Sierra Entertainment, Inc. (formerly On-Line System and then Sierra On-Line, Inc. ) is an American video game developer based in Bellevue, Washington.
Founded in 1979 as On-Line Systems, by Ken and Roberta Williams. The company was acquired by CUC International in July 1996 and was organized under CUC Software subsidiary in September 1996. CUC Software was later renamed Cendant Software in 1997, and Cendant Software was later acquired by Havas Interactive (later renamed Vivendi Universal Games and Vivendi Games) in December 1998.
In 2008, Vivendi Games was acquired by and joined Activision, and Sierra Entertainment was dissolved shortly thereafter.
The brand name "Sierra" was relaunched by Activision in 2014, and exists as a publishing label where Sierra's title of heritage was re-released, as well as several independent titles.
Video Sierra Entertainment
Histori
Pendirian
Sierra Entertainment was founded in 1979 as an On-Line System in Simi Valley, California, by Ken and Roberta Williams. Ken Williams, a programmer for IBM, bought the Apple II microcomputer he plans to use to develop Fortran compilers for Apple II. At the time, his wife Roberta Williams was playing a text adventure game at Apple II. Unsatisfied with the text-only format, it realizes that the graphical display capabilities of the Apple II can enhance the experience of playing adventure games. After initial success, On-Line Systems was renamed Sierra On-Line in 1982, and the company moved to Oakhurst, California. In early 1984 InfoWorld estimated that Sierra was the 12th largest microcomputer company in the world, with $ 12.5 million in sales in 1983.
1980s
In 1980, On-Line Systems released their first game in the Hi-Res Adventure series, Mystery House. Roberta wrote the script for adventure games in three weeks, then presented to Ken. At this point, Roberta convinces Ken to help him develop the game at night after work. He worked on the text and graphics, and told Ken how to put it together to make it the game he wanted. They worked for about three months and, on May 5, 1980, Mystery House was ready to be shipped.
The Hi-Res Adventure series is followed by Mission Asteroid , released as Hi-Res Adventure # 0, although it is the second release. The next release, Wizard and the Princess , also known as Adventure in Serenia , is considered a prelude to the King's Quest series later on in both story and concept. Through 1981 and 1982, more games were released in the series including Cranston Manor, Ulysses and Golden Fleece, Time Zone, and The Dark Crystal . The simplest version of The Dark Crystal is intended for a younger audience, written by Al Lowe and released as Gelfling Adventure .
Many of Sierra's most famous series began in the 1980s. In 1983, Sierra On-Line was contacted by IBM to create games for his new PCjr. IBM will fund the entire game development, pay royalties for it, and advertise for the game. Ken and Roberta accept and start the project. Roberta created a story that features elements of classical tales. The concept of the game includes animated color graphics, a pseudo-3D perspective where the main character is visible on the screen, a more competent text parser that will understand advanced commands from players, and music played in the background via PCjr sound hardware. For the game, a complete development system called Adventure Game Interpreter was developed. In the summer of 1984, King's Quest was released for much praise, starting the King's Quest series.
While working to complete The Black Cauldron, programmers Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy began planning for their own adventure game. After a simple demonstration for Ken, he allows them to start working on the full game, called Space Search: The Sarien Encounter . The game, released in October 1986, was an instant success and will spawn many sequels in subsequent years as part of the Space Quest series.
Al Lowe, who has worked in Sierra On-Line for many years, was asked by Ken Williams to write a modern version of Chuck Benton's Softporn Adventure from 1981, the company's only pure text adventure. ever released. Leisure Suit Larry in Land of the Lounge Lizard was a big hit (although first became famous as an early example of software piracy, since Sierra sold more manuals than actual copies of the game) and won the Adventure Game Award Best Association of Best Publishers of 1987. A long series of Leisure Suit Larry games will follow in the coming years.
Ken Williams befriended a retired patrolman named Jim Walls, and asked him to make an adventure series based on a police theme. The wall went on to create a Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel, released in 1987. Several sequels followed, and the series was praised for its adherence to police protocols (the relevant sections described in the games manual ',' and presents some of the real-life situations faced by Walls during his career as an officer.
Quest for Glory is a series of adventure video games/role-playing hybrid designed by Corey and Lori Ann Cole. The first game in the series, Quest for Glory: So You Want Be Be Hero , was released in 1989. The series combines humor, puzzle elements, themes and characters borrowed from various legends, words, and memorable characters, creating a 5-part series from the stable Sierra. Although the series originally titled Hero's Quest, Sierra failed the trademark name. Milton Bradley managed to trade an electronic version of their unrelated game board game HeroQuest, which forced Sierra to change the series titles' to Quest for Glory. This decision led to all future games in the series (as well as new releases of Hero Quest I) to switch to a new name.
In 1987, Sierra On-Line began publishing their own game magazine, where people could read about their upcoming games and interviews with the developers. The magazine was originally named The Sierra News Magazine and The Sierra/Dynamix Newsmagazine . However, since the Sierra Club had published a magazine called Sierra Magazine, the name of a magazine published by Sierra On-Line was changed to InterAction in 1991. The magazine InterAction discontinued in 1999.
The Sierra Adventure Interpretation Game Machine, introduced with King's Quest, was replaced in 1988 with the Sierra Creative Translator at King's Quest IV. The game is released under both machines, so those with new computers can use new machines and better rendering technology.
1990s
In 1990, Sierra released the King's Quest V . This is the first Sierra On-Line game ever to sell more than 500,000 copies and is the highest selling game over the next five years. It won several awards as well, such as the Best Adventure Game of the Year from both the Software Publisher Association and the World Computer Gaming magazine.
The ImagiNation Network, the first online game environment, started its development in 1989. Launched on May 6, 1991, as the Sierra Network. Providing "land-based" predecessors to MMORPG and internet chat rooms, each ground theme for the content type provides multi-player games and bulletin boards based on categories and chat rooms across the continent. AT & amp; T took over ownership of the network on November 15, 1994, and as a result his name was changed to Imagine Network. The network failed to find a mass audience.
In 1991, Sierra released the first title in Dr.'s series. Brain, Castle of Dr. Brain , educational adventure game of hybrid puzzle, which has several sequels. In 1993, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father was released, starting the Gabriel Knight series. Generally regarded as the subject of the point-and-click adventure genre, its games and sequels are critically acclaimed in mainstream media at the time.
Sierra and Broderbund ended the merger discussion in March 1991.
Sierra has grown since the first few years, and new buildings will be needed to expand its operations to continue making games. The decision was made to move the headquarters north to Bellevue, Washington. Sierra's original location in Oakhurst continued as an internal development studio for the company, and later renamed Yosemite Entertainment .
The company now consists of five separate and largely autonomous development divisions: Sierra Publishing, Sierra Northwest, Dynamix, Bright Star Technology, and Coktel Vision, with each group working separately on product development but sharing manufacturing resources, distribution, and sales.
1995 will prove to be a very successful year for the company. Sierra is the market leader in PC gaming for this year. With $ 83.4 million in sales from its software publishing business, revenues increased by 19 percent, bringing a net profit of $ 11.9 million to the company. In June 1995, Sierra and Pioneer Electric Corp. signed an agreement to create a joint venture that will develop, publish, manufacture and market entertainment software for the Japanese software market. This joint venture creates a new company called Sierra Venture. With Sierra and Pioneer investing more than $ 12 million, the new company soon produced and sent over twenty of the most popular Sierra products to Japan and created a new title for the Japanese market. 1995 also saw Sierra acquire a number of development companies, both small home developers and large companies.
Phantasmagoria is the largest project ever undertaken by Sierra. By the time it was released in late 1995, the anticipation for the game was high. Although nearly one million copies were sold when the game was first released in August 1995, making it the best-selling Sierra adventure game ever made, the game received mixed reviews from industry critics.
Sold to CUC
In February 1996, the earliest e-commerce pioneer CUC International, which sought to expand into interactive entertainment, offered to buy Sierra for about $ 1.5 billion. The deal with CUC closed on July 24, 1996. Immediately after the sale, Ken Williams resigned as Sierra CEO. He lives with the software division as CUC Vice President so he can provide strategic guidance for Sierra and start working on CUC's online product distributor, NetMarket. A year later, Ken and Roberta leave CUC.
In September 1996, CUC announced plans to consolidate some of its gaming companies into a company called CUC Software Inc., headquartered in Torrance, California. Davidson & amp; Partner became the publisher for the studio. CUC Software will consolidate the manufacturing, distribution and sales resources of all upcoming divisions to include Sierra, Davidson, Blizzard, Knowledge Adventure, and Gryphon Software.
On November 5, 1996, Sierra was restructured into three units.
Cendant Corporation
In December 1997, CUC joined HFS Incorporated. The two companies jointly form Cendant Corporation with more than 40,000 employees and operate in more than 100 countries.
In 1998, Sierra divided its organization into 4 sub-brands and corporate divisions:
- Sierra Attractions (For casual games like poker)
- Sierra Home (For home/lifestyle software)
- Sierra Sports (For sports games)
- Sierra Studios (public publishing division)
On November 24, 1997, Sierra published Diablo: Hellfire, the official expansion package for the very popular Diablo game. It was developed by Synergistic Software, a division of Sierra.
On November 19, 1998, Sierra published Half-Life for PC, developed by Valve Corporation, widely regarded as one of the greatest games of all time.
In March 1998, a large accounting fraud at CUC was exposed. With the news, Cendant announced its intention to sell its computer entertainment division, and on November 20, 1998, announced the sale of its entire consumer software division to Havas SA Sierra based in Paris to be part of Havas Interactive, the interactive entertainment division of the company.
Big firing
On February 22, 1999, Sierra announced a massive reorganization of the company, resulting in the closure of several of their development studios, reductions in others and relocation of key projects, and employees from the studios, to Bellevue. About 250 people total lost their jobs. Development groups within Sierra like PyroTechnix are closed. Others like Books That Work were moved to Bellevue. Also closed is Yosemite Entertainment, the division that occupies the original headquarters of Sierra On-Line. The company sells the rights of Headgate Studio back to its original owner. With the exception of warehouses and distribution departments, the entire studio was closed. Game designers Al Lowe and Scott Murphy were dismissed. Lowe has just started working on Leisure Suit Larry 8 . Murphy was involved in the Space Search project at that time. The layoffs continued on March 1, when Sierra decided 30 employees at Dynamix were previously unaffected, 15 percent of their workforce.
Despite the layoffs, Sierra continues to publish games for the construction of smaller homes. In September 1999, they released Homeworld , a real-time space-fighting strategy game developed by Relic Entertainment. The game design is revolutionary for the genre, and the game gets critical acclaim and many awards.
Legacy of Yosemite Entertainment
UK-based game developers and codemasters, in an effort to establish themselves in the United States, announced that they will launch a new development studio in Oakhurst, using the abandoned Sierra facility and hire most of Yosemite Entertainment's layoff staff in mid-September 1999. In early October the company announced that it will take over the management and maintenance of Realm's online RPG and will retrieve and complete the previously canceled Navy SEALs . The company also reported that it has obtained the right to continue using Yosemite Entertainment's name for home construction.
Reorganize
Meanwhile, Sierra announced another reorganization, this time into three business units: Core Games, Casual Entertainment, and Home Productivity. This reorganization resulted in more layoffs, eliminating 105 additional jobs and a number of games in production. After 1999, Sierra almost completely stopped being a game developer and, over time, became a game publisher by independent developers.
2000s
At the end of June 2000, the strategic business alliance between Vivendi, Seagram and Canal was announced, and Vivendi Universal, a leading global media and communications company, was formed after a merger with Seagram (Universal Studios parent company). Havas S.A. renamed Vivendi Universal Publishing and became a new group publishing division, divided into five groups: games, education, literature, health, and information. This merger was followed by many more layoffs of Sierra employees.
On February 19, 2002, Sierra On-Line officially announced the change of name to Sierra Entertainment, Inc.
In 2002, Sierra, working with High Voltage Software, announced the development of a new chapter in the Leisure Suit Larry franchise, titled Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude . It was released to mostly mixed into negative reviews; The creator of Larry, Al Lowe, was not involved with the project.
The newly renamed Sierra Entertainment continues to develop most of the interactive entertainment products that do not work. However, the hit Homeworld 2 once again cemented Sierra's reputation as an honorable publisher.
In 2003, Sierra Entertainment released the second video game adaptation of The Hobbit , and NASCAR Racing 2003 Season .
Cost-cutting measures were taken due to the financial problems of Vivendi Universal Games (VU Games') parent company and due to Sierra's lack of profitability as a working developer. Impressions Games and Papyrus Design Group closed in the spring of 2004, and about 50 lost jobs in the cuts; 180 Sierra related positions were removed at Vivendi Los Angeles office; and finally in June 2004, VU Games closed the Sierra location in Bellevue, which spent more than 100 of their jobs, dissolved Sierra's work into other VU Games divisions, and moved the company to Vivendi Universal Games corporate headquarters in Fresno, California. Other titles, such as Print Artist, are permanently terminated. Hoyle's franchise is sold to independent developers. In total, 350 people lost their jobs.
At the end of 2005, Sierra's brand was relaunched from Los Angeles, including the Sierra Online brand, focusing on online titles only.
Throughout 2005 and 2006, Vivendi Universal Games acquired several game development studios including Massive Entertainment, High Moon Studios, Radical Entertainment, Secret Lair Studios/Studio Ch'in (based in Seattle and Shanghai) and Swordfish Studios and integrated it into Sierra, in addition to licensing creatives from other Universal Vivendi divisions and from companies that partner with Vivendi Universal Games and the copyright of some famous intellectual property, such as Crash Bandicoot , Spyro the Dragon , <50 Cent: Bulletproof and Scarface .
After Vivendi Universal Games was renamed Vivendi Games in mid-2006, all games published by the company will all be branded under the name of Sierra Entertainment.
Caesar IV was published September 26, 2006 in North America, in partnership with Tilted Mill Entertainment.
In the summer of 2007, Sierra Online began launching Xbox Live Arcade titles for Xbox 360. One of its first releases was the conversion of the successful German-style "Carcassonne" board game, which had been in development at Secret Lair Studios.
In September 2007, Sierra released a real-time tactical video game World in Conflict .
In October 2007, Sierra released TimeShift .
In 2008, Sierra Entertainment's parent company, Vivendi Games joined the video game publisher Activision to form the parent company Activision Blizzard. Vivendi Games is absorbed into Activision after the merger and ownership of Sierra and its properties go to Activision. Later that year, Sierra was closed for possible future sales.
On July 29, 2008, Activision dropped several Sierra titles planned for release that did not fit their long-term strategy. [1] Future titles such as Crash: Mind Over Mutant , The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon and Prototype are maintained by Activision. Many of the old titles that Vivendi/Sierra planned to publish were sold to other publishers. Ghostbusters: The Video Game and The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athens sold to Atari, Inc., BrÃÆ'¼tal Legend is sold to Electronic Arts, WET sold to Bethesda Softworks, <50 Cent: Blood on the Sand sold to THQ and World in Conflict: Soviet Assault sold to Ubisoft, which also acquired Massive Entertainment. Swordfish Studios was sold to Codemasters.
2010s
On August 7, 2014, the Sierra website, previously transferred to the Activision website, has been updated, featuring a new logo, teasing: "More to be announced at Gamescom 2014." The revived Sierra Entertainment will re-release some of their old games, re-imagine their older franchises, and collaborate with indie studios to create new "innovative, unique and unique graphics" projects. Sierra will focus on publishing games that can be downloaded via PlayStation Network, Steam for PC, and Xbox Live. "We are very proud of what we made years ago with Sierra On-Line, and today's news about bringing Sierra forward as a very exciting indie-specific brand," said co-founder Sierra Ken Williams in an official statement. "We are looking forward to seeing the independent spirit of the living Sierra." On the same day, King's Quest and Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions were announced; they are the first two games published under the revived Sierra brand.
On December 5, 2014, they were awarded the "Industry Icons" during the 2014 Game Awards, and they also introduced the first recording of the King's Quest reboot.
Maps Sierra Entertainment
Management team
Ken Williams (co-founder perusahaan):
- CEO (1979 - November 1997)
- Presiden (1979-1981, 1983-1995)
- Ketua (September 1988 - Juli 1996)
Dick Sunderland
- President (1981 - Summer 1983)
Michael Brochu:
- CFO and Senior Vice President (June 1994 - October 1995)
- President and COO (October 1995 - October 1997)
David Grenewetzki
- Presiden (Juni 1998 - Juni 2001)
Thomas K. Hernquist
- Presiden (Juni 2001)
Michael Ryder
- COO and Vice President of Product Development (June 2001)
- The President (June 2001 - June 2004)
Studio
Absorbed
- The Book Works
- The Shining Stars Technology in Bellevue, Washington, founded in 1980, earned 1992.
- Green Thumb Software, obtained in 1995.
Off
- Berkeley Systems in Berkeley, California, founded in 1987, was acquired in 1997, closed in 2000.
- Dynamix in Eugene, Oregon, established in 1984, acquired August 1990, closed August 14, 2001.
- Home Page Sports, closed January 28, 1998.
- The Impressions Game in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded in 1989, was acquired in 1995, closed in April 2004.
- Papyrus Design Group in Watertown, Massachusetts, founded in 1987, was acquired in 1995, closed in May 2004.
- PyroTechnix, founded as a Computer Presentation, was acquired in February 1996, closed in 1999.
- Yosemite Entertainment in Oakhurst, California, formed in 1998, closed in 1999 and then sold to Codemasters that year.
Joined with Activision
- High Moon Studios in San Diego, California, founded in 2001, was acquired by Vivendi Games in January 2006.
- Radical Entertainment in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, founded in 1991, was acquired by Vivendi Games in 2005.
Sold
- Coktel Vision in Paris, France, founded in 1985, acquired in 1993, was sold to Mindscape in 2005.
- Headgate Studios in Bountiful, Utah, founded in 1992, was acquired in April 1996, sold to original owners in 1999.
- Massive Entertainment in MalmÃÆ'¶, Sweden, founded in 1997, was acquired by Vivendi Games in 2002, sold to Ubisoft on November 10, 2008.
- Swordfish Studios in Birmingham, England, founded in September 2002, was acquired by Vivendi Games in June 2005, sold to Codemasters on November 14, 2008.
- Sinergistic Studios, founded in 1978, was acquired in 1996, the studio closed in 1999. No longer involved in the video game industry.
- Wanako Games, founded in 2002, was acquired in 2007, Sold to Artificial Mind and Current Movement of Interactive Behavior, in 2010 Wanako is now the Santiago Behavior
Sierra House Title
- Generation 1-8 - Family tree program for Windows 95-98
- Power Chess - A game that teaches how to play chess
- Hoyle Card Games - Collection of popular card games like Poker, Bridge, Euchre, Hearts, Spades
- Hoyle Board Games - a collection of popular board games
- Hoyle Puzzle Game
- Hallmark Card Studio - Issuance of rights that will be provided to Nova
See also
- List of video game companies
- List of video game publishers
- AGD Interactive
- Activision Blizzard
- Brave Adventure
- Vivendi Game
References
- Notes
- Interview with Ken Williams, Gamasutra, October 2005
- An Interview With Russisk Laawson, Module And Graphic Designer: 2006-10-12
- HACKERS, Hero of the Computer revolution, Steven Levy, reprinted - Penguin Books 1994, ISBNÃ, 0-14-023269-9
External links
- Official website
- SierraGamers - The founder's official website
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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