The Sierra OnLine Story

Online was the PC game company of that era. In nine, just to give you a little spoiler for later in the episode, the company was acquired for the princely sum of one point zero six billion dollars, though that was all in a stock swap, it wasn't for cash. If you adjust that for inflation for today's money, that ends up being about one point seven billion dollars. That's how much the game company was acquired back in nineteen and

considering its origins, that's phenomenal. Now I got the chance to speak with Sierra Online co founder Ken Williams, and he and his wife Roberta founded Sierra Online back in and we're gonna play the interview first and then I'll fill in some of the gaps with the timeline for Sierra Online and go into more detail about what was going on with the company. But the interview is pretty interesting.

One thing I want to mention right off the bat is the interview with Ken really drove home the fact that there's no substitute for talking with a primary source. Because I had researched Sierra quite a bit before I had a conversation with Mr Williams, and as you'll hear, I didn't even have a full understanding of things that

were going on behind the scenes. You know, you read about these articles, these reports, you read all this information, all this supplemental information, and then when you go to the primary source, you find out, like now, that's not exactly how things happened, and you realize the written record of history appears to be different than what actually happened. That's a valuable thing to keep in mind all the time, always, but particularly for this episode. I don't want to spoil anything,

so let's go straight to the interview. Ken Williams, Welcome to Tech Stuff. Thank you so much for taking time to talk with me and my listeners. I really appreciate it. Thank you, and I think so too. It is really a dream come true for to get the opportunity to speak with you, just to give you a little bit of an idea of where I'm coming from. I was born in so I grew up right as the era of the micro computer morphing into the small computer was taking place. We had an Apple to e in my home.

I was one of those folks who, largely because my dad is also one of those folks, started playing games early on. And obviously the Sierra Online series of games became a huge, uh influential power in those early days and I think definitely played a role in pushing forward

the narrative aspect of gaming in general. That was something that you really you only saw one of two types of games in those early days before I would I would say before really Mystery House came out, which is that you either got text only or you've got a very simple arcady kind of game, but you never really had the combination of graphics and texts, something that Sierra really became known for in those early days. But before I jump into that, once a little bit about your

background before you got into be eating games. Were you were you a programmer for things like mainframe systems, and things of that nature. Yep I was a program on mainframe computers and well, I don't know, I was doing software development for a lot of different companies in the Los Angeles area and it was all focused on online applications.

In those days, people have mainframe computers in terminals scattered around the country and I was kind of the I guess, semi expert on dealing with that, and that that was where the name. Initially CRE was taught online systems and it was my consulting practice, and then the first couple of games I think still set online systems, and then we decided to move to the Yosemite and we named

it um CRE Online Nice. And when you were working, from the stories that go around, and I don't know how much of it is apocryphal versus true history, but the story tends to be that you were, uh, you had purchased an Apple computer, that this was one of those early micro computers, that's what we called personal computers before we started calling all of them personal computers, and that you were working on a Fortrain compiler for the Apple computer when the first the first thoughts of building

a game came up. Was that is that accurate? Yeah, that's accurate. I had actually done oh, something very similar to Fortran compilers for a company I was working for, and the Microsoft released Visual Basic for them, I think p rs AD and I started thinking about wouldn't it be cool if there was a portrayin compiler on the

Apple two and computer with Microsoft, I guess. And then ROBERTA saw a game that was on a time sharing terminal post in the mike, the original uh, the Original Adventure, and was playing it and it said that she got to be fun. It's what There was a version of it for micro computers are personal computers, and they were about that time. She got me an Apple two for Christmas and I started coding on the game for her at the same time I was working on the compiler.

And when I started going door to door with computer stores to you know, kind of peddle, not the idea of my Coortran pilot. They were all excited about her game and not Fortran. So so was the game of game company. Very practical, very pragmatic approach into getting into into games, and it really it's hard to explain to people today how this was really a huge leap forward to have the graphic element the images element, even though they were static images and they were monochromatic because of

the old Apple two. Uh that adding that to the element of a text based adventure where you're you are put in the role of a protagonist who has to make choices in order to navigate through a game. That combination had not really been explored before the first game Mystery House comes out, which was as the name implies,

that you're solving a mystery. And I imagined that that ended up creating a bit of a stir at the time because it was it was sort of a new idea, but also as I understand it, uh, there was the world was so different back then. Today, if you want to buy a game, you tend to go with digital distribution. You will download a game and that's it. You never have to worry about it. In those early, early early days of PC gaming, there were very few places where

you could actually go to buy games. It was a very young industry, and from what I understand, the initial approach to selling Mystery House was that you had a full page ad in like a hobbyist magazine, and people had to cut out a little order form and actually fill it out and send it into you. Is that accurate? Um, well, kind of that. Yeah, those are primitive times. There was no Part of the problem is how do you deliver

the games. Games in those days were on audio cassette and most of the software sold for the piano said he was on audio cassette, and even the Apple two

originally I think games were on audio cassette. And then they came up with the idea of a disk drive that it only had a d K of storage and that's less than you know, they're one low as picture, so it you know, how to deliberate game and put it on an ad K floppy and then get it to the user who it's kind of a challenge and how do you do pictures given that there's no place to storm and even memory I think on the original Apple two was only sixteen K and memory, so it

was it was kind of a challenge that No for marketing, I think they were only what was the name fifteen stores in the United States selling computers at that time, so really selling was pretty easy. He was tapped the stores and there was so much thirst for games that you know, they do anything to get the games. They because they wanted to sell the computers. You can sell the computers without the software, and so we packaged them

up and to sell to the public. Um. Yeah, it's funny that the retailers didn't complain about is going direct. But we did run some ads and had had our home phone at the time and people had called place orders and then they had put them in a box and go to the post office and shipping and at the company. I mean, the company was gone so fast in those days that you know that that really was

a short time stand. I think from m when we realized the company was going to be a hit, and quit my job and moved to Ysemity and we bought a home there and looked there and started selling and going back and forth to the post office to ship to When we rented an office and hired people, it was about a three month or four months span. I mean it was you know, it was literally exploding and every day, you know, sales were um way. Yet from the fire day getting rid of our personal phone number

and all the ads happened happen pretty quick. Even the original companies of pustry House, I think had our our home plown for the end. Any questions call. So yeah, those were different times. Yeah, I can't imagine anyone taking those kind of pains today that would have been Uh, certainly, it was certainly an interesting approach, and the fact that, of course the industry was so small at the time.

I mean still, I'm sure you're getting calls around the clock all the time, but at least it wasn't something where you're talking about a game launching and then getting a million sales right off the bed. It was in the thousands, which at that time was amazing success, especially when you look at the install base. There really weren't that many personal computers out. This is in the era where it was just emerging from that hobbyist market and starting to get creep into into more of an average

consumer kind of household. But that was a very gradual process.

And around the same time, while you guys had your early years over at Sierra, there was something going on with the home video game market on the console and where there was this glut of various types of consoles that were on the market, and then we know that that eventually kind of capitulated into the video game crash that happened around three And from what I understand, there was a similar kind of rough patch for software for computer about a year later, and uh, and I imagined

that those early years there were some some real ups and downs over at Sierra kind of you know, I don't remember ever a softness in computer software. There was you know, kind of a period of wild growth and he sees and then the video game industry was, you know, kind of allowed. The personal computer industry is probably going

from zero to ten raid and revenue. The video game industry left from zero to a couple hundred millions, though it was growing much faster, and we got interested in the video game market and shifted a lot of development resources over the video games just as the video game market collapsed. And that kind of left is with no product for personal computers and yeah, and just people focused in the wrong place. So plus with a lot of money to buy cartridges and fund the development of the

video games, all of which was wasted. This is the era when people were bearing EP cartridges out in the desert. And yeah, they caught us and we went from I think a hundred and ten employees to twenty employees almost overnight. And Albert and I had to borrow on our credit cards and get a second on our home and everything in order to pay their rent and keep us in business.

And but then we got lucky in that I showed IBM I guess prototypes and games that we were thinking about and um and also a work process or people forget that we were We did an amazing work processor at that point in time that was graphically based and IBM was impressed and gave us some nice advanced money towards the products. And it's time. It was a weird world, and the IBM was worried about being broken up by

the government is monopoly. So when they would give us development financing, they also had assigning this agreement saying that we agreed not to sell the them exclusively. They were they were in kind of weird mode that they said, okay, we'll come the development. You can sell the product us, but we also have the promences still sell at our competitors.

And we said sure, and they released their machine. The PC JR was bombed and we put the same software on the and the thousand from Radio Shack and it was a big bit and so it was kind of strange and that IBM that bringing the company back to life in order to from software that radio shack and asked me a lot of money. But but that was that was good and so it wasn't really a sack in the personal computer business. It was more of a Um, we had shifted resources and that market collapsed and then

we had to refocus. But that we did and we never really had another tough match after that. Yeah, it's great that you were able to pivot like that. It's a you know, it says a lot about a company that had already experienced a great deal of success still being nimble enough to recover after after a huge shift in the market. There we've seen companies, many companies go

under when they were encountering similar circumstances. Uh. I assumed that the big software piece, the big game piece that was going to the PC junior into Tandy was the beginning of the King's Quest franchise. Is that correct? Yep. Kings One was kind of our first animated adventure and was huge. I mean, it's hard to believe looking back at it now, that's pretty clucky, but um, there was nothing else like it in the market, and um, and

and so little competition. I mean, in a world in which there's you know, ten or twenty games released to hear, it's easier to break through than when there's uh, you know, two's five thousand games released to do today and you know most of its bomb. But in those days it's fairly easy to get a exposure. And you know, Scare was there first, which it was kind of an extra edge and plushily. We did a lot of a lot

of cool stuff. Yeah, King's Quest was really innovative in the sense that it had this ability where you would have objects within the frame of the picture that you're in the area that you're walking around, and you could actually walk in front of or behind different objects. That kind of lad to describing it as a three D sort of thing, because it wasn't just an X Y access where your character is stuck along one plane of movement.

You actually had some depth in there, and that was a big you know, just like adding the graphics into text adventure. Now we have this animated adventure where you can even walk behind different objects, and that was really innovative at the time. And again, the focus on narrative

was something that I found really intriguing. You had all these different puzzles and jokes and uh things that were really challenging and caused gamers to think in different ways in or to progress further, and it was again sort

of pushing the art form of gamemaking forward. One thing I definitely wanted to mention so that my listeners could get an appreciation for it is UH, doing research on Sierra and looking at these teams that were working on these different titles, it struck me how many women were working on this as developers on these games, something that was I think a lot of people think is was unheard of really, but you had a lot of of women heading up various franchises, whether it was King's Quest

or other ones. And UH, to me, that was a very forward thinking approach to it was obviously you were getting the right people for the right jobs and trying to make sure that you continued, ah, you know, pushing forward the the capabilities of your games and the narration

of your games. But I found that fascinating because it wasn't It's not something I ever encounter and pretty much any other tech company unless it was a conscious decision, uh, in an effort to create more diversity within the workplace. But this seemed like it was part of the culture early early on. Yeah, I mean I don't know it was a conscious decision. It was just looking for the best person for the job. And yeah, I guess uh. In non quoting roles it tends to be a lot

more evenly balanced. Quoders do tend to be male when we have some female quoders, but certainly in the creative and design and are everything else, it was far more balanced. And I never tried to balance or tried for anything, you know, it just kind of fell out the way it fell out, and you look for the best person for the job. So um, yeah, I can't say that at least a explicit effort to try to do I

don't know, you coopportunity hiring anything like that. I really yeah, I guess it was just focused on don't be good games. So we got a lot of great games in this series. Like the King's Quest series, is extremely influential in the storytelling adventure game genres. You could argue the fantasy genre as well, so much so that we've seen some really

remarkable even spoofs of King's Quest. One of the ones I think of is from the Brothers Chap who did Homestar Runner and did a whole Peasants Quest kind of take off of it, and it clearly relied heavily on this knowledge of and familiarity with King's Quest. It became kind of a um not just King's Quest, but the other series as well that followed in a similar kind of vein, like like a Space Quest. It really shows that it had a huge impact on the culture of

gaming in those early days. Were there any particular times during those the like the eighties era of Sierra where you just were sitting back and just kind of marveling at the impact that your products were having on the market. Well, I mean, I guess to answer that question I want is yeah, every day. It was really amazing. What mean you nowhere to being um recognized everywhere? I mean, it's

stunning that. Yeah, we were kind of kind of celebriting c in away and just because computers are growing so fast and we were kind of at the center of it, um, particularly as consumers. So um, yeah, I guess we're probably even now. What's funny is that I don't think we realized how much so that now we're twenty years later, you know, since we sold the company and still people remember see here online that you're talking to me. Is amazing.

It's twenty years after we did the game, the games have we sold the company and retired, and there's still people that you know we existed, So it's uh kind of astounding. It's one of the things that I think back on in my childhood are all the different games I played. So it's clearly a huge impact on myself, and I know several my listeners. I mean, I've I've had people request that I cover Sierra multiple times. So

I'm very thankful for this opportunity. Um now in I guess no, no, please, no. I was just gonna say that. One thing people don't, I guess relate to now is that because there hadn't been computers before and then there were that people weren't sure what they would do, what they were capable of, and there was this inferrent belief

that they were educational. So parents loved buying computers for their kids, and Seeric kind of played into that in a way, and that because our games are using Parson and there was on screen texts to be read, parents

had no doubt that they were educational. And I think most parents in those days the lead computers are good for their kids, which is a little different than today, when a lot of the games are kindalyticum shoot them ups and kill people at the games, and I think parents are not quite as enthusiastic about buying games for their kids anymore. It's kind of a different kind of game and as different, I don't know, just a whole

different attitude any Anyway, hold on for one second. We're just trying to get yoga video going on at PV and I need be able to figure it out. But one minute, I'll be back. In nine Sierra held its initial public offering. And so you you transition from a privately held company to a publicly traded company. How did things change behind the scenes or was it essentially business as usual that were there any kind of shifts in

the way you were doing things from before and after? Well, you know, I guess the biggest thing was incredible stress to hit numbers. The every every employee in the company had stock options, and every employee in the company, maybe not every employment company had stock options. I tend to tended to getting to people that could really influence our growth, so i'd be more of the development teams. Although we

were heavily stewed toward development. UM there were always at all times, I'd say two thirds and more of the staff were involved in creating product. So um, but everybody have stock options, and people started watching the stock price daily and the network would go up and down based on the stock price and on the rocks. So obviously all the mutual funds that held our stock and all the individual people, and if fire stock went up, everybody smiled, and if they went down, they were you know, they

were depressed. So and performance as a public company has measured every ninety days, and a game hitting the quarter not hitting the quarter would have a huge impact on the top line, which would have an even bigger impact on the bottom line. And suddenly there was an incredible

push to get a date. I get a game out on a particular date, and um, you know, if you look back at our numbers, there would be going along fine until you get three weeks from me into the quarter, and then all of a sudden, you know, I would have to run over the development say we've got to ship this. It's got to go out the door next week, and the team's order a bell and they would take me for fishing and release a game and they'd say, just in me another day, another day, and they will

be better. And you know, I didn't want to be in that position, and they didn't want to be in that position. But it was kind of this horrible trap to found ourselves in where every quarter had to be better than the prior quarter and otherwise the stock and cut down and theoretically shouldn't be managing the company according to the stock price, and we tried not to, but it's not that easy. It really is oh horrible to

be a public company. UM. At least I didn't like it, and it was stressful for me personally, and suddenly instead of trying to change the world, we think I need cool things to do every day. I was backed down and taking calls from the financial community. And there was even one point where I just said that's it, I'm out of here and took off for I think there's

three months for what I called is abbatical. That really it was kind of around the world trip, just kind of reset and kind of get my jag right, and then dropped back in UM being public. UM. We were actually public for one almost eight years, and then we did we did some good stuff, but it was also in a lot of ways kind of the worst time in my life. Yeah, I can, I can imagine. I mean,

you you go. You go from a world where you know you can develop a game and you can ship it when it's ready, and the success of the game continues to propel the company forward into a world where if you have a release date that you have in mind and if it's been announced at all, missing that becomes a huge problem. I know, there's a lot of criticism in the video game computer game world now against companies doing one of two things, and it puts them

in a terrible position. One thing number one is that you miss your ship date and everyone goes bananas because the game is late, and that can be reflected in the stock price as well as just in the public opinion among gamers, who, among many of their traits, patients

is rarely one of them. And then on the other side, you have the the option of shipping on time, but the game itself is either not really complete or there's a lot of things that need to be fixed on a zero day patch, and the the announcement is this game is coming out and over the next couple of months it's going to improve. So there might be some rough spots at the beginning, but don't worry, it'll get better.

And gamers don't like that either, right, they want that finished, polished game where they feel like the thing they're buying is a complete experience, it's not something that they have to add on to after that purchase. So then it puts the actual companies in a really tough position where you can't miss your your ship date without dire consequences. But if you send out something that people perceive as

not being complete, you get lambasted. So you kind of are in the worst of all worlds, as opposed to going in that that privately held company route, where you have the luxury of not necessarily announcing things like a ship date so that you can continue to develop it until it's ready. And of course, in your you know, heyday of of creating games, there was no option of patching after the fact. What you shipped was the complete game.

That was it. When I went Gold, it was set down, And so I assume that that must have I mean, I can't imagine the amount of stress you're talking about here on a on a daily basis of dealing with this kind of shift in culture. Really, yeah, now, we well we did actually have a I remember it's called a BBS and there's one computer that'st in the corner and we would put patches on it that people could

download that. Most people didn't have modems early to unfold in those days, so it was the big dial a phone number directly into that computer and it could support some number users. And we didn't catch that. Um. Yeah,

it was kind of a flawed process. And on being development, people don't realize that there's there's people that have analytics skills and people that have creative skills, but they often you know, that same person that you know I had always think of artists is um creative and getting an artist to be able to say, you know, I expect twenty cells of animation out of you per day, Um, that's just never going to happen. An artists will set it to create and agonize over one cell of animation forever.

And and it's tough to that allowed to creative people, designers or musicians. I mean, it's managing a game, is it's message. The coders also will be a problem in times that you know, I I developed kind of a system for doing it which worked well at UM. Oh we were we were scattered. And it's one thing people don't realize about there is that I had kind of the core philosophy that too many developers in one place

can destroy creativity. Mentally, I would I would think, you know, we start getting million developers in one place, it's just too many, and it suddenly there comes a democratic machine instead of a uncreative group. And so we were scattered too. Toward the end, I think twelve different locations, and I would fly feature those locations and we would have a kind of a review and people would shot their game and I did my ideas for what to do and try to help them the kind of the metrics for um,

you know, this is your budget, this is your ship date. Um, it looks to me that you even have the money. And I would go through team by team, and we have many fifty games in development at any time, and by the time I finished going to all the developments, it was time to go back to the first than again.

And that was kind of my life was, um, you know, fly to Boston, fly to San Francisco, um you knows, and fly over to the outside development, going in the outside of Paris, And I spent all my life on airplanes. It was kind of fun and I got to see the games, but really every every meeting with a game developer was kind of a battle, and that I was kind of the horrible corporate guide coming in described their lives,

and that is that part was not fun. I mean behind the scenes, I was student for them and I loved the games and what a what a cool stuff to happen. But there's also, I guess a business side of things where you have the project development Patchet is a million ducks, then you've got to deliver for a million because you develop the free maillion. The market is that expand its um, just use money instead of make money.

So and after after we did so with company, Um, you know, I was horrified that the company kind of went away, but also divided that all those people that it's your horrible chemisy, just leave us alone be mega hits on time and on budget without you. Um. Yeah. I guess there's kind of a night culture sell there, which is that you do need some business discipline produced

games or you're going to have a disaster. So in my show, I've talked about some other game companies and some of them have had relationships with Sierra and I'd love to hear your take on it. Uh So the first would be ID because there was this this time period early in the days of ID where the heads of ID software came to Sierra. Can you tell me a little bit about what was going on back then? Well, yeah, I mean there's a few parts of this story. I m I saw Doom and Newcam and all the games

coming along, and nobody at Sierra. You know, there's kind of a passion you have to do a kind of to do a kind of game, otherwise it's going to turn out horrible. So I wanted a game like that, but I kind of didn't kind of didn't. It was a side of me that never lived violent games and the idea of just running through a building, shooting at things and onund defensive. I mean, I really still to

this day kind of a tribute. Some of the problems in schools with kids, um, kids that are unbalanced, getting out of control and shooting at other kids can come from games, well, from role playing games. They do that. So I didn't really want to shift those games. But I also recognized that customers wanted to buy them, and so I was always kind of on the fence. But then you know, when I saw Doom and stuff, I finally kind of said, Wow, this is good enough, maybe

we should ship it. And then I talked to uh at John Carmac and there's body guys and come visit. And they drove out in a van and they were living out of the dam at the time I employed it. They had sports cars. But they came out. Man. I set up done at the fancy restaurant to kind of um Wyne and Dinham that Sarah should be their publisher. And they showed up looking kind of stuffy and probably would have them kicked out of the restaurant have they not had it not done me and that I was

a regular customer. And but actually, I mean we did see and I we had a really nice dinner, and I think came real close to publishing their product, but they didn't think if they want to give up control and there was a side and made it didn't physically when I published their products, I just never really came together that um that's to death. It really was a nice product. So and I forget what they did. I think they published themselves, but I don't remember how they

did that. Yeah, they I mean obviously made a ton of money and did well with it, and it really defined a style of game to this day, it almost dominates the industry that. Um so there there, I mean, yeah, the pioneers in a genre and really cool kind. It's a great guys. And I missed one there that later I made up for by publishing Half Life. But even when we published Half Life, there was a cybing made it said, you know, this is it's going to get

because people killed. This is really a dumb thing to be doing on computers. But but well, you know, that's what it is. It definitely said that the ground where where the deal with Valve could go through. And obviously now Valve is is the dominant powerhouse at least in distribution for PC games that it's been a while since we've seen any development from them. But the distribution side is I mean, that's if you're not buying your games off Steam, you are in the minority at this point.

So the fact that that Sierra played such an important role early on in Valves Life, um, you could argue that that is a large reason why the company was able to get a really strong foothold and move to the success that it's at now and you mentioned also that you know, seeing the Sierra name kind of go away, it's sort of emerged as kind of a almost like

a boutique brand in two fourteen. Um, I I imagine that that also, it just probably feels like there's very little, if any connection to the Sierra that you that you and your wife built back in the eighties. Is there Do you feel any connection to the current Sierra name or apart from I mean obviously your long history with it, but like the way it's it's current incarnation is now now, either I played any attention to the game industry possibly part of what I really doesn't like to do interviews.

It won't do them this because she doesn't want people to think she's, um, she's dumb when they say what do you think about such and such a game? And she has didn't that she has played the game in twenty years. So that's UM. Yeah, now we're pretty disconnected from we got briefly involved and the guys were doing kind of caught gentlemen. UM tried to start up the king Quest franchise and game series again and show there's

something they were working on. We thought it looked pretty fun, um, but then UM, as far as I know, didn't go anywhere, and even us we kind of got a copy in started playing at the lost inter Spring quick and um, I don't know if it was a game or just be our farm kind of. Um Um, I'm not sure. I'm not sure what it was. But we didn't finish playing, and yet it looks beautiful and played really nice. So I don't know. It's hard. It's hard to do something

that's really fun. So but I actually don't know how I did. I mean it was I had this funny that we know so a little about today's industry. We just kind of gone on to other stuff them. You know, we kind of did our second fifteen minutes of fame as voters, and that we bought a boat and circumnavigated and they've gone to lots of parts of the world

that um, very few people see. Um, you know, in the Bering Sea and the Turkey and all kinds of crazy places and over four books on voting, and now we can't go to any marina anywhere in the world. Whose days about somebody saying Ken Williams, Um, so we were just kind of shifted gears, so you should say, well, I think that The legacy is certainly a worthy one. It is an amazing legacy of games from multiple incredibly successful franchises that all went on to inform later games

that have games that still continue to come out. You can see the influence that you were your games had on those. Like the people who are developing those are people who grew up playing the Sierra Online games. So I think that that is continuing well. At one point in marketing, we did a list and I wish I had it, um some of the first that Sierra did, and it was like two pages long, and not just fluss. I mean there was a lot of things that we kind of pioneered that um yeah, I mean just you know,

little things like music games and sound cards. We can ship sound cards and we did so many around modems, online games, and we think about this Yer network and what we did there. That's probably my most ground accomplishment in all and that there wasn't even the Internet and we were doing um we had we had online site simulators, I mean not twenty four hundreds Bob modems, years before

the Internet came along. So um, I don't know, Yeah, we we had some pretty pretty pretty amazing history at that time, they had a good team we had because we were Sierra and because we were first anyone who was kind of interested in doing gaming. You know, for them, it wasn't really about the money. It was about working for Sierra because we were you know, we were were

we were leaders at the time. It's all. We were able to get the best engineers um that the world had to offer, and you know, I was you know, I was there helping to leave the pack. But really at least the reputation as Sierra and our ability to recruit amazing people to put us where we were, which is strange too because we were located is screwball place to put the company, And yeah, became kind of a

company town. I think we've had five hundred employees at the time when there were only five thousand people in the town. And then we kind of help grew it, moved to Seattle, left the development behind. But basically, you are a company down and when you get to a point where you're your operation is so large that you don't have enough places for people to live in in the town that you're located and you have to relocate to a different city, that's pretty remarkable. I don't think

there are a whole little companies that have that story. Ken, I gotta thank you so much about now. I think I think we've got a good I think we've got a good conversation, and you can. I really appreciate it. We you know, the the we'll do, we'll do. You take care alright. So here's a little bit more background on the whole story of Sierra Online's origins and evolution. So how did it go from a husband and wife

start up operation to a billion dollar company? Well, as Mr Williams mentioned, he had been programming computers back in the old mainframe days, and he had been doing contract work for a company called Informatics and was working with other programmers to try and build out a four tran compiler. As part of his work, he brought back a teletype machine.

Teletype machines could communicate back to a mainframe computer and you would get pronounced, And it was a pretty primitive terminal kind of access to a a mini computer, not a micro computer that's what personal computers would become, but a mini computer or a mainframe. So this was kind of like having that long distance terminal. And it didn't take long after the development of the programmable computer in general,

for people to start creating games for those machines. This happened well before the era of the personal computer, back when the only people who had any access to computers typically were computer programmers. Sometimes the programmer would tackle the challenge of making a game as a way to teach him or herself how to program it. Just it became

kind of like an engineering challenge. How would I make a program that could play this particular game, something simple like Tic Tac toe or Battleship or something on those lines. Some of those games found their way onto the computer that Ken Williams was using for work, and he would he could access those games at home. Now. Roberto Williams was reportedly not terribly impressed with all of this until

she played a game called Colossal. Cave Adventure also just known as Adventure, sometimes just called Cave Adventure, has several different names, but it's a text based game and which you play as a character exploring a cave to find various tres pasures. Now, text based games are a type of interactive fiction in which the player is taking control of a protagonist. I almost said it in the red

red letter media way. The protagonist and attempts to guide the hero through a scenario, and you use typed commands to do this. If you were to load up one of those games today, what you would see as a paragraph of text that would describe the immediate surroundings of your character. You could then type in commands to either try and get more information or take some sort of action within that environment, or even to leave that particular

environment completely. So, for example, if the description said that there's a threadbare rug on the floor, you might try to examine the rug, or look under the rug, or take the rug. You would type these commands in, so you might say examine rug and hit enter. If the programmer had built in a response to whatever it was you typed in, you would get that response, so it might say you look under the rug and there's a key.

If they did not build in some sort of response to that, you would typically get some sort of generic message, such as you don't see anything interesting, or I'm sorry you can't do that. ROBERTA. Williams found the puzzles of this interactive fiction to be really compelling, and so she ended up playing other games along that type, although she said none of them were quite as interesting to her as the first one was. She played a lot of

games written by a guy named Scott Adams. This is not the Scott Adams who is the cartoonist behind Dilbert. He instead was a text adventurer designer. He created games like Adventure Land, Pirate Adventure, and Voodoo Castle, which really threw off that whole adventure motif they had going. By the winter of nineteen seventy nine, Roberta Williams had come up with an idea for her own game, and she just kind of thought that she could tell the same

sort of stories. Now. She didn't have the programming knowledge, but she did have this passion for interactive story telling that she thought that she could pursue now. According to old interviews, Roberta's influences for developing this first game were Agatha Christie, particularly the story Ten Little Indians, and also the board game Clue. So her game was going to be in the mystery genre, requiring players to unravel a murder mystery as they played through, with multiple characters dying

as the game continued. The way she got Ken on board because of course, Ken's doing his job as a programmer. He wasn't immediately sold on the concept of spending more time programming but building a game that his wife had designed. Uh. She said that, well, maybe what we do is buy ourselves an Apple two computer and that will be our

Christmas present to each other. This is a two thousand dollar computer, well more than that when you start adding in all the different components at back in nineteen seventy nine, I mean, that's an enormous amount of money. And so they agree. You know, Ken Williams was like, I get a computer out of this, and ROBERTA. Williams is like, I can have the game I've thought of created and someone could actually play it. Now, Roberta's idea actually added in an element that was not found in other text

adventures at the time, and that was graphics. Now, these were very simple graphics. They were just simple drawings. They were static, so there was no interactivity, there was no animation, but they did provide something that other text games did not. You could get a depiction of whatever that scene was. And the resulting title was Mystery House and it was a success. The game was ready to hit the market in the spring of nineteen eighty. This was a big

deal in an era in which computer. Personal computers were still a very new concept. It was. It wasn't really that common to find a household that had one. It was essentially hobbyists that owned these sort of machines, and they sold it through on print ads as well as kind of going door to door to different computer stores. They developed other software as well, including other games, so

it wasn't just games that were looking at. In fact, Ken Williams would use some of the tools he developed to make these games and then make them available as commercial products. So first you're like, well, how do I build this game? And then you would design a tool to help you build the game, and then you think this tool might be valuable to people on its own. It it's not just an internal tool for us to use. We can actually sell this as a product, and so

they started to do that as well. They also began to sell some titles from other developers like Scott Adams, though on a small scale, so they sort of were

acting like a publisher distributor in those days. In September of that year, this being nineteen eighty, they relocated from Los Angeles to Oakhurst, California, which is not far from Yosemite National Park and during the first six months of selling games, they they had brought in about seventy five thousand dollars in revenue, so that's before expenses, but not a bad start. Seventy five grand in your first six months in a startup, uh, not just a startup, but

like a mon pas startup. That's kind of incredible. Right around that time, they decided to rename their company Sierra Online, named after the Sierra Mountains, which they were now right at the foothills of UH. The company would officially become Sierra Online, Incorporated on in September of n Their second original title was called The Wizard and the Princess, and this was sort of a proto King's Quest game. King's Quest would become an enormous franchise in Sierra's history. It

featured color graphics and intriguing puzzles. It sold more than sixty thousand copies, which was again back in those days, it was a surprisingly large number of copies. Sixty thou copies today is nothing because the the era of PC gaming has meant that we've seen a huge boost in the numbers of people who are playing games, and digital delivery makes it way easier to produce and distribute games, but back in those days, sixty thou units. That was

a lot. Other games that the small company offered in those early years included titles like Crossfire, Jawbreaker, which was sort of like a pac Man clone, Mission, Asteroid Lunar Leapers, and Ulysses in the Golden Fleece. In Chuck Benton, a programmer who decided to make a game as an exercise and programming, created a text based adventure game titled and

I'm not making this up soft porn adventure. With a name like that, it probably doesn't surprise you to learn it was a game in which you control a guy who's trying to hook up with various women. Not terribly sophisticated, or you could argue, not terribly classy, But like other text adventures, it meant trying to solve various puzzles in

order to achieve your goal. The game would later become an important influence on one of Sierra's most sussiful franchises just a few years later, and that's why I mentioned it here, And spoiler alert, it is not the King's Quest series that it influenced. In November two, Sierra would announce that it would invest almost a million dollars in sales and marketing, which marked the next step up in

becoming a big business. And games that Sierra developed and or published in this time included a Donkey Kong clone called Cannonball Blitz. They did a port of Frogger for the Atari eight bit computer systems, and they published a little game called Ultimate to the Revenge of the Enchantress. Now, I want to take a moment to talk about some of these. First of all, the ports became a big business.

You had arcades that were doing quite well, and you had video game consoles that were selling uh ports of those games, usually at around the eight bit level or less. Then you had PCs that were starting to try and get in on this too, but they were able to play arcade style games quite at the level that consoles were because consoles were a very specific, purpose built machine and PCs were general machines, which meant they weren't necessarily as good at doing things that consoles could do at

the time. Keeping in mind the consoles were primitive as well in those days, but there was a big call for doing these sort of ports. Meanwhile, Ultimate too, uh that is got a special place in My Heart. The Ultimate series was created by a guy named Richard Garriott, who with his brother and his dad, created a computer

game business out of their families Garage. Richard Garriott had become interested in computer programming while he was in high school, and at that time he wrote games for systems that didn't even have a computer display, so instead the computer

would print out results on tape. So you had tape that was coming out of a printer and it would print out a design using common computer characters, you know, letters and numbers and symbols, that kind of thing, in order to represent stuff like walls or characters or monsters and other elements. In a basic sort of dungeon crawling kind of game, every time you make a move or take some sort of action that would change the appearance of that environment, it would have to print out a

new representation of that space. So you know, you you move one space to the west, and it prints out a new version of the display so it reflects your move. That kind of thing. Now, Gary had got a chance to work with Apple computers in the late nineties seventies and he created a game called a Calabeth Just for Fun, which was a graphics Overhead display computer RPG game, one

of the first computer RPG games. He was working at a computer store at the time, and the store owner actually allowed him to sell copies of his game in the store. They just made a sheet that had the art for the game on one side, basic rules on the back side of the sheet, and they put a floppy disk in there, and they put in a zip luck bag and they just tack it to the bulletin board.

He managed to sell about a dozen copies, but one of those somehow made its way to a games publisher called California Pacific, and that became his publisher for that first game. They said, we want to publish a Calibeth. Are you cool with that? And he said, tote school. Well. His next game was Ultimate one, which also was published by California Pacific, and after the success of Ultima one, he began to work on the sequel, but he wanted

something special for Ultimate two. He wanted to include a cloth map of the world, which was an expensive item to throw in as a freebee in a game box. It was considered to be a premium thing and most game publishers weren't interested in doing that. This was shortly after the era where all the games were showing up in just zip luck bags. So Garriott started a little look for a new publisher and he found one in

Sierra Online. They agreed to his request to publish the game with a cloth map that established the way that

Ultima would come out from that point forward. Coincidentally, Ultimate two was one of the first games I ever owned for the Apple to E, and I've been lucky enough to chat with Richard Garriott several times, the earliest being back when I was a teenager, and someday I'll have to do a full episode on him and the companies he's worked for, and not only his work in developing games, but also the story about how he became one of just seven citizens to ever visit the International Space Station

in orbit without becoming an actual astronaut. First, but let's get back to Sierra. So they published Ultimate two and that ends up getting some more success. By three the company had achieved ten million dollars in sales. The titles that ROBERTA. Williams was working on. We're gaining special attention because they had a reliance upon storytelling that other games

of that era lacked. Most other games were developed just by programmers who were really good at coding, but they weren't necessarily the most to dept at creating a narrative. So ROBERTA. Williams came at game development from a totally different angle. She would conceive of the story and the puzzles outside of the realm of coding, and the difference was noticeable. At this time, computers relied upon several different types of media. It all dependent on the system you

had what kind of media you would use. You know, this was before you would log in someplace and download a code, so you had the emergence of the floppy disk that was starting to happen right around this time. But you also had cassette tapes. Some computers use cassette tapes as storage devices, and you would insert a program with a cassette tape into a drive on your computer. Some of them had cartridges, very similar to the classic game consoles of the time, like the AT and cartridges

in particular were problematic for a couple of reasons. One was that they were more expensive per unit to produce than other types of media. But the other big one was that once you designed a cartridge, you couldn't write over it. It was read only memory, so the actual coding for whatever the software is was hardwired into the cartridge, so you were committed once you did this. It was an expensive undertaking. Floppy disks, on the other hand, could

be erased and overwritten. So even if for some reason you didn't need the software anymore. Let's say you buy something and you realize all this software is terrible. I don't, I don't, I'm never going to use this again, you could erase the disk and overwrite it. You could still make some use of the disk cartridges if you didn't need that software. You just had a big piece of plastics saying on your hands that you couldn't do anything

else with well. Sierra Online created games for the Atari computer systems, which relied on cartridges, and then there was a big crash that essentially brought down Atari, and Sierra had committed to supporting Atari, so they were affected as well, and they ended up having to downsize to about a third of what their company size had been at that time.

According to Funding Universe, it meant going from about a hundred twenty employees down to third d Now another failed piece of hardware that plays a part in the history of Sierra is the PC Junior. This was a micro computer from IBM that was meant to be the first home computer, and it was the first home computer front the business giant, I should say, from IBM itself. This posed a huge threat, potentially to other computer companies like Apple, Commodore,

and Texas Instruments. Everyone was sure that IBM was gonna come in, throw its weight around and put everyone else out of business and become a monopoly in the personal computer space. IBM had really deep pockets and already dominated the corporate computer landscape. And while the home computer was meant to be a general consumer device, IBM had seen some success with early personal computers, but they were aimed more toward home business operators, not so much the general consumer.

This PC Junior was meant to be something that the average person could go out and buy, not just someone who was a hobbyist or home business operator. So it was their game to lose, and they fumbled the ball big time. The PC Junior had two models. One of them sported sixty kilobytes of memory and the other had

a kilobytes of memory. I was designed to connect to a television that that's what you would use as your display, and you would actually have to turn the televisions volume up in order to hear any sounds that the computer was generating. IBM also sold a monitor specifically for the computer. They called it the PC Junior color Display. The PC Junior shipped with a chick lit style keyboard that used infrared signals to communicate with the PC Junior itself, so

it was wireless. It had an emitter that shot infrared information to the computer that would then presumably pick it up. Used double A batteries I think four of them in order to operate. The physical design of the keyboard was one of the things that a lot of people cited as a negative aspect of this computer, and along with that came the computer's cost. It was pretty expensive and other limitations that it had that ended up cutting the PC Junior off at the knees before I could even debut.

By the time it finally came to market, the general consensus was that the hardware was a big disappointment, and as a result, it became one of the biggest flops in technology. But it did create the possibility for King's Quest, because that was the game Sierra was developing for the PC Junior at the time, and while the intended hardware floundered, Sierra was able to port King's Quest over onto other platforms,

and there the game found an enormous fan base. And now, before I jump into the last section to really talk about what Sierra turned into, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Now I had mentioned in the last section about King's Quest. King's Quest was another big

leap forward for games. Instead of a text based game with some static images the way the previous games had been over at Sierra, players would actually control a figure who could move through an environment, and as you interacted with the environment, you would get animations that would accompany your command. So this was no longer static. It was dynamic. King's Quest would spawn several sequels eight if you're being technical, and it would serve as a model for several other

Sierra Online games. And again, it was very much story driven and most of the puzzles had something to do with the fairy tale nature of the game. You played as a character named Graham, and you would go on a quest in order to save a kingdom and become the king at the end. Some of the games that were also based upon this same sort of engine were

licensed properties, so they weren't original. I P from Sierra Sierra created a video game version of the Black Culture and that was modeled after the Disney adaptation of the classic Lloyd Alexander fantasy series. I had read the books, saw the cartoon, and then I even played the game. They also created a game adaptation of The Dark Crystal, which is a fantasy film that was made by Jim Henson Pictures. If you've not seen it, I recommend checking

it out. It is really an interesting original fantasy story and has some pretty creepy characters in it too. In nine six, after a couple more King's Quest sequels had boosted more sales over at Sierra, the company developed and published the first Space Quest game, and this is where you start seeing the word quest become very important in

various Sierra franchises. Uh This one was called Space Quest the Sorry in Encounter, and he used a game engine identical to that of King's Quest, but had a science fiction theme and was much more lighthearted and comical than King's Quest tended to be. The game's creators were Scott Murphy and Mark Crow. They became known as the guys from Andromeda. They they wanted to make a game that was a little more silly and goofy than what Sierra

was really focusing on. They said that the the tone of the games was a little too serious and dower for their tastes. Space Quest put the player in control of what amounts to be a space janitor who must defeat an aggressive alien force, and the game, like King's Quest, was a big success and spawned several series, uh several sequels, I should say within a series in Sarah Online. Gave Al Low, another game developer, a guy who was coming

up with various stories for games in Sierra. They gave him the go ahead to adapt that soft porn adventure game I mentioned earlier that came from the early eighties into a game more in line with the style of King's Quest and Space Quest, something that was a graphical adventure where you control the character that could move around an environment and not just a text based game. And

that's when leisure Suit Larry was born. The first title in the game was leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, and not only was it a big hit, it was also one of the most pirated games of that era. Legend says that Sierra actually sold more copies of the hint book for leisure Suit Larry in the Land of Lounge Lizards then they sold copies of the game itself, suggesting that a whole bunch of people got their hands on that game without paying Sierra

any money. Also, this was a time when you couldn't just casually look up hints to a game online. There was no worldwide web to go to, so you either would talk to other people who had the game and had figured something out, or you went out and bought a hint book, or you called some sort of phone number that would charge you by the minute to hear hints about how to solve puzzles in the game. Sierra continued to grow, they added more developers, they published more games.

To go through all of them would be austing and pointless. There are hundreds of titles that came out over the years from Sierra, but there were some other big series that were important during the history of the company. One of those was a game called Police Quest, and it actually had a former police officer as the lead for

the game. Series. That was Jim Walls, and he had no programming background, but he oversaw development of the game and incorporated actual police procedure and tactics into the game mechanics and the game design. So not only is it a game where you're playing a law enforcement officer, you actually have to follow specific protocols in order to advance

in the game properly. This also spawned a series of games, although Jim Walls would leave after the third entry I Believe into the series, and a different police officer became the lead developer for the other games, which eventually evolved into a series called Swat. Sierra also developed a game called Heroes Quest, but due to a trademark issue, another company had claim over Heroes Quest. They would rename the future entries into that series the Quest for Glory that

started with the second game in that series. And it was around that time that Ken Williams was meeting with folks from a little company called ID Software to talk about their games that they had in mind. Now those

conversations ended up going nowhere. Ken Williams decided against pursuing being a publisher for ID Software games, and eventually he would come to regret that decision because it became incredibly successful and Sierra could have been in on that, but Ken Williams didn't really feel strongly that this was a good fit at the time, and you heard him say

that over in the interview. But it did also plant the seed in Sierra to consider Valve a little more carefully when they came to the company in the late nineties. So you got a bunch of franchises that are all doing well over at Sierra, boosted by a lot of on off titles as well. In nine nine, Sierra would launch the Sierra Network later known as the Imagination Network, making it the first games only network. And this is nineteen eighty nine. It's still before the Worldwide Web. This

is the old Bolton board system days. You would use a modem to call into a computer that would log you into this network. Uh so, very forward thinking, not something that a lot of game companies had really thought about, and it was a bit ahead of its time. It required a huge investment up front, like a million dollars, and it took some time to catch on and never really became profitable in Sierra reached an agreement with Prodigy

and online service provider. Back before we had internet service providers, we had online service providers and prodily agreed to carry the network. The Imagination Network also formed a partnership with ah an outlet called seu C International. They had a service called Shoppers Advantage that allowed for online shopping, So you had this collection of services that were packaged together.

The venture was never really profitable, as the cost of operating the service was parading much the same as what it brought in through revenue, and eventually Sierra would sell off its network to A T and T in return for the promise that A T and T would pay royalties to Sierra for any of the software that it used. Also, back in nine Sierra went public. It changed from a privately owned corporation to a publicly traded one. But you

heard from Mr Williams what that was like. The nature of the work changed dramatically, the nature of the business, the culture changed, and suddenly there were a lot of other considerations Williams had to make while operating his company.

Now Sierra had also made some acquisitions during this time, growing as a business by purchasing smaller companies that did lots of different stuff, not just games, but including companies like Dynamics, which was known for making flight simulators, a company all the Impressions Software, which specialized in strategy games. They also bought Papyrus Design Group and sub Logic. These were other companies that made things like sports games, racing games,

other strategy games. It was all meant to round out the sort of games that Sierra could make without having to higher on new developers and create new divisions within the company itself. It's was seen as easier to buy an existing organization that already specialized in that, and they just added to the Sierra family. Now, well, Sierra had sold software outside of games for a while, you know it made money by selling those tools that Kim Williams had developed. It really began to pick up speed in

this business in the mid nineties. They began to sell productivity software and recipes software and all sorts of stuff that wasn't at all connected to gaming, which might be a surprise to you if you only know Sierra from the game titles that it's sold. They also produced a lot of educational software, became a big money maker for them. The company created a type of software internally called Sierra

Creative Interpreter. This would allow artists and musicians to create content for games without having to learn complicated coding languages themselves. So it was meant to streamline that process, and in the company released an enormous multi media game. It spread across seven compact discs. So you've got to also remember Sierra existed in a time that went from cartridges and cassettes to floppy disks, and then from floppy disks to

compact discs. And at this point they had done a few compact disc based games that included multimedia in it, like full motion video, full music, full sound effects, that kind of stuff. So by they were able to release their most ambitious game in this realm, and it was called Phantasmagoria. It featured live actors I think there were twenty five for an actors in the actual game, three dimensional backgrounds the characters could move around, also took advantage

of the latest in PC hardware. This was a point and click adventure game and it was also a labor of love for ROBERTA. Williams herself. The game was a commercial success, but it received some mixed reviews from critics at the time. It also had experienced numerous delays before it finally came out around the same time the company was on on the verge of becoming a true behemoth in the software industry. I'm talking about on the same level as Microsoft. Microsoft of course a big software company,

but Sierra was almost neck and neck with them. And it was around that time that See You See International, the company that made that shopping service I had talked about a second ago, decided to make a move to acquire Sierra. Ultimately, they struck a deal for more than a billion dollars in stocks. That's the one I mentioned at the top of the show. Sierra would end up joining a few other companies that were on under the youth the umbrella that seu C owned. They created a

brand called Sendant Software. One of those other companies that Sierra joined was one called Blizzard Entertainment. I'll probably have to do an episode on Blizzard sometime in the future. And Ken and ROBERTA. Williams stayed on with the company after that acquisition until a year had passed, and in November they retired from Sierra. Ken Williams at that point had become pretty disenchanted with the way the company had been going. He really was having issues. Ever since they

had gone public. They had stuck around to provide some leadership during the transition, but they wanted to move on with their lives and since then they've done a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with software, mostly

sailing around the world. Now back at Sierra. Under the Scendant Corporation that was formed after c UC merged with another company called h F S Incorporated, the company that was Sierra split into four major divisions, so now you had kind of four sub brands under the brand of Sierra.

There was Sierra Sports, which obviously was all the sporting titles, Sierra Home which was all the non game software titles, Sierra Attractions, which was casual games stuff like poker, that kind of thing, and Sierra Studios, which were all the big name games that people were expecting from Sierra. They published some games and expansions that are pretty well known around that time, such as Diablo Hellfire. They didn't develop Diablo, but they did publish an expansion pack for Diablo, and

they also published Valves game Half Life. This was sort of a response to that passing up of ID earlier. Uh In there was a big scandal at SEU see that parent company, and it involved an accounting fraud case and so as part of the fallout of this, CUC decided that they wanted to divest divest themselves of some of their assets, including Sierra. So there was another company, a French company called Havas s A, which purchased Sierra

at that time. I also mentioned that around this point Sierra began to transition from developing and publishing games to mainly just publishing them. A lot of the development houses got shut down in the company underwent a reorganization and two hundred fifty positions were eliminated as a result. Layoffs included longtime employees like Scott Murphy, that co creator of Space Quest and Al Low, the guy behind the leisure suit Larry series. He got laid off at this time too.

Not long after that, the company held another reorganization, so they had just gotten rid of two hundred and fifty positions. After the second reord they got rid of another hundred positions and in two thousand Havas Esa became part of Vivendi Universal and in two thousand two Sierra Online was

renamed as Sierra Entertainment. Now Sierra continued to be used law actually as a brand name for a publisher for the next several years, so between two thousand two and two thousand eight, Sierra published games, but it was almost like the name of Atari, where the name Sierra had very little connective tissue to the company that had existed

in the eighties and nineties. It was almost more like just a brand name um that could be slapped onto any game that was being developed under Vivindy for whatever purposes. It might have been a budgeting thing, saying this division needs to publish this game. In two thousand and eight, the Vindi Games merged with Activision to create Activision Blizzard, and Sierra was transferred over to Activision as a result of this merger, and the brand would remain dormant. It

kind of disappeared. It still technically existed. There was a point where it sounded like Activision was looking to sell off Sierra, and for a while it just seemed like Sierra was gonna just gonna be a thing of the past, us that it was no longer going to be a

relevant term. And then in two thousand and fourteen, seemingly out of nowhere, the Sierra website was updated and said that there would soon be some interesting news about Sierra, including new games coming out, and if you go to that web page now you'll see you can download the original King's Quest if you like. And there's also promise of things to come. So the Sierra story is not

necessarily over. We may see a renaissance of Sierra Online Sierra Entertainment, so we'll keep our eyes out for that, but for now the story is at an end. Uh. It was a dramatic rise in popularity, and we could probably do full episodes about some of these games and their impact on the gaming industry and how they developed over time. But obviously, if we want to be more succinct, then we need to draw this episode to a close and maybe in the future I'll cover some of these

in more detail and more depth. If you guys have suggestions for topics I should cover on tech stuff, whether it's a company or a personality or specific technology. Maybe you're sitting there thinking, I just want to know really where telescopes came from and how they work and all their varieties. You should let me know, and it doesn't have to be telescopes, could literally be any kind of technology. Just send me a message. You can write to me.

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