In The Chair: Ken Williams
The pioneering head of Sierra Online drops anchor to discuss the early days of the company
What first got you into computer engineering, and what was it like programming mainframes in the early days?
When I started in computers, computers were just getting started! My first job as a programmer literally involved plugging in wires to program the computer. I then had another job programming keypunch machines, and another as a computer operator hanging tapes. I had a tendency in those days to inflate my experience and change jobs as soon as I could make an extra dollar a year. It worked for me. I was able to graduate from the bottom of the heap as a software engineer to a much sought-after specialist in mainframe computers – time-sharing and terminals for IBM mainframes – in a very short span of time.
When did you and Roberta first meet?
We met in high school. I was only 16 at the time. We were double-dating with another couple, except that I was with another girl and Roberta was with a friend of mine. Months later, when my friend had broken up with her, I talked him out of her phone number. We were married only five days after I turned 18. My parents thought our marriage wouldn’t last. But it did!
When did you decide to start your own company, On-line Systems, and develop your first game, Mystery House?
Roberta and I were living in Burbank, California, during the Seventies. I was working on a contract basis for a lot of companies in the Los Angeles area, programming mainframe computers. Around 1979, Apple released the Apple II and Radio Shack the TRS-80, the first of the personal computers. We wanted to find a way to support ourselves, while living ‘in the woods’. We had this idea of taking our kids and moving to a log cabin in the mountains. With 20/20 hindsight, it was a bad idea for a lot of reasons, but it is why Sierra was started.
What prompted you to move out there, and what was it like working on those early games? Roberta and I had a naive notion that living in the woods would be good for our children. We didn’t start Sierra to ‘get rich’. I certainly wanted that, but our dominant thought at the time was to get out of Los Angeles and raise our kids in a safe and wholesome environment. It didn’t quite work out that way. Where we moved was a small town, but it turned into a bad place to raise the kids for a variety of reasons. If I had it to do over again, I’d do some things differently. The biggest issues were access to talent – it was a hard place to convince good engineers to move to – and it became a company town. We had 500 employees in a town of 5,000 people. Our kids took a lot of abuse at school. You’d think it would work the other way around, but it didn’t.
What were the most revolutionary aspects of Mystery House?
The biggest innovation in Mystery House was everything! The industry was new. There was almost nothing you could do that wasn’t interesting and new. We had zero competition. The biggest technical challenge was that at the time there were no development tools. There were no graphic editors, no animation software, no subroutine packages, no compilers – everything we did was a technical challenge. We had to create everything ourselves. We had to develop animation editors, paint programs, even our own compiler and computer language.
Did the 10,000-plus orders for Mystery House take you by surprise?
I never would have dreamed of the success of Mystery House. I only made the game to please Roberta. Fulfilling the orders was overwhelming. And, answering all the calls! We quickly hired people to help. It was an amazing time.
Were you surprised that a game developed in just three months, by two people, was so commercially successful?
Yes, but the lack of competitors was a definite advantage! There was so little product being produced that retailers wanted our product. Dealers were hungry for something to sell.
How did you make it through the videogame crash of 1983?
It was the deal with IBM and the cash they provided, or we would have been dead. With that said, we also hadn’t put all our eggs in the videogame basket. The computer game market softened but never collapsed. We kept going by focusing on computer games.
Was the IBM commission a major milestone moment in your growth?
Absolutely. IBM brought us money, free advertising and credibility. But, ultimately, it was Radio Shack who put us on the map. The Tandy 1000 was a hit and our games were perfect for it. We made a fortune selling games on the Tandy 1000 and at Radio Shack stores.
How did the company grow, through the Hi-res Adventures phase, into 1983’s 12th largest software company, worth $12.5 million?
There’s a saying that ‘a rising tide raises all ships’. We were in the right place at the right time. Computers were taking off. As I look back, I see now that we were not particularly brilliant or creative. We were just kids making games and having fun – at a time when the home computer industry was exploding. It helped that I had a strong entrepreneurial sense and wanted to capture as much of the market as I could.
How big of a shift was the process behind King’s Quest? Did this feel like a natural progression?
As the market grew and became more competitive, the budget for each game, and the size of the teams, had to grow. Plus, one of my themes at the time was that Sierra needed to break ground with every game we produced. We constantly had to do something cool that no one had seen before. The technology was changing monthly. Computers were getting faster and gaining capabilities, like higher resolution graphics and sound. We constantly had to push the state of the art.
In your view, what was the biggest impact the King’s Quest series had on the gaming industry? Roberta, my wife and King’s Quest’s designer, understood better than anyone on our staff how important it was to shake things up with each release. With each game, she wanted to pioneer new technology or new UIS. People bought new games, not just to see what happened with the characters, but to see what was new. Roberta’s King’s Quest always set the standard for user interface and technology, which would then find its way into our other products.
What was Sierra’s philosophy towards adventure games, with its other franchises, like Space Quest and
Police Quest?
I always used a ‘bookstore’ theme for our product development strategy. I would tell our developers to go to a bookstore and look for storytelling categories that seem large – lots of revenue for books – but weren’t being serviced by the computer game industry. True crime? Comedy? Romance? Fantasy? I wanted to have products to target all the different demographics that were proven in other industries.
What was the budgeting, design and production process like for your larger projects?
Our process revolved around some formulas I had. For example, I always wanted to believe that we could get initial orders for a game that represented five times the development cost in revenue. So, if we thought we would sell 50,000 copies at $25 wholesale – $1.25 million in revenue – then the development budget needed to be under $250,000. If that math didn’t work, the project didn’t get funded. We had a brand management organisation, which was charged with studying the market and trying to estimate the demand for new products. Our designers would pitch the brand management organisation their ideas and explain why they thought there was a big market. The bigger budgets went to the developers with a proven track record and with name recognition.
Who did you consider your greatest competitors through the mid to late eighties?
Brøderbund. Lucasarts. Even Microsoft. Electronic Arts. By the mid to late Eighties, there were lots of companies all trying to catch up with us.
What were your thoughts on Lucasarts as a competitor to Sierra?
Lucas put out some awesome games! We felt like they were chasing us and worried about them. They had some amazing titles. Were there any Lucasarts titles that stood out in particular?
All Lucasarts products were awesome. I definitely worried about them. I remember Loom, and that they integrated music clues into the game and I thought that was very innovative.
Was it difficult keeping up with technology, or were new innovations a breath of fresh air? Technology was our friend. We were very good with it and had a good code base to build on. We prided ourselves on being able to tackle any challenge and make impossible things possible. The rapid change in the market is what allowed us to stay ahead.
What was so special about the AGI and SCI engines; what made them so unique?
Both languages were built from the ground up to be portable between platforms – operating systems and hardware – and specifically for building games; built-in animation and sound engines. The big leap from AGI to SCI was that SCI was an object-oriented language, something that was almost unheard of in those days. Part of Sierra’s secret to success was that our tools allowed us to move faster than our competitors.
How did Leisure Suit Larry fit into the company’s range of titles?
LSL grew out of my vision that we were in the ‘entertainment business’, not the ‘computer game business’. I thought it was obvious looking at television and movies that there was a large niche of people who wanted risqué humour. Larry seemed cutting edge only when viewed as a computer game.
What was your attitude towards getting the most out of your talent, and what was your vetting process?
I liked looking for people who seemed to be passionate about something. My feeling was that passion couldn’t be faked. So, I would define a target market and then look for someone who seemed passionate about that category. Jane Jensen was someone who lived and breathed Gabriel Knight. She had the story inside and was excited about telling that story. For her it wasn’t a job, it was her life. My goal was to find people like her and give them full creative control and a team to realise their vision. And then get out of the way.
What was your working relationship with Roberta like during the golden years? Working with family is always difficult. Throughout
I liked looking for people who seemed to be passionate about something Ken Williams
At the time we didn’t realise how much we were making history Ken Williams
the company’s history there were allegations that Roberta received favourable treatment. In actuality, she did get special treatment, but it was because her games were great and sold well. It was always a circular argument. Did her games sell well because she got the best engineers, artists and marketing, or, did they sell well because she was a good designer? It depended on who you asked. I never had a doubt. The games sold because she designed great games.
What did you think of the early internet and did you experiment much with it?
You’ll note that our name was ‘Sierra On-line’. I was always fascinated by anything ‘online’ and our TSN [The Sierra Network] games was my favourite project ever.
What was the philosophy behind developing something so groundbreaking?
I consider TSN the greatest thing I ever did. We were flying flight simulators, multiplayer, years before the internet was invented. It was incredible! If we had stuck with TSN, it would have easily been a huge company.
What do you think tsn could have been – what was your original ambition for it?
TSN was based on a simple mission statement: ‘What if I could come up with something where my grandma could pick up a game of bridge 24 hours a day, seven days a week?” Once I had that idea, it of grew from there. The original name for TSN was ‘Constant Companion’. Later we expanded it to target everyone and be a massively multiplayer online community. What was your favourite feature of tsn?
It was the interaction with other people, and the idea of role-playing as a character. If you wanted to be an elf, you could be an elf. There was total anonymity. You could be someone else and that was all people knew about you. Now, people do it every day.
What do you consider some of the key moments in the rise of tsn?
Moments that stand out are when we first did a test with 75 seniors, with an average age of 80-plus, none of whom had ever used a computer. We had only simple card games going and the seniors fell in love immediately. Our servers kept overheating and yet the seniors never complained. They just kept dialling in and waiting. It was something radically new and fun! I remember our first gathering of TSN fans. Hundreds of people appeared, and we even had a wedding. Amazing! I remember our first flight simulator. It was the first time planes had ever fought in a virtual world. It was a blast, and we were doing it on 2400-baud modems. Unbelievable.
What do you think were the key factors in its downfall? Why didn’t you stick with it?
TSN failed because we partnered it with AT&T. The Internet was just beginning and AT&T wanted TSN rewritten to support the Internet. The head of TSN had allegiance to AT&T and my perception was that he was hostile to Sierra. He was a corporate guy who wore a suit and tie and fit in better with the AT&T culture. I, in effect, lost control of TSN and it got bogged down in corporate bureaucracy. Instead of a fast moving, highly creative enterprise, it became a dinosaur run by a corporation. It died the day we partnered with AT&T.
could you talk me through how your business grew into multiple entities through to the nineties? How successful were your ventures into international markets?
We failed in Japan despite trying very hard. The problem was that Microsoft-based PCS weren’t used for gaming in Japan. There were some Japanese clones that did well, but our games didn’t run on them. In Europe, we did much better. I acquired a French company named Coktel Vision and let their CEO run Europe for us. He was a great guy and helped build Europe to become a huge percentage of our revenue.
Did you feel like you were waiting for the tech to catch up to your ideas, or did you find yourself trying to catch up to the technology?
Someone told me that to lead an industry, you need to really lead. I 100 per cent ignored what others did, and encouraged our team to not look at the competition. Instead, we spent a lot of time thinking about what new things emerging technologies would make possible, and how we could use our games to show off the new hardware. We were leaders, not followers.
What are your thoughts on the bold, revolutionary title, Phantasmagoria? Phantasmagoria was awesome! Unfortunately, Phantas II was done by someone other than Roberta and bombed, destroying the whole category. If Phantas II had been a different product, there would probably be games like Phantasmagoria today that would be a billion dollar industry. There was something magical there. It was just never followed up on.
In the wake of titles like Mortal Kombat, groups in the nineties campaigned against mature content in games. Did you face much backlash for your more mature titles?
We did have problems keeping Phantasmagoria and Leisure Suit Larry on shelves at places like Wal-mart. The original Softporn Adventures was relaunched as Leisure Suit Larry partly to overcome this and soften the name. We also had problems in places like Germany, which was resistant to violent games and originally banned some of our flight simulators.
I had personal objections to violent games. The racy games never bothered me – we were the publishers for a Playboy line of products at one point – but I was never comfortable with games where you were shooting at representations of real people. I worried that kids were too young to draw a distinction between role-playing in a videogame and real life. That said, I
had a responsibility to do my job for customers and shareholders and did publish Half-life and other games, even though I never felt 100 per cent comfortable with the impact these games might have on society.
could you briefly describe the sale of the company; why did you decide it was time to move on, and what did the buyers do wrong?
My responsibility as CEO was to Sierra’s shareholders. We received an attractive offer to acquire the company. It was one in which both the payment was attractive and I believed the company would be stronger after the deal. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way. Promises made when Sierra was acquired weren’t honoured and a management structure was put in place that I didn’t believe in. It was better for me to leave than to stay and try to convince people that they were on the wrong path. Half-life was published while I was there. Even that was screwed up though after the sale, by releasing the title to Valve – I don’t know why that occurred.
If you had to sum up your company’s legacy, how would you describe it?
We were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. At the time we didn’t realise how much we were making history and what incredible things we were doing. It was a truly amazing experience. I wish I could go back in time and do it again!
What are your thoughts on the current resurgence of adventure games?
I haven’t followed the industry. At times, I wish I were still in the industry because I haven’t seen anything in a while that has really caught me by surprise. At Sierra that was always our goal – to show people something they’d never seen before.
could you tell me about your current lifestyle? Roberta always thinks of herself as Indiana Jones. She likes adventure. I prefer coding. Thus, she really controls our lives and forces me out of my comfort zone. We have circumnavigated our small boat and I’ve written several books on boating. Along the way we’ve cruised over 25 countries and had a lot of fun.
Whereabouts are you in the world right now? We are in Cabo San Lucas, in Mexico. We have lived in Mexico about a third of the year for over 20 years. We love it out here!