Ken’s biggest problem was dealing with the constant expansion of On-Line Systems. The crowded offices, packed to the gills with employees, were not neat, and neither was Ken. Sometimes he couldn’t find contracts amid the piles of papers and boxes on the floor. Sometimes he couldn’t find disks that had essential computer code on them. Music blared to the point of cacophony. There was drinking to drunkenness on Fridays, and on Tuesdays there was Men’s Night, which included more boozing. Pot smoke filled the air too, and sometimes employees howled like banshees in the company bathroom, screwing with abandon. Nevertheless, the money was still coming in, a ton of it. It was then that Roberta and Ken had a serious discussion. If they wanted to keep growing, they knew they needed a manager who had business school experience. That didn’t mean they still couldn’t have fun making games. They just needed to tighten and streamline the process.
In early September 1982, Ken hired Don Sutherland, his boss from his software programming days. Sutherland tried his best to tighten things up, but both Ken and Roberta were resistant. After all, they had created this multimillion-dollar company and they wanted to have their say. It all nearly fell apart when the Atari-induced videogame crash came. Sierra On-Line, the new name of the company (sporting a logo that featured a mountain peak reaching for the sky) nearly became a victim. Roberta blamed Sierra’s venture capitalists, who, after putting $10 million into the company, had pressured them into making cheesy Atari games for naught; after all, Atari’s greed was the cause of the crash. Roberta told Ken that taking the money was the worst mistake they ever made. Both of them felt they were being treated like hicks by the money people from New York and Boston. At a meeting in San Francisco, those money people said the only way out was to sell the company to Spinnaker Software, an edutainment software firm with dubious titles like Fraction Fever.
In a kind of fuck-you voice, Roberta, knowing she and Ken controlled 60 percent of the company, said, “We’re not selling anything. This is our lives.”
“Then you’ll go down. You’ll die with the company,” said a bespectacled man in an expensive suit.
At that point, the Williamses walked out of the meeting and got the hell out of Dodge. Back in the mountains, they eliminated nearly three quarters of the staff, which took its toll on Ken, who rarely relished firings of any sort. After the carnage, Sierra was down from 129 employees to 29. Ken and Roberta leveraged their house and maxed out their credit cards to keep the other employees. Through all this, Roberta was plotting a comeback with a new adventure game. To save money, she wore many hats, including heading up Sierra’s purchasing department. Sutherland was gone, and Ken was both CEO and COO of a company that people began to think of as a mere fad. The smartest money analysts and Wall Streeters in the country felt that Sierra On-Line was on life support.
“We have to get back to our core,” Roberta told Ken as they walked together in the woods near their home. “Let’s do what we do best.”
“Forget all that Atari crap,” agreed Ken. “That’s over. That’s water under the bridge.”
Their critical center was in adventure games, in particular an ambitious project Roberta called King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown. It would be the first adventure game to feature an animated world to explore. Ken had wangled a deal with IBM, which would be producing a computer it hoped would be as popular as the Apple IIc. The PCjr, which would be available in March 1984, had so much marketing muscle behind it, you couldn’t avoid seeing it on TV or in magazines. To help launch the machine, which sported two ports for joysticks, IBM asked the Williamses for an adventure game. The fantasy game, which took place in the fanciful kingdom of Daventry, was a $700,000 gamble for Sierra. It took six full-time programmers eighteen months to create. But Big Blue didn’t even ask for exclusivity, so Ken sold a version of King’s Quest to Tandy for their home PC, the Tandy 1000, which was distributed through RadioShack stores across the nation.
Confident that the code was clean, polished, and well tested, the Williamses unleashed King’s Quest in May, to much acclaim. Even though the PCjr was a failure, due to its high price and badly designed wireless keyboard, King’s Quest was a critical hit on that machine and very popular on the better made Tandy 1000. It did so well that Sega, Apple, and Atari came knocking to license it.
“We’re back, baby,” Ken would say to his creditors as if it were his own version of the Bronx cheer. Not much more than a year after the tempestuous meeting with venture capitalists in San Francisco, Sierra had paid all of its outstanding bills. It was a remarkable rise from the ashes, one that led the money people to trust the Williamses again.
From that point on, Sierra seemed to be unable to do any wrong. At an Apple Fest, Ken signed up Richard Garriott, the son of a Spacelab astronaut who was so far ahead of his time that his Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress fantasy role playing game had thousands of orders before it was released. Ken and Roberta also brought in Al Lowe, who worked on the pun-filled and slightly naughty Leisure Suit Larry, featuring a protagonist whose one goal in life was a simple one: to get laid. There was a deal with NASCAR for racing games and a deal with Hoyle, the one-hundred-year-old United States playing card manufacturer, to make poker games. Soon Sierra became so flush, Roberta and Ken moved north to swanky offices in Bellevue, Washington. From Washington, they acquired a dozen smaller companies. Ken knew precisely what he wanted in games, and he could tell if they were right for Sierra in a matter of minutes. Partially, Roberta and Ken’s success came because Sierra fans were forgiving. If there were minor errors in a game, the fans of a popular series would still buy it, as long as it stayed true to its roots. By the time Roberta’s King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Younger was unleashed in late 1990, the frenzy for Roberta’s games showed no boundaries. With its hint-giving, bespectacled owl, Cedric, King’s Quest V sold more than 500,000 copies, making it the bestselling computer game of its time. By then, Ken and Roberta ruled their kingdom with elegance and strength, just as the royalty of her fictional kingdom of Daventry ruled theirs. Ken and Roberta weren’t like JFK and Jackie. But within their milieu, they lived in a sort of Camelot—if only because there were no other husband-and-wife game company moguls in the industry.
At the time, Roberta was becoming bored with the King’s Quest series. She wanted to do something that was a bigger, better version of Mystery House. In 1991, she began voluminous research into the horror genre that extended beyond games. She read horror classics. She watched so many scary movies that she’d wake up in the middle of the night feeling that she’d been bitten by a vampire or haunted by a ghost. She asked everyone she met what their favorite eerie camp-fire story was. She had notebooks full of stories, outlines, and general thoughts on horror. The Seattle area itself was the perfect place to go deep into what makes up the essence of fear. You could see strange beings in the misty rain if you tried, and the mystery of the Green River Killer, a man who was murdering dozens of women, was often in the news. For a year before she started writing the game, it was all horror, all the time for Roberta.
The time for Ziploc bags had long since ended. Budgeted at $4 million, Phantasmagoria would be Sierra’s costliest game, one that would take four years to make. If you were a reporter at the time, you might dine with Roberta in Seattle, and she would expound upon the making of the game. It was like making a real movie, she would say. There were eight hundred scenes and a 550-page script, which she had written. There were Screen Actors Guild performers cast in the roles and a top-notch casting director, too. The Gregorian choir that sang in Latin included 135 people. There was so much video, it would take up seven CD-ROM computer disks. Myst and The 7th Guest had moved PC computer games into new territory by adding snippets of video and by helping to make CD-ROM drives de rigueur. But Phantasmagoria came at the very peak of the adventure game’s popularity. So Roberta stuffed in two hours of video, as much as a Hollywood movie. “Turn out the lights when you play it,” Roberta would say, “and light some candles. This game
is going to scare the bejesus out of you.”
When it was released in July 1995, the horror game was criticized for being derivative. The movie-like introduction appeared to have been cribbed from The Twilight Zone. Horror fans could see elements of The Shining here and bits of A Nightmare on Elm Street there. There was even a grimace-filled nod to serial killer Ed Gein (the inspiration for Hitchcock’s Psycho) when the crazed protagonist’s husband dons a human scalp and hair. Roberta had felt that art director Andy Hoyos, who collaborated on script ideas, wanted to add things that were too violent, so she’d put the kibosh on some of the bloodier suggestions. Beyond that, the adventure tale itself moved too slowly before you encountered the scares. And, in a bid to lure the new game player, Sierra had made the game’s puzzles too easy.
Yet it could induce terror. During its monstrous rape scene, Phantasmagoria creeped you out. And the tension was palpable when a giant horned demon chased the stalwart though panicked heroine through the Victorian manse. The creepiness came to a head when the creature, sharp talons at the ready, ripped her face in two. But it was the portrayal of sexual violation in the game that led chains like CompUSA to ban it.*
The controversy and the mixed reviews didn’t hurt sales of Phantasmagoria very much; priced at $70, it went on to sell more than a million copies in its first six months. If you added together the sales of all the other Sierra games in 1995, they wouldn’t have matched those of Roberta’s adult horror offering. She had reached the highest of videogame heights, and so had Ken, whose days were filled with managing the various companies Sierra now owned. Even as Sierra was adding early Internet multiplayer abilities to some of their games, Ken and Roberta were getting tired. It was especially evident with Ken, who had always liked the technology that made games run more than the games themselves.
In 1996, they sold Sierra On-Line for a mammoth $1.5 billion in stock to CUC International, a company known primarily for its shopping service. CUC became Cendant. Ken and Roberta, who still owned 60 percent of Sierra when it was sold, became filthy rich on paper.
Then, in April 1998, Cendant became embroiled in the biggest accounting scandal of the time; during 1996 and 1997, it had inflated income by $500 million. Cendant stock plummeted to about 15 percent of its market high, and both the CEO and vice chairman were sentenced to a decade in jail. Cendant’s game division began pumping out really horrible games. Ken left the company, feeling completely disenchanted. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen that CUC was run by such scurrilous individuals.
Roberta, on the other hand, was still obliged contractually to finish King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, the eighth in the landmark adventure series. There were problems from the get-go. Sierra was now overseen by another Cendant acquisition, a conservative Christian edutainment software company called Davidson & Associates. The Davidsons, especially former schoolteacher Jan, looked down on the Williamses in the way a wary parent might look down on the punky teenager who comes to date the pure-as-snow daughter. Roberta told people that the Davidsons believed Phantasmagoria was immoral, something that would ruin the nation’s youth, who might go on rampages of violence in imitation of what they’d witnessed. If the Davidsons had been fully behind Phantasmagoria—which had still been on shelves and selling steadily at the time of the CUC acquisition—Roberta believed it would have sold far more during its retail life span.
Roberta tried to hold back her feelings, but she felt sick inside. At times she was livid; she no longer had true control over her work, in particular the next installment of the King’s Quest series. As Roberta worked on her script and puzzle ideas, another team worked on theirs. When it came down to it, she felt like she wasn’t being listened to. When it was crunch time, Roberta saw that the graphics were subpar. Worse, Mask of Eternity hadn’t been aggressively tested for bugs. In the end, the last King’s Quest was a mishmash of styles. Critics gave it the worst reviews of any game in the series.
That was why she was in bed, crying, that afternoon in 1998.
Deep down, she realized that times had changed. It was now a console world, one Sony controlled with the PlayStation, with racing games like Gran Turismo and with Crash Bandicoot. PC games like Roberta’s had had their time in the sun, but now they were becoming old-fashioned.
Friends in the business had cautioned her, “Once you sell the company, get out. And don’t look back.” Finally, in late 1998, she heeded the wise suggestions of her peers. Now that King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity was on the shelves, she could leave. Soon she would sail the world with Ken in a twin engine Nordhavn 68 yacht called Sans Souci. She would begin writing an Alex Haley–like novel about her Irish roots. Roberta Williams would have a new life, sans souci, and she would try not to look back.
She would never make another game.
Sierra certainly grew big, but it also grew bloated. It had a computer game in every genre imaginable, and even had its hands in releasing productivity software for the home office. Even so, Sierra did not change with the times. So freaked out were Ken and Roberta by the fall of Atari that they never worked with consoles again, even when the PC was no longer a go- to platform for gamers. That was a mistake because videogame companies need to be agile enough to stay ahead of the trends. Still, their core games were a cut above the rest when it came to writing, and that was key. It would be nearly another decade before writing in games would deepen again. But Roberta was also the only woman game company founder who consistently made creditable, bestselling series. The fact that she has not made another game is troubling. Women certainly have made strides in game making over the years. For instance, Jade Raymond produced the Assassin’s Creed series for Ubisoft, and Amy Hennig directed and wrote the Uncharted series, influenced by the old penny dreadful novels and Indiana Jones, for Sony. Both have been massive bestsellers that consistently receive stellar review scores. But sadly, no woman since Roberta has had such a long-running impact on games and on game companies. Decades later, Sierra still represents the high point for women in videogames.
* CBS television came over to interview me about the rape scene. I mentioned to them that parents or the faint of heart could turn off the offending portion of the game. “There’s no story in that,” announced the annoyed reporter. In a huff, the CBS team packed up their equipment and left.
EVERQUEST: ORCS, ELVES, AND A CAST OF THOUSANDS
While everyone from Ralph Baer to Ken and Roberta Williams to Ken Kutaragi envisioned a world of online games, it wasn’t until the late nineties that the general gaming population became interested. On one gray day at Sony’s midtown Manhattan headquarters an all-hands meeting made everyone present a small part of a new kind of game. Within days, a select group was beta testing EverQuest, which would become one of the more popular massively multiplayer online role playing games.*
MMOs (massively multiplayer online games) feature the most communicative, expansive game play ever devised. Thousands of happy, rabid nerds can play online at once. The idea was revolutionary. You hustle over to your favorite game store, buy the game, and install it on your PC. Then with your modem you connect online with throngs of people who are of the same mind. All these people want to level up and become powerful wielders of magic or they want to be healers, peaceful helpers. But more, each one has an impact on the way the game evolves. As a social group, you all create a sprawling, somewhat chaotic city of fantasy, full of paladins, rogues, wizards, trolls, and shamans. The choices are like riches to a nerd, and they include a wide array of customized powers and physical features for your avatar. With friends, you set forth on dramatic adventures to kill dragons and other beasts, and then you bore everyone who isn’t playing the game with what you firmly believe to be vast accomplishments. As you play, you suspend disbelief and ignore the occasional errors, like the egregiously bad grammar and spelling in the text, knowing that it’s a work in progress. The problems will always be fixed over time. And then there will be new problems. It really is like a city online.
B
ut Sony had needed to be pulled kicking and screaming into the world of PC gaming. The germ of the idea came from John Smedley, a longtime Dungeons & Dragons fan whose childhood dream was to make that game into a computer role playing game. At nineteen, the San Diegan son of a naval officer was a college dropout, already making great money in the videogame industry. The optimistic, nerdy Smedley had toiled away at Sony Imagesoft, learning the rosters and minutiae of all things puck-related for the ESPN National Hockey Night game. While he did the job well, he hated it, spending his free time instead on a proposal for a game that included orcs and elves and dragons. In January 1994, he gave the proposal to Rich Robinson, the head of Sony Imagesoft development. Robinson, who was more interested in collaborating with established properties like Mickey Mouse, Dracula, Frankenstein, and the awful Last Action Hero, didn’t get it and passed on the idea quickly. In the meantime, Smedley continued to be an enthusiastic gamer who spent way too many of his dollars playing online role playing games at home. During just one month in 1993 he spent $600 playing CyberStrike, a graphically low-tech combat game in which up to sixteen giant walking robots blasted one another to smithereens via General Electric’s early online service, GEnie. (Back then in the early nineties, you were charged an hourly rate for time online.) He would not give up on his dungeons or his dragons, pushing on various occasions to get the powers at Sony to move forward with an online game for the PC, somewhat à la Ultima Online, but with more distinct, more human-looking graphics. But with the success of the PlayStation all over the world, no one would listen. Finally he met with Kelly Flock, now head of the PlayStation sports division called 989 Studios. After the slew of meetings for which Sony is famous before it moves forward, Smedley convinced Flock to go ahead with a Lord of the Rings–style online game. To that end, in early 1996, Smedley hired two young game designers who had already worked on their own online sword and sorcery game in 1993. War Wizard, which was released as shareware, was invented by Brad McQuaid and Steve Clover for their small company, MicroGenesis. Graphically, it was no Mona Lisa, but the online game did offer its cult following the ability to aim and shoot at portions of an opponent’s body, giving the enemy a mortal wound that would hinder him from retaliating.
All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture Page 17
