the company hierarchy to adjust the various accounts — thus creating a false income statement and balance sheet. Their methods included under-funding reserves, accelerating recognition of revenues, deferring expenses, and drawing money from a merger account to boost income. After lower-level managers made the accounting changes to the financials, the cycle would be completed by adjusting the top line of quarterly changes and, subsequently, making back-dated journal entries at the division level to get the general ledger to balance. CUC’s leadership was able to hide the irregularities through misrepresented accounting entries, often moving certain transactions off the books. For a company of this size to maintain two sets of books requires a widespread internal effort to produce the second set of books so the company can present a blend of truth and fiction to the auditor without getting caught.

Eventually, CUC started to run out of internal revenue streams to which it could apply its portfolio of tricks. It was at this point that Walter Forbes began aggressively buying up other companies, among them Sierra On-Line and Davidson and Associates. These transactions were always conducted in stocks, never cash. The fraud that followed depended on the concept of the “merger reserve,” meaning the cash profits and assets that the acquired company brought with it into the new relationship. CUC reported this reserve as operating income for the parent company. In order to keep the hamster wheel spinning, of course, CUC had to keep buying more companies with the funny money it had “earned” from its last round of acquisitions. Underneath his unruffled exterior, Walter Forbes had been paddling as furiously as a duck on a placid pond.

But there had to come an end point, when neither the internal shenanigans nor the acquisitions could continue to paper over the discrepancy between the money CUC said it was making and the money it was really making. This limit point was looming by 1997. And this was what had set Walter Forbes down at a table with Henry Silverman, to negotiate a merger on a whole different scale from the acquisitions he had carried out to date. That said, it’s hard to identify what his real endgame in all of this actually was. He had to know that the fraud would come to light soon after the merger was consummated, and even he could hardly have been delusional enough to believe that Silverman would be willing and able to cover it up and let bygones be bygones. We can only conclude that chicanery had become such a way of life that the deal was worth it to him just to keep the wheel spinning for a few more months. When you get down to it, everything he and his people had done before negotiating the merger had been equally short-term. It was just a question of surviving and continuing to play the rich and successful businessman for today. Tomorrow could be dealt with when it came.

For once, even Henry Silverman was rendered speechless when he was told all of this about the man to whom he had shackled himself. After he picked his jaw up off the floor of his office, his analytical mind went to work. He knew right away that there could be no attempt to hide, minimize, or excuse this fraud; to do so would be to run the risk that the legal authorities would suspect that he and his people were also complicit in it in one way or another. The only way to save Cendant, and with it his own reputation, was to get out in front of the scandal before it broke on its own. He prepared a press release, to be sent out just after the markets closed on that very day. It spoke vaguely of “accounting irregularities” that had been perpetrated by “certain members of the former CUC management,” then announced matter-of-factly that the latter company’s earnings for 1997 would have to be adjusted — reduced, that is — by $165 million immediately, with more such adjustments very likely to come later. Having fired off this bombshell, Henry Silverman went home to get a good night’s sleep, knowing the storm that would break over his head when the next day’s trading began.

The tempest was as violent as he had anticipated, if not worse. Almost 110 million Cendant shares were traded that day, setting a Wall Street record. The stock price plunged from $36 to $19, reducing the company’s market cap by $14 billion. The first three shareholder lawsuits had already been filed before the trading day was over. In the weeks that followed, Cendant adjusted the figure of $165 million to $260 million in missing revenue for 1997 alone, with yet more years full of “irregularities” still craving investigation. Within six months, the stock price would be down to $9, the shareholder lawsuits numbering more than 70.

With characteristic brazenness, Walter Forbes contended that he had known nothing of the fraud committed on his watch — a claim of innocence that was, even if believed, as damning in its way as a confession, what with the degree of incompetence and negligence it would have to reveal. Nevertheless, forgetting what had been discussed in that Manhattan hotel suite on April 1, he fought to stay on as the current chairman of the board and the CEO in waiting of Cendant. He urged stonewalling opacity to the rest of the board as an alternative to Silverman’s strategy of transparency. The ruthless Wall Street money man thus found himself cast in the unwonted role of Cendant’s voice of conscience. “To urge me, as you seem to do, to not properly portray accurate information about our businesses,” wrote Silverman to Forbes in a letter (“I had difficulty looking at him” face to face, he admits), “appears to be of similar ilk to the conduct that brought us to this situation. I will not do that.”

Silverman didn’t manage to force Forbes out once and for all until July of 1998. When Forbes did leave, he took with him ten members of his board (good riddance, thought Silverman!) and a $47.5 million severance check. Whatever the long-term future held for Walter Forbes, he would have no problem continuing to enjoy his current lifestyle for the time being.

While Forbes was doing so, Henry Silverman rolled up his sleeves and set to work repairing the damage the disastrous merger had done to his own, legitimately profitable company. It was a daunting task, but it would prove not to be an impossible one. Hewing still to his strategy of powering through the heart of scandal so as to put it behind him as quickly as possible, Silverman agreed to shell out $2.83 billion in December of 1999 to settle the various shareholder lawsuits. The fact that Cendant, the name now associated with the biggest accounting scandal in American business history, was almost unknown to the American public in any other context, being hidden behind a welter of other brand names that they did know well, was an immeasurable aid to its survival; few consumers made any mental connection to the scandal when they booked a room at a Days Inn or rented a car from Avis. Indeed, most of those rental-car, hotel, and real-estate franchises which Cendant administered were still doing pretty darn well out there in the real world. For all of its difficulties, then, Cendant still had real money coming in, enough to offset the missing funny money of CUC over the long arc of time. It would survive and even expand its franchising reach well into the new millennium. In 2005, it voluntarily broke itself up into four separate companies to better service its increasingly diverse portfolio of brands. Henry Silverman, the first, last, and only CEO of Cendant, walked away from that culmination of fifteen years of work with a cool $250 million. Seen from this perspective, the CUC merger seemed like little more than a bump in the road.

As for Walter Forbes: the pace of criminal law for white-collar offenders like him is regrettably slow in the United States, but, in some cases at least, some form of justice is served in the end. After eight years of legal wrangling, he was convicted of conspiracy to defraud and two counts of submitting false reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission in October of 2006. (E. Kirk Shelton had been found guilty of a similar collection of charges a year earlier.) Forbes was sentenced to twelve years in prison and $3.28 billion in fines and restitution — fines which, needless to say, nobody expected him to ever be able to pay. By the time he was released from prison in July of 2018, the financial scandal that had made him and CUC infamous for a while had been all but forgotten, eclipsed by even bigger ones like the collapse of Enron and the machinations of Bernie Madoff. As far as I know, he is still alive today. If you asked the current 82-year-old Walter Forbes about his history, and if he happened to be in an honest mood when you did so, perhaps he would tell you that his halcyon decades as a jet-setting titan of industry were worth the twelve years of his life he had had to spend in prison to pay for them. He booked his revenue well ahead of his debt to society, just the way CUC always did it.



The infamous merger between CUC and HFS was actually a brilliant stroke of luck for the former Sierra On-line. For if that deal hadn’t gone through, CUC would almost certainly have crashed and burned at some point during late 1997 or early 1998, with no Henry Silverman to hand to clean up the mess. Blizzard Entertainment was doing so well by then that someone would probably have found a way to scoop it out of the wreckage, but Sierra, which could boast of no similar run of recent hits — Ken Williams’s parting gift to his old company of Half-Life wouldn’t be released until November of 1998 — might very well have been permanently buried under the rubble.

As it was, Silverman had no long-term interest in maintaining the software arm of Cendant. For him, games studios and publishers were a distraction from Cendant’s core business, to be unloaded as quickly as possible. To accomplish this, he replaced the rather clueless Chris McLeod — yet another legacy of Walter Forbes whom he couldn’t be rid of fast enough — with a well-respected games-industry executive named David Grenewetzki, whose last job had been with the publisher Accolade. While Blizzard was obviously doing just fine as it was, Grenewetzki’s brief when it came to Sierra and the rest of the software arm was to trim the fat, to finish and ship whatever was reasonably far along and worth the effort, and to cancel whatever was not, all in order to make this superfluous part of Cendant look as attractive as possible to potential buyers. If he did a good enough job that a buyer wanted to keep him on afterward, more power to him.

By this point, King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity had been dawdling along without any firm sense of direction for some eighteen months. Grenewetzki ordered Roberta Williams, Mark Siebert, and the rest of their unruly crew to kick it into gear and get the game done in time for Christmas, assigning them a new set of minders to settle their disputes and make sure they met their milestones. These were effective enough: the game shipped on November 24, 1998. Roberta Williams was largely missing in action during the last few months, choosing to join her husband on a vacation to France while the rest of the team was crunching.

Playing the game today puts me in mind of Douglas Adams’s description of an aye-aye lemur: “a very strange-looking creature that seems to have been assembled from bits of other animals.” Or perhaps the old joke about a camel being a horse that was designed by a committee is more apropos. Collaboration, feedback, and testing are of incalculable importance in any kind of game development, mind you; in fact, I would argue that one of the biggest problems with virtually all of Roberta Williams’s earlier games was that she didn’t engage in enough of these things. Yet a game also needs to have a firm sense of its own identity, which usually translates into having a decisive final arbiter in charge of it. Mask of Eternity all too clearly didn’t have that; neither Roberta nor anyone else was allowed to fill that role. In the absence of an empowered lead designer, Mask of Eternity became a game of bits, a collection of disparate parts that clash more often than they gel.

This strange-looking digital creature that was assembled from bits of other popular games sports the acrobatic challenges of Tomb Raider, the ultra-violent action of DOOM and Quake, the CRPG-lite trappings of Diablo, and even from time to time the puzzle-solving of a traditional King’s Quest, all of it implemented more or less badly. The floating camera is an especial pain, requiring constant fiddly adjustments that break up whatever sense of flow the rest of the game permits you to establish. The writing veers all over the place, from Roberta Williams’s trademark fairy-tale whimsy to adolescent gross-out humor that wouldn’t have felt out of place in Duke Nukem 3D. The dialog is delivered for some reason in a pseudo-Shakespearian diction, all “thee” and “thou” and “by your leave, milady,” read by dulcet-toned British voice actors who clearly have no idea what the characters they’re playing are on about and don’t much care. The game is very hard to connect with King’s Quest at all for long periods, until someone seems suddenly to remember the name on the box and throws in a few gratuitous references to King Grahame’s earlier adventures or the history of Castle Daventry. I’m not the best person to wax outraged over all the ways that Mask of Eternity betrays its lineage, given that I’m the farthest thing from a hardcore fan of King’s Quest in general. Yet even I can see why so many gamers who are much more invested in the series than I am consider this, its final official entry prior to a brief-lived and almost equally underwhelming 2015 revival, such an insult to everything that came before.

As is the case with so many such Frankenstein’s monsters, it’s hard to figure out just whom Mask of Eternity was supposed to be for. The series’s usual pool of players — who tended to skew younger and to include more women and girls than was the norm even for the adventure genre in general — would be put off the first time they punched a monster in the face and saw its head fly off in a shower of blood and gore. And yet the demographic that enjoyed more violent and visceral games would be equally put off by the harsh reality that Mask of Eternity just wasn’t a very good action game long before they came across the first convoluted adventure-style puzzle to cement their indifference. You can’t be all things to all people — especially not with all-around execution as poor as this.

If anything, reviewers were kinder to the game than it deserved. Computer Gaming World magazine gave it four out of five stars, whilst admitting that it “required an open mind” and that “the old-school puzzles may frustrate newbies, while the veterans may be annoyed at the jumping and the combat.”[1]Reviewer Thierry Nguyen seemed not to have played any game since the early 1980s. “If you wanted to pull a switch in an earlier game,” he wrote, “you probably would have typed, ‘push box,’ then ‘get on box,’ and finally ‘pull switch.’ Here, you have to literally push the box, jump on top of it, and look up to pull the switch.” What a revelation! The website GameSpot called it “enjoyable” but “occasionally maddening”: “Sierra should be applauded for trying something new, even if its reach somewhat exceeds its grasp.”

But gamers weren’t buying such prevarications, and didn’t buy many copies of Mask of Eternity. Its commercial failure killed the longest-running series in the adventure genre as dead as one of its pixelated goblins. It marked the final nail in the coffin as well of Roberta Williams’s tenure as the “Queen of Adventure Games.” She wouldn’t design another game for a quarter of a century. The times, they were a-changing.


Sierra’s decision to drop the Roman numeral from the eighth King’s Quest game is indicative of the confused, have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too quality of all of its messaging around Mask of Eternity. The logic was that the new generation of gamers Sierra was hoping to attract would be intimidated by its being the eighth game in a series, might even feel they shouldn’t bother with it if they hadn’t played the previous seven. But then, if you are so concerned about reaching these people, why call it a King’s Quest game at all? The only cachet that brand might have held for most of them was the negative cachet of the “kiddie games” their moms or sisters used to play.

Mask of Eternity’s hero Connor looks like he could break Sir Grahame or any of the other protagonists from the first seven King’s Quest games in two without straining his tree-trunk-sized arms.

This level — err, area — is Egyptian-themed. What does this have to do with King’s Quest? Beats me… but Stargate SG-1 was popular on television at the time. Got to tick those boxes…

“Oh, great, another jumping challenge! I love those, especially with these extra clunky controls!” said no player of Mask of Eternity ever.



Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.


Sources: The books Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Line by Ken Williams, Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks & Fraud in Financial Reports by Howard Schilit, Stay Awhile and Listen, Book II: Heaven, Hell, and Secret Cow Levels by David L. Craddock, Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay, and Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine. Wired of November 1997; New York Times of May 27 1997, July 4 1998, July 5 1998, and June 16 2000; Wall Street Journal of July 29 1998; Fortune of November 1998; Next Generation of June 1997; Sierra’s customer magazine InterAction of Fall 1996, Holiday 1996, and Fall 1997; Computer Gaming World of April 1999.

Online sources include “How Sierra was Captured, Then Killed, by a Massive Accounting Fraud” by Duncan Fyfe at Vice, Ron Rimkus’s analysis of the CUC/Cendant debacle for the CFA Institute, “A Pathological Probe of a Pool of Pervasive Perversion” by Abraham J. Briloff of Baruch College, Forbes’s report of Walter Forbes’s sentencing, and the vintage GameSpot review of King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity.

I also made use of the materials held in the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play.

Where to Get It: King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity is available as a digital purchase at GOG.com, packaged together with the more fondly remembered King’s Quest VII: The Princeless Bride.

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 Reviewer Thierry Nguyen seemed not to have played any game since the early 1980s. “If you wanted to pull a switch in an earlier game,” he wrote, “you probably would have typed, ‘push box,’ then ‘get on box,’ and finally ‘pull switch.’ Here, you have to literally push the box, jump on top of it, and look up to pull the switch.” What a revelation!
 
 

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The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisition

I feel very comfortable working in a company where you can’t touch anything.

— Walter Forbes

At the beginning of 1996, Sierra On-Line was still basking in the success of the previous summer’s Phantasmagoria, the best-selling game it had ever published. With revenues of $158.1 million and profits of $16 million in 1995, the company was bigger and richer than it had ever been. In light of all this, absolutely nobody anticipated the press release that went out from Sierra’s new headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, on February 20. It announced that Sierra would soon “merge with CUC International, Inc., a technology-driven retail and membership-services company that provides access to travel, shopping, auto, dining, home-improvement, financial, and other services to 40 million consumers worldwide. Sierra stockholders will receive 1.225 shares of CUC common stock for each share of Sierra common stock. The transaction is valued at approximately $1.06 billion. The merger is subject to stockholder approval and other customary closing conditions.”

As this bombshell filtered down to the gaming sites that were popping up all over the young Web, and eventually to the laggardly print magazines, one question was first on the lips of every gamer who read about it. Just who or what was this CUC International anyway? Or, to frame the question differently: if CUC was such a big wheel, why had no one ever heard of it, and why did CUC itself seem to have such a hard time explaining what it actually did?

Time would show the answers to both of those questions to be more complicated and fraught than anyone could have expected. Still, it was clear from the outset that the path to understanding must pass through CUC’s CEO, a sprightly, dapper-looking man of business named Walter Forbes. This particular Forbes was not a member of the wealthy family who owned and operated Forbes magazine, one of the business and investment world’s primary journals of record. That fact notwithstanding, he had been born into decidedly privileged circumstances, and would certainly not have looked out of place with that other Forbes family at a blue-blood country club. Walter Forbes was a titan of industry straight out of Central Casting, from his artfully arranged salt-and-pepper coiffure to the gleaming Gucci loafers he donned on “casual” days. He was as convincing a figure as has ever walked into a corporate boardroom. In a milieu where looking the part of a General Patton of business was a prerequisite to joining the war for hearts, minds, and wallets, Forbes had the role down pat. With a guy like this at its head, how could CUC be anything but amazing? And how could little Sierra count itself anything but fortunate to become a part of his burgeoning empire?

As Forbes himself told the story to a wide-eyed journalist from Wired magazine in 1997, it had all begun for him back in 1973, when, having recently graduated from Harvard Business School, he was eating dinner one evening with some friends and some of his former professors. Somehow the discussion turned to the future of shopping. “Wouldn’t it be neat if we could bypass stores and send products from the manufacturer to the home, and people would use computers to shop?” Forbes recalled “someone” at the table saying. “Everyone forgot about what we talked about that night. Except me.”

Forbes envisioned a scenario in which brick-and-mortar retailers, those traditional middlemen of the chain of commerce, would be replaced by digital storefronts operated by his own company, which was founded in 1973 under the name of Comp-U-Card. According to his own testimony, he mooted various impractical schemes for priming the e-commerce pump before the technology of telecommunications finally showed signs of catching up with at least some of his aspirations circa 1979, the year that the pre-Web commercial online services The Source and CompuServe made their debut. Now favoring the acronym CUC over the “Comp-U-Card” appellation — needless to say, nobody would rush to embrace that name today; the evolution of language can be a dangerous thing for corporate branders — Forbes took his company public in 1983, with an IPO that came in at $100 million. His business plan at the time, at least as he explained it fourteen years later, rings almost eerily prescient.

Manufacturers would simply send information about their products to [Forbes’s] database company, which would aggregate the data, organize it, and then present it to consumers in an engaging way. When a shopper ordered something, the manufacturer would be notified to ship it directly to the consumer’s home. Since no retailer would be involved, the customer would simply pay the wholesale price, plus shipping charges. The database company would make almost no money on the transactions. Rather, it would make its money by charging the consumer a flat annual membership fee — typically $49 — for access to the data and the chance to buy at such low prices.

Apart from a few details here and there, this is the way that Amazon, the 800-pound gorilla of modern online retail, operates today, right down to the “buyers club” where it makes most of its real money.

But here’s where the waters surrounding Walter Forbes and CUC start to get muddy. (I do hope you packed your diving goggles, because there are a lot of such waters ahead.) For the first ten years after the IPO, CUC actually took very little in the way of concrete steps in pursuit of the proto-Amazonian dream that Forbes had supposedly been nursing since 1973. Instead it administered offline shopping clubs that were marketed via bulk-rate post and telephone cold-calling. This was a sector of the consumer economy that thrived mostly on fine print and the failure of its often elderly customers to do their due diligence, being just one step removed from timeshares on the continuum of shady business models that never turn out to deliver quite what their customers think they are getting; in fact, timeshares soon became a part of CUC’s portfolio too. CUC sold its shopping clubs and other services as turnkey packages that could be purchased and branded by other corporations, thus partially explaining why so few people had ever heard of the company even fourteen years after its IPO. It wasn’t above using guile to retain customers, such as quietly signing them up for automatic recurring billing plans — charges that, it hoped, some portion of its customers who thought they were just making a one-time payment would fail to notice on their credit-card statements. Even the fawning profile in Wired had to acknowledge how close to the ethical edge CUC was prepared to fly.

If a customer takes the trouble to call and quit, the CUC telephone operator goes into what any football fan would recognize as a prevent defense. The operator frantically starts explaining the value of the service, then often sacrifices a $20 coupon or check as a bribe to stick around. They will give up ground, but [will] do anything to keep you from reaching that goal line.

As late as the year that CUC acquired Sierra On-Line, it was the offline shopping clubs that were still the heart of its revenue stream, the subject that its annual report for the year chose to open with and to return to again and again.

CUC International is a leading technology-driven, membership-based consumer services company, providing approximately 66.3 million members with access to a variety of goods and services. The Company provides these services as individual, wholesale, or discount program memberships. These memberships include such components as shopping, travel, auto, dining, home improvement, lifestyle, vacation-exchange [i.e., timeshares], credit-card and checking-account enhancement packages, financial products and discount programs. The Company also administers insurance-package programs which are generally combined with discount shopping and travel for credit-union members, distributes welcoming packages which provide new homeowners with discounts for local merchants, and provides travelers with value-added tax refunds. The Company believes it is the leading provider of membership-based consumer services of these types in the United States.

The Company solicits members for many of its programs by direct marketing and by using a direct sales force calling on financial institutions, fund-raising charitable institutions and associations…

The Company offers Shoppers Advantage, Travelers Advantage, AutoVantage, Dinner on Us Club, PrivacyGuard, Buyers Advantage, Credit Card Guardian, and other membership services. These benefits are offered as individual memberships, as components of wholesale membership enhancement packages and insurance products, and as components of discount-program memberships. For the fiscal year ended January 31, 1997, approximately 536 million solicitation pieces were mailed, followed up by approximately 70 million telephone calls.

Walter Forbes’s digital aspirations that got Wired so hot and bothered are mentioned only in passing in the report: “Some of the Company’s individual memberships are available online to interactive computer users via major online services and the Internet’s World Wide Web.”

Forbes first became associated with Sierra in 1991, when he agreed to join the company’s board. Ken Williams, Sierra’s co-founder and CEO, considered this a major coup, a sign that his little publisher of computer games was really going places in this new decade of multimedia and cyber-everything. He was excited even though, as he admits in his recent memoir, he “never completely understood Walter’s business. To this day, I can’t completely tell you what it was. There were components of it that made sense — for instance, they owned a company called RCI that facilitated timeshare swapping. They also operated a series of discount shopping clubs, where customers would pay an annual subscription fee, allowing them to buy products at near-wholesale prices. Whatever it was, they were certainly doing something right. They had $2 billion in revenue and over $200 million in profit.”

The voice of Forbes whispering in Ken Williams’s ear was a hidden motivator behind the spate of acquisitions that the latter pursued during the first half of the 1990s, which saw the American educational-software developer Bright Star, the French adventure-games maker Coktel Visions, the British strategy house Impressions, and the American sim specialists Papyrus and subLOGIC all entering the Sierra tent. Having thus hunted down and captured so much smaller prey with Forbes at his side, Williams perhaps shouldn’t have been surprised when his trusted advisor started eying his own company with a hungry look. Nevertheless, when Forbes broached the subject with Ken’s wife Roberta Williams, the designer of Sierra’s flagship King’s Quest series as well as Phantasmagoria and many other adventure and children’s games, she at least was taken aback.

“Have you and Ken ever thought about selling Sierra?” he asked her out of the blue one day in the lobby of the Paris hotel where they happened to be attending a board-of-directors meeting. (An insatiable connoisseur of French food and wine, Forbes had had enough sway with Ken to convince him to hold the meeting at this distant and expensive location.)

“No,” Roberta answered shortly. “We’re not interested.”

“But if you ever were, what sort of price would you be looking at?”

“A lot,” Roberta replied, then walked away as quickly as decorum allowed. She had the discomfiting feeling that Forbes was a predator probing for a flock’s weak link, and she was determined that it wouldn’t be her.

But when Forbes brought the subject up in a more formal way, at another Sierra board meeting closer to home on February 2, 1996, Roberta’s husband proved far more receptive than she had been.

The only detailed insider account of what happened next and why is the one written by Ken Williams. Needless to say, this must raise automatic red flags for any historian worth his salt. And yet his memoir does appear to be about as even-handed as anyone could possibly expect under the circumstances. To his credit, he owns up to many of his own mistakes with no hesitation whatsoever. While we would be foolish to take his account as the unvarnished gospel truth, he doesn’t strike me as a completely unreliable witness by any means. I think we can afford to take much if not all of what he writes at face value as we ask ourselves what led him to the most monumental decision of his life, excepting only the decision to found Sierra in the first place all the way back in 1980.

To begin with, Williams admits forthrightly that he was quite simply tired at this juncture of his life, and that his sense of exhaustion made the prospect of selling out and taking a step back more appealing than it might have been just a few years earlier. His fatigue is eminently understandable: Sierra had consumed almost his every waking hour for over fifteen years by this point. He tells us that people had been telling him for ages that he “needed to delegate more, but it just wasn’t in my personality to do so.” More and more as the games got more expensive and the stakes for every new release higher, Williams had felt forced to play the role of the corporate heavy.

My visits to Sierra’s development teams were occasionally liked, but not very often. Left to their own devices, the teams would agonize over the games forever. Asking an artist to compromise quality in order to bring the art in on budget is not a win-win for either of us, but it’s something I had to do every day. Shutting down projects, ruining dreams, staring endlessly at spreadsheets, riding on airplanes. That was my life.

Sierra had become rather notorious these last few years for shipping games before they were ready. At the end of the day, the decision to do so was Ken Williams’s, but he often believed he had no real choice in the matter at all. For Sierra was now a publicly traded company, and he felt it couldn’t afford the hit to the stock price that would result from not having Game X on the shelves in time for some given Christmas shopping season. Now, the skeptical reader might argue that there were surely ways to improve internal processes such that games weren’t continually falling behind schedule, going over budget, and winding up caught in the “ship it now or die” trap — and such a reader would be absolutely right. But that doesn’t change the state of play on the ground from the perspective of Ken Williams, who was not good at delegating and seemed to lack the turn of mind that was required to implement more rigorous methodologies of game development. This situation being what it was, he hoped that the (apparently) deep pockets of CUC would insulate Sierra somewhat from the vagaries of stock prices and holiday seasons, would give him more leeway to grant a promising game the six more months in the oven it needed to become a great one.

In addition to all of the above, Williams leans heavily on his “fiduciary duty” to his shareholders to explain why he was so willing and even eager to embrace Forbes’s offer. As CEO, he says, he was obliged to maximize his shareholders’ return on their investment, regardless of his personal feelings: “To state it simply, the decision wasn’t mine to make. I had a responsibility to the company’s true owners.” Alas, it’s here that I do have to part ways somewhat with the idea of Ken Williams as a completely reliable witness; this statement does begin to veer into self-serving territory.

The majority of Sierra’s shareholders were of the passive stripe, who had little understanding of the company’s business and were thus very ready to listen when the CEO who had just delivered a record profit told them what he thought they ought to do. And Ken Williams made it abundantly clear to these shareholders that he thought they ought to take the deal.

Yet he did so over the objections of virtually everyone he talked to who did understand Sierra’s business reasonably well. His board of directors was unanimous in its opposition, with the exception only of the member named Walter Forbes. Mike Brochu, Sierra’s hard-nosed president and chief operating officer, who was in many ways the architect of the company’s last couple of years of solid growth and profitability, saw no reason for it to surrender its independence now, just when things were going so swimmingly for it.

Likewise, Jerry Bowerman, a former investment banker who was now vice president for product development, says today that he “pleaded” with Williams to at the very least take a longer, harder look at Forbes and his “company that sells coupons” than he had shown any interest in doing prior to this point; something about CUC, Bowerman says, “made [the] hair stand up on the back of my neck.” In particular, he saw a communist convention worth of red flags in CUC’s habit of just beating its earnings expectations on Wall Street every single quarter: “That’s categorically impossible. Does not happen.” But somehow with CUC it did. “He has a fiduciary responsibility, and the board has a fiduciary responsibility, to take the offer seriously,” acknowledges Bowerman. “What [Williams] never did do was, like, hire an investment bank to say, is this actually a fair offer?”

Even Ken’s own wife Roberta was dead-set against the acquisition: “When Walter asked me, did we ever think of selling the company, and I said no, I meant it. I always had a little bit of intuition about Walter. Not that he was a crook or anything like that. Just… take him with a grain of salt.”

Ken Williams normally listened to his wife. As lots of people knew then and will happily tell you today, Roberta was often the final arbiter of what did and didn’t happen at Sierra, in discussions that took place around the Williams family dinner table long after the lights in the boardroom and executive suites had been extinguished. In this case, however, he ignored her advice, as he did that of so many of his professional colleagues. Instead of taking Walter Forbes with a grain of salt, he took his deal — signed on the dotted line, with no questions asked, selling the company that had been his life’s work to another one whose business model and revenue streams were almost entirely opaque to him.

Doing so was without a doubt the worst decision Ken Williams ever made in his business career, but it wasn’t totally out of character for the man. There’s a theory in pop psychology that every alpha male is really looking to become the beta to an even bigger cock-of-the-walk. Be that as it may, Ken Williams — this man’s man who had the chutzpah to imagine becoming a transformative mogul of mass media, a Walt Disney-like figure — could be weirdly quick to fall under the sway of other men who seemed to embody the same qualities he cherished in himself. Sometimes that worked out okay, as when he met the furloughed police officer Jim Walls through his hairdresser and asked that man who knew nothing of computers or the games they played to join Sierra as a game designer. The three Police Quest games that resulted were… well, it’s hard to really call them good in any fundamental sense, but they were good enough for the times, whilst being fresh and unique in their subject matter when compared with all those other adventure games about dragons and spaceships. At other junctures, however, Williams’s gut instinct led him badly astray, as when he asked the police brutalist Daryl F. Gates to replace Walls as the personality behind Police Quest, a decision which appalled and outraged most of his own employees and left a stain on Sierra’s legacy that can never be fully expunged.

Just as the aforementioned two men walked and talked the part of the hard-edged, no-nonsense cop in a way that profoundly impressed Ken Williams, Walter Forbes was the very picture of the suave and sophisticated financier, making monumental deals next to a crackling fire in his elegant parlor, a glass of Chianti in hand, before rushing off to Europe in his private jet to take in an opera. For Ken, a working-class striver without any university degree to his name, much less one from Harvard, the idea that a man like this would be so interested in him and his company must have been a very alluring one indeed.

Had Ken Williams followed the advice of Jerry Bowerman and dug a little deeper into Walter Forbes and CUC, he might have learned some things to give him pause. He might have discovered, for example, that Forbes hadn’t founded CUC himself to pursue his grand vision of e-commerce, as the interview in Wired implies; he had rather bought himself a seat on an existing company’s board with a cash investment from his familial store of same, then fomented from that perch a revolt that led to the real founder being defenestrated and Forbes himself taking his place. If nothing else, this did cast Forbes’s willingness to join Sierra’s board and his early chat with Roberta Williams on the subject of an acquisition, as if he was nosing around for a weak link, in rather a different light.

Of course, there’s been an elephant in the room through all of the foregoing paragraphs, one which we can no longer continue to ignore. Once more to his credit, Ken Williams doesn’t fail to mention the elephant in his book: “Personally speaking, it would be a nice payday.”

Ken Williams had grown up with just one dream. It wasn’t to make great games or to revolutionize entertainment or even to become the next Walt Disney, although all of those things were eventually folded into it as the means to an end. It was to become rich — nothing more, nothing less. “Somewhere along the way, I developed an aggressive personality,” he writes of his boyhood and adolescence. “All that I could think about was 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.”

By most people’s standards, Ken and Roberta Williams were rich by the mid-1990s. But most of their wealth was illiquid, being bound up in their company — an arrangement which entailed duties and obligations that were becoming, for Ken at least, increasingly onerous. “It seemed like everyone associated with Sierra except me was having fun,” he says.

I just wrote that the decision to sell to Walter Forbes was the worst business decision Ken Williams ever made. Ironically, though, it was his best decision ever in terms of his private finances. For he sold Sierra when the “Siliwood” craze of which he had been the industry’s most outspoken and articulate proponent — that peculiar melding of computer games with Hollywood movies, complete with live actors and unabashedly cinematic audiovisual aesthetics — was at its absolute zenith; he sold when Phantasmagoria, the latest poster child for the trend, had just become Sierra’s best-selling game ever. The remainder of 1996 — a year which produced no more Siliwood hits on the scale of Phantasmagoria, from Sierra or anyone else — would show that there was only one way forward for “interactive movies” from here, and that way was down. They were doomed to be replaced by a very different vision of gaming’s future, emphasizing visceral action, emergent behavior, and player empowerment over the elaborate set-piece storytelling that had been Sierra’s bread and butter for so long.

Over the last few decades, signing Walter Forbes’s contract has allowed Ken and Roberta Williams to enjoy that enviable lifestyle that is the preserve of the ultra-wealthy alone, with multiple homes in multiple countries and a boat in which they have cruised around the world several times. Mind you, I don’t say that such a lifestyle was foremost on Ken Williams’s mind when he made the decision to sell; on the contrary, he had every expectation at the time of continuing to manage Sierra for the foreseeable future. I merely say — as if it needs to be said yet again! — that life is seldom black and white.

But we’ve belabored these points enough: Ken secured the preliminary approval of Sierra’s shareholders, signed on the dotted line on their behalf, sent out the press release, then secured their final approval to complete the transaction a few months later. On the face of it, it was indeed a great deal for them: they got to trade in their Sierra stock for 22 percent more shares in CUC, a far bigger, even faster-growing company.

Once all that was behind them, Walter Forbes and Ken Williams and all of their closest associates flew off to Paris in Forbes’s jet to celebrate the acquisition. Some members of the entourage were happier than others. At an expensive Parisian restaurant, Forbes ordered a $5000 bottle of wine, saying it was on him. “I [found] out after the fact, digging around in the accounting system, that he’d expensed it,” says Jerry Bowerman. “So he was just a liar. Just a very fat liar.”



Amazingly, Sierra On-Line wasn’t the only software publisher that Walter Forbes and CUC agreed to purchase during February of 1996. In a way, the other major acquisition turned out to be even more of a plum prize than this one. It was a publisher and distributor of educational software and games called Davidson and Associates. If that name fails to set any bells a-ringing, know that Davidson was itself the proud owner of Blizzard Entertainment, whose Warcraft 2Diablo, and Starcraft, combined with its innovative Battle.net service for online multiplayer play, would make it the hottest brand in gaming over the course of the next few years, a veritable way of life for millions of (mostly) young men. CUC, this company nobody had ever heard of, was suddenly in possession of a gaming empire with few peers.

But for Ken Williams, the time to come would be filled with far less pleasant surprises than the meteoric ascent of Blizzard. After the acquisitions of Sierra and Davidson were finalized in June of 1996, it slowly and agonizingly dawned on him that he had made a terrible mistake. He learned that Walter Forbes had given the exact same promise of ultimate superiority in the new software arm of CUC to both him and Bob Davidson, the co-founder of Davidson and Associates. Forbes obviously couldn’t honor his promise to both men. Worse, it soon became clear that he favored Davidson whenever push came to shove. Davidson’s people took over most of the marketing and distribution of Sierra’s games, with Williams’s own people being sidelined or laid off. Williams chafed at his newfound beta status, and feuded bitterly if futilely with his de-facto superior. When Sierra failed to come up with another hit to rival Phantasmagoria’s sales in 1996 — a failure which further reduced his standing in the conglomerate as a whole, what with the numbers Blizzard was shifting — he blamed it on Davidson’s logistics and marketing.

Yet he did manage to do Sierra and CUC one great service that year, despite the constraints that were being laid upon him. Late in 1996, he agreed to hear a pitch from a new studio called Valve Corporation, founded by a couple of former Microsoft employees who had never made a game before and who were therefore having trouble gaining inroads with the other major publishers. With his background in adventure games, Williams was intrigued by Valve’s proposal for Half-Life, a first-person shooter which, so he was told, would place an unusual emphasis on its story. Even when setting that element of the equation aside, Williams knew all too well that Sierra really, really needed to become a player in the shooter space if it was to survive the popping of the Siliwood bubble. Listening to his gut, he signed Valve to a publishing contract. Well after he left Sierra, Half-Life would become by most metrics the most successful single shooter in history, by a literal order of magnitude the best-selling game that Ken Williams was ever involved with. The landscape of gaming might look vastly different today had he not made that deal; Steam, for instance, was able to come to be only thanks to Half-Life’s publication and success. Not all of Ken Williams’s gut decisions were bad ones. Far from it.

Half-Life aside, though, life under the new regime had little to offer him beyond constraints and warning signs. One of the other perks he had been promised, and that in this case was delivered, was a seat on CUC’s board. His first board meeting only reinforced his sense of the cloud of obscurity hanging around CUC’s operations. He realized that he wasn’t the only person sitting at the table who didn’t entirely understand what the company they were all supposed to be overseeing actually did. The other board members, however, didn’t much seem to care. As long as the stock price kept climbing, they were happy to leave it all in the evidently capable hands of Walter Forbes. Ken Williams:

By the end of the first hour, we had covered everyone’s golf scores and favorite wines. I was not a golfer and was left out of the discussion. I avoided the game, and was disappointed that these pillars of the business world thought it was important enough to disrupt a board meeting. We finally sat at the table, and vacations were discussed. Walter was asked at some point, “How’s business?” He answered that all was good, followed by hardly anything more. I was waiting patiently for the lights to dim and the projector to light up. It never happened. Instead we were back to conversations having nothing to do with CUC. And then the meeting ended.

Feeling out of place among the old-money scions gathered around tables such as this one, tired of having his decisions in the software space countermanded by Bob Davidson, Williams started casting about for someplace else within CUC where he could rule the roost as he had once done at Sierra. He dove deep into another recently acquired company, the e-commerce facilitator NetMarket, which had scored a prominent write-up in The New York Times two years earlier for enabling the first encrypted credit-card transaction — for a Sting CD — ever to take place on the Internet. Yet he was never quite sure of his ground there, and never felt that NetMarket was much of a priority for Forbes — a strange thing in itself, given the way the latter was always rattling on about e-commerce in interviews. Williams had become an executive without a clear role or any clearly delineated scope of authority. It was not a comfortable situation for a man of his personality and predilections.

It might therefore have seemed like good news when Bob Davidson abruptly quit in January of 1997. And yet the circumstances of his resignation were just odd enough that it was hard for even his primary internal rival to feel too sanguine about it. Davidson had had a dream job, running a software empire that had just shipped Blizzard’s Diablo to a rapturous reception. Why had he thrown it away? Williams heard through the grapevine that Davidson had come to Forbes with an ultimatum, demanding that the software arm be spun out from the CUC mother ship to become its own company as the condition of his staying on there. Why had he been so strident about this? Had he discovered something that other people hadn’t? It was almost as if he felt he had to protect the software business from whatever was coming for the rest of the company.

As it happened, Williams was never offered Davidson’s job anyway. It was given instead to one Chris McLeod, a “member of the office of the president and executive vice-president” of CUC with no background in technology, software, or gaming, although he did sport a rather impressive golf handicap.

In May of 1997, Walter Forbes announced his latest deal. CUC was to merge with another company that nobody other than Wall Street investment bankers had ever heard of, one that went by another anonymous-sounding three-letter acronym. But it turned out that HFS (“Hospitality Franchise Systems”) owned a considerable number of brands that actually were household names: Avis Rental Cars, the real-estate chains Century 21, ERA, and Coldwell Banker, and the hotel chains Days Inn, Ramada, Super 8, Howard Johnson’s, and Travelodge. The New York Times diplomatically described CUC, by contrast, as “a powerful but less known force in telemarketing, home-shopping clubs, and travel information.” HFS was far too big for CUC to gobble up like it had Sierra On-Line and Davidson and Associates. This was to be a “merger of equals.”

HFS had been founded in 1990 by an infamously ruthless, hard-charging Wall Street money man named Henry Silverman, who had grown tired of playing “second banana” to the moguls and investors he stood in between. His business plan was deceptively simple: HFS bought brands, then rented them out to others under the franchising model. Said model allowed the company to accrue most of the benefits of running a chain of real-estate firms or rental-car offices or hotels without getting bogged down in most of the responsibilities. Anyone who wished to open a branch of one of these businesses could apply to HFS for a license to use one of its brands. If approved, they would pay a lump sum up-front, followed by ongoing “subscription” fees. In return for their money, they would receive, in addition to the brand itself, guidance on best practices and access to proprietary computer systems. On the stick side of the ledger, they would also need to pass regular inspections, to assure that they didn’t dilute the cachet of the brand they leased. It would be an overstatement to claim that administering such a franchising system was trivial for HFS, but it was much less financially and logistically fraught than actually owning and running thousands of properties all over the country. The Wall Street portfolio managers who had so recently been Silverman’s colleagues ate it up. And why shouldn’t they? An investor who got in on the ground floor with HFS in 1992, when it first went public, would have gotten her money back twenty-fold by the time of the merger with CUC.

HFS was a larger company than CUC in 1997, with a more transparent and more obviously sustainable business model. Although both stock prices were overvalued by any objective measure, sporting fairly outrageous price-to-earnings ratios, you could go out into Main Street, USA, and see the sources of HFS’s revenues right there in bricks and mortar. This was not true of CUC.

Given this reality, those who knew Henry Silverman well would continue to ask themselves for years to come why he had wanted to make this deal in the first place, and why he had failed to look harder into CUC’s business before consummating it. For Silverman, unlike Ken Williams, was not in the habit of letting the gravitational pull of charm, power, and ostentatious displays of wealth trump sober-minded judgment. On the contrary, Silverman was a numbers guy to the core, a classic cold fish who seemed immune to personal charisma when he considered his potential business partners. And yet he allowed Walter Forbes to reel him in almost as easily as Ken Williams had. The player got played: “A master deal-maker bought a pig in a poke,” as Fortune magazine would be writing in the not-too-distant future.

Still, the terms of this deal quite clearly left Silverman rather than Forbes in the catbird seat. The merger agreement stipulated that Silverman would be the CEO of the conjoined venture and Forbes only the chairman of the board until January 1, 2000, after which date the two would swap roles. They would then continue to trade places, in two-year cycles, for as long as they both wanted to keep at it. That said, many of those who knew Henry Silverman best suspected that he never intended to relinquish the position of CEO, that he would find some way to freeze Forbes out when the time came to trade places. In the end, though — and as we’ll see in my next article — other developments would make all of that a moot point. In the meanwhile, Wall Street was all-in; one investment analyst said that it would take “mismanagement for this deal not to work.” She had no idea what a soothsayer she was…

Any merger as big as this one, valued at $14 billion, takes some time to effectuate. It wouldn’t go through until the very end of 1997, by which point Ken Williams would be gone from CUC and from Sierra.

In August of 1997 — “one miserable year after Sierra’s acquisition had been completed,” as he puts it — Williams decided that he had had enough. A proud man, he felt disrespected, even “humiliated,” at that month’s board meeting, where his proposals and all of his attempts to steer the conversation around to actual matters of business had not gone down well. As soon as the meeting adjourned, he sat down at the computer in his office and typed out a letter of resignation. Walter Forbes, this fellow whom Williams had once thought he shared a special bond with as a fellow dynamic man of business, accepted the letter without much comment or expression of regret. It took some time to finalize Williams’s departure with Human Resources, but it was agreed in the end that his last day would be November 1.

So, Ken Williams’s association with Sierra On-Line, the company he had founded and built from the ground up over almost eighteen years, officially ended on November 1, 1997. There was no public or private fanfare — no going-away party, no line of colleagues awaiting a last handshake. Nothing like that. “I just packed my stuff and went home,” he says. Both coincidentally and not so coincidentally, Mike Brochu and Jerry Bowerman, Williams’s right-hand men who had argued so fruitlessly against the acquisition, likewise decided they had had enough at around the same time. This left Sierra as little more than another of Henry Silverman’s brands, in the hands of people who had bought their way into it rather than growing it from the grass roots. They would deign to fund and release a few more games that played in the old Sierra’s worlds, would even employ a few of the old designers to make them. Nevertheless, one can make a compelling argument that the main story of the Sierra that is still so fondly remembered by adventure-game fans today ended on that November 1, 1997, when Ken Williams walked out of his office for the last time, with no one even bothering to tell him goodbye. What followed — and will follow, in the next three articles of this series — was merely the epilogue, or perhaps the hangover; you can pick your own metaphor.

It beggars belief that something so huge — something that touched the lives of so many people who worked for Sierra or played the many, many games of its golden years — could end so anticlimactically, with one unremarkable-looking 43-year-old office worker quietly switching off his computer and driving home. But such is life in the real world. Concluding whimpers are more common than bangs.



Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.


Sources: The books Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Line by Ken Williams, Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks & Fraud in Financial Reports by Howard Schilit, Stay Awhile and Listen, Book II: Heaven, Hell, and Secret Cow Levels by David L. Craddock, and Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay. Wired of November 1997; Los Angeles Times of February 21 1996; New York Times of August 12 1994 and May 27 1997; Wall Street Journal of July 29 1998; Fortune of November 1998.

I owe a big debt to Duncan Fyfe, whose 2020 article on this subject for Vice is a goldmine of direct quotations and inside information. I also made use of CUC’s last annual report before the merger with HFS, and of the materials held in the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play.

 

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Starcraft (A History in Two Acts)

Act 1: Starcraft the Game



Great success brings with it great expectations. And sometimes it brings an identity crisis as well.

After Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft: Orcs and Humans became a hit in 1995, the company started down a very conventional path for a new publisher feeling its oats, initiating a diverse array of projects from internal and external development teams. In addition to the inevitable Warcraft sequel, there were a streamlined CRPG known as Diablo, a turn-based tactical-battle game known as Shattered Nations, a 4X grand-strategy game known as Pax Imperia II, even an adventure game taking place in the Warcraft universe — to be called, naturally enough, Warcraft Adventures. Then, too, even before Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness was finished, Blizzard had already started on a different sort of spinoff than Warcraft Adventures, one which jettisoned the fantasy universe but stayed within the same gameplay genre of real-time strategy. It was to be called Starcraft, and was to replace fantasy with science fiction. Blizzard thought that one team could crank it out fairly quickly using the existing Warcraft II engine, while another one retooled their core RTS technology for Warcraft III.

In May of 1996, with Warcraft II now six months old and a massive hit, Blizzard brought early demos of Starcraft and most of their other works in progress to E3, the games industry’s new annual showcase. One could make a strong argument that the next few days on the E3 show floor were the defining instant for the Blizzard brand as we still know it today.

The version of Starcraft that Blizzard brought to the 1996 E3 show. Journalists made fun of its fluorescent purple color palette among other things. Was this game being designed by Prince?

The gaming press was not particularly kind to the hodgepodge of products that Blizzard showed them at E3. They were especially cruel to Starcraft, which they roundly mocked for being exactly what it was, a thinly reskinned version of Warcraft II — or, as some journalists took to calling it, Orcs in Space. Everyone from Blizzard came home badly shaken by the treatment. So, after a period of soul searching and much fraught internal discussion, Blizzard’s co-founders Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime decided not to be quite so conventional in the way they ran their business. They took a machete to their jungle of projects which seemed to have spontaneously sprouted out of nowhere as soon as the money started to roll in. When all was said and done, they allowed only two of them to live on: Diablo, which was being developed at the newly established Blizzard North, of San Mateo, California; and Starcraft, down at Blizzard South in Irvine, California. But the latter was no longer to be just a spinoff. “We realized, this product’s just going to suck,” says Blizzard programmer Pat Wyatt of the state of the game at that time. “We need to have all our effort put into it. And everything about it was rebooted: the team that was working on it, the leadership, the design, the artwork — everything was changed.”

Blizzard’s new modus operandi would be to publish relatively few games, but to make sure that each and every one of them was awesome, no matter what it took. In pursuit of that goal, they would do almost everything in-house, and they would release no game before its time. The time of Starcraft, that erstwhile quickie Warcraft spinoff, wouldn’t come until March of 1998, while Warcraft III wouldn’t drop until 2002. In defiance of all of the industry’s conventional wisdom, the long gaps between releases wouldn’t prove ruinous; quite the opposite, in fact. Make the games awesome, Blizzard would learn, and the gamers will be there waiting with money in hand when they finally make their appearance.

Adham and Morhaime fostered as non-hierarchical a structure as possible at Blizzard, such that everyone, regardless of their ostensible role — from programmers to artists, testers to marketers — felt empowered to make design suggestions, knowing that they would be acted upon if they were judged worthy by their peers. Thus, although James Phinney and Chris Metzen were credited as “lead designers” on Starcraft, the more telling credit is the one that attributes the design as a whole simply to “Blizzard Entertainment.” The founders preferred to promote from within, retaining the entry-level employees who had grown up with the Blizzard Way rather than trying to acclimatize outsiders who were used to less freewheeling approaches. Phinney and Metzen were typical examples: the former had started at Blizzard as a humble tester, the latter as a manual writer and line artist.

For all that Blizzard’s ambitions for Starcraft increased dramatically over the course of its development, it was never intended to be a radical formal departure from what had come before. From start to finish, it was nothing more nor less than another sprite-based 2D RTS like Warcraft II.  It was just to be a better iteration on that concept — so much better that it verged on becoming a sort of Platonic ideal for this style of game. Blizzard would keep on improving it until they started to run out of ideas for making it better still. Only then would they think about shipping it.

The finished Starcraft in action, looking much more chic than it did during its Orcs in Space days.

The exceptions to this rule of iteration rather than blue-sky invention all surrounded the factions that you could either control or play against. There were three of them rather than the standard two, for one thing. But far more importantly, each of the factions was truly unique, in marked contrast to those of Warcraft and Warcraft II. In those games, the two factions’ units largely mirrored one another in a tit-for-tat fashion, merely substituting different names and sprites for the same sets of core functions. Yet Starcraft had what Blizzard liked to call an “asymmetric” design; each of the three factions played dramatically differently, with none of the neat one-to-one correspondences that had been the norm within the RTS genre prior to this point.

In fact, the factions could hardly have been more different from one another. There were the Terrans, Marines in space who talked like the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket and fought with rifles and tanks made out of good old reliable steel; the Zerg, an insectoid alien race in thrall to a central hive mind, all crunchy carapaces and savage slime; and the Protoss, aloof, enigmatic giants who could employ psionic powers as devastatingly as they could their ultra-high-tech weaponry.

The single-player campaign in which you got to take the factions for a spin was innovative in its way as well. Instead of asking you to choose a side to control at the outset, the campaign expected you to play all three of them in succession, working your way through a sprawling story of interstellar conflict, as told in no fewer than 30 individual scenarios. It cleverly began by placing you in control of the Terrans, the most immediately relatable faction, then moved on to the movie-monster-like Zerg and finally the profoundly alien Protoss once you’d gotten your sea legs.

Although it seems safe to say that the campaign was never the most exciting part of Starcraft for the hyper-competitive young men at Blizzard, they didn’t stint on the effort they put into it. They recognized that the story and cinematics of Westwood Studio’s Command & Conquer — all that stuff around the game proper — was the one area where that arch-rival RTS franchise had comprehensively outdone them to date. Determined to rectify this, they hired Harley D. Huggins II, a fellow who had done some CGI production on the recent film Starship Troopers — a movie whose overall aesthetic had more than a little in common with Starcraft — as the leader of their first dedicated cinematics team. The story can be a bit hard to follow, what with its sometimes baffling tangle of groups who are forever allying with and then betraying one another, the better to set up every possible permutation of battle. (As Blizzard wrote on their back-of-the-box copy, “The only allies are enemies!”) Still, no one can deny that the campaign is presented really, really well, from the cut-scenes that come along every few scenarios to the voice acting during the mission briefings, which turn into little audio dramas in themselves. That said, a surprising amount of the story is actually conveyed during the missions, when your objectives can unexpectedly change on a dime; this was new to the RTS genre.

One of the cut-scenes which pop up every few scenarios during the campaign. Blizzard’s guiding ethic was to make them striking but short, such that no one would be tempted to skip them. Their core player demographic was not known for its patience with long-winded exposition…

Nonetheless, any hardcore Starcraft player will tell you that multiplayer is where it’s really at. When Blizzard released Diablo in the dying days of 1996, they debuted alongside it Battle.net, a social space and matchmaking service for multiplayer sessions over the Internet. Its contribution to Diablo’s enormous success is incalculable. Starcraft was to be the second game supported by the service, and Blizzard had no reason to doubt that it would prove just as important if not more so to their latest RTS.

If all of Starcraft was to be awesome, multiplayer Starcraft had to be the most awesome part of all. This meant that the factions had to be balanced; it wouldn’t do to have the outcome of matches decided before they even began, based simply upon who was playing as whom. After the basic framework of the game was in place, Blizzard brought in a rare outsider, a tireless analytical mind by the name of Rob Pardo, to be a sort of balance specialist, looking endlessly for ways to break the game. He not only played it to exhaustion himself but watched match after match, including hundreds played over Battle.net by fans who were lucky enough to be allowed to join a special beta program, the forerunner of Steam Early Access and the like of today. Rather than merely erasing the affordances that led to balance problems — affordances which were often among the funnest parts of the game — Pardo preferred to tweak the numbers involved and/or to implement possible countermeasures for the other factions, then throw the game out for yet another round of testing. This process added months to the development cycle, but no one seemed to mind. “We will release it when it’s ready,” remained Blizzard’s credo, in defiance of holidays, fiscal quarters, and all of the other everyday business logic of their industry. Luckily, the ongoing strong sales of Warcraft II and Diablo gave them that luxury.

Indeed, Blizzard veterans like to joke today that Starcraft was just two months away from release for a good fourteen months. They crunched and crunched and crunched, living lifestyles that were the opposite of healthy. “Relationships were destroyed,” admits Pat Wyatt. “People got sick.” At last, on March 27, 1998, the exhausted team pronounced the game done and sent it off to be pressed onto hundreds of thousands of CDs. The first boxed copies reached store shelves four days later.

Starcraft was a superb game by any standard, the most tactically intricate, balanced, and polished RTS to date, arguably for years still to come. It was familiar enough not to intimidate, yet fresh enough to make the purchase amply justifiable. Thanks to all of these qualities, it sold more than 1.5 million copies in the first nine months, becoming the biggest new computer game of the year. By the end of 1998, Battle.net was hosting more than 100,000 concurrent users during peak hours. Blizzard was now the hottest name in computer gaming; they had left even id Software — not to mention Westwood of Command & Conquer fame — in their dust.

There was always a snowball effect when it came to online games in particular; everyone wanted the game their friends were already playing, so that they too could get in on the communal fun. Thus Starcraft continued to sell well for years and years, flirting with 10 million units worldwide before all was said and done, by which time it had become almost synonymous with the RTS in general for many gamers. Although your conclusions can vary depending on where you move the goalposts — Myst sold more units during the 1990s — Starcraft has at the very least a reasonable claim to the title of most successful single computer game of its decade. Everyone who played games during its pre- and post-millennial heyday, everyone who had a friend that did so, everyone who even had a friend of a friend that did so remembers Starcraft today. It became that inescapable. And yet the Starcraft mania in the West was nothing compared to the fanaticism it engendered in one mid-sized Asian country.

If you had told the folks at Blizzard on the day they shipped Starcraft that their game would soon be played for significant money by professional teams of young people who trained as hard or harder than traditional athletes, they would have been shocked. If you had told them that these digital gladiators would still be playing it fifteen years later, they wouldn’t have believed you. And if you had told them that all of this would be happening in, of all places, South Korea, they would have decided you were as crazy as a bug in a rug. But all of these things would come to pass.


Act 2: Starcraft and the Rise of Gaming as a Spectator Sport



Why Starcraft? And why South Korea?

We’ve gone a long way toward answering the first question already. More than any RTS that came before it and the vast majority of those that came after it, Starcraft lent itself to esport competition by being so incredibly well-balanced. Terran, Zerg, or Protoss… you could win (and lose) with any of them. The game was subtle and complex enough that viable new strategies would still be appearing a decade after its release. At the same time, though, it was immediately comprehensible in the broad strokes and fast-paced enough to be a viable spectator sport, with most matches between experienced players wrapping up within half an hour. A typical Command & Conquer or Age of Empires match lasted about twice as long, with far more downtime when little was happening in the way of onscreen excitement.

The question of why South Korea is more complicated to answer, but by no means impossible. In the three decades up to the mid-1990s, the country’s economy expanded like gangbusters. Its gross national product increased by an average of 8.2 percent annually, with average annual household income increasing from $80 to over $10,000 over that span. In 1997, however, all of that came to a crashing halt for the time being, when an overenthusiastic and under-regulated banking sector collapsed like a house of cards, resulting in the worst recession in the country’s modern history. The International Monetary Fund had to step in to prevent a full-scale societal collapse, an intervention which South Koreans universally regarded as a profound national humiliation.

This might not seem like an environment overly conducive to a new fad in pop culture, but it proved to be exactly that. The economic crash left a lot of laid-off businessmen — in South Korea during this era, they were always men — looking for ways to make ends meet. With the banking system in free fall, there was no chance of securing much in the way of financing. So, instead of thinking on a national or global scale, as they had been used to doing, they thought about what they could do close to home. Some opened fried-chicken joints or bought themselves a taxicab. Others, however, turned to Internet cafés — or “PC bangs,” as they were called in the local lingo.

Prior to the economic crisis, the South Korean government hadn’t been completely inept by any means. It had seen the Internet revolution coming, and had spent a lot of money building up the country’s telecommunications infrastructure. But in South Korea as in all places, the so-called “last mile” of Internet connectivity was the most difficult to bring to an acceptable fruition. Even in North America and Western Europe, most homes could only access the Internet at this time through slow and fragile dial-up connections. South Korean PC bangs, however, jacked directly into the Internet from city centers, justifying the expense of doing so with economies of scale: 20 to 100 computers, each with a paying customer behind the screen, were a very different proposition from a single computer in the home.

The final ingredient in the cultural stew was another byproduct of the recession. An entire generation of young South Korean men found themselves unemployed or underemployed. (Again, I write about men alone here because South Korea was a rigidly patriarchal society at that time, although this is slowly — painfully slowly — changing now.) They congregated in the PC bangs, which gave them unfettered access to the Internet for about $2 per hour. It was hard to imagine a cheaper form of entertainment. The PC bangs became social scenes unto themselves, packed at all hours of the day and night with chattering, laughing youths who were eager to forget the travails of real life outside their four walls. They drank bubble tea and slurped ramen noodles while, more and more, they played online games, both against one another and against the rest of the country. In a way, they actually had it much better than the gamers who were venturing online in the Western world: they didn’t have to deal with all of the problems of dial-up modems, could game on rock-solid connections running at speeds of which most Westerners could only dream.

A few months after it had made its American debut, Starcraft fell out of the clear blue South Korean sky to land smack dab in the middle of this fertile field. The owners of the PC bangs bought copies and installed them for their customers’ benefit, as they already had plenty of other games. But something about Starcraft scratched an itch that no PC-bang patron had known he had. The game became a way of life for millions of South Koreans, who became addicted to the adrenaline rush it provided. Soon many of the PC bangs could be better described as Starcraft bangs. Primary-school children and teenagers hung out there as well as twenty-somethings, playing and, increasingly, just watching others play, something you could do for free. The very best players became celebrities in their local community. It was an intoxicating scene, where testosterone rather than alcohol served as the social lubricant. Small wonder that the PC bangs outlived the crisis that had spawned them, remaining a staple of South Korean youth culture even after the economy got back on track and started chugging along nicely once again. In 2001, long after the crisis had passed, there were 23,548 PC bangs in the country, roughly the same number of Internet cafés as there were 7-Elevens.

Of course, the PC bangs were all competing with one another to lure customers through their doors. The most reliable way to do so was to become known as the place where the very best Starcraft players hung out. To attract such players, some enterprising owners began hosting tournaments, with prizes that ranged from a few hours of free computer time to up to $1000 in cash. This was South Korean esports in their most nascent form.

The impresario who turned Starcraft into a professional sport as big as any other in the country was named Hwang Hyung Jun. During the late 1990s, Hwang was a content producer at a television station called Tooniverse, whose usual fare was syndicated cartoons. He first started to experiment with videogame programming in the summer of 1998, when he commemorated that year’s World Cup of Football by broadcasting simulated versions of each match, played in Electronic Arts’s World Cup 98. That led to other experiments with simulated baseball. (Chan Ho Park, the first South Korean to play Major League Baseball in North America, was a superstar on two continents at that time.)

But it was only when Hwang tried organizing and broadcasting a Starcraft tournament in 1999 that he truly hit paydirt. Millions were instantly entranced. Among them was a young PC bang hanger-on and Starcraft fanatic named Baro Hyun, who would go on to write a book about esports in his home country.

Late one afternoon, I returned from school, unloaded my backpack, and turned on the television in the living room. Thanks to my parents, we had recently subscribed to a cable-TV network with dozens of channels. As a cable-TV newbie, I navigated my way through what felt like a nearly infinite number of channels. Movie channel; next. Sports channel; next. Professional Go channel; popular among fathers, but a definite next for me.

Suddenly I stopped clicking and stared open-mouthed at the television. I could not believe what I was seeing. A one-on-one game of Starcraft was on TV.

Initially, I thought I’d stumbled across some sort of localized commercial made by Blizzard. Soon, however, it became obvious that wasn’t the case. The camera angle shifted from the game screen to the players. They were oddly dressed, like budget characters in Mad Max. Each one wore a headset and sat in front of a dedicated PC. They appeared to be engaged in a serious Starcraft duel.

This was interesting enough, but when I listened carefully, I could hear commentators explaining what was happening in the game. One explained the facts and game decisions of the players, while another interpreted what those decisions might mean to the outcome of the game. After the match, the camera angle switched to the caster and the commentators, who briefed viewers on the result of the game and the overall story. The broadcast gave the unmistakable impression of a professional sports match.

Esports history is made, as two players face off in one of the first Starcraft matches ever to be broadcast on South Korean television, from a kitschy set that looks to have been constructed from the leavings of old Doctor Who episodes.

These first broadcasts corresponded with the release of Brood War, Starcraft’s first and only expansion pack. Its development had been led by the indefatigable Rob Pardo, who used it to iron out the last remaining balance issues in the base game. (“Starcraft [alone] was not a game that could have been an esport,” wrote a super-fan bluntly years later in an online “Brief History of Starcraft.” “It was [too] simple and imbalanced.”)

Now, the stage was set. Realizing he had stumbled upon something with almost unlimited potential, Hwang Hyung Jun put together a full-fledged national Starcraft league in almost no time at all. From the bottom rungs at the level of the local PC bangs, players could climb the ladder all the way to the ultimate showcase, the “Tooniverse Starleague” final, in which five matches were used to determine the best Starcraft player of them all. Surprisingly, when the final was held for the first time in 2000, that player turned out to be a Canadian, a fellow named Guillaume Patry who had arrived in South Korea just the year before.

No matter; the tournament put up ratings that dwarfed those of Tooniverse’s usual programming. Hwang promptly started his own television channel. Called OnGameNet, it was the first in the world to be dedicated solely to videogames and esports. The Starcraft players who were featured on the channel became national celebrities, as did the sportscasters and color commentators: Jung Il Hoon, who looked like a professor and spoke in the stentorian tones of a newscaster; Jeon Yong Jun, whom words sometimes failed when things got really exciting, yielding to wild water-buffalo bellowing; Jung Sorin, a rare woman on the scene, a kindly and nurturing “gamer mom.” Their various shticks may have been calculated, but they helped to make the matches come alive even for viewers who had never played Starcraft for themselves.

A watershed was reached in 2002, when 20,000 screaming fans packed into a Seoul arena to witness that year’s final. The contrast with just a few years before, when a pair of players had dueled on a cheap closed set for the sake of mid-afternoon programming on a third-tier television station, could hardly have been more pronounced. Before this match, a popular rock band known as Cherry Filter put on a concert. Then, accepting their unwonted opening-act status with good grace, the rock stars sat down to watch the showdown between Lim Yo Hwan and Park Jung Seok on the arena’s giant projection screens, just like everyone else in the place. Park, who was widely considered the underdog, wound up winning three matches to one. Even more remarkably, he did so while playing as the Protoss, the least successful of the three factions in professional competitions prior to this point.

Losing the 2002 final didn’t derail Lim Yo Hwan’s career. He went on to become arguably the most successful Starcraft player in history. He was definitely the most popular during the game’s golden age in South Korea. His 2005 memoir, advising those who wanted to follow in his footsteps to “practice relentlessly” and nodding repeatedly to his sponsors — he wrote of opening his first “Shinhan Bank account” as a home for his first winnings — became a bestseller.

Everything was in flux; new tactics and techniques were coming thick and fast, as South Korean players pushed themselves to superhuman heights, the likes of which even the best players at Blizzard could scarcely have imagined. By now, they were regularly performing 250 separate actions per minute in the game.

The scene was rapidly professionalizing in all respects. Big-name corporations rushed in to sponsor individual players and, increasingly, teams, who lived together in clubhouses, neglecting education and all of the usual pleasures of youth in favor of training together for hours on end. The very best Starcraft players were soon earning hundreds of thousands of dollars per year from prize money and their sponsorship deals.

Baseball had long been South Korea’s most popular professional sport. In 2004, 30,000 people attended the baseball final in Seoul. Simultaneously, 100,000 people were packing a stadium in Busan, the country’s second largest city, for the OnGameNet Starcraft final. Judged on metrics like this one, Starcraft had a legitimate claim to the title of most popular sport of all in South Korea. The matches themselves just kept getting more intense; some of the best players were now approaching 500 actions per minute. Maintaining a pace like that required extraordinary reflexes and mental and physical stamina — reflexes and stamina which, needless to say, are strictly the purview of the young. Indeed, the average professional Starcraft player was considered washed up even younger than the average soccer player. Women weren’t even allowed to compete, out of the assumption that they couldn’t possibly be up to the demands of the sport. (They were eventually given a league of their own, although it attracted barely a fraction of the interest of the male leagues — sadly, another thing that Starcraft has in common with most other professional sports.)

Ten years after Starcraft’s original release as just another boxed computer game, it was more popular than ever in South Korea. The PC bangs had by now fallen in numbers and importance, in reverse tandem with the rise in the number of South Korean households with computers and broadband connections of their own. Yet esports hadn’t missed a beat during this transition. Millions of boys and young men still practiced Starcraft obsessively in the hopes of going pro. They just did it from the privacy of their bedrooms instead of from an Internet café.

Starcraft fandom in South Korea grew up alongside the music movement known as K-pop, and shares many attributes with it. Just as K-pop impresarios absorbed lessons from Western boy bands, then repurposed them into something vibrantly and distinctly South Korean, the country’s Starcraft moguls made the game their own; relatively few international tournaments were held, simply because nobody had much chance of beating the top South Korean players. There was an almost manic quality to both K-pop and the professional Starcraft leagues, twin obsessions of a country to which the idea of a disposable income and the consumerism it enables were still fairly new. South Korea’s geographical and geopolitical positions were precarious, perched there on the doorstep of giant China alongside its own intransigent and bellicose mirror image, a totalitarian state hellbent on acquiring nuclear weapons. A mushroom cloud over Seoul suddenly ending the party remained — and remains — a very real prospect for everyone in the country, giving ample reason to live for today. Rather than the decadent hedonism that marked, say, Cold War Berlin, South Korea turned to a pop culture of giddy, madding innocence for relief.

A 2010 match in the Korean Air Headquarters Hangar in Gimpo.

Alas, though, it seems that all forms of sport must eventually pass through a loss of innocence. Starcraft’s equivalent of the 1919 Major League Baseball scandal started with Ma Jae-yoon, a former superstar who by 2010 was struggling to keep up with the ever more demanding standard of play. Investigating persistent rumors that Ma was taking money to throw some of his matches, the South Korean Supreme Prosecutors’ Office found that they were truer than anyone had dared to speculate. Ma stood at the head of a conspiracy with as many tendrils as a Zerg, involving the South Korean mafia and at least a dozen other players. The scandal was front-page news in the country for months. Ma ended up going to prison for a year and being banned for life from South Korean esports. (“Say it ain’t so, Ma!”) His crimes cast a long shadow over the Starcraft scene; a number of big-name sponsors pulled out completely.

The same year as the match-fixing scandal, Blizzard belatedly released Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty. Yet another massive worldwide hit for its parent company, the sequel proved a mixed blessing for South Korean esports. The original Starcraft had burrowed its way deep into the existing players’ consciousnesses; every tiny quirk in the code that Blizzard had written so many years earlier had been dissected, internalized, and exploited. Many found the prospect of starting over from scratch deeply unappealing; perhaps there is space in a lifetime to learn only one game as deeply as millions of South Korean players had learned the first Starcraft. Some put on a brave face and tried to jump over to the sequel, but it was never quite the same. Others swore that they would stop playing the original only when someone pried it out of their cold, dead hands — but that wasn’t the same either. A third, disconcertingly large group decided to move on to some other game entirely, or just to move on with life. By 2015, South Korean Starcraft was a ghost of its old self.

Which isn’t to say that esports as a whole faded away in the country. Rather than Starcraft II, a game called League of Legends became the original Starcraft’s most direct successor in South Korea, capable of filling stadiums with comparable numbers of screaming fans. (As a member of a newer breed known as “multiplayer online battle arena” (MOBA) games, League of Legends is similar to Starcraft in some ways, but very different in others; each player controls only a single unit instead of amassing armies of them.) Meanwhile esports, like K-pop, were radiating out from Asia to become a fixture of global youth culture. The 2017 international finals of League of Legends attracted 58 million viewers all over the world; the Major League Baseball playoffs that year managed just 38 million, the National Basketball Association finals only 32 million. Esports are big business. And with annual growth rates in the double digits in percentage terms, they show every sign of continuing to get bigger and bigger for years to come.

How we feel about all of this is, I fear, dictated to a large extent by the generation to which we happen to belong. (Hasn’t that always been the way with youth culture?) Being a middle-aged man who grew up with digital games but not with gaming as a spectator sport, my own knee-jerk reaction vacillates between amusement and consternation. My first real exposure to esports came not that many years ago, via an under-sung little documentary film called State of Play, which chronicles the South Korean Starcraft scene, fly-on-the-wall style, just as its salad days are coming to an end. Having just re-watched the film before writing this piece, I still find much of it vaguely horrifying: the starry-eyed boys who play Starcraft ten to fourteen hours per day; the coterie of adult moguls and handlers who are clearly making a lot of money by… well, it’s hard for me not to use the words “exploiting them” here. At one point, a tousle-headed boy looks into the camera and says, “We don’t really play for fun anymore. Mostly I play for work. My work just happens to be a game.” That breaks my heart every time. Certainly this isn’t a road that I would particularly like to see any youngster I care about go down. A happy, satisfying life, I’ve long believed, is best built out of a diversity of experiences and interests. Gaming can be one of these, as rewarding as any of the rest, but there’s no reason it should fill more than a couple of hours of anyone’s typical day.

On the other hand, these same objections perchance apply equally to sports of the more conventionally athletic kind. Those sports’ saving grace may be that it’s physically impossible to train at most of them for ten to fourteen hours at a stretch. Or maybe it has something to do with their being intrinsically healthy activities when pursued in moderation, or with the spiritual frisson that can come from being out on the field with grass underfoot and sun overhead, with heart and lungs and limbs all pumping in tandem as they should. Just as likely, though, I’m merely another old man yelling at clouds. The fact is that a diversity of interests is usually not compatible with ultra-high achievement in any area of endeavor.

Anyway, setting the Wayback Machine to 1998 once again, I can at least say definitively that gaming stood on the verge of exploding in unanticipated, almost unimaginable directions at that date. Was Starcraft the instigator of some of that, or was it the happy beneficiary? Doubtless a little bit of both. Blizzard did have a way of always being where the action was…



Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.


Sources: The books Stay Awhile and Listen, Book II by David L. Craddock and Demystifying Esports by Baro Hyun; Computer Gaming World of May 1997, September 1997, and July 1998; Retro Gamer 170; International Journal of Communication 14; the documentary film State of Play.

Online sources include Soren Johnson’s interview of Rob Pardo for his Designer’s Notes podcast, “Behind the Scenes of Starcraft’s Earliest Days” by Kat Bailey at VG247, and “A Brief History of Starcraft at TL.net.

Starcraft and the Brood War expansion are now available for free at Blizzard’s website.

 

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The Rise of POMG, Part 1: It Takes a Village…

No one on their deathbed ever said, “I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer!”

— Dani Bunten Berry

If you ever want to feel old, just talk to the younger generation.

A few years ago now, I met the kids of a good friend of mine for the very first time: four boys between the ages of four and twelve, all more or less crazy about videogames. As someone who spends a lot of his time and earns a lot of his income writing about games, I arrived at their house with high expectations attached.

Alas, I’m afraid I proved a bit of a disappointment to them. The distance between the musty old games that I knew and the shiny modern ones that they played was just too far to bridge; shared frames of reference were tough to come up with. This was more or less what I had anticipated, given how painfully limited I already knew my knowledge of modern gaming to be. But one thing did genuinely surprise me: it was tough for these youngsters to wrap their heads around the very notion of a game that you played to completion by yourself and then put on the shelf, much as you might a book. The games they knew, from Roblox to Fortnite, were all social affairs that you played online with friends or strangers, that ended only when you got sick of them or your peer group moved on to something else. Games that you played alone, without at the very least leader boards and achievements on-hand to measure yourself against others, were utterly alien to them. It was quite a reality check for me.

So, I immediately started to wonder how we had gotten to this point — a point not necessarily better or worse than the sort of gaming that I knew growing up and am still most comfortable with, just very different. This series of articles should serve as the beginning of an answer to that complicated question. Their primary focus is not so much how computer games went multiplayer, nor even how they first went online; those things are in some ways the easy, obvious parts of the equation. It’s rather how games did those things persistently — i.e., permanently, so that each session became part of a larger meta-game, if you will, embedded in a virtual community. Or perhaps the virtual community is embedded in the game. It all depends on how you look at it, and which precise game you happen to be talking about. Whichever way, it has left folks like me, whose natural tendency is still to read games like books with distinct beginnings, middles, and ends, anachronistic iconoclasts in the eyes of the youthful mainstream.

Which, I hasten to add, is perfectly okay; I’ve always found the ditch more fun than the middle of the road anyway. Still, sometimes it’s good to know how the other 90 percent lives, especially if you claim to be a gaming historian…



“Persistent online multiplayer gaming” (POMG, shall we say?) is a mouthful to be sure, but it will have to do for lack of a better descriptor of the phenomenon that has created such a divide between myself and my friend’s children.  It’s actually older than you might expect, having first come to be in the 1970s on PLATO, a non-profit computer network run out of the University of Illinois but encompassing several other American educational institutions as well. Much has been written about this pioneering network, which uncannily presaged in so many of its particulars what the Internet would become for the world writ large two decades later. (I recommend Brian Dear’s The Friendly Orange Glow for a book-length treatment.) It should suffice for our purposes today to say that PLATO became host to, among other online communities of interest, an extraordinarily vibrant gaming culture. Thanks to the fact that PLATO games lived on a multi-user network rather than standalone single-user personal computers, they could do stuff that most gamers who were not lucky enough to be affiliated with a PLATO-connected university would have to wait many more years to experience.

The first recognizable single-player CRPGs were born on PLATO in the mid-1970s, inspired by the revolutionary new tabletop game known as Dungeons & Dragons. They were followed by the first multiplayer ones in amazingly short order. Already in 1975’s Moria,[1]The PLATO Moria was a completely different game from the 1983 single-player roguelike that bore the same name. players met up with their peers online to chat, brag, and sell or trade loot to one another. When they were ready to venture forth to kill monsters, they could do so in groups of up to ten, pooling their resources and sharing the rewards. A slightly later PLATO game called Oubliette implemented the same basic concept in an even more sophisticated way. The degree of persistence of these games was limited by a lack of storage capacity — the only data that was saved between sessions were the statistics and inventory of each player’s character, with the rest of the environment being generated randomly each time out — but they were miles ahead of anything available for the early personal computers that were beginning to appear at the same time. Indeed, Wizardry, the game that cemented the CRPG’s status as a staple genre on personal computers in 1981, was in many ways simply a scaled-down version of Oubliette, with the multiplayer party replaced by a party of characters that were all controlled by the same player.

Chester Bolingbroke, better known online as The CRPG Addict, plays Moria. Note the “Group Members” field at bottom right. Chester is alone here, but he could be adventuring with up to nine others.

A more comprehensive sort of persistence arrived with the first Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), developed by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle, two students at the University of Essex in Britain, and first deployed there in a nascent form in late 1978 or 1979. A MUD borrowed the text-only interface and presentation of Will Crowther and Don Woods’s seminal game of Adventure, but the world it presented was a shared, fully persistent one between its periodic resets to a virgin state, chockablock with other real humans to interact with and perhaps fight. “The Land,” as Bartle dubbed his game’s environs, expanded to more than 600 rooms by the early 1980s, even as its ideas and a good portion of its code were used to set up other, similar environments at many more universities.

In the meanwhile, the first commercial online services were starting up in the United States. By 1984, you could, for the price of a substantial hourly fee, dial into the big mainframes of services like CompuServe using your home computer. Once logged in there, you could socialize, shop, bank, make travel reservations, read newspapers, and do much else that most people wouldn’t begin to do online until more than a decade later — including gaming. For example, CompuServe offered MegaWars, a persistent grand-strategy game of galactic conquest whose campaigns took groups of up to 100 players four to six weeks to complete. (Woe betide the ones who couldn’t log in for some reason of an evening in the midst of that marathon!) You could also find various MUDs, as well as Island of Kesmai, a multiplayer CRPG boasting most of the same features as PLATO’s Oubliette in a genuinely persistent world rather than a perpetually regenerated one. CompuServe’s competitor GEnie had Air Warrior, a multiplayer flight simulator with bitmapped 3D graphics and sound effects to rival any of the contemporaneous single-player simulators on personal computers. For the price of $11 per hour, you could participate in grand Air Warrior campaigns that lasted three weeks each and involved hundreds of other subscribers, organizing and flying bombing raids and defending against the enemy’s attacks on their own lines. In 1991, America Online put up Neverwinter Nights,[2]Not the same game as the 2002 Bioware CRPG of the same name. which did for the “Gold Box” line of licensed Dungeons & Dragons CRPGs what MUD had done for Adventure and Air Warrior had done for flight simulators, transporting the single-player game into a persistent multiplayer space.

All of this stuff was more or less incredible in the context of the times. At the same time, though, we mustn’t forget that it was strictly the purview of a privileged elite, made up of those with login credentials for institutional-computing networks or money in their pockets to pay fairly exorbitant hourly fees to feed their gaming habits. So, I’d like to back up now and tell a different story of POMG — one with more of a populist thrust, focusing on what was actually attainable by the majority of people out there, the ones who neither had access to a university’s mainframe nor could afford to spend hundreds of dollars per month on a hobby. Rest assured that the two narratives will meet before all is said and done.



POMG came to everyday digital gaming in the reverse order of the words that make up the acronym: first games were multiplayer, then they went online, and then these online games became persistent. Let’s try to unpack how that happened.

From the very start, many digital games were multiplayer, optionally if not unavoidably so. Spacewar!, the program generally considered the first fully developed graphical videogame, was exclusively multiplayer from its inception in the early 1960s. Ditto Pong, the game that launched Atari a decade later, and with it a slow-building popular craze for electronic games, first in public arcades and later in living rooms. Multiplayer here was not so much down to design intention as technological affordances. Pong was an elaborate analog state machine rather than a full-blown digital computer, relying on decentralized resistors and potentiometers and the like to do its “thinking.” It was more than hard enough just to get a couple of paddles and a ball moving around on the screen of a gadget like this; a computerized opponent was a bridge too far.

Very quickly, however, programmable microprocessors entered the field, changing everyone’s cost-benefit analyses. Building dual controls into an arcade cabinet was expensive, and the end result tended to take up a lot of space. The designers of arcade classics like Asteroids and Galaxian soon realized that they could replace the complications of a human opponent with hordes of computer-controlled enemies, flying in rudimentary, partially randomized patterns. Bulky multiplayer machines thus became rarer and rarer in arcades, replaced by slimmer, more standardized single-player cabinets. After all, if you wanted to compete with your friends in such games, there was still a way to do so: you could each play a round against the computerized enemies and compare your scores afterward.

While all of this was taking shape, the Trinity of 1977 — the Radio Shack TRS-80, Apple II, and Commodore PET — had ushered in the personal-computing era. The games these early microcomputers played were sometimes ports or clones of popular arcade hits, but just as often they were more cerebral, conceptually ambitious affairs where reflexes didn’t play as big — or any — role: flight simulations, adventure games, war and other strategy games. The last were often designed to be played optimally or even exclusively against another human, largely for the same reason Pong had been made that way: artificial intelligence was a hard thing to implement under any circumstances on an 8-bit computer with as little as 16 K of memory, and it only got harder when you were asking said artificial intelligence to formulate a strategy for Operation Barbarossa rather than to move a tennis racket around in front of a bouncing ball. Many strategy-game designers in these early days saw multiplayer options almost as a necessary evil, a stopgap until the computer could fully replace the human player, thus alleviating that eternal problem of the war-gaming hobby on the tabletop: the difficulty of finding other people in one’s neighborhood who were able and willing to play such weighty, complex games.

At least one designer, however, saw multiplayer as a positive advantage rather than a kludge — in fact, as the way the games of the future by all rights ought to be. “When I was a kid, the only times my family spent together that weren’t totally dysfunctional were when we were playing games,” remembered Dani Bunten Berry. From the beginning of her design career in 1979, when she made an auction game called Wheeler Dealers for the Apple II,[3]Wheeler Dealers and all of her other games that are mentioned in this article were credited to Dan Bunten, the name under which she lived until 1992. multiplayer was her priority. In fact, she was willing to go to extreme lengths to make it possible; in addition to a cassette tape containing the software, Wheeler Dealers shipped with a custom-made hardware add-on, the only method she could come up with to let four players bid at once. Such experiments culminated in M.U.L.E., one of the first four games ever published by Electronic Arts, a deeply, determinedly social game of economics and, yes, auctions for Atari and Commodore personal computers that many people, myself included, still consider her unimpeachable masterpiece.

A M.U.L.E. auction in progress.

And yet it was Seven Cities of Gold, her second game for Electronic Arts, that became a big hit. Ironically, it was also the first she had ever made with no multiplayer option whatsoever. She was learning to her chagrin that games meant to be played together on a single personal computer were a hard sell; such machines were typically found in offices and bedrooms, places where people went to isolate themselves, not in living rooms or other spaces where they went to be together. She decided to try another tack, thereby injecting the “online” part of POMG into our discussion.

In 1988, Electronic Arts published Berry’s Modem Wars, a game that seems almost eerily prescient in retrospect, anticipating the ludic zeitgeist of more than a decade later with remarkable accuracy. It was a strategy game played in real time (although not quite a real-time strategy of the resource-gathering and army-building stripe that would later be invented by Dune II and popularized by Warcraft and Command & Conquer). And it was intended to be played online against another human sitting at another computer, connected to yours by the gossamer thread of a peer-to-peer modem hookup over an ordinary telephone line. Like most of Berry’s games, it didn’t sell all that well, being a little too far out in front of the state of her nation’s telecommunications infrastructure.

Nevertheless, she continued to push her agenda of computer games as ways of being entertained together rather than alone over the years that followed. She never did achieve the breakout hit she craved, but she inspired countless other designers with her passion. She died far too young in 1998, just as the world was on the cusp of embracing her vision on a scale that even she could scarcely have imagined. “It is no exaggeration to characterize her as the world’s foremost authority on multiplayer computer games,” said Brian Moriarty when he presented Dani Bunten Berry with the first ever Game Developers Conference Lifetime Achievement Award two months before her death. “Nobody has worked harder to demonstrate how technology can be used to realize one of the noblest of human endeavors: bringing people together. Historians of electronic gaming will find in these eleven boxes [representing her eleven published games] the prototypes of the defining art form of the 21st century.” Let this article and the ones that will follow it, written well into said century, serve as partial proof of the truth of his words.

Danielle Bunten Berry, 1949-1998.

For by the time Moriarty spoke them, other designers had been following the trails she had blazed for quite some time, often with much more commercial success. A good early example is Populous, Peter Molyneux’s strategy game in real time (although, again, not quite a real-time strategy) that was for most of its development cycle strictly a peer-to-peer online multiplayer game, its offline single-player mode being added only during the last few months. An even better, slightly later one is DOOM, John Carmack and John Romero’s game of first-person 3D mayhem, whose star attraction, even more so than its sadistic single-player levels, was the “deathmatch” over a local-area network. Granted, these testosterone-fueled, relentlessly zero-sum contests weren’t quite the same as what Berry was envisioning for gaming’s multiplayer future near the end of her life; she wished passionately for games with a “people orientation,” directed toward “the more mainstream, casual players who are currently coming into the PC market.” Still, as the saying goes, you have to start somewhere.

But there is once more a caveat to state here about access, or rather the lack thereof. Being built for local networks only — i.e., networks that lived entirely within a single building or at most a small complex of them — DOOM deathmatches were out of reach on a day-to-day basis for those who didn’t happen to be students or employees at institutions with well-developed data-processing departments and permissive or oblivious authority figures. Outside of those ivory towers, this was the era of the “LAN party,” when groups of gamers would all lug their computers over to someone’s house, wire them together, and go at it over the course of a day or a weekend. These occasions went on to become treasured memories for many of their participants, but they achieved that status precisely because they were so sporadic and therefore special.

And yet DOOM‘s rise corresponded with the transformation of the Internet from an esoteric tool for the technological elite to the most flexible medium of communication ever placed at the disposal of the great unwashed, thanks to a little invention out of Switzerland called the World Wide Web. What if there was a way to move DOOM and other games like it from a local network onto this one, the mother of all wide-area networks? Instead of deathmatching only with your buddy in the next cubicle, you would be able to play against somebody on another continent if you liked. Now wouldn’t that be cool?

The problem was that local-area networks ran over a protocol known as IPX, while the Internet ran on a completely different one called TCP/IP. Whoever could bridge that gap in a reasonably reliable, user-friendly way stood to become a hero to gamers all over the world.



Jay Cotton discovered DOOM in the same way as many another data-processing professional: when it brought down his network. He was employed at the University of Georgia at the time, and was assigned to figure out why the university’s network kept buckling under unprecedented amounts of spurious traffic. He tracked the cause down to DOOM, the game that half the students on campus seemed to be playing more than half the time. More specifically, the problem was caused by a bug, which was patched out of existence by John Carmack as soon as he was informed. Problem solved. But Cotton stuck around to play, the warden seduced by the inmates of the asylum.

He was soon so much better at the game than anyone else on campus that he was getting a bit bored. Looking for worthier opponents, he stumbled across a program called TCPSetup, written by one Jake Page, which was designed to translate IPX packets into TCP/IP ones and vice versa on the fly, “tricking” DOOM into communicating across the vast Internet. It was cumbersome to use and extremely unreliable, but on a good day it would let you play DOOM over the Internet for brief periods of time at least, an amazing feat by any standard. Cotton would meet other players on an Internet chat channel dedicated to the game, they’d exchange IP addresses, and then they’d have at it — or try to, depending on the whims of the Technology Gods that day.

On August 22, 1994, Cotton received an email from a fellow out of the University of Illinois — yes, PLATO’s old home — whom he’d met and played in this way (and beaten, he was always careful to add). His name was Scott Coleman. “I have some ideas for hacking TCPSetup to make it a little easier. Care to do some testing later?” Coleman wrote. “I’ve already emailed Jake [Page] on this, but he hasn’t responded (might be on vacation or something). If he approves, I’m hoping some of these ideas might make it into the next release of TCPSetup. In the meantime, I want to do some experimenting to see what’s feasible.”

Jake Page never did respond to their queries, so Cotton and Coleman just kept beavering away on their own, eventually rewriting TCPSetup entirely to create iDOOM, a more reliable and far less fiddly implementation of the same concept, with support for three- or four-player deathmatches instead of just one-on-one duels. It took off like a rocket; the pair were bombarded with feature requests, most notably to make iDOOM work with other IPX-only games as well. In January of 1995, they added support for Heretic, one of the most popular of the first wave of so-called “DOOM clones.” They changed their program’s name to “iFrag” to reflect the fact that it was now about more than just DOOM.

Having come this far, Cotton and Coleman soon made the conceptual leap that would transform their software from a useful tool to a way of life for a time for many, many thousands of gamers. Why not add support for more games, they asked themselves, not in a bespoke way as they had been doing to date, but in a more sustainable one, by turning their program into a general-purpose IPX-to-TCP/IP bridge, suitable for use with the dozens of other multiplayer games out there that supported only local-area networks out of the box. And why not make their tool into a community while they were at it, by adding an integrated chat service? In addition to its other functions, the program could offer a list of “servers” hosting games, which you could join at the click of a button; no more trolling for opponents elsewhere on the Internet, then laboriously exchanging IP addresses and meeting times and hoping the other guy followed through. This would be instant-gratification online gaming. It would also provide a foretaste at least of persistent online multiplayer gaming; as people won matches, they would become known commodities in the community, setting up a meta-game, a sporting culture of heroes and zeroes where folks kept track of win-loss records and where everybody clamored to hear the results when two big wheels faced off against one another.

Cotton and Coleman renamed their software for the third time in less than nine months, calling it Kali, a name suggested by Coleman’s Indian-American girlfriend (later his wife). “The Kali avatar is usually depicted with swords in her hands and a necklace of skulls from those she has killed,” says Coleman, “which seemed appropriate for a deathmatch game.” Largely at the behest of Cotton, always the more commercially-minded of the pair, they decided to make Kali shareware, just like DOOM itself: multiplayer sessions would be limited to fifteen minutes at a time until you coughed up a $20 registration fee. Cotton went through the logistics of setting up and running a business in Georgia while Coleman did most of the coding in Illinois. (Rather astonishingly, Cotton and Coleman had still never met one another face to face in 2013, when gaming historian David L. Craddock conducted an interview with them that has been an invaluable source of quotes and information for this article.)

Kali certainly wasn’t the only solution in this space; a commercial service called DWANGO had existed since December of 1994, with the direct backing of John Carmack and John Romero, whose company id Software collected 20 percent of its revenue in return for the endorsement. But DWANGO ran over old-fashioned direct-dial-up connections rather than the Internet, meaning you had to pay long-distance charges to use it if you weren’t lucky enough to live close to one of its host computers. On top of that, it charged $9 for just five hours of access per month, with the fees escalating from there. Kali, by contrast, was available to you forever for as many hours per month as you liked after you plunked down your one-time fee of $20.

So, Kali was popular right from its first release on April 26, 1995. Yet it was still an awkward piece of software for the casual user despite the duo’s best efforts, being tied to MS-DOS, whose support for TCP/IP relied on a creaky edifice of third-party tools. The arrival of Windows 95 was a godsend for Kali, as it was for computer gaming in general, making the hobby accessible in a way it had never been before. The so-called “Kali95” was available by early 1996, and things exploded from there. Kali struck countless gamers with all the force of a revelation; who would have dreamed that it could be so easy to play against another human online? Lloyd Case, for example, wrote in Computer Gaming World magazine that using Kali for the first time was “one of the most profound gaming experiences I’ve had in a long time.” Reminiscing seventeen years later, David L. Craddock described how “using Kali for the first time was like magic. Jumping into a game and playing with other people. It blew my fourteen-year-old mind.” In late 1996, the number of registered Kali users ticked past 50,000, even as quite possibly just as many or more were playing with cracked versions that bypassed the simplistic serial-number-registration process. First-person-shooter deathmatches abounded, but you could also play real-time strategies like Command & Conquer and Warcraft, or even the Links golf simulation. Computer Gaming World gave Kali a special year-end award for “Online-Enabling Technology.”

Kali for Windows 95.

Competitors were rushing in at a breakneck pace by this time, some of them far more conventionally “professional” than Kali, whose origin story was, as we’ve seen, as underground and organic as that of DOOM itself. The most prominent of the venture-capital-funded startups were MPlayer (co-founded by Brian Moriarty of Infocom and LucasArts fame, and employing Dani Bunten Berry as a consultant during the last months of her life) and the Total Entertainment Network, better known as simply TEN. In contrast to Kali’s one-time fee, they, like DWANGO before them, relied on subscription billing: $20 per month for MPlayer, $15 per month for TEN. Despite slick advertising and countless other advantages that Kali lacked, neither would ever come close to overtaking its scruffy older rival, which had price as well as oodles of grass-roots goodwill on its side. Jay Cotton:

It was always my belief that Kali would continue to be successful as long as I never got greedy. I wanted everyone to be so happy with their purchase that they would never hesitate to recommend it to a friend. [I would] never charge more than someone would be readily willing to pay. It also became a selling point that Kali only charged a one-time fee, with free upgrades forever. People really liked this, and it prevented newcomers (TEN, Heat [a service launched in 1997 by Sega of America], MPlayer, etc.) from being able to charge enough to pay for their expensive overheads.

Kali was able to compete with TEN, MPlayer, and Heat because it already had a large established user base (more users equals more fun) and because it was much, much cheaper. These new services wanted to charge a subscription fee, but didn’t provide enough added benefit to justify the added expense.

It was a heady rush indeed, although it would also prove a short-lived one; Kali’s competitors would all be out of business within a year or so of the turn of the millennium. Kali itself stuck around after that, but as a shadow of what it had been, strictly a place for old-timers to reminisce and play the old hits. “I keep it running just out of habit,” said Jay Cotton in 2013. “I make just enough money on website ads to pay for the server.” It still exists today, presumably as a result of the same force of habit.

One half of what Kali and its peers offered was all too obviously ephemeral from the start: as the Internet went mainstream, developers inevitably began building TCP/IP support right into their games, eliminating the need for an external IPX-to-TCP/IP bridge. (For example, Quake, id Software’s much-anticipated follow-up to DOOM, did just this when it finally arrived in 1996.) But the other half of what they offered was community, which may have seemed a more durable sort of benefit. As it happened, though, one clever studio did an end-run around them here as well.



The folks at Blizzard Entertainment, the small studio and publisher that was fast coming to rival id Software for the title of the hottest name in gaming, were enthusiastic supporters of Kali in the beginning, to the point of hand-tweaking Warcraft II, their mega-hit real-time strategy, to run optimally over the service. They were rewarded by seeing it surpass even DOOM to become the most popular game there of all. But as they were polishing their new action-CRPG Diablo for release in 1996, Mike O’Brien, a Blizzard programmer, suggested that they launch their own service that would do everything Kali did in terms of community, albeit for Blizzard’s games alone. And then he additionally suggested that they make it free, gambling that knowledge of its existence would sell enough games for them at retail to offset its maintenance costs. Blizzard’s unofficial motto had long been “Let’s be awesome,” reflecting their determination to sell exactly the games that real hardcore gamers were craving, honed to a perfect finish, and to always give them that little bit extra. What better way to be awesome than by letting their customers effortlessly play and socialize online, and to do so for free?

The idea was given an extra dollop of urgency by the fact that Westwood Games, the maker of Warcraft‘s chief competitor Command & Conquer, had introduced a service called Westwood Chat that could launch people directly into a licensed version of Monopoly. (Shades of Dani Bunten Berry’s cherished childhood memories…) At the moment it supported only Monopoly, a title that appealed to a very different demographic from the hardcore crowd who favored Blizzard’s games, but who knew how long that would last?[4]Westwood Chat would indeed evolve eventually into Westwood Online, with full support for Command & Conquer, but that would happen only after Blizzard had rolled out their own service.

So, when Diablo shipped in the last week of 1996, it included something called Battle.net, a one-click chat and matchmaking service and multiplayer facilitator. Battle.net made everything easier than it had ever been before. It would even automatically patch your copy of the game to the latest version when you logged on, pioneering the “software as a service” model in gaming that has become everyday life in our current age of Steam. “It was so natural,” says Blizzard executive Max Schaefer. “You didn’t think about the fact that you were playing with a dude in Korea and a guy in Israel. It’s really a remarkable thing when you think about it. How often are people casually matched up in different parts of the world?” The answer to that question, of course, was “not very often” in the context of 1997. Today, it’s as normal as computers themselves, thanks to groundbreaking initiatives like this one. Blizzard programmer Jeff Strain:

We believed that in order for it [Battle.net] to really be embraced and adopted, that accessibility had to be there. The real catch for Battle.net was that it was inside-out rather than outside-in. You jumped right into the game. You connected players from within the game experience. You did not alt-tab off into a Web browser to set up your games and have the Web browser try to pass off information or something like that. It was a service designed from Day One to be built into actual games.

The combination of Diablo and Battle.net brought a new, more palpable sort of persistence to online gaming. Players of DOOM or Warcraft II might become known as hotshots on services like Kali, but their reputation conferred no tangible benefit once they entered a game session. A DOOM deathmatch or a Warcraft II battle was a one-and-done event, which everyone started on an equal footing, which everyone would exit again within an hour or so, with nothing but memories and perhaps bragging rights to show for what had transpired.

Diablo, however, was different. Although less narratively and systemically ambitious than many of its recent brethren, it was nevertheless a CRPG, a genre all about building up a character over many gaming sessions. Multiplayer Diablo retained this aspect: the first time you went online, you had to pick one of the three pre-made first-level characters to play, but after that you could keep bringing the same character back to session after session, with all of the skills and loot she had already collected. Suddenly the link between the real people in the chat rooms and their avatars that lived in the game proper was much more concrete. Many found it incredibly compelling. People started to assume the roles of their characters even when they were just hanging out in the chat rooms, started in some very real sense to live the game.

But it wasn’t all sunshine and roses. Battle.net became a breeding ground of the toxic behaviors that have continued to dog online gaming to this day, a social laboratory demonstrating what happens when you take a bunch of hyper-competitive, rambunctious young men and give them carte blanche to have at it any way they wish with virtual swords and spells. The service was soon awash with “griefers,” players who would join others on their adventures, ostensibly as their allies in the dungeon, then literally stab them in the back when they least expected it, killing their characters and running off with all of their hard-won loot. The experience could be downright traumatizing for the victims, who had thought they were joining up with friendly strangers simply to have fun together in a cool new game. “Going online and getting killed was so scarring,” acknowledges David Brevick, Diablo‘s original creator. “Those players are still feeling a little bit apprehensive.”

To make matters worse, many of the griefers were also cheaters. Diablo had been born and bred a single-player game; multiplayer had been a very late addition. This had major ramifications. Diablo stored all the information about the character you played online on your local hard drive rather than the Battle.net server. Learn how to modify this file, and you could create a veritable god for yourself in about ten minutes, instead of the dozens of hours it would take playing the honest way. “Trainers” — programs that could automatically do the necessary hacking for you — spread like wildfire across the Internet. Other folks learned to hack the game’s executable files themselves. Most infamously, they figured out ways to attack other players while they were still in the game’s above-ground town, supposedly a safe space reserved for shopping and healing. Battle.net as a whole took on a siege mentality, as people who wanted to play honorably and honestly learned to lock the masses out with passwords that they exchanged only with trusted friends. This worked after a fashion, but it was also a betrayal of the core premise and advantage of Battle.net, the ability to find a quick pick-up game anytime you wanted one. Yet there was nothing Blizzard could do about it without rewriting the whole game from the ground up. They would eventually do this — but they would call the end result Diablo II. In the meanwhile, it was a case of player beware.

It’s important to understand that, for all that it resembled what would come later all too much from a sociological perspective, multiplayer Diablo was still no more persistent than Moria and Oubliette had been on the old PLATO network: each player’s character was retained from session to session, but nothing about the state of the world. Each world, or instance of the game, could contain a maximum of four human players, and disappeared as soon as the last player left it, leaving as its legacy only the experience points and items its inhabitants had collected from it while it existed. Players could and did kill the demon Diablo, the sole goal of the single-player game, one that usually required ten hours or more of questing to achieve, over and over again in the online version. In this sense, multiplayer Diablo was a completely different game from single-player Diablo, replacing the simple quest narrative of the latter with a social meta-game of character-building and player-versus-player combat.

For lots and lots of people, this was lots and lots of fun; Diablo was hugely popular despite all of the exploits it permitted — indeed, for some players perchance, because of them. It became one of the biggest computer games of the 1990s, bringing online gaming to the masses in a way that even Kali had never managed. Yet there was still a ways to go to reach total persistence, to bring a permanent virtual world to life. Next time, then, we’ll see how mainstream commercial games of the 1990s sought to achieve a degree of persistence that the first MUD could boast of already in 1979. These latest virtual worlds, however, would attempt to do so with all the bells and whistles and audiovisual niceties that a new generation of gamers raised on multimedia and 3D graphics demanded. An old dog in the CRPG space was about to learn a new trick, creating in the process a new gaming acronym that’s even more of a mouthful than POMG.



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Sources: the books Stay Awhile and Listen Volumes 1 and 2 by David L. Craddock, Masters of Doom by David Kushner, and The Friendly Orange Glow by Brian Dear; Retro Gamer 43, 90, and 103; Computer Gaming World of September 1996 and May 1997; Next Generation of March 1997. Online sources include “The Story of Battle.net” by Wes Fenlon at PC Gamer, Dan Griliopoulos’s collection of interviews about Command & Conquer, Brian Moriarty’s speech honoring Dani Bunten Berry from the 1998 Game Developers Conference, and Jay Cotton’s history of Kali on the DOOM II fan site. Plus some posts on The CRPG Addict, to which I’ve linked in the article proper.

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 The PLATO Moria was a completely different game from the 1983 single-player roguelike that bore the same name.
2 Not the same game as the 2002 Bioware CRPG of the same name.
3 Wheeler Dealers and all of her other games that are mentioned in this article were credited to Dan Bunten, the name under which she lived until 1992.
4 Westwood Chat would indeed evolve eventually into Westwood Online, with full support for Command & Conquer, but that would happen only after Blizzard had rolled out their own service.
 
 

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