Ada Lovelace is widely recognized as the world’s first programmer. To celebrate Ada’s spirit the world wide blogging community wrote a bunch of awesome posts about women in technology that they admire. This was back on March 24th, and I’m pretty late to the party. So I’m going to make up for it by writing about not one, not two, but a talented handful of ladies — Roberta Williams, Lori Cole, Jane Jensen and Christy Marx. The fabulous female game designers of classic Sierra On-Line.
Back in the glory days of adventure games, there were basically two companies that were the genre. LucasArts and Sierra On-Line. And like anything bipartisan, there were two respective camps of followers: LucasArts fans and Sierra fans. While the games from the two companies had a lot in common, there are certain things that Adventure Game historians can easily point to that separate them. The biggest, mechanics wise, was that in Sierra games your character could die, sometimes in very sudden and annoying ways. In LucasArts games, you never died, but your interest could die as you wander around and around trying everything possible to get through the obscurely silly puzzle solution. (To be fair, Sierra had its occasional weird and painful puzzles too). Sierra games also tended to be more likely to include mini games to mix up the gameplay, while LucasArts games stayed straight on course with pure “find thing put thing in right place talk to guy for clue” adventure gameness.
But the biggest difference between the Sierra and LucasArts styles had more to do with tone and story than with gameplay. Both companies were prone to put in silly jokes and plenty of puns. But while LucasArts games, for the most part, seemed to have been written by people with the random senses of humor of sophomoric 9 – 11 year old boys, most Sierra games felt more satisfying in terms of goals, story, and theme immersion. In other words, the story wasn’t just about the jokes.
I think this is why I always gravitated towards the Sierra camp. In fact, two of my favorite games of all time were the Sierra adventure/RPGs Quest for Glory: So you want to be a hero, and its sequel: Quest for Glory: Trial by Fire. I also was a huge fan of Gabriel Knight, and there were several other games that I always wanted to play but just never got to: The Laura Bow mystery games, Quest for Camelot and Robin Hood: Quest of the Long Bow were all on Christmas lists of the past along with my Cobra Raven.
Coincidentally (or not) the above mentioned games were all designed or co-designed by women. I don’t know what the difference was between Sierra and LucasArts as companies back in those days, but Sierra employed several female game designers. LucasArts games were mostly (with apologies to former co-workers and their friends) written and designed by guys with the random senses of humor of sophomoric 9-11 year old boys. Sierra also promoted its designers by putting their pictures on the back of the game boxes, and seeing those women there was very inspiring to me as a young person.
Roberta Williams
I have a strong memory of picking up a King’s Quest box at Electronic Boutique in Stonestown shopping center and seeing Roberta Williams on the back of the box. I thought she was a lot younger than she really was and I said to my mom “Look! This kid made this game!” My mom informed me that she was actually an adult but I was still impressed. I felt a surge of ambition and maybe something like jealousy. But it definitely was a sense that I could do this too.
Roberta Williams designed an amazing 20 games while at Sierra. She was the brain behind the King’s Quesst series and the Laura Bow mysteries. She was a co-founder of the company. Her games always had a lot of heart, and many of them featured a female protagonist (still unusual at this time).
Lori Cole
Lori Ann Cole, along with her husband Corey Cole were the designers and writers of some of the best games ever made — the Quest for Glory series. I remember falling in love with the first Quest for Glory game long before I ever played it. It was called Hero’s Quest: So you want to be Hero (before the game series was forced to change its name). I remember looking at the box and WANTING it. When it appeared under the Christmas tree that Christmas, I was ecstatic. This was the game that caused my sister and I to literally fight each other to get up the stairs of our house so we could claim the computer first. Even to this day, Quest for Glory with its unique hybrid RPG/adventure game mechanics whets my appetite for design. When people ask me what my “dream game to make” might be, my answer always starts out as “Something like Quest for Glory….”
Jane Jensen
Jane Jensen, in addition to writing work on a handful of Sierra games, was the design and writing brains behind the Gabriel Knight games. Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father was an awesome game. It had a lovely dark voodoo theme and a rich mystery to solve. The writing was stellar. I never got to pick up the other two in the series but always looked at them fondly in the stores. Jane Jensen is still making games, and designed the really intriguing BeTrapped! Which is a nifty cross between an adventure game mystery and mine-sweeper. She has a new game, Gray Matter, coming out later this year.
Christy Marx
Christy Marx was the writer and designer of Quest for Camelot and Robin Hood: Quest of the Long Bow. These were two games I salivated over but sadly never got to play. I was a subscriber to the Sierra magazine/newsletter and read with excitement about both of these games. I especially loved the inclusion of narrative-appropriate mini-games and Nine Men’s Morris in the Robin Hood game. Christy is an active freelance writer. She worked on the first Telltale CSI game, as a matter of fact, and continues to inspire women in game development through her contributions to the IGDA’s women in games mailing list.
There is no doubt to me that all these women served as inspiration to me on my path to become a game designer, and have deeply informed my design sensibilities. And so, on this post-Ada Lovelace day, I just want to say thank you to all of them.
The Camelot/Longbow games are officially “Conquests of Camelot” and “Conquests of the Longbow” respectively. And I can’t believe you’ve never played them!
Longbow is right up there with QfG IMO. It has multiple solutions for most puzzles (though unfortunately one of them is usually “optimal”) and multiple endings (though, again, there’s a “best” one).
Excellent article.And while I am a mere male, I would be lacking if I didn’t not tell the truth and say that with more women in computer gaming would have created a much better gaming industry (more honest and closer to the gamers) and would have led to many many more interesting games.
Quite simply I believe if we had had more women in gaming, i believe the gaming industry would have followed the book industry and concentrated on content rather than following the movie industry, with it’s mostly more shallow story telling and reliance on special effects (graphics) over characterization (content). Maybe instead of licensing deals with COBRA (Sylvester Stalloin) and Die Hard (Bruce Willis) movies we would have had games licensed from The Colour Purple and A League of their Own,leasing to a larger gaming market as wellas a more intelligent one!
So good luck to you and any other women in the video games business. If I win the lottery I will bring you all together into my games publishing company and we’ll dominate the market within 2 years!
I really appreciated this post–Sierra has such an interesting history, and so many female game designers…it’s quite sad how badly it is trashed in the academic game history press.
BTW, I’m curious about your exclusion of infocom from your list of adventure game companies at the time. Any thoughts?
Sorry that I didn’t see these comments before..they were buried under spam!
DanF — I once had a copy of Longbow, but for whatever reason it had a critical bug in it. I think I need to seek this out again though and actually play it. I’ve been wanting to since it first came out!
UK_John — Thanks for the praise! There are lots of women in gaming now, although still very much outnumbered. Still, I think there is a push overall for the type of content you are describing, its just that publishers find it to be “risky”. That is to say, they can’t easily predict how much money they will make from it.
L. Nooney — Well, I was really focusing on the Sierra/LucasArts camps who were fans of graphical adventures. Maybe I should have specified that. Infocom was absolutely huge, but I am not sure fans of those games took place in this debate. (They probably debated that games shouldn’t have graphics at all!)