Sierra On-Line

Ken and Roberta Williams started On-Line Systems in 1979 in Simi Valley, California. Ken brought home an Apple II; Roberta, dissatisfied with text-only adventures, designed Mystery House (1980), the first computer adventure game to combine text and graphics. It sold well enough to fund a company. In 1982 they moved to Oakhurst, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, and renamed it Sierra On-Line. Over the next fifteen years the studio defined the graphic adventure: King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and later Gabriel Knight. Sierra ran its own dial-up network, published outside studios, and put out Half-Life in 1998. For most of the 1980s and 1990s it was the dominant maker of the genre it had invented.

In February 1996 CUC International bought Sierra On-Line for about $1.06 billion in stock. Ken Williams resigned on 1 November 1997; Roberta had opposed the sale from the start. In April 1998 Cendant — the company formed by CUC’s merger with HFS — disclosed that CUC had overstated income by more than $500 million across the prior three years, a fraud that wiped out roughly $14 billion in market value. Cendant sold off its software units, including Sierra, to Havas in late 1998; Havas was absorbed into Vivendi. The Oakhurst studio was closed, and the surviving Sierra label passed to Vivendi Games. After Vivendi Games merged with Activision in July 2008 to form Activision Blizzard, the Sierra label was retired and most remaining subsidiaries closed by October 2008. Activision brought the Sierra name back in 2014 as a publishing label — a new episodic King’s Quest, a Geometry Wars sequel — and dropped it again by 2016. That was a logo on re-releases and indie deals, not the company Ken and Roberta built.