Sierra Online

While this blog post will not be popular and will reveal me as the nerd I am, I figure I may as well write it.

Sierra Online recently died. Some say it died when Vivendi bought it out 5 years ago, which is - to an extent - correct, but today the body was buried. The doors of Sierra Entertainment were closed, workers were laid off, and the company that first brought us graphical computer games, King's Quest, Quest for Glory, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Gabriel Knight, Phantasmagoria, Goblins, and a host of other adventure games turned off.

When I got over the Nintendo games of Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda, I turned to Sierra Online. They produced brilliant games with brilliant plots and hundreds of jokes that only made sense to the educated. Al Lowe, creator of Leisure Suit Larry, once said that adventure games had died with the invention of the idiot proof computer. I can't say how true that is. I can only say that the games that demand an education are gone, and we are left with Quake and Doom III, button mashers. There may still be a few games out there (Syberia) in the adventure genre and a few hybrids (Half-Life), but the wave has ended, and I am sad.

In other news, not much is up. The people I work with have intelligence, but it does not fit my definition. They can't spell, and they have poor grammar. I'm not sure that I'll ever be able to leave a university setting, because I doubt my ability to deal with the grammatically challenged.

On that note, I shall call it a night. Sleep well, all. I'm exhausted.