Determinance screenshot

Sierra On-line and the Most Over-the-top Marketing Materials Ever

I spoke a bit about my fond memories of Sierra catalogues from the 90′s in my talk at Gamecity, but I’d never come across this truly astonishing video until this evening…

This probably would have blown my mind if I’d seen it at the time.  It’s just so fantastically intense, despite the slightly tongue-in-cheek nature of everything.  But seriously, live re-enactments of King’s Quest 4 and Police Quest 2?  Nothing compares.

Now, I know certain well-known fans of point-and-clicks out there will continue to protest the abject shitness of the King’s Quest series until the cows come home, but as they were basically the first games I ever played seriously, they’re always going to have a special place in my slightly esoteric heart.

I’d never heard of Gold Rush! before…and, er, now I have.

Manhunter: San Francisco…I have actually completed this game.  An utterly misguided night-long session with my university gaming companion Mr Richard Bush resulted in us achieving the dubious honour of completing this utter cack.  Don’t ever touch it, unless you have no self-respect.

The Space Quest bit is just horrible.  But good shots of the game…neeeargh.

Amazing stuff.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 3:14 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Sierra On-line and the Most Over-the-top Marketing Materials Ever”

  1. JamesU:

    § November 20th, 2008 at 12:59 pm

    Haha, these videos really show the level of imagination required in order to play all those old sierra adventure games.

    Interesting that they should include footage with the debug menu, as well as the tool used to create the room and character art as well. Just shows how much crap they had to put up with in order to make these games, in stark contrast to the great user friendly content pipelines and tools we have today.

    Then again, maybe it was better back then. ;)

  2. Paul:

    § November 20th, 2008 at 5:25 pm

    While I’m fairly sure using a lot of that stuff was like being shot in the head over and over again by a perfect, grinning effigy of yourself wielding a gun with “YOU ARE STUPID FOR DOING THIS” written on it, at least their format allowed them to explore concepts really easily. Want to make a game set in a comedic space universe? Fine. Want to make a game set in a futuristic version of San Francisco where EVERY SINGLE PUZZLE IS COMPLETELY BROKEN. Fine? Making basically the same gave every time but in different settings is fantastic and more people should do it – I hope Bethesda come up with a load of different freeform / open world settings and keep making Oblivion in them. I’m not joking.

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