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silveradept[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. We've filled all the remaining spots for this year. It's been great having you along for the ride, and I hope reading all of this has been interesting, and possibly even the occasional bit of informative as well.]
Consoles are fun, and I have played a fair few, but most of where I cut my teeth on gaming, and many of the games that I remember playing a lot of, were on a PC. The Kaypro is my earliest memory, but most of my computer gaming happened on PCs running DOS. At that particular time, games have made the jump from being solely text to games with interactive graphics, but we haven't completely made the leap to the point-and-click interfaces that will follow them. But that is very much right on the cusp of happening.
At this particular point in time, one of the biggest genres of game is an adventure. The protagonist goes through a series of events, often picking up ites that seem otherwise useless along the way, only for them to come in handy at exactly the right moment to surpsass an obstacle and continue the adventure. One of the undisputed leaders of adventure games at this point is Sierra (On-Line). Ken and Roberta Williams have already done a successful job creating games for other studios, and where I enter this picture, they are involved as the publisher of several different series of adventure games. There's a fantasy series about the royal family of the kingdom of Daventry, headed by King Graham (who will be the protagonist of King's Quest I, II, and V, as well as a reboot King's Quest much, much later along the line) and Queen Valanice (King's Quest VII), their son Alexander (King's Quest III and VI, although Alexander doesn't know he's the son of Daventry until almost the end of III), and daughter Rosella (King's Quest IV and vII), which is Roberta's design and writing. There's also a King's Quest game called Mask of Eternity that's much more of an action-adventure game than the point and click / text parser games, doesn't star a member of the royal family of Daventry, and is such a tonal shift from the previous games that I've mostly shoved it off into its own continuity as an AU, even though the Wiki tells me that its story mirrors that of the first King's Quest, and it uses many of the elements that are common to the King's Quest series. (And that it was supposed to potentially be the beginning of a Gneeration II loop for the series.) It was also developed on the tail end of Sierra, before it became not much more than a name for Vivendi Universal to use on some of their games. (For example, the Sierra name is on Geometry Wars 3, even though that's not the style of game that Sierra would be morst famous for developing.)
Sierra developed a lot of different series following the model of King's Quest, for different stories and roles to take on. Sierra developed Police Quest in conjunction with the Los Angeles Police Department, and provided a copy of the LAPD procedures manual, not just as a copyright protection measure (in this era, a particular puzzle would have to be solved through the use of feelies that came with the game as a way of preventing someone who had bought or pirated the game from being able to go particularly far in it) but as a way of passing more than a few puzzles the correct way by following police procedure. I played a little bit of those games, but I wasn't particularly interested in taking on the role of a detective at that point.
Al Lowe developed a series of adult-themed adventure games following a hapless protagonist named Larry Laffer, who, thanks to his inconic outfit of a 70s-style leisure suit, game name to the series, Leisure Suit Larry. Larry distaff counterpart, Passionate Patti (who would star in Leisure Suit Larry III and V) had a similar lack of luck with finding someone, but these games were as much about confirming that sex is funny as much as they were more serious adventure games about sex. Not being old enough to play them at the time, and not really having been interested in going back to play them, that series is mostly getting mentioned for showing how much Sierra waws trying to hit everyone's niches for games. Where I would encounter Al Lowe's sense of humor is in his send-up of Western tropes, Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist, about a retired, one-eared gunslinger who just wants to settle down into a nice town and provide medicines for them. Unfortunately, there's someone who has their eye on the town (as it turns out, because there's a significant amount of oil underneath the town) and wants to drive all of the residents away so they can buy it up and make a pretty penny on the black gold. After foiling several of the plots that the antagonist puts forth, such as feeding horses lentils in an attempt to suffocate the town through methane inhalation or trying to stampede a herd of giant snails through the town, Freddy has to take up his gunslinger persona againt the forces threatening his town. And naturally, nobody knows who the "handsome silver-eared stranger" is until the very end. (And also, Al Lowe developed Torin's Passage, a game full of humor for both kids and adults with a teenage protagonist and his shapeshifting Boogle.)
One of the notable things about Sierra adventure games is that they usually had a score counter, so that a player could tell how well they were doing (and, incidentally, how far along they were in the game). Having gotten the population used to the score counter, there were some occasional tricks played on the player by it - Space Quest IV, for example, had an unstable ordnance that would give the player 25 points upon pickup, but when Roger jumped down a sewer grate to try and advance the plot, the ordnance would explode in his pocket and kill him. Putting the ordnance back where it was found deducted 20 points from the score but allowed the plot to proceed. The net gain of 5 points went unnoticed a lot, but would eventually help someone toward a perfect score. Freddy Pharkas gave 500 of the possible 999 points in the game for unlocking the front door of the pharmacy, because, frankly, it was the act that kicks off the entire plot. And because Al Lowe wanted to mess with people's perceptions of the game (since most Sierra games were scored to 500 points as a perfect game).
Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, under the moniker of "The Two Guys From Andromeda", were in the middle of making a bitingly funny send-up of science fiction shows and tropes in the Space Quest series, which would ultimately end at six games. Space Quest followed (Almighty) janitor Roger Wilco, who manages to stumble, bumble, and get lucky all the way through foiling several different potentially planet and/or galaxy-destroying plots, involving insurance salesmen, superweapons, body swaps, genetic manipulations, and more, at some point even ascending to the rank of Captain (of a garbage retrieval vessel) before his involvement in yet another potentially galaxy-spanning plot has him stripped of rank (and clothing) at a tribunal and returned to his usual rank of janitor for the final game in the series. There's a certain amount of thankfulness on their part that the series never made it to game ten, because, according to the time-travel plot of Space Quest IV, Space Quest X was supposed to be titled "Latex Babes of Estros." There's the possibility that the Two Guys, at that point, were doing a send-up of how science fiction tended to treat Strong Women by not only having them become damsels in distress, but turn out to be entirely girly and obsessed with shopping underneath their tough exterior. Also in that same game is cross-dressing as a plot point, and I suspect that some of the jokes haven't aged well at all, even if I remember most of them as being funny and parody of science fiction (some of which I might not have even understood at the time.)
And, the one I really considered a favorite (although Space Quest was a close second), was Lori and Corey Cole's Quest for Glory series, following a recent graduate of the Famous Adventurer's Correspondence School looking to make a name for themselves as an adventurer, and possibly right some wrongs along the way. The first game, So You Want to Be A Hero?, took place in Spielburg ("Gametown"), following the motifs of a Grimm-style fairy tale, with a guest appearance from Baba Yaga. There are fairy rings, creatures to slay, curses to undo, and the most important part about it is that the player character's data is exported at the end of the game and imported into the next one, allowing the adventure to continue with the same equipment present in the last game, although there always has to be currency exchange between the various places that the Adventurer ends up in for their next installment. Game II, Trial By Fire, took on a style from the Tales of A Thousand Nights and One Night, following innkeepers from the first game who are away from their home place (and also have a magic carpet to fly upon), III, Wages of War, explored African tales, following characters introduced in game II who were from a different region, in the same way the innkeepers from I were, IV, Shadows of Darkness, firmly rooted itself in Slavic folklore (and Baba Yaga returns to her normal place, having been driven away from Spielburg by the Hero in the first game), and V, Dragon Fire, centered on Greek mythology as its core background while bringing back a significant number of characters from previous games, as befitting the final installment in the series. V also shifted to the same action/RPG style that King's Quest: Mask of Eternity did, and had some issues with gameplay on the computers that I had, so I haven't fully finished it. I should go back and run the entire series at some point, because it's a series really worth going all the way through, from beginning to end, to see the journey of a single hero from newbie adventurer to seasoned Hero of several lands who has to defeat a dragon at the very end.
The other interesting thing about the series was that the game's puzzles were often solvable in multiple ways, based on what profession the player chose for their adventurer at the beginning. To max out on the content available, the player could choose to put their points in skills outside their regular set and build hybrids that could do all sorts of things, like fighters that can pick locks and cast spells, but just about all of the solutions involved had a strength option, a magic option, and a stealth option such that each character could approach the situation in a way that was fitting for their chosen character archetype and solve it accordingly.
There were several other series that leaned more into horror, like Gabriel Knight, Phantasmagoria, and Shivers, which I haven't played (although I do own some of them in bundles), because, well, horror is not exactly the genre that I want a whole lot to do with, being easily startled and not necessarily interested in either seeing a lot of gore or in being terrified all the time about what might be out there lurking for me. There were some murder mystery games that I did play (both of the Laura Bow mysteries, The Colonel's Bequest and The Dagger of Amon Ra), and those were okay, but they still had quite a bit of jump scare involved. Of the games I enjoyed playing, there were often many different ways for the player character to die, most of them were usually in a humorous way, with a snappy message at the end and the options to "Restore, Restart, or Quit". Which is where I learned the first important rule of any given Sierra adventure game: Save early, save often. Some puzzles could not be solved without the proper item, and usually, getting stuck on a spot in the game meant that there was some part of the game that had been missed earlier that would reward the player with an item that was useful for the current seemingly-impassable situation.
(And, okay, some of the fun of playing Sierra games was finding all of the creative ways there were to get yourself killed, just to see all the death messages and pictures that would come of them.)
Some problems even had multiple solutions to them, some of which were worth more points than others. For example, there are two ways to kill the definitely-not-a-Terminator robot in Space Quest 3. One involves knocking him into a dynamo at the right time. The other involves luring him underneath a set of creatures that the player has already discovered are lethal and react to sound, hiding and then using the sound to have the creatures attack the Terminator robot. That version also uses an item that was otherwise obtainable but unknown in purpose to retrieve the key item the not-Terminator was wearing. So there's a lot more points at stake doing it the hard way. Kind of like luring a robot intended to blow up anything organic it comes across into the cave of something big and mean that will happily use Roger Wilco as a basketball if it catches him and letting the two of them hash out their differences. (Spider-droid wins.) The droid could be avoided, the creature could be destroyed by giving it your container of instant water ("pure hydrogen! Just add oxygen!"), which is will happily consume, with the expected effects of having consumed a container of p0ure hydrogen, and so long as Roger doesn't die of dehydration because the player is efficient in their movement, the other solution might never be discovered.
Sierra eventually went on to acquire a company or two, like Dynamix, which opened up their software library some, but also gave us great adventure games like The Adventures of Willy Beamish, where a delinquent student manages to foil more than a few plots from the local richie-riches involving frogs and pollution. Willy Beamish had an interesting mechanism where player decisions might get them in trouble with his parents. Too much trouble would result in a non-standard Game Over where Willy is sent off to military school to curb his troublemaking tendencies, but there's entirely a few things here and there that are necessary and good for the plot to continue that will get Willy in trouble if he's discovered doing them or doesn't hide his evidence quite well enough. But it's a fun romp through being a child and managing to somehow succeed at foiling a plot that's eventually meant to frame your father for all the pollution that's happening, and whose climactic action takes place on a giant toilet bowl, no really. Dynamix also did a licensed game in Raymond Feist's Midkemia that worked quite well, although I had to get used to the first-person perspective to do anything at all.
As you can guess, I spent a lot of time playing adventure games, and there would eventually develop a competing school of thought to the Sierra-style "save early, save often, here, have some amusing death messages to take the sting out of the fact that you're still going to be doing this sequence again and again until you get all the actions and their timing right." LucasArts, while really well-known for their Star Wars tie-in games (since, y'know, LucasFilm were the people who did the movies) also produced several adventure games on the model that killing the player character isn't really a useful idea for good gameplay. While Maniac Mansion still had issues of captures and game-overs possible, its sequel, Day of the Tentacle, fully embraced the zero-deaths idea and otherwise made the price for experimentation and failure to be essentially zero, as items wouldn't break if used improperly, and characters could be infinitely taunted into putting themselves into terrible situations where the protagonists would have the opportunity to get it right. It's also a time-travel plot, where the three main characters are spread out across the "present", the supposed past of the colonial United States, and a dystopian future where everything is run by sentient tentacles and humans are kept as pets for their amusement.
The licensed game Sam and Max Hit The Road, based on the Sam and Max comics (which I didn't know existed until well after playing the game) followed a dog private investigator and his hyperkinetic rabbity-thing friend across the United States, going to tourist traps and attractions to try and solve a mystery involving mole men, Bigfoot conventions, and a country star whose ego is waaaaay bigger than his actual height. Max's solution to everything involves violence, and occasionally, Sam lets Max threaten others, or uses Max to do something specifically violent, like dunking him in the water of the Tunnel of Love and then applying the wet Max to the ride's electrical board, causing it to short and opening a path to find an inhabitant of the ride who isn't interested in much, but has useful information to give. Sam and Max also had an interesting arcade-style game involving Max surfing on top of the car and trying to bounce up and down on top of the various highway signs along the way. Good for relaxing and letting the brain work on whatever puzzle was causing issues at the time.
This no-deaths idea of LucasArts is best known, however, for the Monkey Island series, following pirate Guybrush Threepwood on adventures and tales involving treasure, cursed idols, cursed zombie pirates, insult combats, and many, many possible places where it looked like Guybrush might actually end up dying, only for something comedic to happen that keeps him unscathed, and in at least one instad, a direct parody of the Sierra-style death message, before the fourth wall gets unceremoniously shredded and things return to their usual comedic hilarity. Sadly, LucasArts didn't make nearly enough of any of these kinds of games to be a serious contender for all the things that Sierra was putting out as well, despite these games being really good, and eventually Lucas-Everything would be bought out by Disney.
Sierra itself, even after the success of being Valve's publisher for Half-Life, would eventually be bought out by Vivendi Universal, which in itself would be bought out by Activision-Blizzard. At the time of the Vivendi purchaswe, though, the writing was definitely on the wall that the era of adventure games they had pioneered and ridden to great success would come to a close. Many of the developers for Sierra games are in the process of making or have already made other games of the same style. They might not be explicitly in the same universe, but they are there and it's a nice thought for the demographic that grew up on Sierra's various games and wanted to be sure that the people behind them didn't just fade away into obscurity, a fond memory of a time gone by that will never return.
Additionally, it's not like the point-and-click adventure game went away, necessarily, just that as graphics got better and computers faster, and the demographics of who owned a PC and who played games on them changed, the adventure-style games of the Sierra era changed more toward twitch-action styles, like platformers and FPSes. And adventure games of the Sierra style also branched out into things like hidden object games, FMV games, and, once the United States got obsessed with more than just console RPGs coming from Japan, visual novels. And, of course, Sierra's name gets bought out in the early stages of the World Wide Web, before ubiquitous broadband and digital delivery and the utter explosion of content that comes with that.so now, you can see that the genre never really died, and that these days, there are plenty of indie authors who are taking up the torch in the same way and developing games that are either throwbacks, homages, or entirely new directions for the genre to go in, led in many ways by Telltale Games and their episodic licensed game properties.
Most, if not all, of the Sierra-Dynamix catalog is available on the game platform of your choice, with or without DRM attached. Or, depending on which game you may have a hankering for, if you also played a significant amount of that catalog, their spiritual successors or imitators are also available, usually on the platform of your choice. The environment where I learned a lot about gaming, and a lot about puzzle-solving in games (which usually amounts to "try everything, even the things that seem counter-logical, because something will usually work.") is the Sierra Adventure game, and the other games that Sierra-Dynamix were involved in creating. And that's before we talk about the Incredible Machine, Gobliiins, and so many other games that I could spend several thousand more words on describing in detail that were also Sierra-related, even if they weren't specifically first-party Sierra-Dynamix games. That would probably be a December Days series all unto itself, really, if I just wanted to pluck games from my childhood and describe them in detail and why I remember playing this particular game. I'm not entirely sure, however, that anyone other than me would be interested in that kind of a series. Because it would be deeply personal, entirely idiosyncratic, and unless you also have played that particular game, it would be a lot of text about something that you haven't experienced or played yourself. And it wouldn't be a Let's Play, or a speedrun, or something where you could at least watch the game while someone was providing commentary. It would all be text.
Anyway, if you want to take a tour of the potential nostalgia halls, or learn a bit more about why I'm particularly nostalgic for this company that only exists in name now, SierraGamers exists, and has a significant amount of information and scanned copies of the feelies and ephemera that came along with being a customer of the company.
Consoles are fun, and I have played a fair few, but most of where I cut my teeth on gaming, and many of the games that I remember playing a lot of, were on a PC. The Kaypro is my earliest memory, but most of my computer gaming happened on PCs running DOS. At that particular time, games have made the jump from being solely text to games with interactive graphics, but we haven't completely made the leap to the point-and-click interfaces that will follow them. But that is very much right on the cusp of happening.
At this particular point in time, one of the biggest genres of game is an adventure. The protagonist goes through a series of events, often picking up ites that seem otherwise useless along the way, only for them to come in handy at exactly the right moment to surpsass an obstacle and continue the adventure. One of the undisputed leaders of adventure games at this point is Sierra (On-Line). Ken and Roberta Williams have already done a successful job creating games for other studios, and where I enter this picture, they are involved as the publisher of several different series of adventure games. There's a fantasy series about the royal family of the kingdom of Daventry, headed by King Graham (who will be the protagonist of King's Quest I, II, and V, as well as a reboot King's Quest much, much later along the line) and Queen Valanice (King's Quest VII), their son Alexander (King's Quest III and VI, although Alexander doesn't know he's the son of Daventry until almost the end of III), and daughter Rosella (King's Quest IV and vII), which is Roberta's design and writing. There's also a King's Quest game called Mask of Eternity that's much more of an action-adventure game than the point and click / text parser games, doesn't star a member of the royal family of Daventry, and is such a tonal shift from the previous games that I've mostly shoved it off into its own continuity as an AU, even though the Wiki tells me that its story mirrors that of the first King's Quest, and it uses many of the elements that are common to the King's Quest series. (And that it was supposed to potentially be the beginning of a Gneeration II loop for the series.) It was also developed on the tail end of Sierra, before it became not much more than a name for Vivendi Universal to use on some of their games. (For example, the Sierra name is on Geometry Wars 3, even though that's not the style of game that Sierra would be morst famous for developing.)
Sierra developed a lot of different series following the model of King's Quest, for different stories and roles to take on. Sierra developed Police Quest in conjunction with the Los Angeles Police Department, and provided a copy of the LAPD procedures manual, not just as a copyright protection measure (in this era, a particular puzzle would have to be solved through the use of feelies that came with the game as a way of preventing someone who had bought or pirated the game from being able to go particularly far in it) but as a way of passing more than a few puzzles the correct way by following police procedure. I played a little bit of those games, but I wasn't particularly interested in taking on the role of a detective at that point.
Al Lowe developed a series of adult-themed adventure games following a hapless protagonist named Larry Laffer, who, thanks to his inconic outfit of a 70s-style leisure suit, game name to the series, Leisure Suit Larry. Larry distaff counterpart, Passionate Patti (who would star in Leisure Suit Larry III and V) had a similar lack of luck with finding someone, but these games were as much about confirming that sex is funny as much as they were more serious adventure games about sex. Not being old enough to play them at the time, and not really having been interested in going back to play them, that series is mostly getting mentioned for showing how much Sierra waws trying to hit everyone's niches for games. Where I would encounter Al Lowe's sense of humor is in his send-up of Western tropes, Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist, about a retired, one-eared gunslinger who just wants to settle down into a nice town and provide medicines for them. Unfortunately, there's someone who has their eye on the town (as it turns out, because there's a significant amount of oil underneath the town) and wants to drive all of the residents away so they can buy it up and make a pretty penny on the black gold. After foiling several of the plots that the antagonist puts forth, such as feeding horses lentils in an attempt to suffocate the town through methane inhalation or trying to stampede a herd of giant snails through the town, Freddy has to take up his gunslinger persona againt the forces threatening his town. And naturally, nobody knows who the "handsome silver-eared stranger" is until the very end. (And also, Al Lowe developed Torin's Passage, a game full of humor for both kids and adults with a teenage protagonist and his shapeshifting Boogle.)
One of the notable things about Sierra adventure games is that they usually had a score counter, so that a player could tell how well they were doing (and, incidentally, how far along they were in the game). Having gotten the population used to the score counter, there were some occasional tricks played on the player by it - Space Quest IV, for example, had an unstable ordnance that would give the player 25 points upon pickup, but when Roger jumped down a sewer grate to try and advance the plot, the ordnance would explode in his pocket and kill him. Putting the ordnance back where it was found deducted 20 points from the score but allowed the plot to proceed. The net gain of 5 points went unnoticed a lot, but would eventually help someone toward a perfect score. Freddy Pharkas gave 500 of the possible 999 points in the game for unlocking the front door of the pharmacy, because, frankly, it was the act that kicks off the entire plot. And because Al Lowe wanted to mess with people's perceptions of the game (since most Sierra games were scored to 500 points as a perfect game).
Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, under the moniker of "The Two Guys From Andromeda", were in the middle of making a bitingly funny send-up of science fiction shows and tropes in the Space Quest series, which would ultimately end at six games. Space Quest followed (Almighty) janitor Roger Wilco, who manages to stumble, bumble, and get lucky all the way through foiling several different potentially planet and/or galaxy-destroying plots, involving insurance salesmen, superweapons, body swaps, genetic manipulations, and more, at some point even ascending to the rank of Captain (of a garbage retrieval vessel) before his involvement in yet another potentially galaxy-spanning plot has him stripped of rank (and clothing) at a tribunal and returned to his usual rank of janitor for the final game in the series. There's a certain amount of thankfulness on their part that the series never made it to game ten, because, according to the time-travel plot of Space Quest IV, Space Quest X was supposed to be titled "Latex Babes of Estros." There's the possibility that the Two Guys, at that point, were doing a send-up of how science fiction tended to treat Strong Women by not only having them become damsels in distress, but turn out to be entirely girly and obsessed with shopping underneath their tough exterior. Also in that same game is cross-dressing as a plot point, and I suspect that some of the jokes haven't aged well at all, even if I remember most of them as being funny and parody of science fiction (some of which I might not have even understood at the time.)
And, the one I really considered a favorite (although Space Quest was a close second), was Lori and Corey Cole's Quest for Glory series, following a recent graduate of the Famous Adventurer's Correspondence School looking to make a name for themselves as an adventurer, and possibly right some wrongs along the way. The first game, So You Want to Be A Hero?, took place in Spielburg ("Gametown"), following the motifs of a Grimm-style fairy tale, with a guest appearance from Baba Yaga. There are fairy rings, creatures to slay, curses to undo, and the most important part about it is that the player character's data is exported at the end of the game and imported into the next one, allowing the adventure to continue with the same equipment present in the last game, although there always has to be currency exchange between the various places that the Adventurer ends up in for their next installment. Game II, Trial By Fire, took on a style from the Tales of A Thousand Nights and One Night, following innkeepers from the first game who are away from their home place (and also have a magic carpet to fly upon), III, Wages of War, explored African tales, following characters introduced in game II who were from a different region, in the same way the innkeepers from I were, IV, Shadows of Darkness, firmly rooted itself in Slavic folklore (and Baba Yaga returns to her normal place, having been driven away from Spielburg by the Hero in the first game), and V, Dragon Fire, centered on Greek mythology as its core background while bringing back a significant number of characters from previous games, as befitting the final installment in the series. V also shifted to the same action/RPG style that King's Quest: Mask of Eternity did, and had some issues with gameplay on the computers that I had, so I haven't fully finished it. I should go back and run the entire series at some point, because it's a series really worth going all the way through, from beginning to end, to see the journey of a single hero from newbie adventurer to seasoned Hero of several lands who has to defeat a dragon at the very end.
The other interesting thing about the series was that the game's puzzles were often solvable in multiple ways, based on what profession the player chose for their adventurer at the beginning. To max out on the content available, the player could choose to put their points in skills outside their regular set and build hybrids that could do all sorts of things, like fighters that can pick locks and cast spells, but just about all of the solutions involved had a strength option, a magic option, and a stealth option such that each character could approach the situation in a way that was fitting for their chosen character archetype and solve it accordingly.
There were several other series that leaned more into horror, like Gabriel Knight, Phantasmagoria, and Shivers, which I haven't played (although I do own some of them in bundles), because, well, horror is not exactly the genre that I want a whole lot to do with, being easily startled and not necessarily interested in either seeing a lot of gore or in being terrified all the time about what might be out there lurking for me. There were some murder mystery games that I did play (both of the Laura Bow mysteries, The Colonel's Bequest and The Dagger of Amon Ra), and those were okay, but they still had quite a bit of jump scare involved. Of the games I enjoyed playing, there were often many different ways for the player character to die, most of them were usually in a humorous way, with a snappy message at the end and the options to "Restore, Restart, or Quit". Which is where I learned the first important rule of any given Sierra adventure game: Save early, save often. Some puzzles could not be solved without the proper item, and usually, getting stuck on a spot in the game meant that there was some part of the game that had been missed earlier that would reward the player with an item that was useful for the current seemingly-impassable situation.
(And, okay, some of the fun of playing Sierra games was finding all of the creative ways there were to get yourself killed, just to see all the death messages and pictures that would come of them.)
Some problems even had multiple solutions to them, some of which were worth more points than others. For example, there are two ways to kill the definitely-not-a-Terminator robot in Space Quest 3. One involves knocking him into a dynamo at the right time. The other involves luring him underneath a set of creatures that the player has already discovered are lethal and react to sound, hiding and then using the sound to have the creatures attack the Terminator robot. That version also uses an item that was otherwise obtainable but unknown in purpose to retrieve the key item the not-Terminator was wearing. So there's a lot more points at stake doing it the hard way. Kind of like luring a robot intended to blow up anything organic it comes across into the cave of something big and mean that will happily use Roger Wilco as a basketball if it catches him and letting the two of them hash out their differences. (Spider-droid wins.) The droid could be avoided, the creature could be destroyed by giving it your container of instant water ("pure hydrogen! Just add oxygen!"), which is will happily consume, with the expected effects of having consumed a container of p0ure hydrogen, and so long as Roger doesn't die of dehydration because the player is efficient in their movement, the other solution might never be discovered.
Sierra eventually went on to acquire a company or two, like Dynamix, which opened up their software library some, but also gave us great adventure games like The Adventures of Willy Beamish, where a delinquent student manages to foil more than a few plots from the local richie-riches involving frogs and pollution. Willy Beamish had an interesting mechanism where player decisions might get them in trouble with his parents. Too much trouble would result in a non-standard Game Over where Willy is sent off to military school to curb his troublemaking tendencies, but there's entirely a few things here and there that are necessary and good for the plot to continue that will get Willy in trouble if he's discovered doing them or doesn't hide his evidence quite well enough. But it's a fun romp through being a child and managing to somehow succeed at foiling a plot that's eventually meant to frame your father for all the pollution that's happening, and whose climactic action takes place on a giant toilet bowl, no really. Dynamix also did a licensed game in Raymond Feist's Midkemia that worked quite well, although I had to get used to the first-person perspective to do anything at all.
As you can guess, I spent a lot of time playing adventure games, and there would eventually develop a competing school of thought to the Sierra-style "save early, save often, here, have some amusing death messages to take the sting out of the fact that you're still going to be doing this sequence again and again until you get all the actions and their timing right." LucasArts, while really well-known for their Star Wars tie-in games (since, y'know, LucasFilm were the people who did the movies) also produced several adventure games on the model that killing the player character isn't really a useful idea for good gameplay. While Maniac Mansion still had issues of captures and game-overs possible, its sequel, Day of the Tentacle, fully embraced the zero-deaths idea and otherwise made the price for experimentation and failure to be essentially zero, as items wouldn't break if used improperly, and characters could be infinitely taunted into putting themselves into terrible situations where the protagonists would have the opportunity to get it right. It's also a time-travel plot, where the three main characters are spread out across the "present", the supposed past of the colonial United States, and a dystopian future where everything is run by sentient tentacles and humans are kept as pets for their amusement.
The licensed game Sam and Max Hit The Road, based on the Sam and Max comics (which I didn't know existed until well after playing the game) followed a dog private investigator and his hyperkinetic rabbity-thing friend across the United States, going to tourist traps and attractions to try and solve a mystery involving mole men, Bigfoot conventions, and a country star whose ego is waaaaay bigger than his actual height. Max's solution to everything involves violence, and occasionally, Sam lets Max threaten others, or uses Max to do something specifically violent, like dunking him in the water of the Tunnel of Love and then applying the wet Max to the ride's electrical board, causing it to short and opening a path to find an inhabitant of the ride who isn't interested in much, but has useful information to give. Sam and Max also had an interesting arcade-style game involving Max surfing on top of the car and trying to bounce up and down on top of the various highway signs along the way. Good for relaxing and letting the brain work on whatever puzzle was causing issues at the time.
This no-deaths idea of LucasArts is best known, however, for the Monkey Island series, following pirate Guybrush Threepwood on adventures and tales involving treasure, cursed idols, cursed zombie pirates, insult combats, and many, many possible places where it looked like Guybrush might actually end up dying, only for something comedic to happen that keeps him unscathed, and in at least one instad, a direct parody of the Sierra-style death message, before the fourth wall gets unceremoniously shredded and things return to their usual comedic hilarity. Sadly, LucasArts didn't make nearly enough of any of these kinds of games to be a serious contender for all the things that Sierra was putting out as well, despite these games being really good, and eventually Lucas-Everything would be bought out by Disney.
Sierra itself, even after the success of being Valve's publisher for Half-Life, would eventually be bought out by Vivendi Universal, which in itself would be bought out by Activision-Blizzard. At the time of the Vivendi purchaswe, though, the writing was definitely on the wall that the era of adventure games they had pioneered and ridden to great success would come to a close. Many of the developers for Sierra games are in the process of making or have already made other games of the same style. They might not be explicitly in the same universe, but they are there and it's a nice thought for the demographic that grew up on Sierra's various games and wanted to be sure that the people behind them didn't just fade away into obscurity, a fond memory of a time gone by that will never return.
Additionally, it's not like the point-and-click adventure game went away, necessarily, just that as graphics got better and computers faster, and the demographics of who owned a PC and who played games on them changed, the adventure-style games of the Sierra era changed more toward twitch-action styles, like platformers and FPSes. And adventure games of the Sierra style also branched out into things like hidden object games, FMV games, and, once the United States got obsessed with more than just console RPGs coming from Japan, visual novels. And, of course, Sierra's name gets bought out in the early stages of the World Wide Web, before ubiquitous broadband and digital delivery and the utter explosion of content that comes with that.so now, you can see that the genre never really died, and that these days, there are plenty of indie authors who are taking up the torch in the same way and developing games that are either throwbacks, homages, or entirely new directions for the genre to go in, led in many ways by Telltale Games and their episodic licensed game properties.
Most, if not all, of the Sierra-Dynamix catalog is available on the game platform of your choice, with or without DRM attached. Or, depending on which game you may have a hankering for, if you also played a significant amount of that catalog, their spiritual successors or imitators are also available, usually on the platform of your choice. The environment where I learned a lot about gaming, and a lot about puzzle-solving in games (which usually amounts to "try everything, even the things that seem counter-logical, because something will usually work.") is the Sierra Adventure game, and the other games that Sierra-Dynamix were involved in creating. And that's before we talk about the Incredible Machine, Gobliiins, and so many other games that I could spend several thousand more words on describing in detail that were also Sierra-related, even if they weren't specifically first-party Sierra-Dynamix games. That would probably be a December Days series all unto itself, really, if I just wanted to pluck games from my childhood and describe them in detail and why I remember playing this particular game. I'm not entirely sure, however, that anyone other than me would be interested in that kind of a series. Because it would be deeply personal, entirely idiosyncratic, and unless you also have played that particular game, it would be a lot of text about something that you haven't experienced or played yourself. And it wouldn't be a Let's Play, or a speedrun, or something where you could at least watch the game while someone was providing commentary. It would all be text.
Anyway, if you want to take a tour of the potential nostalgia halls, or learn a bit more about why I'm particularly nostalgic for this company that only exists in name now, SierraGamers exists, and has a significant amount of information and scanned copies of the feelies and ephemera that came along with being a customer of the company.
