Original Sierra Source Code analysis

[lance.ewing]

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.

[Collector]

Somehow I have missed this.

[lance.ewing]

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.

[lance.ewing]

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.