The history of Sierra Entertainment 

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Part 1 - The Early Years (1979-1983)

The birth of an industry

At the time, Ken was working as a contract programmer for IBM, developing an income tax program on a mainframe computer 3,000 miles away from L.A. One night he found a program labeled "Adventure" on the mainframe. Curious of what it could be, he downloaded it and it turned out to be a copy of Colossal Caves, the legendary text adventure game created by William Crowther in 1972 and expanded by Don Woods in 1976. Back in the days of the ARPAnet (the early Internet), this game was very famous. It was the first true "interactive fiction" computer game. Ken (as so many other people who saw the game) was very fascinated with it.

Roberta wasn't very interested in computers at the time, but Ken showed her the game on a terminal he had brought home from work. Roberta, who had been a big fairy-tale and adventure fiction lover ever since her childhood, was instantly hooked in this new breed of storytelling and played her way through Colossal Cave with great enthusiasm.

For Christmas 1979, Ken bought a $2,000 Apple II microcomputer with a whooping (for its day) 64k of memory, an 85k floppy disk drive and a monochrome monitor. He was planning to use it to develop a FORTRAN compiler for Apple computers. At the time, he could never have imagined in what a dramatic way this purchase would affect his future, and indeed the future of computer gaming itself!

At the time, a company called Adventure International developed text adventure games for the Apple II. Roberta played their games, but even though she liked them, she wasn't entirely content with the adventure games that existed at the time. She realized that this medium had the possibilities to do even more than presenting text descriptions on the screen. Modern computers could display graphics! So, instead of telling the player ”You are standing in front of a house”, why not just display a picture of the house on the screen instead? The games could use better plots too, making them even more interesting to play. A wild idea started to form in her mind...

Roberta sat down in front of the kitchen table and started to write down her ideas. Three weeks later she presented to Ken the script of a computer game called Mystery House, an idea she had developed during the previous days, in between watching the kids (D.J. was seven at the time and Chris was only one year old) and doing other everyday household stuff. The game would revolve around a murder mystery, where you as the player would be trapped overnight in an old house together with seven other people, one of whom would be a killer. But who? The house would also contain a hidden treasure that the player had to find. (Inspiration was taken from the famous Agatha Christie story Ten Little Indians and the parlor game Clue.) At first, Ken wasn't very excited about her idea, but eventually Roberta caught his attention, especially when she said she wanted the game to contain pictures instead of just text.

Roberta managed to talk Ken into helping her develop the game in the evenings after work. Ken figured out a way to fit the amount of graphics she wanted into the very limited memory of their Apple II computer and created the tools needed to draw it, as there still were no drawing programs available on the market. They bought a crude graphics drawing tablet with a mechanic arm that, with lots of hard work, could transfer a drawing on a piece of paper to a computer image. Ken also programmed the logic code needed in the game. Roberta worked on the text and the graphics and told Ken how to put it all together to make it the game she wanted. She did the quality assurance of the game herself. They worked on it for about three months and in May 5 1980, Mystery House was finally ready for shipment! They placed a small ad in Micro Magazine, made copies of the game themselves and packaged them in small square folders, sealed inside ziplock bags. The boxart was designed by Roberta's mother Nova, who was a good oil painter. The games were then distributed to the only four (!) software stores available in Los Angeles county at the time by Ken and Roberta personally. It cost $24.95 and was distributed under Ken's company name On-Line systems.

With their first computer game done, Ken and Roberta started to make plans for the future. They thought that if they could just write games popular enough to earn them about $40,000 a year, they could move out of Los Angeles in a few years and live in a ”log cabin in the woods”, working together at home, making computer games and raising their children in a peaceful and beautiful environment close to nature instead of the big and busy city of L.A. They had no idea that this humble dream would be a heavy understatement to what was actually going to happen to them in the following years.

A change of lifestyle

Mystery House is usually regarded as the first computer game ever to have graphics, and as such is considered a classic game and a landmark achievement in computer gaming history. It sold about 15,000 copies and earned $167,000, an unprecedented number for the time. Ken and Roberta who had not anticipated this huge popularity of the game would constantly get telephone calls day and night by people who wanted to buy the game. They realized that suddenly, 30-40,000 people had become aware of their home phone number! After about 6 months they moved to the small mountain town of Oakhurst, seven miles north of Coarsegold. Chaos lasted for about three more months in their new home until Ken and Roberta finally hired an office, located on top of a print shop, to take care of the business from. Their very first employee was John Williams, Ken's brother, and the early On-Line systems staff consisted mostly of friends and relatives of Ken and Roberta. But the company was growing quickly...

Ken and Roberta's second adventure game was Wizard and the Princess, a game with a story based on the many fairy-tales Roberta used to read as a child. This game was an improvement from Mystery House mainly because it had color graphics. It's possible that it was the first computer game ever to have color graphics (at least it was surely the first adventure game with color) and it sold over 60,000 copies, truly an impressive number for the early 80’s! The Apple II could only display six different colors simultaneously, but clever use of pixel patterns, (a technique called dithering), made it possible to give the illusion of more colors on the screen.

Wizard and the Princess was also released for the Atari 8-bit, the Commodore 64 and, in 1982, for the IBM PC, then under the name Adventures in Serenia.

Mystery House and Wizard and the Princess were the first two in a series of about ten games, called the Hi-res Adventures, released between 1980 and 1982. Roberta and Ken were very involved in the design of most of them.

In 1981, Roberta broke the barriers of adventure gaming again with the release of Time Zone, a game that was so big it spanned six double-sided disks, far more than any previous computer game. It was the biggest computer game ever made for about seven years. While the average adventure game of the time usually had about 90 "rooms", Time Zone had about 1400! This was also the first On-Line systems game with graphics drawn by professional artists, and it took a full year to make. The game even earned special recognition by the Smithsonian Institution. It was first sold for $99.95, but that was much too expensive for most consumers so the game didn't sell very well in the beginning and the price had to be lowered.

Sometime around this period, On-Line systems changed their name to Sierra On-Line, relating to their location in the Sierra Nevada area. They also adopted the shape of Half Dome, one of Yosemite's most spectacular and famous landmarks, in their logotype.

Roberta also wrote The Dark Crystal in 1982, a game based on Muppets creator Jim Henson's animated movie with the same name. It was released under a new logo: SierraVenture. Some of the earlier games, including Mystery House and Wizard and the Princess were also re-released under this new logo, packaged in more proffesional-looking boxes. The Dark Crystal was later released in a simplified version intended for younger players as The Gelfling Adventure. This game was the first one made by Al Lowe, who a couple of years later would become one of Sierra On-Line's most famous game designers. The Dark Crystal was the first computer game to be based on a movie.

Alongside with Sierra On-Line, computer game company Infocom developed pure text adventure games. Without the graphics they could utilize computer memory to develop much better text parsers than Sierra On-Line, enabling the player to write long and complicated sentences in the games. Sierra On-Line could not compete with Infocom in this field, but they didn't really need to as they still sold a lot of games.

Next to the adventure games, Ken and Roberta's company also released a number of very successful arcade games on license, such as Frogger and Jawbreaker. These games were labeled SierraVision for some time. It's all a bit confusing, but so was the computer industry as a whole during these years. They even released a few non-entertainment software products, such as the HomeWord Speller word processor. Ken was working hard during this initial period of the company to gain understanding of the digital entertainment industry so he could lead the company in the right direction. His opinion of computer games had changed dramatically in these few years. Hundreds of letters from all over the country, though many of them unfortunately lost when the Williams' Coarsegold house burnt to the ground in 1982, told Ken and Roberta that the games they were making were important to people. Even Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, obviously a real hero in Ken's eyes, sent them a letter and told them what a delight it was to see their games run on the Apple II. This was an important encouragement to Ken, as he had to face an uncertain future for the company...