All decisions at Sierra were based on the long-term, not the short-term, and that’s why we did so well. I wanted to create a company that my grandkids would know about, and that would still be around for multiple generations. We’re both highly focused, hardworking people. And I think that almost anybody who’s really willing to dig in and work hard can succeed. Even on this game, I get up before the East Coast people and I’m there after the West Coast people. I’m just kind of a good old boy who works really hard. I don’t claim to be a genius of any sort. There are a lot of people like me who were born with parents that couldn’t send them to a good school, that weren’t able to afford to go to college because they had to quit and get married early, and yet somehow I managed to go from the bottom of the heap to the top of the heap, and really it was just through hard work. And they came back into the conference room and they said, “OK, you can do it however you want.” And I did. I’m not going to do it.” And he called them into his office, and he basically said, “She’s not going to work on it unless you leave her alone and let her do it her way”-that they had to trust me. There’s too many places where you’re letting the player wander around and nothing is happening, and you realize this is a movie, right? You have to follow the script of the movie.” … I went into Ken’s office and I said, “I’m not going to do this game with them because they just took my game and they changed it all around, and back to-basically it’s almost like a script for a movie again, and so what’s the point?” I just said, “I’m done. came into the room, and they basically sat down and said, “We decided to change a lot of your game because it wasn’t fitting our script. And check out some highlights from the discussion below. Listen to the complete interview with Ken and Roberta Williams in Episode 523 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And they have come to have such respect for this game, which is a really good sign.” “And I have to say that as we’ve worked with them on this game, in various ways-programmers, animators, artists-they have come to have such respect for this game, and I’ve been told many times, ‘I had no idea that this game was this good, and this interesting, and this deep and complex.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, it is.’ It’s a really good design. “None of them really knew what Colossal Cave was, and we’ve had to educate them,” Roberta says. Ken and Roberta have assembled a team of almost 30 artists and programmers, most of whom weren’t even born when the original Colossal Cave was released in 1976. “What we’re doing on this game couldn’t have been done five years ago.” “In some ways the pandemic saved the game, because suddenly everybody uses Teams and Slack and all of these screen-sharing apps, and it’s practical now to work remotely on a project,” he says. But Ken says modern communications technology has allowed them to work on Colossal Cave from anywhere. Since selling Sierra in 1996, Ken and Roberta have spent much of their time sailing the world, a lifestyle that doesn’t generally lend itself to running a game studio. There’s still probably more people that play that game each year than play a lot of the indie games that come out. “If you’re doing history, you don’t want to change it. “We’re trying to stay super faithful to the original version,” Ken says. The game features modern graphics and sound, and even support for virtual reality devices such as the Quest 2, but is otherwise unchanged from the original text adventure.
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