Colossal cave sesame street11/15/2023 ![]() The company ’s poor performance at this time prompted layoffs of 60 employees. Although the network reached 45,000 subscribers, high development costs consumed its increasing revenues ($20 million in 1994). The ImagiNation Network, originally known as the Sierra Network, formed an alliance with Prodigy in 1993, and added CUC International ’s Shopper ’s Advantage on-line shopping service. In 1989, the company started its own games-only network, another first, which fared poorly out of the gate in spite of a $1 million investment. In 1994, Roberta Williams estimated that women made up 15 percent (growing 2 percent yearly) of Sierra On-Line ’s customers. The gambit worked, and the game sold twice as well as its predecessors. Realizing that most buyers of computer software were male, she dared to makeĪ female character, Princess Rosella, the protagonist for King ’s Quest IV. Sierra On-Line featured female heroines in later versions of King ’s Quest and in the 1995 release Phantasmagoria, a development in which Roberta Williams took pride. By the mid-1990s, series sales had reached three million copies, with each sequel selling better than its predecessor. Aside from garnering international awards, King ’s Quest spawned as many sequels as a Hollywood blockbuster. King ’s Quest, conceived by Roberta Williams, proved Sierra could continue to ride the crest of innovation and lead a new generation of video games. Sierra later agreed to produce a version of its Red Baron game, to be released in 1996, for Nintendo ’s cartridge-based video game system.Ī major break for the company came in 1987, when IBM hired the company to develop a game to highlight its XT line of PCs. The resulting disaster forced Sierra to cut its number of employees from 120 to 30. At the urging of investors, in 1983 the company began producing cartridges for the early Atari video game machines, which were about to fall out of fashion. At first, computers were simply too expensive for the mass market. This was ironic, since the innovation in her first adventure game was the graphics.Īlthough Ken and Roberta Williams believed their venture to have lucrative possibilities from the beginning, their success was limited by the growth of the personal computer industry. Roberta Williams ’s attention to story made her games stand out among the industry ’s first games, which had been developed by programmers, students, and hackers. Within three years the company ’s sales reached $10 million. Its second product, also authored by Roberta Williams, was The Wizard and the Princess it sold more than 60,000 copies and offered color graphics. The company, first known as On-Line Systems, moved in 1980 to Oakhurst, California, at the foot of the Sierra Mountains, and was renamed Sierra On-Line. These impressive sales came in spite of low-tech packaging involving Ziploc bags and text clipped from magazines. ![]() In the first six months, more than 3,000 copies were sold, worth a retail value of $75,000. Mystery House, the resulting product, immediately sparked incredible demand as the first computer adventure game to combine text and graphics. ![]() In 1980, Roberta Williams wrote a murder mystery and her husband wrote the computer code for the game in less than a month. ![]() Ken Williams had himself previously stumbled upon these games while logged onto a remote mainframe computer during a tax software programming session. She was intrigued by the possibilities of incorporating graphics into such a narrative adventure game. His wife Roberta, a real estate speculator, soon found herself hooked on an early text-only, interactive game called Colossal Cave. In 1979, Los Angeles computer programmer Ken Williams bought an Apple for Christmas. Sierra ’s story began when personal computers were a novelty. ![]() The company ’s popular software titles include Hoyle, You Don ’t Know Jack, the Print Artist Series, the Hallmark Card Studio series, Grand Prix Legends, Nascar Racing 3, Football Pro 99, King ’s Quest, and Homeworld. The firm ’s four major brands include Sierra Attractions, Sierra Home, Sierra Sports, and Sierra Studios. Sierra On-Line, Inc., a subsidiary of Vivendi Universal Publishing (formerly known as Havas Interactive), operates as one of the original developers and largest publishers of interactive entertainment and productivity software worldwide. Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Vivendi Universal Publishing Incorporated: 1979 as On-Line Systems Employees: 685 Sales: $69.5 million (1999) NAIC: 51121 Software Publishers 334611 Software Reproducing ![]()
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