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.
