Growing Up With Sierra

When people say they "grew up on" something, they usually mean it was an important part of their childhood. For me, when I say I grew up on Sierra games, I mean it quite literally: I grew up alongside Sierra On-Line.

I was born in 1980, which meant I arrived at precisely the right moment. Old enough to discover King's Quest as I was learning to read, young enough for it to feel like magic.

At first, I didn't even realise you could type commands. I was perfectly content wandering the kingdom, moving Sir Graham from screen to screen, exploring Roberta Williams' world on my IBM PC. Then one day a work colleague of my father's sat down with my Dad and I and showed us how the game really worked. Suddenly, the world opened up. You could take part in the story by typing!

I was hooked.

I played King's Quest countless times. Then one day, without ceremony, my father placed the disks for King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne on our computer desk - there was more. The story continued.

To this day, one of my strongest childhood memories is going to the park across the road from our house, being pushed on a swing while my Dad and I tried to talk through a recent KQ2 play session together. It's striking how quickly those games escaped the computer screen. They became conversations at the dinner table, topics of debate in the car, and puzzles to solve while standing in a park on the other side of the world from the people who created them.

Those games had become part of our family life.

So much so that when my father passed away earlier this year, Sierra games found their way into his eulogy.

After King's Quest came Space Quest, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and countless others. Looking back, Sierra adventure games taught me far more than puzzle solving. They introduced me to storytelling, humour, logical thinking, and, as an Australian, even the occasional lesson in American pop culture through Leisure Suit Larry's famously unforgiving age-verification quiz. Baseball? O.J. Simpson? (The CTRL-X shortcut would remain a mystery to me for many years.)

Around that same time, I received a phone call from another boy my age. His uncle worked with my Dad and had heard that I had completed King's Quest II and suggested I might be able to help. He was stuck.

My first hint:

"Kill Dracula with stake."

That single conversation became the first of thousands.

At the time it felt like we were talking about games. In reality, we were laying the foundations of a friendship that would outlast the computers, operating systems and technologies those conversations revolved around. A friendship that continues to this day.

For years afterwards, our home phone was affectionately known as the "Sierra Hintline" as we traded solutions, theories, discoveries, and frustrations from whatever Sierra game we happened to be playing at the time.

Living in Perth, Western Australia, we were about as far away from Sierra's headquarters in Coarsegold, California as it was possible to be while still sharing the same planet. There was no internet, no YouTube trailers, no social media accounts posting screenshots from upcoming games.

Looking back, it still amazes me that a company in a small Californian town could have such an influence on the life of a child growing up in suburban Perth.

My friend and I attended a local Sierra Users Group religiously. Every few months its members would gather to share the latest news, demonstrations and rumours arriving from overseas. They were our connection to a world that otherwise felt impossibly distant. Today, information travels around the globe in seconds. Back then, anticipation was part of the experience.

As the years passed, I grew, and Sierra grew with me.

The AGI era gave way to SCI. The humble PC speaker in our family computer eventually evolved into a Roland CM-32L. King's Quest IV arrived and suddenly games had richer music, larger worlds, and stories that felt more ambitious than anything I had experienced before.

Somewhere during those years, a subtle shift occurred.

Playing those games wasn't enough. I wanted to make some of my own.

I had decided what I wanted to do "when I grew up" - work for Sierra.

Sierra had always celebrated its creators in a way few companies did. Roberta Williams, Jim Walls, Al Lowe, Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe were not hidden away. Their names were on the boxes. Their personalities were part of the stories. For a young player, that mattered.

It transformed game development from something mysterious into something tangible. If people created these worlds, perhaps one day I could too.

Like many children, I didn't stop at dreaming. My best friend and I set about designing our own adventure game. We called it Underwater Adventure, a Police Quest-inspired underwater spy thriller. We mapped out the story, designed locations, drew the game world, and assembled our masterpiece.

Then we posted it to Sierra.

Weeks later, a letter arrived on official Sierra letterhead. It politely thanked us for our submission and explained that Sierra was not accepting unsolicited game ideas at the time. It did not explicitly mention that they were also probably not looking for game concepts from two twelve-year-olds.

We were more thrilled than disappointed.

Sierra had written back!

That would not be my last correspondence with the company. A few years later, after teaching myself some programming and animation, I sent some of my early work to Ken and Roberta Williams. This time, I received a personal reply from Roberta herself.

More than three decades later, I still have that letter.

It's one of two framed items on the wall of the study where I am developing Sierra Quest - the other is the hand drawn map my Dad made of Daventry from King's Quest I.

Some things are difficult to throw away.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether those letters represented an unconscious attempt to stay connected to a dream. Perhaps I imagined that if I kept improving, kept learning, and kept developing, one day I might end up with my dream job.

Life, of course, had other plans.

I never worked for Sierra, and by the time I would have been employable the Sierra I knew was unrecognisable.

But in another sense, Sierra shaped my life more profoundly than I could have imagined.

Those classic point-and-click adventure games did something their creators could never have imagined.

They quietly altered the trajectory of my life.

They sparked an interest in technology. They led me to programming. They helped shape a career that I still enjoy today as a software developer. They even gave me one of my closest lifelong friendships.

That story is not unique.

Since becoming more involved in the Sierra community in recent years, I have discovered countless people with remarkably similar experiences. For many of us, these were never simply games. They were formative experiences. They encouraged creativity. They taught persistence. They fostered friendships. They inspired careers.

The impact of Sierra On-Line extended far beyond the monitor. It can be measured in friendships that still endure decades later. In careers that began with curiosity sparked by a parser prompt. In artists, writers, musicians and developers who realised that ordinary people could create extraordinary worlds.

My own story was recently included in Sean Mills' book, The Sierra Adventure, a project I was proud to support and honoured to contribute to. Reading the experiences of others reinforced something I had slowly come to realise: Sierra's greatest legacy was not the games themselves.

It was the people they inspired.

Which brings me back to the question I have asked myself many times since announcing Sierra Quest.

Why me?

What gives me the audacity to create a new Sierra-style adventure game featuring characters who are beloved by so many people?

The answer is actually quite simple.

Partly, it is my way of saying thank you.

Thank you to a company that helped shape my childhood, my career, my friendships, and countless happy memories.

But there is another reason.

A game like this does not exist.

For decades, fans have imagined what it might look like if the worlds of King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, Quest for Glory, Laura Bow, and other classic Sierra adventure games somehow collided. We have joked about it, discussed it, and dreamed about it.

I believe that game should exist.

And for the first time, the tools to build it - tools that once required entire teams of people - are now available to everyone.

Sierra Quest is my attempt to build it.

Not because I believe I am uniquely qualified.

Not because I own these characters.

But because I, like so many of you, grew up with them.

They helped shape the person I became.

Somewhere between a hand-drawn map of Daventry, a conversation on a swing about Dracula, a letter from Roberta Williams, and a lifelong friendship, those characters became part of my story too.

And because, after all these years, I still think there is at least one more adventure left to tell.