Q: What happened to The Two Guys in real life? What had both of you been doing since you parted ways after the collapse of Sierra?

Mark Crowe: Well, in 1991 my wife and I decided to move our young family to beautiful, green Oregon. A place where we spent many family summer vacations traveling to and dreamed of living some day. When the opportunity presented itself, I transferred to Dynamix (which was owned by Sierra). Basically, we were ready for a change and to get away from the oppressive summer climate. Then there was the lure of doing some really cool stuff with Dynamix's new adventure game technology (Rise of the Dragon, Heat of China, etc.) which, unfortunately, didn't happen. But after SQ 5, I had a lot of fun working on something new and different, the EarthSiege Mech battle games. My first crack at working on simulation games. I'm really proud of those titles.

[...]

Q: Looking back, to what extent had the management changes within Sierra dampened your creative juices during your last years at the company? How did this affect the development of the rumored Space Quest sequel?

Mark Crowe: Hmm, I can't really say that "management changes" dampened my creativity at all. If we're talking about my time at Oakhurst. I think it was just a case of burnout and shifting priorities in my life with the birth of our second son (Justin), and a desire to try my hand at something new.

FWIW, Jim already seemed to have one foot out the door well before Tsunami came around...although I can't tell you exactly why that was the case.

(Tsunami, it should be mentioned, started promising Sierra employees the moon and the stars in order to get them to jump ship, and I'm sure they did the same with Jim.)

Although Jim is credited as having designed PQ3, his original design document was fairly anemic, and he was pretty much AWOL throughout the making of the game. Mark Crowe, who's credited as the "director" of PQ3, had to do a great deal of design work in order to make the game hang together and get it shipped. If I remember correctly, Jane Jensen and Lorelei Shannon also had to do a large amount of work to compensate for Jim's lack of involvement.

So I believe that whatever events led Jim to leave Sierra had begun before Tsunami was even a factor.

--Josh

At the instant of Hero’s Quest‘s release, Sierra was just embarking on a major transition in their approach to game-making. Ken Williams had decided it was time at last to make the huge leap from the EGA graphics standard, which could display just 16 colors onscreen from a palette of 64, to VGA, which could display 256 colors from a palette of 262,144. To help accomplish this transition, he had hired Bill Davis, a seasoned Hollywood animator, in the new role of Sierra’s "Creative Director" in July of 1989. Davis systematized Sierra’s heretofore laissez-faire approach to game development into a rigidly formulated Hollywood-style production pipeline. Under his scheme, the artists would now be isolated from the programmers and designers; inter-team communication would happen only through a bureaucratic paper trail.

[...]

Despite using the older technology, their second game was, at Davis’s insistence, created using the newer production methodology. This meant among other things that the artists, now isolated from the rest of the developers, had to create the background scenes on paper; their pictures were then scanned in for use in the game. I’d like to reserve the full details of Sierra’s dramatically changed production methodology for another article, where I can give them their proper due. Suffice for today to say that, while necessary in many respects for a VGA game, the new processes struck everyone as a strange way to create a game using the sharply limited EGA color palette. By far the most obvious difference they made was that everything seemed to take much longer. Lori Ann Cole: Some of the Coles’ frustrations with the new regime came out in the game they were making. Have a close look at the name of Raseir, an oppressed city - sort of an Arabian Nights version of Nineteen Eighty-Four - where the climax of the game occurs.

Ingmar: Same question about part 2: Please share some anecdotes from the creation of Trial by Fire.

Corey: The title was all too appropriate to the development process. We had just gotten everything figured out after completing our first game, when Sierra changed all the rules. Stories had to be completely defined and storyboarded up front. All art was to be hand-drawn and scanned in, rather than drawn on the computer. All team communication was to follow the chain of command: A programmer with a question for an artist had to ask me, I would ask Ken, and he would get the answer from the artist. Frequently this led to miscommunication and misunderstanding.

The process was designed to improve art standards of the new 256-color VGA games. But we were the guinea pigs - Trial By Fire was Sierra's last 16-color EGA game, but was developed using processes intended for 256-color graphics. It was a stressful process, and the budget climbed dramatically from the first game due to having to do some tasks two or three times. In hindsight, I wish Sierra had delayed the game six months or a year so we could have used VGA graphics and kept it up to date.

That's why we had fun spoofing Sierra in the game. The evil city, Raseir, is an anagram of Sierra. The main villain, Ad Avis, was named after the new Creative Director, Bill Davis. We also used other people and rules as inspirations for design elements.

Q: Your involvement in the development of Space Quest 6: The Spinal Frontier had been turbulent, and you ultimately left the project and Sierra On-Line before the game was completed. What was the final "straw" that led to this most difficult decision? What were the reactions of your coworkers at Sierra On-line when they first learned of your departure, particularly from Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe (The Two Guys from Andromeda)?

JM: At the time that I left, the place was going through more than its usual share of tumult: lots of new managers in a relatively short timespan, and development was being fragmented and moved piecemeal to "Sierra North" (Bellevue, WA). I needed a more stable environment.

[...]

Q: Describe the working environment at Sierra On-Line when you came there in 1990. How had it changed by the time you left? Do you feel these changes were indicative of the industry at large?

JM: When I got there, the company was in the process of shedding its "seat of the pants" atmosphere. They had just made their first acquisition - Dynamix - and so what had been a small company was suddenly a "parent corporation" with a "family." It retained just a little of the flavor that people who'd been there longer would speak of (and which you can read about in the book "Hackers" by Stephen Levy). SQ was still edgy enough to warrant lawsuits from companies who felt they'd been slighted, there was tremendous excitement about the first VGA games about to come out (JONES, KQ5, AND SQ4), and the whole operation was still contained in Oakhurst, albeit not in the Sierra building (the one depicted at the end of SQ3).

By the time I'd left, the corporate operations and all the major series aside from SQ and PQ had moved to Washington. The managers running the show didn't have the same innate love of games, nor sense of history, that had built the company, and the line-up had so diversified that adventure games were losing their prominence as the company's bread-and-butter. It was a lot more corporate of an environment - perhaps it had to be that way in order to retain its status as an industry leader - but the Bellevue/Oakhurst split was devastating to morale. The book "Up the Organization" talks about how relocation is one of the most damaging things that can be done to a company and its employees, and when I left, the relocation was in full swing. It was not a happy time.

Scott Murphy: I remained at Sierra-Oakhurst longer than Mark by several years. That is, I was in Oakhurst where Sierra had long been headquartered. As Mark said, he had moved and was in Eugene at Dynamix, a company Sierra had acquired as Ken Williams grew the company. As I understand it, they were a little less affected by what happened at what had been Sierra-proper, which was all about adventure games for the most part. Dynamix was more diverse in its product genre spectrum. Still, they suffered the ax too. In Oakhurst, we had a revolving door where management was concerned. They'd sign on for a hefty sum, get stock options, hang around a while and then leave for a higher paying job elsewhere. Few had entertainment software backgrounds. The environment and knee-jerk changes for change's sake was less than ideal for creativity. Although we haven't talked about it at length, I don't think Ken knew very much about what was happening in Oakhurst based on communications we've had since. He seemed pretty out of the loop then as he had relocated to the new headquarters near Seattle. The company had gotten too big. But in his defense, I have since learned that he was dealing with some VERY difficult investors and a hostile board. It was apparently a very tough exit for him.

Q: Chainsaw Monday obviously left a bitter taste in your mouth (not to mention the mouths of the other 149 people who were laid off that day, the fans of the Sierra series, and anybody else who cared to look it up). So many years later, are you still bitter about the situation or is it water under the bridge now?

Scott: Yeah, that day sucked incredibly hard, but like I said, I'd been laid off for about a month and a half. The former workers that were my friends at Sierra were the ones who suffered the most. My only bitterness about that particular chapter was in regard to the impact that had on their lives. At that time I was doing alright. I didn't realize how much pressure I'd really been under and what a truly flaming ass pain dealing with Sierra management had become. I mean, I knew it was bad but until I was gone I really, really didn't know how much I'd gotten used to. That made my leaving, regardless of how it happened, a total blessing in disguise. I realized I'd needed to leave a long time before that. For me, it was water under the bridge a long time ago. I know that my comrades in arms have long ago moved on and are doing well but I'll never forget how roughly their lives were impacted despite the blood, sweat and tears they gave to what had become a truly ungrateful company.

The bitterness I posses is at what Sierra and Ken Williams had become as they became more and more successful, and how the Space Quest 6 abortion came about after broken promises and the just plain fucking over I got from the people I'd worked so incredibly hard for. The more successful each game became, the worse they treated us and the less they wanted to pay us. I'm not talking about us demanding more money like some sort of prima donnas. They seemed like they were actually penalizing us for being successful for them. They didn't want to pay us as much, which wasn't a lot anyway, as they had for each of the previous games. We'd done well for them despite the fact that they spent virtually no money advertising the games, especially when you look at how much they hyped the King's Quests. I'm quite proud of how we sold despite that.

On Space Quest 2, I worked fourteen months and had only TWO days off during that period, but that wasn't good enough for them. I got called in and chewed out after that one and SQ3 for taking too long to get them shipped. SQ4 showed how dark we'd become as a result.

Here's a little tidbit about how the parser interface went away and how management worked us. One day when we're literally halfway through SQ4, Mark and I were called into Ken's office. We were asked what we thought about using the (dumbass) point-and-click interface that they were using, in I guess it was King's Quest 5 then, and what we thought about putting it in SQ4. We said we wanted to keep the parser. Ken and Bill Davis asked us to talk about it together and then tell them what we wanted to do the next day. After the meeting, Mark and I agreed without hesitation as we walked out Ken's office door that there was absolutely no way we wanted the point-and-click. The next day when we came in, Bill Davis tracked Mark down and asked him what we'd decided. Mark told him that we'd decided to keep the parser, to which Bill instantly replied something to the effect of, "But you can't do that. Ken has already decided that you have to use the point-and-click!" Apparently they figured they had a fifty percent chance that we would make the decision and wouldn't realize that they'd already made the decision for us. That kind of mentality was another straw on the pile of last ones.

When he decided to go to Sierra's Dynamix division, he didn't have the decency to tell me he was leaving until we were headed to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. The only reason he told me then was that I was inevitably going to see him talking with Dynamix management personnel about the move while we were out there. I lost a lot of respect for him

Q: After Space Quest IV, you left Roger Wilco indefinately, while Mark moved to Dynamix to do SQ5. What is your own view of the situation?

SM: As I understand it from Mark, they didn't approach him to do SQ5 until he'd been up there a while. He didn't go there with that intent. I don't think he was tickled pink when they talked to him about it. We were both tired of Space Quest. It was all that Mark and I did pretty much. We were burned out. As soon as we finished one they wanted us to get to work on the next one. By SQ4 we started getting a little bitter about the situation which resulted in a little darker game in SQ4. Anyway, I really didn't know Mark was leaving for Dynamix until he'd pretty much made the deal. It didn't take long before Ken wanted another Space Quest. I don't know if it was my lack of interest or what but they approached Mark to do it at Dynamix. They were doing adventures at the time. I didn't know that it was being done until I saw someone down here running a demo of it. They don't tell you a whole lot around here unless they need you for something. Guess that's just a reality of the corporate world.

Mark and I had been cooped up together working on The Black Cauldron for the Disney movie by the same name. I'd conned Ken into letting me learn how to program adventure games in my off time, which meant being at his house from 5:00pm to 3:00am usually. There was a puzzle in the game where you had to acquire some gruel. I was rather tired one VERY early morning, and to amuse myself I installed a response message that said something like, "Mmmm, this tastes like freshly roasted mule shit, just like mom used to make." When I saw something I wrote actually displayed on the screen, I was totally f'ing hooked. What I didn't know was that they were going to send that version of the game down to Disney for their perusal of our progress. They saw that message and pretty much shit themselves. Amazingly, I didn't get fired and Mark and I eventually came up with our space comedy idea and convinced Ken to let us develop it. The rest is weird history.

[...]

I feel it only fair that I should note that, having said that and some other things in this interview I want to point out that I have some good memories with Roberta, mainly because I didn't have to work for her. She was the only person I knew in the early days that understood what the pressure was like to pull a game out of one's ass on demand. We had some really good talks and she was quite supportive. She even took time out to do a cameo in a little video that Leslie Balfour and I put together for inclusion in the first Space Quest Collection, for which I was grateful. She was the only one I could talk to about certain feelings involved in the creative process of adventure game design. That mattered a lot to me and I consider her a friend to this day as oddly, based on certain things I have said here, I do Ken. Away from work Ken was a completely different person and we enjoyed some good times together not to mention some fun and very interesting parties. There were times when we had to blow off some steam from the pressure that we were all under in our various roles.

Q: Were there any interesting anecdotes from the production of 'The Sarien Encounter?'

Scott: Well, the most interesting thing was that we convinced Ken to let us make a game and then we realized we didn't know what we were doing. Oddly, Space Quest 1 came from that. (or maybe that's the weirdest thing?)

[...]

Q: Were there ever any jokes that you had to cut from any of the Space Quest games? Anything that the corporate brass said went too far?

Scott: Mark and I did a pretty good job of reviewing our own work and making appropriate changes whether through adjustment or omission. We always had some really, uh, interesting text in the game during development that we would be careful to remove in the last QA versions. QA made sure to point them out fortunately. There were moans and whines on some things from some people but we ultimately only had to listen to Ken, and when he did have a concern, at least it a discussion. It occurred only a few times which I thought was quite cool on Ken's part. He could've just said "DO IT!" He trusted us for the most part and we were grateful for it.

Q: Fans who purchased the most recent version of the Space Quest Collection were treated to the promotional movie for Space Quest 7. Many of these fans, however, are not aware of the story behind the game's eventual cancellation. Could you give us the full scoop on what happened to Roger's seventh adventure?

SM: The deal with the demo is that it had nothing to do with what Space Quest 7 was supposed to be. It was merely eye candy for management (ugh) and for the Collection.

It never stood a chance. With the unrealistic expectations of the dumb-asses running the Sierra division in Oakhurst and Bellevue at the time, it was doomed from the start. I know that they'd pretty much jerked my heart out of the process. The only good thing about that time was the people I got to work for a while who would have made up the SQ7 team, and they were some great people. Just don't tell the bastards I said that. Nobody reads this crap anyway. Right?

AL: I'm Al Lowe and I created a series of games called Leisure Suit Larry for Sierra back in the '80s and '90s along with another 20 games and titles back in that period. I was with Sierra from 1982 until 1998 when it -- well, it was the poor victim of a hostile takeover by criminals. How about that for an opening?

Q: I feel like that merits a follow-up question.

AL: [Laughs.]

Q: Can you elaborate?

AL: The company was going great and literally had a 28 percent market share. In other words, 28 cents out of every dollar spent on entertainment software for home computers in the US went to Sierra. They had a tremendous product line in all aspects of entertainment home software, all kinds. That was the company that Ken and Roberta [Williams] literally started on their kitchen table and built to a billion-dollar market capitalization company.

One of Ken's board members on a Monday morning called and said, "I'm gonna stage a hostile takeover of your company and I'm gonna offer 50 percent more than the going price of the stock. If you fight me, every stockholder in the country will file a lawsuit against you for not accepting this wonderful offer from me." It was like, "Okay, I guess you're in charge now."

Turned out that one thing led to another, the company went away, Ken and Roberta went away, the company changed hands, and it turned out that the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C. investigated and found out that the entire business was a kind of a house of cards. They didn't have the money that they said they had, they didn't have the means to do this stuff, and they ended up fining them the largest fine in the history of the United States government. Over a billion dollars, as I recall. This was pre-Enron, of course. [Laughs.] Enron broke the record, I suppose.

But, yeah. Sierra ended up being the victim of this takeover, and then, the government went after these guys and said, "You're guilty of fraud." And after a number of trials, the guy who staged the whole thing, plus at least two of his henchmen ended up going to federal penitentiary back in New England and hopefully until this day are making big rocks into little ones. [Laughs.] I hope. But I doubt it. It's probably more of a country club.

Anyway. If you have any questions about it, Google "Cendant verdict Forbes trial." Something like that. Those four words'd probably do it. The guy's name was Walter Forbes, and as I said, he was a board member of Sierra and he ended up wrecking the company.

I loved the old parser interface because I felt I could have a lot more fun with the player, including insulting them based on their input. I liked to surprise them when they thought that they'd typed something in they didn't think there would be a response to other than a canned, "I don't understand."