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AGI Programming => AGI Development Tools => Topic started by: lance.ewing on June 30, 2026, 06:28:19 AM
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I think one of the most interesting bits of that archive are the file timestamps, for the executables and the game source files. I'm going to have fun analyzing those file timestamps as part of my book, as I think it will help to give a timeframe on when development of certain games took place, e.g. Black Cauldron. I'm quite interested in that 1985 time period. This is when Sierra were starting to rise again from the ashes. As far as I've been able to work out, the big layoff at Sierra (that happened around the time of the video game crash of 83/84) happened for Sierra sometime around the end of June/start of July 1984. Haven't been able to find anything that mentions a specific date but I've narrowed it down to a window of about a month between mid June and mid July 1984. Ken mentions laying off 100 employees and only a small crew of about 28 people (Ken's number from his book) staying on. Things were picking up again in 1985, after decent sales of the Disney products, and of course King's Quest starting to really take off in sales around the end of 1984. Sales in the summer of 1984 had not been good, and that period from mid 1984 to the end of 1984 was a matter of survival. Focus was mainly on the new Disney educational game projects (Donald Duck's Playground, Mickey's Space Adventure, etc.) and on finding a way to make money from King's Quest (released in May 1984) after the IBM PCJr flopped so spectacularly in the market. Tandy, and the Radio Shack stores, were mainly to thank for King's Quest's eventual success story.
I thought that I would create a new topic dedicated to the analysis of the big archive of Sierra Source Code that was added to archive.org a few years ago. I realised that we didn't really do it justice at the time. I had big plans to analyse all the timestamps and piece together a timeline of when the dev work was done on these games, with particular interest in 1985.
I don't have anything more to add at this time, but I intend to start working on this analysis again, as I've left my "book" lingering for too long. I should try to finish it at least before Sierra On-Line's 50th anniversary in a few years time.
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Somehow I have missed this.
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For those who want to browse the timestamps in the archive online without downloading it, you can click on this view contents link directly on archive.org:
https://ia601503.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/9/items/sierrasourcecode/SierraSourceCode.zip
If you then use the web browser find tool to search for 1985 on the page, it comes back with 185 matches. We can see that various game resources, e.g. PICs and VIEWs, from Black Cauldron have a 1985 timestamp. Some of them have a 1987 timestamp. It seems fairly obvious that they were working on a newer release of Black Cauldron in 1987 but didn't update some of the older original resources from the first BC release, so those 1985 timestamps hopefully give a good indication of when the original Black Cauldron dev work was being done.
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Starting to look at some of those BC timestamps, the resource files that still have 1985 timestamps suggest that the dev work was being done between the end of June 1985 and the end of October 1985. I've seen magazine adverts advertising BC for sale from December 1985 (there are some magazines mentioning it prior to release from earlier in 1985). And the MAIN.EXE interpreter executable on the 1.1J booter version of BC has a datetime of 16-Oct-1985 14:00:52. Given that some of the game resource files were still being worked on after that (up to the end of October 1985), this timestamp for the interpreter suggests that they prepared and built the interpreter version a couple of weeks prior to the end of game dev work.
Worth noting that the KQ2 1.0W booter disk has a MAIN.EXE on it dated: 24-Apr-1985 11:45:28 and that the file size of KQ2's MAIN.EXE is smaller, 22205 bytes for KQ2 vs 25566 bytes for BC. So that does suggest additional work was done on the AGI1 interpreter in between KQ2 and BC.
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I would love it if any findings you make gets documented on the new Wiki.
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I would love it if any findings you make gets documented on the new Wiki.
I shall indeed.
I'm trying to sketch out a timeline for 1984-1985, using several different sources. One of those is old magazine articles. I'd already seen the following one in the past, but I've realised that it provides a rough starting date for when the King's Quest 2 development started:
https://www.atarimagazines.com/rom/issue8/interview.php
https://archive.org/details/ROM_Magazine_v1i8/page/n7/mode/2up
While her husband runs the company as President and Chief Executive Officer, Roberta works as Product Development and Creative Director with input into all the creative areas of the company. In addition, she designs her own games. I was able to talk with her on August 13th and had quite an enjoyable interview which was as follows.
This bit above mentions that the interview happened on the 13th August 1984, which is a very useful fact for a game historian to discover, as quite often articles like this don't mention the interview date. The magazine issue is allegedly the October/November 1984 issue, which highlights how often the "news" in these old magazines can be a few month's out of date already.
With this date in mind, what does Roberta say?
Q. What game are you working on at this time?
A. I'm just finishing up "Mickey's Space Adventure" as we now have Disney products. It doesn't look like King's Quest, its like the old style adventure game, but it will have some animation in it.
Q. Have you ever thought of writing a sequel to any of your games'?
A. Yes, because this week I'll be starting on the sequel to King's Quest.
This article therefore takes place at a very interesting moment. The 13th August 1984 was a Monday. Roberta says that she is just finishing off the Mickey's Space Adventure Disney game, and that that very week she would be starting on the sequel to King's Quest, i.e. KQ2.
So there we have it. The KQ2 development began mid-August 1984. The game was released in May 1985.
Worth noting that when Roberta says that she was finishing off the Mickey's Space Adventure game, I assume that this would be from a design/story perspective. The devs were probably still hard at work. It wasn't released until December 1984. - So it is also likely then that Roberta starting on KQ2 that week mid-August was also from a design/story perspective and that the artists, coders, etc. didn't begin work on KQ2 development until later in the year.
This is the official KQ2 team in the credits from the original release of KQ2:
Designed & Written by: Roberta Williams
Game Logic: Ken Williams, Sol Ackerman, Chris Iden
Programming: Jeff Stephenson, Chris Iden
Scenery: Doug MacNeill
Animation: Mark Crowe
Music: Al Lowe
"Programming" in this context, given the "Game Logic" distinction on the line above, would refer to the development of the AGI interpreter, in fact the very first AGI interpreter in this case, i.e. AGI V1. - GAL was something very similar but was different enough that these days we tend to refer to it as GAL rather than AGI V0. When you think about it, the fact that AGI V1 is numbered with a version 1 number is quite a good indicator that they considered it the first version of AGI as well. We don't often see versioning for released things start at 0. Perhaps GAL was considered a kind of prototype that they learnt from and then rebuilt it the way they needed it to be going forward.
I can just imagine Jeff Stephenson, in his one man effort to port the GAL engine to the Apple IIe/IIc in mid 1984 (to support the Apple II version of King's Quest), thinking to himself that things could be done in a better way, a more portable way, and maybe that experience is what prompted the rewrite that produced AGI V1 in time for KQ2.
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Remember that the RAM capacity of typical machines was growing at that time. KQ1 ran in 128K RAM, and was a booter. Even though MAIN.EXE was a .EXE file, it would not run under DOS, because it made assumptions about the memory map that do not hold when DOS is loaded. Sierra had their own rudimentary .EXE file parser. In fact, the GAL version of MAIN.EXE is bigger than those you cite.
By the time AGI ran under DOS, they could ditch the disk formatting routines, for example. It's not much in terms of size, but letting the OS handle formatting does improve portability. When did they start to write AGI in C? From the beginning?
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Sierra had their own rudimentary .EXE file parser. In fact, the GAL version of MAIN.EXE is bigger than those you cite.
What size in bytes do you calculate the GAL interpreter executable to be?
When did they start to write AGI in C? From the beginning?
I'm not sure to be honest. The date times recorded in the header comments of the original AGI source code only includes dates from 1987. I guess that doesn't prove much other than that they started adding a few change history comments from a point in time.
Has anyone disassembled the AGI V1 interpreters to see how similar (or not) they are to the AGI V2 interpreters? I realise that the AGI command opcode orders are different but I would assume that given AGI V1 is so similar to AGI V2, there must be a lot of similar code. And if this is the case, then does the executable code show in parts any signs of being compiled from C?
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Quick update regarding my 1984-1985 timeline investigations:
I have found aerial photos of the site of the "Redwood" Sierra On-Line building (i.e. the one that features in SQ3 at the end) from 1983 and 1984. These are the dates and what I can see in the photos (the dates are not exact, just a range that covers when the aerial photography was being done in that area):
1983-06-28 - 1983-08-25: The site looks like bare land with no obvious indication of a building or building work.
1984-09-15 - 1984-09-25: The building appears to be complete, with the surrounding car park area also complete, and at least 25 cars parked in the car park.
So someone at least was already working in that building mid-September. I've read accounts from people like Ken Williams that when they first moved in, they had to sub-let the building to pay for the rent, so some of those cars might be from non-Sierra people. People like Mark Crowe and Chuck Benton have commented on how empty the building was when they first moved in there. This is because of the big layoffs that happened a few months before that.
Judging by those dates, the building site went from "ground breaking" to competition in about a year. I have found an article from the Sierra Star newspaper, dated 28th June 1984, that says that Sierra are currently constructing a new building, so they hadn't yet moved in at that point.
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Probably not yet finished. Those cars outside in the parking lot were probably contractors'. If you notice new construction they often go up very fast, but takes far more time to complete the inside.
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Yeah, it is a fair point, and I did wonder the same thing, but I do have one other bit of evidence to support Sierra being in the new build in September 1984, which is that Chuck Benton, the coder that wrote the original C64 version of Donald Duck's Playground (who didn't normally live in Oakhurst, but did a couple of stints working in the Sierra offices) remembers a final 6 week push to finish Donald Duck's Playground where he spent those 6 weeks in the Sierra office working 16 hour days. He seems to recall that the 1st November was a deadline that they were aiming for, so that it would be ready to sell for the lucrative Christmas period.
The reason this supports Sierra already being in the new building is because Chuck Benton says that this 6 week period was in the new building. It was definitely before the end of 1984 because he was working on Donald Duck's Playground (the C64 version), which was released in December 1984 in time for Christmas. If the 1st Nov was the deadline they were aiming for with their 16 hour days, then 6 weeks prior is September. Maybe the 6 weeks overlapped slightly into Nov, in case they ran over the deadline a bit, but I assume not much over. If he was asked to be based on site for 6 weeks, with a deadline in mind, then most of that time would likely be on the September side of the deadline.
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Sierra had their own rudimentary .EXE file parser. In fact, the GAL version of MAIN.EXE is bigger than those you cite.
30912 bytes according to the directory entry. But the WORDS.BIN file is contained within that, which I had forgotten. That's 3KB right off the bat,. Then you have an object table and a few other things which were separate in later AGI. But they don't amount to much.
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Hi, guys! Long time no see! In truth, I haven't posted in a long time, but I do come here to see what's new from time to time.
I'm sorry if I'm being na?ve for saying this, but, Lance, if you want to find out more about this topic, wouldn't it help if you raised the issue to Ken Williams himself? Or to programmer Jeff Stephenson? Or maybe Al Lowe, who seems to be more chatty and approachable? I'm asking from complete ignorance. I don't know if you've already tried to contact them about this subject.
It's good to see you guys are still out there. Take care!
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@pabuslem: The thing is, when we're dealing with the earliest part of the timeline, people don't remember! That the earliest language was called GAL (not AGI), that Arthur Abraham was the lead creator of GAL, and so on. These are things that we (i.e. Lance) have had to dig up ourselves, because the Sierra alumni have forgotten.
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Oh, that's true. It's been more than 40 years! Some of them might remember the "broad strokes," but not the details. No one kept disks with original material, like Al Lowe with the original source code for some games, as they announced some years ago? Anyway, yours is a hard work, where the historian meet the detective. I think it's fascinating, though. Good luck on your quest!
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Ken Williams can barely remember some of the key people that originally developed GAL/AGI and SCI. I doubt that anyone will manage to get much out of Jeff Stephenson, which is the one that I would be the most interested in hearing his thoughts of those times. Some developers are more open to talking, but as noted, time wears on memory. I found Robert Lindsey is more open than others, but he was not a systems guy. Cory Cole is more open and did do a little systems development, but he is still more of a game dev. Facebook is a good resource for contacting a lot of the old Sierra devs, but again, mostly game devs.
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I'm sorry if I'm being na?ve for saying this, but, Lance, if you want to find out more about this topic, wouldn't it help if you raised the issue to Ken Williams himself? Or to programmer Jeff Stephenson? Or maybe Al Lowe, who seems to be more chatty and approachable? I'm asking from complete ignorance. I don't know if you've already tried to contact them about this subject.
@pabuslem: The thing is, when we're dealing with the earliest part of the timeline, people don't remember! That the earliest language was called GAL (not AGI), that Arthur Abraham was the lead creator of GAL, and so on. These are things that we (i.e. Lance) have had to dig up ourselves, because the Sierra alumni have forgotten.
@pabuslem, I have spoken to Jeff and Al multiple times over the past 15 years or so, and Collector is right, they don't remember specific details, such as dates. 40+ years ago is indeed a long time. They remember the big events but not exactly when they happened. Jeff wasn't one of those that was laid off mid-1984 (I think Jeff and Bob were two of the only programmers that were not laid off), but Al was laid off, but was hired back almost immediately as a contractor working on the Disney projects, across several of those Disney games. He remembers that kind of detail but not exactly when that happened. They usually remember the relative order of when things happened though.
I haven't spoken to Ken in the past, other than swapping a few comments in places like youtube. I know that I could easily do so, but I would probably prepare a set of questions that I think he would be more likely to remember. Ken admits himself (as he mentions in his recent book) that he can't remember the details, and that what he covers in his book is not guaranteed to be accurate (not sure he uses exactly those words, but words to that effect). I've also seen a number of video interviews with him where he mentions he struggles to remember the details. I am currently thinking that I will probably send the timeline to him when I have it ready.
My approach is to try to find as many dates that can't be disputed, things that can be set in stone. For example, I know that one of the programmers that worked on one of the Disney contracts in 1984 signed the contract on the 17th July 1984. I also know that Sierra and Disney announced their partnership and initial line up Disney educational games at the start of June 1984 (at the Summer CES show that year). I also know that a newspaper article from the Sierra Star dated 28th June 1984 mentions the same Disney/Sierra partnership, mentions the change in name from Sierra On-Line to simply Sierra, and mentions that the new building is still under construction. I found another article from towards the end of 1984 that states that Sierra got another $2 million in venture capital in July that year, i.e. July 1984.
These are the kinds of dates that everything else can be slotted between. If we know that some events happened after or before one of these fixed points in time, then we can narrow in more on a rough date.
Dates like the timestamps on original game disks, or like in this big source code archive, are also indisputable. I've been looking at the file timestamps from 1986 in the Donald Duck's Playground game in that archive. It is clear from that that Al was working on the first AGI version of that game in early 1986. Dev work began at the end of February 1986, the majority of the work happened in March 1986, with a bit more in April/May, finally finishing early June 1986. The AGI documentation in the DOCO folder have timestamps dated 29th May 1986. This happens to be just before the timestamp usually associated with AGI v2.001 (9th June 1986), which was the first AGI V2 interpreter version we know of, that was used in that first AGI version of Donald Duck's Playground. That all ties up then. Al was working on converting the original Donald Duck game (which came out on the C64 at the end of 1984) to AGI v2 over that first half of 1986. Jeff was most likely providing him with early cuts of the AGI v2 interpreter, with 2.001 being what ended up in the release.
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Ken Williams can barely remember some of the key people that originally developed GAL/AGI and SCI.
No one can remember the GAL name. Jeff believes it was always called AGI, certainly that what was built as part of the original top-secret King's Quest game was the start of AGI. I actually tracked down the author of the 1985 magazine article that mentions the name GAL, to find out where it came from. He said that in the preparation of that article, he had only phone interviews, with John Williams, Ken Williams and Roberta Williams, no one else. He said the name came from one of them. - They almost certainly won't remember it. My guess is that it was a short lived name.
Jeff was interviewed a few years ago in a podcast. It was very interesting, if you haven't listened to it yet. He was actually "in the room" where the King's Quest team built the original interpreter, although he himself was not involved in the King's Quest project. He was working on other IBM PC JR software, such as Home Word, which was just as secret, because the secret was the IBM PC JR.
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Hey, Lance! Yesterday I replied to a post by @lskovlun thinking it was you. Sorry about that!
You've probably tried this, but have you looked in local newspapers from that time? Maybe one of them published a piece about the big Sierra layoff, which could help to narrow the dates.
I recently came upon this conversation with Jeff Stephenson on YouTube. This might be the podcast you mentioned. I still find it amusing how several of yesteryear's programmers such as Jeff, Al Lowe and Jordan Mechner, taught themselves how to program, or learned looking at codes on books or computer magazines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3s0nW1FBN8&t=7016s
Jeff's formal college education was in meteorology and physics! Anyway, best of luck on your quest!
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You've probably tried this, but have you looked in local newspapers from that time? Maybe one of them published a piece about the big Sierra layoff, which could help to narrow the dates.
I would love to be able to do that, but the Sierra Star archives, which I think was the main one in Oakhurst, is not available online. Apparently the archives can be searched physically if you visit the area, so if I ever do at some point in my life make a visit to Oakhurst, that will be one of the things on my todo list. As you say, there would surely be news articles in the local newspapers from that time. It was a big local event, given how many people lost their jobs. I think I'd be spending days with those archives, searching for any little news snippet of relevance.
I recently came upon this conversation with Jeff Stephenson on YouTube. This might be the podcast you mentioned.
Yeah, that is the one.