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.

[Collector]

I would love it if any findings you make gets documented on the new Wiki.

[lance.ewing]

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.