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.