Sierra On-Line

Sierra On-Line began in 1979 as On-Line Systems, founded by programmer Ken Williams and his wife Roberta in their California home. Roberta, entranced by a text adventure Ken brought home, sketched out a mystery of her own and insisted it have pictures. The result, Mystery House in 1980, was the first graphic adventure game ever sold — crude wireframe drawings that nonetheless changed the medium forever. The couple soon relocated to the tiny town of Oakhurst near Yosemite, renaming the company Sierra On-Line after the surrounding foothills.

Sierra became the defining house of the adventure genre. Roberta Williams' King's Quest, launched in 1984 with animated on-screen characters, established the template; it spawned sequels for years and made her one of gaming's most famous designers. Around it grew a stable of beloved franchises with a distinctly Sierra sense of humor and cruelty: the raunchy Leisure Suit Larry from Al Lowe, the sci-fi comedy Space Quest, the procedural Police Quest, and the atmospheric Gabriel Knight and Quest for Glory. Sierra also pushed technology relentlessly, championing sound cards, CD-ROM, and its own scripting engines, and diversified into simulation hits like Aces of the Pacific and the Dynamix-developed action games.

By the mid-1990s Sierra was a giant. Then came the fall. In 1996 the company was acquired by CUC International, which soon merged into Cendant — and in 1998 Cendant collapsed amid one of the largest accounting-fraud scandals of the era. Sierra's finances had been cooked, its value hollowed out. In the aftermath the Oakhurst studios were closed in 1999, the founders departed, and the creative heart of the company was scattered.

The Sierra name limped on as a publishing label under Havas and then Vivendi, attached to franchises like Half-Life and Homeworld, until Activision Blizzard shelved the brand entirely in 2008. (It was later dusted off for indie reissues.) The company that had invented the graphic adventure and nurtured a generation of designers was destroyed not by the market it helped create, but by a boardroom fraud far from the mountains it was named for.