New Sierra Documentary In the Works

[AGKorson]

Ken & Roberta's new company, Cygnus Entertainment, sends out occasional emails with updates on their Colossal Cave game, as well as other things they are involved in.  Their update for today included this:

A while back, we were approached by some filmmakers who were interested in producing a documentary about the adventure game genre, but more specifically, the story of myself, Roberta and Sierra On-Line.

We refused.

Sierra On-Line's story is an amazing one. It deserves to be told. However, we've been down this road before, on a variety of other documentary projects and nothing ever happened with them. One of the producers on the project, Cade Peterson, is a friend of a friend, and also in the game industry. Cade persisted after our refusal, ultimately convincing us his team would deliver.

The Sierra story is the thing great movies are made of. There are highs, lows, good guys and bad. We are excited to finally see it told in this documentary format.

A few weeks ago, we conducted our interview for the documentary. It was a long grueling day.

The documentary folk dug in deep, capturing some incredible footage. I had thought we might be done, but there's a lot more to cover. We?re delighted to see that some of our beloved Sierra creators like Al Lowe and Lori and Corey Cole are part of the project too? with many more to come, we?re told!

You can follow the project for updates at this link.

[russdanner]

Ken & Roberta's new company, Cygnus Entertainment, sends out occasional emails with updates on their Colossal Cave game, as well as other things they are involved in.  Their update for today included this:

A while back, we were approached by some filmmakers who were interested in producing a documentary about the adventure game genre, but more specifically, the story of myself, Roberta and Sierra On-Line.

We refused.

Sierra On-Line's story is an amazing one. It deserves to be told. However, we've been down this road before, on a variety of other documentary projects and nothing ever happened with them. One of the producers on the project, Cade Peterson, is a friend of a friend, and also in the game industry. Cade persisted after our refusal, ultimately convincing us his team would deliver.

The Sierra story is the thing great movies are made of. There are highs, lows, good guys and bad. We are excited to finally see it told in this documentary format.

A few weeks ago, we conducted our interview for the documentary. It was a long grueling day.

The documentary folk dug in deep, capturing some incredible footage. I had thought we might be done, but there's a lot more to cover. We?re delighted to see that some of our beloved Sierra creators like Al Lowe and Lori and Corey Cole are part of the project too? with many more to come, we?re told!

You can follow the project for updates at this link.

I hope it's ok -- but a few weeks ago I reached out to them to tell them about this forum and that they really need to consider talking to a few of you guys because you are keeping part of this world alive. They appeared receptive to that and I think some of you may be contacted. Sorry :p  BUT... you guys rock... and you are part of the bigger story <3

[lskovlun]

I hope it's ok -- but a few weeks ago I reached out to them to tell them about this forum and that they really need to consider talking to a few of you guys because you are keeping part of this world alive. They appeared receptive to that and I think some of you may be contacted. Sorry :p  BUT... you guys rock... and you are part of the bigger story <3

Yeah, especially because the whole GAL story has had to be untangled by some very persistent people (NewRisingSun, lance.ewing). The main authors of that engine aren't even credited in the most widespread versions of KQ1.

[lance.ewing]

This documentary sounds very interesting, and I'd certainly be interested to talk to them. I watched something on Netflix a while back that had an episode that featured Ken & Roberta quite prominently. What was it called...? "High Score", episode 3: https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81019087. The same episode featured Richard Garriot as well, who features within the Sierra story, him and Chuck Bueche, although I don't think Chuck Bueche was in that Netflix episode. I spoke to Chuck Bueche a while back in relation to the 1982 video that Ken posted on the Colossal Cave Youtube channel. There is a scene that has Chuck in the foreground.

I also tracked down employee number 3, Eric Griswold. He is quite a friendly guy. You probably won't have heard of him, as he wasn't with Sierra for too long. One of the games he was involved in was Time Zone.

[lance.ewing]

The Backerkit campaign for this launched yesterday and it has already exceeded their lowest goal amount, so I guess that means it is definitely going ahead now. The first 48 hours apparently has cheaper amounts for the pledges. I was very tempted to back it yesterday, in fact almost entered my card details. The bonus for backing in the first 48 hours is not only the cheaper price, but also a free PDF of Ken's book. I already bought that book about 20 months ago, so if I don't back it now, its only the cheaper price I'd be missing. I am wondering if anyone else has backed it yet? And, if so, do people have a feel for how safe this website is? It looks like they don't charge the card until the end of the campaign, which implies that they hold on to the card details, right?

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/legends-of-adventure/legends-of-adventure

[Collector]

A PDF of Ken's book holds little attaction to me. I also have a phsical copy as well as I will get a PDF included with my boxed copy of "Colossal Cave" I pre-ordered that should be coming around Sept. I only know of Kickstarter and can't say anything about this company.

[lance.ewing]

For those who haven't been keeping an eye on it, the crowd funding campaign is in its last 8 hours. It is currently over 400% funded, which means that it has exceeded a few of the stretch goals along the way. The latest one is the mini-doc series, which means that in addition to the main documentary, they'll do a further series of mini-docs with even more in-depth coverage. I think its going to be great. If you were intending to back it, then you have 8 hours left.

The other thing that was really cool recently was the Adventure Game Fan Fair. I didn't attend, but I watched some of the streams online. It was great to see the former Sierra employees speaking in the various panels, including Bob Heitman in a couple of them. Always great to hear what he has to say. I think that his memory of those days is second to none. I have my fingers crossed that since the team behind the documentary were at the Fan Fair that they will have spoken to Bob about being involved in the documentary as well. They already have a rather impressive cast of ex-Sierra employees lined up.

[pmkelly]

The other thing that was really cool recently was the Adventure Game Fan Fair. I didn't attend, but I watched some of the streams online. It was great to see the former Sierra employees speaking in the various panels, including Bob Heitman in a couple of them. Always great to hear what he has to say. I think that his memory of those days is second to none. I have my fingers crossed that since the team behind the documentary were at the Fan Fair that they will have spoken to Bob about being involved in the documentary as well. They already have a rather impressive cast of ex-Sierra employees lined up.

I don't know how I missed out on this, since I would have considered going, but like you I did watch the videos after the event. Was also quite interesting to hear from Bob Heitman; there was one comment he made in particular that struck me:

"A goal of mine for years - and I don't think I'm going to realise it, because it takes a lot of effort still - is to return game development, at least adventure game development, to a one or two person format. Something, a set of of tools - I can't really phrase how they'd be written - that would put the power of creating games back into the hands of one or two people who just have an idea and they want to get it out there, but they can't affort 20-50 million dollars put their game out there to entertain people. That's something that I still want to see somebody do."

(timestamp 2:40:28 at https://www.youtube.com/live/gjrSZmnzOxI?si=GddV5rTVY1pqEzF-)

I found this quite interesting, since on the one hand he makes a good point, but also there's quite a lot of tools available these days that do make it easier, though none that I'm aware of that can come close to matching the state of the art being produced by AAA studios; for indie devs producing pixel art games there's a lot more available, both in the adventure game world and others.

It does make me wonder though, what might a modern adventure game engine and development environment, one designed for today's technological capabilities, look like? I'm "between jobs" right now and hunting around for something to do to fill my time and feel kind of tempted to have a go at this, but I'm curious to hear what others think of this. A few ideas - 3d world, procedural generation of graphics and/or some game elements, a nice & simple scripting language, interactive programming (game world updates as soon as you change it, no compilation), publishing to web/native, online play and online collaborative editing. Just a few random ideas, but I'd love to hear yours.

[lance.ewing]

Was also quite interesting to hear from Bob Heitman; there was one comment he made in particular that struck me:

"A goal of mine for years - and I don't think I'm going to realise it, because it takes a lot of effort still - is to return game development, at least adventure game development, to a one or two person format. Something, a set of of tools - I can't really phrase how they'd be written - that would put the power of creating games back into the hands of one or two people who just have an idea and they want to get it out there, but they can't affort 20-50 million dollars put their game out there to entertain people. That's something that I still want to see somebody do."

Yeah, I remember him saying that.

It does make me wonder though, what might a modern adventure game engine and development environment, one designed for today's technological capabilities, look like? I'm "between jobs" right now and hunting around for something to do to fill my time and feel kind of tempted to have a go at this, but I'm curious to hear what others think of this. A few ideas - 3d world, procedural generation of graphics and/or some game elements, a nice & simple scripting language, interactive programming (game world updates as soon as you change it, no compilation), publishing to web/native, online play and online collaborative editing. Just a few random ideas, but I'd love to hear yours.

Something that I've been thinking about for a while now is an integrated online editor and interpreter for AGI games, and with AGILE now running in the browser, I guess my approach would be to extend that. Obviously that is quite niche though, and only a handful of people are ever going to use it

You seem to be thinking of something new that will capture a modern audience, but perhaps in the same spirit as AGI and SCI. I think that the online collaborative editor and interpreter would be a key part though, something similar to what kids use in schools these days, e.g. Scratch and Construct3D, where they have an account and can build away, save, execute directly in the browser and share. I'd say yes to the simple scripting language as well, it could even be visual in nature, such as with Google Blockly, whose demos show switching between source and visual, which I think would be needed for people who like to code quickly directly in the source.

The cool thing about a web based interpreter is that it can easily be packaged up to run on mobile devices as well, the game execution bit I mean. Editors on mobile devices are pretty neat at first, but its more of a gimmick I think. It's difficult to actually be productive when "building" within such a small screen size, so the novelty seems to wear off pretty quick... at least in my own experience

[pmkelly]

Something that I've been thinking about for a while now is an integrated online editor and interpreter for AGI games, and with AGILE now running in the browser, I guess my approach would be to extend that. Obviously that is quite niche though, and only a handful of people are ever going to use it

As an experiment to try out the idea and see what it would be like, I think this is something worth considering, even if the actual implementation won't necessarily be of interest to a lot of people. In part i got this idea after learning about Smalltalk's interactive programming environment. The ability to edit code and see changes in near real-time has also been an issue that I've wanted to explore as part of a workflow language/engine I've been working on for several years (which was built for a company I worked for but will soon be open sourced). So I'm interested in exploring this in the general sense and AGI happens to be a convenient vehicle to do so, particularly given we already have a working interpreter, compiler, and other tools that could be leveraged.

You seem to be thinking of something new that will capture a modern audience, but perhaps in the same spirit as AGI and SCI. I think that the online collaborative editor and interpreter would be a key part though, something similar to what kids use in schools these days, e.g. Scratch and Construct3D, where they have an account and can build away, save, execute directly in the browser and share. I'd say yes to the simple scripting language as well, it could even be visual in nature, such as with Google Blockly, whose demos show switching between source and visual, which I think would be needed for people who like to code quickly directly in the source.

Yeah I'm mostly brainstorming ideas at the moment, haven't decided on any specific course of action. I think a new engine/development system would be something interesting to try but only if there's something particularly new or different relative to other things that are out there currently. But AGI is a nice, simple system with which we're both familiar and it sounds like you've been having similar thoughts to me regarding an integrated editor/interpreter.

[Collector]

I don't know how much use Visual AGI would be to draw from, but since the AGI library was initially developed for it before it was adapted for AGILE and then AGILE-gdx from that, there may be something that might get from it. The pic editor in it was about the best vector pic editor I have tried. Anyway, you have the source for it. It would have been nice for it to have been finished. It mostly just needed the logic backend and compiler. I assume that the completion of the library for AGILE already did a lot of the work for the Visual AGI logic backend.

[lskovlun]

Might be worth looking into what DGDS/TitleMaker was like... I hear some people around here have it.